DON KALB
Central European University and Utrecht University
Financialization and the capitalist
moment:
Marx versus Weber in the anthropology of global systems
A B S T R A C T
Kajsa Ekholm Friedman and Jonathan Friedmans The
Anthropology of Global Systems (AGS) is a robust,
ambitious, and timely undertaking in
macrotheoretical and macrohistorical anthropology.
I show that, more than 30 years ago, its
political-economic underpinnings anticipated the
key mechanisms of financialization, so important for
debates on the current financial crisis. By revisiting
the transition from feudalism to capitalism debate
with new insights from diplomatic history, I work
out a Marxian critique of the Friedmans Weberian
concept of capital, which is insufficiently relational
and therefore not sufficiently alert to the politics of
class. Attention to these relational politics adds an
important measure of what I call structured
contingency, and indeed agency, to temporal
process, which in the AGS tends to become overly
teleological. Building on my critique, I also draw
attention to the absence of the possibility of
collective rationality in the Friedmans grid of
modern subject positions. [globalization,
financialization, Marx, Weber, capitalism, transition
to capitalism, class, modernism and modernity]
nvited to comment on the Wall Street collapse while it was ongo-
I
ing, Keith Hart and Horacio Ortiz (2008) made several points worth
recalling: First, anthropologys relevance would be much enhanced
if some of us adopted a more self-conscious strategy of analyzing
the crisis of society at all levels; second, if we want to do so effec-
tively, we need to rethink our methods in terms of the relationship between
ethnography, history, and philosophy; and, third, attention to the work of
Karl Polanyi and Marcel Mauss, with its stress on the embeddedness of
markets and money in social relations and institutions against dominant
neoliberal economism, is one commendable way to start such a project
(see also Gudeman 2008). Embeddedness theory delivers a critique of the
economic paradigms involved in the current capitalist crisis on the basis of
their cognitive distortions or their moral and ethical failings. But Polanyi
and Mauss do not point to an explanation for the recent and continuing
dominance of these paradigms beyond the straightforward functionalist
notion that they have probably served the dominators well. Nor are they
always eloquent about why markets appear to be disembedded.
Mauss and Polanyi derived their vision from the Christian socialism
of small-scale producer associations in early modern European cities.
The Friedmans The Anthropology of Global Systems (AGS; Ekholm Fried-
man and Friedman 2008a, 2008b) builds its political-economy compo-
nent on a later and very different version of European socialism, as rep-
resented by Rosa Luxemburg. Their work adds important elements to
the embeddedness perspective by focusing on the cyclical globaliza-
tion of capital, capital flight as a response to the loss of market com-
petitiveness, and the recurrent geographic shifts in the centers of accu-
mulation throughout human history that underlay such globalizations.
What this results in is a more systematic view of geographic space,
structural obstacles to capital accumulation and flows, and in a con-
ception of time and periodicity that springs from an analysis of cap-
ital and empire rather than just markets and communitiesthough
not sufficiently, as I argue here. This framework actually helps us to
explain why, lately, neoliberalism has served the dominant so well.
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 258266, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. 
C 2013 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12018
 Financialization and the capitalist moment
Obviously, by advancing theoretical work and by combin-
ing contemporary historical ethnography in several world
regions with archaeological research on antique world sys-
tems, the Friedmans approach magnificently embodies the
reconceptualization of the anthropologists mix of methods
that Hart and Ortiz urge us to consider.
Here is a quote that serves as an example of the sort of
insights that this shift from markets to capital helps to
make. It gives a representative flavor of some of the more di-
rectly political economyoriented claims that are advanced
in the AGSwhich are, of course, only a small part of what
that work is about, but a crucial part in any case. I am giving
a long quote, focused on the West, to show how much some
anthropologists not mentioned by Hart and Ortiz have ac-
tually already been engaged in analyzing the structures be-
hind the financial collapse:
This (recent) cycle was one that ran from high national
accumulation and a high proportion of world pro-
duction and export of manufactures associated with
relatively limited internal consumption to a low rate
of accumulation and a high rate of capital export. It
was in the latter phase that internal consumption was
highest, but it was followed by a weakening national
economy, a decline in real wealth, and a shift in the
center of accumulation, the degree of competition, in-
ternal high consumption, fictitious accumulation, and
multinationalization . . . much of the present structural
crisis in the world economy is clearly related to this
developmentthat is, the tendency of the center to be-
come a consumer of the products of its own exported
capital, while producing less itself, leading to a chronic
balance of payments problem . . . The export of capi-
tal reflects a shift in the central stakes from industrial
to financial accumulation . . . As capital is exported, it
shifts increasingly into speculative and fictitious accu-
mulation at home, the latter is a normal cyclical phe-
nomenon that may in fact be offset by massive capital
export if the latter brings back enough money capital in
order to maintain credit levels in an increasingly un-
productive national economy. [Ekholm Friedman and
Friedman 2008a:54]
In particular, the last two sentences closely capture
some of the crucial underlying financial processes that have
been happening lately. The Friedmans argue that similar se-
quences and spatial dislocations with comparable capitalist
mechanisms have been in evidence since the early empires,
and AGS features some wonderful chapters elaborating
this.
