10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4878
application/pdf
2239-625X
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urn:nbn:it:unica-27467
Patrícia Alves de Matos
Anuac
Building new horizons of value, care and freedom
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
10
In memoriam
2021-07-06
2021-07-06
2021-07-23
2021-07-23
31-36
1
Patrícia Alves de Matos
2021/07/06
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4878
31
CRIA/ISCTE - Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Portugal
2239-625X
1
36
urn:nbn:it:unica-27467
Building new horizons of value, care and freedom
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/download/4878/4874
10
                                           2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 1, GIUGNO 2021: 31-36




Building new horizons of value, care and freedom
Patrícia ALVES DE MATOS
CRIA/ISCTE – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa



   I met David Graeber in 2009 at Goldsmiths in London. I had started my
PhD in 2006 and returned from the field in 2009. In those days, there were
many corridor talks among students in the department regarding the recent
arrival of the anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber. I remember
talking with students from other departments on the campus and realising
how thrilled they were about the possibility of listening to, speaking to and
learning from someone who students considered to be a brilliant mind and
engaged activist. Since the beginning of his arrival at Goldsmiths, I always
had the feeling that students were enthusiastic about the many possibilities
that thinking with David Graeber offered. He was a lively presence in our
weekly PhD seminars in the department. I met him often throughout the
2010 student protests in the UK against spending cuts in higher education
and increasing the cap on tuition fees. I remember once that students at
Goldsmiths decided to occupy the library and arrange a public assembly at
the hall of entrance. I remember seeing him and thinking to myself, “good to
know he is here”. Students admired David, and this was one of the reasons:
exercising solidarity, caring with and for us, and making us feel that our
struggles were valuable. In this brief piece, I want to pay tribute to David
Graeber for how he articulated the relation between value, care and freedom
as a path toward more equal and fair livelihood horizons. I will consider the
broad contribution of one of his most widely read books about value and
more recent short pieces and public interventions about care and freedom.
   During 2009 and 2010, my days were mostly filled with writing up my
dissertation on neoliberal precarity, value and call centre labour in Portugal.
The dynamics, expansion and internal premises of neoliberalism was a
central focus of anthropological attention. David Harvey’s Brief history of
neoliberalism (2005) and his update of Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation


This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Patrícia Alves de Matos
Building new horizons of value, care and freedom
2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 1, GIUGNO 2021: 31-36.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/ANUAC2239-625X-4878
32                                                         PATRÍCIA ALVES DE MATOS


through the notion of accumulation by dispossession was a particular used
tool to contextualise and explain the inherent contradictions of neoliberal
forms of value extraction in time and space. I was trying to reconcile the
brilliance of Harvey’s analysis with Silvia Federici’s The Caliban and the
Witch: Women, the body and primitive accumulation (2004) and her astute
suggestion that capital accumulation is not only accumulated labour, it is
also “an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class,
whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as ‘race’ and age, become
constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat”
(Federici 2004: 63-64). I have to admit my disquiet and irritation for realising
how Harvey’s notion of accumulation by dispossession was getting so many
converts while Federici’s impressive and historically detailed re-reading of
Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation by looking in particular at women’s
bodies during the witch hunt had much fewer disciples. At this point, I began
re-reading Graeber’s Towards an anthropological theory of value (2001). I
wanted to subject Harvey and Federici different takes on capitalism and
value extraction to the ethnographic record, within and beyond capitalism.
   Each chapter of Graeber’s book on value is a testimony to his writing
capabilities of marrying theoretical erudition with ground-to earth
commentaries of daily life, constantly signalising to the reader, this is also
about you, not just about going through old theories which need to be
amplified and renovated. Amid my writing-up ordeal, Graeber’s book kept
me enthusiastic, intrigued and curious about his proposal to understand
value as “the importance of actions” (Graeber 2001: 49-89). To my mind,
Graeber’s proposal was at the same time theoretically sophisticated, elegant
and straightforward: value should be understood as consisting of all the
socially embedded actions human beings enact with the intention and
purpose of pursuing and expressing what a meaningful life is or should be.
Before arriving at this simple reasoning, Graeber revisits Marx, linguistic
theory, critical realism, the classical monographs of Jane Fajan and Terry
Turner. But he does so without making the reader losing sight of the most
crucial thing an anthropological theory of value should retain: how human
beings are creatures of meaning, intentionality, purpose and imagination.
Reading Graeber’s book was essential for me not only because of the ways it
enlarged my knowledge about the value question in anthropology but perhaps
more importantly because of how it offered me the opportunity to start
reflecting about the irreducible logics, calculus, and affects through which
people pursue horizons of value, with and against a present which often
doesn’t seem to offer the possibility of a valuable life for the largest majority
of the population.


