The “Marx Brothers”:Wallerstein, Chakrabarty, and Appadurai in Conversation

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document in English

humanities/philosophy

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published 02/06/2008

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level : Advanced

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Summary

The anthropological study of capitalism is rendered difficult by the inaccessibility of capitalist subjects as informants, the political legacy of Marxist and socialist movements, and the continuing disagreement over the origins and productions of capitalism, among other things. However, there are a great many texts that cover the theoretical ground needed to evaluate the competing claims about political economies under conditions of capitalism. Three such texts are Immanuel Wallerstein’s The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Two Histories of Capital, and Arjun Appadurai’s The Social Life of Things. This paper puts these texts in conversation to explore some of the problems encountered when we try to specify the reach of capitalism and commodities around the world.

What emerges from this intertextual give-and-take is a set of helpful and not-so-helpful ways to think about capitalist practices.
Identifying units of analysis.
internalizing-via-contradiction.
Marxist critics like Chakrabarty and Wallerstein are not unaware of this totalizing thrust within their own works.
historian 1 and the labor of abstracting.
Rethinking labor and production
Universal aspirations.
Conclusion: the end of history (one).