Reddit reviews The World of the Gift
We found 5 Reddit comments about The World of the Gift. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
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Reddit reviews The World of the GiftWe found 5 Reddit comments about The World of the Gift. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
If you want a best understanding of what Graeber provocatively calls everyday communism, I suggest you take a look at this book:
Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing by Thomas Widlok.
Thomas Widlok's book is the only book that I know of that talks about the issue of communism in any detail. He edited two books on the ethnography of equality that are also useful.
The anthropological term for that communism is "demand-sharing".
Demand-sharing is distinct from the gift, by the way. Demand-sharing is NOT a form of exchange (Widlok deals with this very well).
For Gifts, I would direct you to The World of the Gift by Jacques T. Godbout and Alain C. Caillé and Gifts and Commodities by C. A. Gregory.
Alain Caillé is the expert on the question of the gift.
P.S:
/u/LitGarbo
You deserve way more subscribers, this is some good quality stuff.
Look you seem to have good intentions but you're completely immersed in the neoclassical economics bullshit.
So, I recommend taking at this particular book:
The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community by Harvard Economics Professor Stephen A. Marglin, who is also a reformed/ former neoclassical economist.
Philip Mirowski's book Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science, his book More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics and his latest The Knowledge We Have Lost in Information: The History of Information in Modern Economics deal with a lot of the bullshit coming from economics.
You can find a more anti-capitalist critique in [The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital](http://www.lamarre-mediaken.com/Site/COMS_630_files/Beginning%20of%20History.pdf
) (I included a PDF to it).
As for books on what communism might look like:
https://www.amazon.com/Living-Edges-Capitalism-Adventures-Mutual/dp/0520287304
https://www.amazon.com/World-Gift-Jacques-T-Godbout/dp/0773517510
https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552
The economic mechanism that Thomas Widlok talks about in his book is very to what Peter Kropotkin calls "mutual aid" and David Graeber calls "everyday communism".
If you're interested in reading more radical perspective on the commons, I recommend reading the work of Massimo De Angelis:
Start with his book The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital, here: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=62F323FC4073EA6CF2C6586F50806911
Then his most recent book on Commons: Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism, here: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=961FEA9AF31094CA0280E0F92B353AF7
As for good non-market stuff, I recommend taking a look at:
Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing by Thomas Widlok:
https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552
The World of the Gift by Jacques T. Godbout and Alain C. Caille:
https://www.amazon.com/World-Gift-Jacques-T-Godbout/dp/0773517510
http://www.mit.edu/~allanmc/godbout1.pdf
"gift economies" are not a past thing that is no longer. Most of our economic activities among families, friends, lovers ...etc are "gift economies".
https://www.amazon.com/World-Gift-Jacques-T-Godbout/dp/0773517510
The credit situations he was referring to were gift exchange situations:
https://www.amazon.com/World-Gift-Jacques-T-Godbout/dp/0773517510
http://www.mit.edu/~allanmc/godbout1.pdf
There's also the non-market and non-gift stuff he calls "communism", or as Widlok calls it simply sharing:
https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552