2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 1, GIUGNO 2021: 31-36
BUILDING NEW HORIZONS OF VALUE, CARE AND FREEDOM                                                 33


   Before Graeber’s book, the value question was not unexamined in
anthropology. But as Jane Collins (2016) recently noted, although there were
important debates around the labour theory of value in anthropology
throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the theme of value suddenly disappeared.
This was perhaps a consequence of the (unintended?) mutual reinforcement
of post-modern theory and neoliberal doctrine. Arguably if there is one
aspect which neoliberal ideology was particularly effective was in its efforts
to makes us believe, by any means necessary (including extreme violence as
the one experienced in Chile), that the whole world, people, relations and
capacities could be reduced to a single standard of value: the market. David
Graeber’s book reinstated the value question in contemporary anthropological
debates with a strong and explicit political critique. There is a passage of the
book to which I often return:
     The ultimate stakes of politics, [...], is not even the struggle to appropriate value; it
     is the struggle to establish what value is. Similarly, the ultimate freedom is not
     the freedom to create or accumulate value, but the freedom to decide (collectively
     or individually) what it is that makes life worth living. In the end, then, politics
     is about the meaning of life (Graeber 2001: 88).

   The most outstanding achievement of capitalist neoliberal hegemony has
been to convince us that value begins and ends in the commodity, thus
preventing us from seeing that it begins and ends with people’s intentions,
practices, motivations, purposes. “The importance of actions” and how they
come to be recognised or sidelined in particular culturally recognised forms
is at the core of the struggle to define what value is, what is it that makes life
worth living.
   Graeber’s ambitious projects of articulating a synthesis from anthropological
theories of value anticipated and encouraged works, within and beyond
anthropology, which in more or less recent years have expanded reductive
notions of value and valuation processes, focusing, for instance, on
valuation struggles (De Angelis 2007), the entanglement of value realms in
flexible capitalism (Narotzky 2015), the dynamics of re-evaluation projects
(Collins 2017) and socio-environmental conflicts (Pusceddu 2020). Graeber
may not have been the only inspiration for these later works. Still, I often
feel that his early re-examination of the value question in anthropology has
left an underground current of inspiration, only waiting for others to pick it
up, expand it, and update it.
   I left London in 2011, returned to Lisbon for three years and then moved
to Barcelona. Throughout the years, I kept following Graeber's prolific
publications, including his major work on debt or the more recent book on
the phenomena of bullshit jobs. However, often it was some of his public


                                              2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 1, GIUGNO 2021: 31-36
34                                                                   PATRÍCIA ALVES DE MATOS


interventions focused on care that caught my attention. In 2014, when
austerity was devastating the livelihood possibilities of so many people in
Europe and beyond, Graeber wrote a short commentary for The Guardian
titled Caring too much. That's the curse of the working classes 1. In this piece,
Graeber starts with the often-heard question, made by wealthy people, on
why people were not rioting on the streets against the violence of austerity.
Graeber suggests quite simply that one of the reasons is related to the fact
that contrary to wealthy people, the working classes are much less self-
obsessed, they care for one another, they care for their families, friends and
communities:
      If you think about it, is this not what life is basically about? Human beings are
      projects of mutual creation. Most of the work we do is on each other. The
      working classes just do a disproportionate share. They are the caring classes,
      and always have been. It is just the incessant demonization directed at the poor
      by those who benefit from their caring labour that makes it difficult, in a public
      forum such as this, to acknowledge it.