Now, here comes the surprise: You might think the
above passage is about the present crisis unfolding since
2007. Wrong. The analysis was first published in 1978 (in
Immanuel Wallersteins Review; see Friedman 1978), a full
generation ago. The surprise is, as usual, a meaningful one:
Minimally, two relevant things can be read from it.
 American Ethnologist
The first is that some fifteen years before Giovanni
Arrighi (1994) discovered the core mechanism of financial-
ization, the Friedmans were already sketching its contours
quite specifically. Financialization is what Fernand Braudel
called a moment of autumn in an accumulation cycle in
the world system. After a period of advances in techniques,
new products, and rising productivity associated with the
emergence of a new hegemon in the system, innovations
are copied by others in the system, wages rise, overall com-
petition starts to increase, profitability declines, and capi-
tal accumulated in the once-expanding core is disinvested,
turned into liquidity, taken out, and used as credit for spec-
ulative purposes at home and abroad in a frantic effort by
the core to regain its profitability.
The background for the financial collapse is the pro-
cess of financialization as described by the Friedmans and,
later, by Arrighi. Recent commentators have emphasized
the insatiable and indiscriminate demand by investors for
whatever financial innovation was on offer. In their presen-
tist perspective, such authors seem to take the enormous
lake of liquidity that massively pushes for valorization as
self-evident. But it is not, and it is precisely what must be
explained in the first place. Financialization, as a slowly
creeping as well as institutionally and spatially revolution-
ary process over time, is the underlying cause. With AGS
in hand, anthropology can claim some early and powerful
insights here. Clearly, the turn toward history and theory
has been a key tool for making such discoveries. AGS also
shows that there is nothing new to historization and theo-
rization in the discipline, not even during the short post-
modern interludewhich, significantly, fell right within the
financialist moment, in what Arrighi called the new belle
e poque, and which was in fact intellectually mimicking
the speculation and infinite flow defining this conjuncture,
as the Friedmans have regularly pointed out. The AGS is
a rationalist and realist monument against the postmod-
ern seduction of endlessly circulating signifiers feverishly in
search of meaning.
The second insight starts from the surprising observa-
tion that it obviously took 30 years for the Friedmans antic-
ipated financialization moment to come to full fruition at
home. The Friedmans were analyzing empirical processes
in the 1970s, but in retrospect we know they were in fact
giving a prediction for things to come after a whole genera-
tion. This speaks both to the strength and to the weakness of
their analysis. The strength lies in their analysis of the basic
cyclical tendencies of capital export and deconcentration,
the weakness in their lack of anticipation of the specificities
and contingencies (in fact, the structured contingencies)
that postponed the full consequences of these trends for a
whole generation.
Both strength and weakness, I would argue, spring from
their notion of capital and capitalism. The Friedmans are
strong on understanding the transhistorical inclinations of
259
American Ethnologist  Volume 40 Number 2 May 2013
money capital in general (commercial capitalism, they
call it) but focus less sharply on the more specific mech-
anisms and politics of capitalism, which, I argue, cannot
be reduced to money capital or commerce. The reason for
their emphasis might relate back again to their specific
version of Hart and Ortizs new methodological mix. As
all-round anthropologists, the Friedmans turned to field-
work in several global peripheries as well as to archaeol-
ogy in the antique cores of the circum-Mediterranean. They
spent less time studying modern European history, which
is, of course, precisely what anthropology was classically
not supposed to be about. Even exemplary omnivorous and
iconoclastic researchers like the Friedmans cannot eat or
slay everything. But provincializing Europe is one thing; not
sufficiently theorizing it is quite another. This must be an-
other recommendation for Hart and Ortizs methodological
wishlist: reject the savage slot.
First, in the above quote, the Friedmans hint at a mech-
anism that could have served to postpone the process of
deflation getting under way until the seventies. They argue
that if exported capital brings back enough money capi-
tal to reinflate the economies of the core with easy credit,
the process could be extended over a longer time span, de-
spite declining local productivity. This has turned out to be
an excellent prediction. But unspecified in the 1978 Review
article are the precise conditions under which those large
quantities of money capital return to the core over a pro-
tracted period. This is where capitalism comes in, which is,
I emphasize, not just wealth or commerce but, first of all,
a social, institutional, and geographic power relation that
can produce, sustain, valorize, and secure wealth over time
by deepening and extending capitalist (imperial) relation-
ships endlessly, as we know. In other words, capitalism is
not just about finance but is defined by the capitalist nature
of formations of state and empire. It is about power.
