Reddit reviews The World of the Gift

The second edition of Debt is better than the first one.




No, he is indeed talking about markets.

An important point that is often overlooked (that you might find interesting given your flair), is the one that Graeber bring up when talking about he calls "human economies":

That the existence of money does not entail the existence of a market. Many societies had money, but they never used to buy/sell "stuff".

People often mistakenly equate money with coinage. Money simply provides a recognized unit of value. That unit can be a price in the market, but it can also be the size of a gift or a measure of need.

People often come out with very weird misunderstandings after reading Debt for the first time.

I think it's because it's their first exposure to economic anthropology, if you anyone want to deepen their understanding of this stuff, read:

• James G. Carrier's A Handbook of Economic Anthropology, it's an introductory text but it's still very useful, you can download it on libgen:
  
  http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=84967F65B9102FE7EE1882ECC8B48C8F
  
  
• Alain Caillé and Jacques T. Godbout's book The World of the Gift is the perfect introduction to anything related to "gift economies", you can find a cheap copy on Amazon:
  
  https://www.amazon.com/World-Gift-Jacques-T-Godbout/dp/0773521364
  
  
  
• For an introduction to non-gift (and even non-exchange) transfers, or what David Graeber call "Communism" in ch5 of Debt, there's Thomas Widlok recent book Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing:
  
  https://www.routledge.com/Anthropology-and-the-Economy-of-Sharing/Widlok/p/book/9781138945548
  
  
  

• Gifts and Commodities by Christopher A. Gregory, (the new edition with a new foreword by Marilyn Strathern).
  
  
  (Chris A. Gregory's book is one of the most important books in economic anthropology. If you want to know anything about economic anthropology, that book has to be on your reading list).
  
  
  
• David Graeber's Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams critiques/shows the discrepancies inherent in various market-based bullshit philosophies.
  
  
• Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing by Thomas Widlok, (this one rips into/destroys the usual economic logics based on exchange, like those coming from market people).
  
  
• Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber.
  
  
  
• Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture by E.P. Thompson.
  
  
  
• The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia by James C. Scott.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• The World of the Gift by Alain Caillé and Jacques T. Godbout.
  
  
  
• The Anthropology of Economy: Community, Market, and Culture by Stephen Gudeman.
  
  
  
• Virtualism: A New Political Economy edited by James G. Carrier and Daniel Miller.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Edit:
  
  
  Commercialism/markets is just as bad a system of social relation as Capitalism.
  
  Markets on their own are just as socially destructive and individuality-crushing as capitalism.
  
  Markets may be distinct from capitalism, but they're inextricably linked to States.
  
  I don't think markets CAN even exist without States.
  
  The historical shows that they pretty follow each other.
  
  Abolishing states would take markets and the commodity relation with it, which is why I think it's absurd to speak of them here, unless you're for some form of state to accompany the legalism and all the bullshit that comes with markets.
  
  That's why most anarchists are very anti-market.