   For Graeber, austerity had not only deprive people of the essential
instruments to satisfy basic human needs, but it had also severely
undermined and demonised the labour of solidarity, support and mutuality
of the “caring classes”: “Our caring has been weaponised against us. And so
it is likely to remain until the left, which claims to speak for labourers,
begins to think seriously and strategically about what most labour actually
consists of, and what those who engage in it actually think is virtuous about
it”.
   In 2018 Graeber gave a conference at the Collège de France titled The
Revolt of the Caring Classes2, in which he invites the audience to rethink and
reimagine the working classes as a class of people whose primary work is
care work, broadly defined as the work put into augmenting or expanding
people’s capabilities of freedom. He asks: what kind of economy would we
have if we focused on care as the primary basis of human freedom? and
further, if we were to reimagine the working classes around care, what kind
of claims could be made? It is inspiring to hear Graeber aligning himself with
a long tradition of feminist perspectives and struggles to reinstate the
political potentials of care. In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when
narratives about “essential labour” and “essential workers” started to


1. Cfr. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/26/caring-curse-working-class-auste-
rity-solidarity-scourge, accessed on 17/6/2021.
2. Cfr. www.college-de-france.fr/site/grandes-conferences/David-Graeber.htm, accessed on
17/6/2021.


2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 1, GIUGNO 2021: 31-36
BUILDING NEW HORIZONS OF VALUE, CARE AND FREEDOM                                    35


emerge, I remember a poster circulating on the internet showing a group of
nurses with the sentence “we don’t want clapping what we want is a wage
rise”. This sentence, and recent works on the relevance of care (The Care
Collective 2020), made me go back to Graeber’s talk. Listening to him has
helped me think about care as something that enables survival and human
flourishing and what ultimately enables people’s agency needs of livelihood
conditions of being and possibilities of becoming by nurturing their abilities
of interdependence, relationality, obligation and affect.
   The vital thread connecting the themes of value, care and freedom in
Graeber’s academic work and public interventions was recently revealed to
me by a 1st year undergraduate student in anthropology. In the fall of 2020, I
began teaching an undergraduate course on Themes of Anthropological
Thought to first-year students in anthropology at the New University of
Lisbon, with one of the classes being focused on neoliberalism and value. I
was worried that first-year undergrad students would not yet be prepared to
deal with the complexities of Graeber’s synthesis of anthropological theories
of value. I highly underestimated the reach of students intuition, and
Graeber’s work appeal to a non-specialist audience. During a seminar
session, one student, referring to Graeber’s work on value, commented: “I
had to read that chapter more than once (referring to chapter 4) but in the
end I was struck to realise how value is only an illusion, what really counts
are OUR values, and the capacities we have to put them into action four
ourselves and for others in the present and the future”. In his way and
vocabulary, the student was stressing what I think is an important thread
connecting Graeber’s synthesis of anthropological theories of value up to
more recent work on the caring classes: his immense hope in human being’s
capabilities of being at their best when they are given the possibilities of
caring for and imagining a different and better livelihood horizon for oneself
and for others. I like to believe that David Graeber would have liked to know
that his ideas, writings, political interventions, and proposals are being
cared for and helping others imagine and build new horizons of value, care,
and freedom.

REFERENCES
Collins, Jane L., 2016, Expanding the labor theory of value, Dialectical Anthropology,
      40: 103-123.
Collins, Jane L., 2017, The Politics of value: Three movements to change how we think
      about the economy, Chicago, Chicago University Press.
De Angelis, Massimo, 2007, The beginning of history: Value struggles and global
      capital, London, Pluto Press.


                                        2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 1, GIUGNO 2021: 31-36
36                                                             PATRÍCIA ALVES DE MATOS


Federici, Silvia, 2004, Caliban and the witch: Women, the body and primitive
     accumulation, New York, Autonomedia.
Graeber, David, 2001, Toward an anthropological theory of value: The false coin of our
     own dreams, London, Palgrave Macmillan.
Harvey, David, 2005, A brief history of neoliberalism, Oxford, Oxford University
     Press.
Narotzky, Susana, 2015, The payoff of love and the traffic of favours: Reciprocity,
     social capital, and the blurring of value realms in flexible capitalism, in
     Flexible Capitalism: Exchange and ambiguity at work, Jens Kjaerulff, ed, Oxford,
     Berghahn Books: 268-310.
Pusceddu, Antonio Maria, 2020, Grassroots ecologies of value: Environmental
     conflict and social reproduction in Southern Italy, Antipode, 52, 3: 847-866.
The Care Collective, 2020, Care Manifesto: The politics of interdependence, London,
     Verso.




2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 1, GIUGNO 2021: 31-36
