Something I posted to this list a few years ago on Graeber's "Debt."

"The heart of the problem with his [Graeber's] theory is that he takes the economic tools of debt and currency, and creates a historical schema in which first one then the other is dominant. Then he overlays that scenario onto successive historical periods in which the dominance of currency leads to expansionary states, which to keep themselves going force subordinate classes and nations to rely on such currency.

"It's like a bourgeois sociologist privileging any given isolated social phenomenon as THE explanation of history.

"And Graeber has nothing to say about modes of production, nor about the laws of motion of capital, nor about the labor theory of value. Actually, he does have something to say about all of them: he thinks they're meaningless.

"His 'solution' is declaration of a jubilee, freeing us from most of our debts, so the cycle can begin all over again.

"And it's no accident that his Proudhonist ideas rely so heavily on the presumption of state domination of the economy."