FREE WORDS: THEORY: DAVID GRAEBER ON MAUSS

Chinese cockle pickers in Lancashire; energy price hikes in Europe after a quarrel between former Soviet states; markets in new reproductive technologies: these events make the news, but cause consternation and perplexity. Are these one-off incidents? Or, are they the tip of radical economic shifts profoundly affecting both our lives and world society? If so, how can we explain these underlying trends?

Is the ‘anti-globalization movement’ anything of the kind? Active resistance is true globalization, David Graeber maintains, and its repertoire of forms is currently coming from the arsenal of a reinvented anarchism.