The Friedmans (2008b:7) define capital in the Webe-
rian sense of abstract wealth. At various places in AGS
(but, in particular, in Historical Transformations, chapter 1),
they argue against the Marxist notion of capital as a social
relation of exploitation between capital and labor, which
they see as necessarily place based rather than spatial and
static rather than dynamic. Marx, they argue, was too im-
pressed by the industrialization and urbanization processes
and their localizing consequences happening around him
in 19th-century Europe. Later Marxists, in a different
conjuncture, such as Luxemburg (2003), V. I. Lenin (1996),
and Rudolf Hilferding (1985), articulated a more expansive
and spatial understanding of capital, focused on the global
circuits involved in the crisis-ridden social reproduction of
societies rather than place-based social production within
factories and localities. The Friedmans critique of Marx is
not unfounded, although David Harvey (2006), for example,
building on Henri Lefebvre, found a way around it in his dy-
namic notion of the production of space and the spatial
260
fix. World-systems theory too never bothered much about
the supposedly localized Marx. It took his insight in uneven
exchange and spatialized it through the notion of world
system. The point is, as Luxemburg (1996), world systems
theory, and Harvey (2006) show, that this relevant critique of
the place fetishism of 19th-century Marxism does not nec-
essarily lead to embracing the entirely nonrelational Webe-
rian notion of capital as abstract wealth. It can also encour-
age one to seek a more spatialized relational notion of cap-
ital. This is a path not taken by the Friedmans. Given their
reliance on Luxemburg in other respects, one wonders why.
Throughout AGS, the Friedmans talk about com-
mercial civilizations, time and again emphasizing that
modern capitalism is no more than a subspecies of this very
broad historical category. If we want to understand why
capital could actively create, indeed impose, the conditions
under which it would bring enough money capital back
into the core between 1977 and 2007, we need to bring
back capitalisms specificity again. I do that via a detour
through the historical core of the core and by revisiting
the transition debate with new historical insights from
diplomatic history.
Anglo-Dutch moments in the transition(s) to
and within capitalism
The term commercial civilization conjures up the image
of the mercantile city and the city-state. The question of
whether the classical empires, in particular Rome, belong
to this category is open, since so much of their internal dy-
namics depended on war, plunder, bounty, and rents from
vassalage rather than mere trade. While the Friedmans do
write about imperialism in several chapters, it seems that
the city-state and its wider territorial hegemony through the
spatial division of labor is much more emblematic of their
theoretical vision. In Wallersteins terms, they talk about
world systems and not so much about world empires. Nei-
ther do they talk about capitalist world systems or capitalist
imperialisms.
Arguably, the transition from Weberian capital as ab-
stract pecuniary urban wealth to full-fledged capitalism ac-
cords with the shift from the last world-dominant city-state
formation in history, the United Provincesa protonational
alliance among trading cities at the muddy margins of Eura-
sia, with Amsterdam, by the late 16th century, as its over-
powering playerto the United Kingdom. This shift in the
center of capital accumulation is also a qualitative shift
in the mechanisms of accumulation: I arguewith an eye
on the classic debate on capitalist transitionthat it is,
in fact, the moment of the making of capitalism, the mo-
ment at which mercantile capital fully merges with territo-
rial state power and becomes, in fact, world making. From
that point on, capitalism subjects territories and their so-
cial structures, including, crucially, the prevailing forms of
 Financialization and the capitalist moment
the state, directly to its own accumulation imperatives. This
transition shows exactly what the difference is between ab-
stract wealth and capitalism as a social, institutional, and
geographic power relation. I discuss it below as an illustra-
tion of what goes missing if you build a theory of capitalism
or finance on Weber.1
The precise dynamics underpinning this momentous
historical shift have not always been well understood. For
the classic authors in the debate about the transition from
feudalism to capitalism, the shift has always remained a
bit of a black box: At some point around 1700, the United
Kingdom, it is assumed, somehow surpassed the United
Provinces in commercial prowess, explained in general by
its larger resources. Both Wallerstein (1980) and Arrighi
(1994) have little more specific to say about it. For Robert
Brenner (1987, 1993), it is not even very significant because,
for him, UK capitalism emerges as an internal phenomenon
in its own countryside, driven by agrarian class formation,
the enclosure movement, and the creation of a landless
proletariat. For Brenner, capitalism in one country seems
a perfect possibility (another Marxist place fetishism).
Whig historians have also always been vague, noting the
emergence of a political union in 1688, when the Dutch
stadholder William III became king of England, supposedly
invited by the Whig party and the Protestant gentry
(Ferguson 2004; Pincus 2009; see also Brenner 1993). This
is, indeed, what Thomas Macaulays classical 19th-century
text History of England narrates. But political union is
a highly unanalytic term suggesting some kind of rosy
get-together. That sort of union does not exist in history,
certainly not when a concentrated container of capital
and maritime firepower such as the United Provinces,
itself utterly disinterested in territory, is one of the desig-
nated partners. This city-state alliance had very specific
interests for making a union, and these interests were
infinitely better served if the outcome were to be forever
represented as a union on English request. What were these
interests?
Recent research suggests that the story about the in-
vitation is, in fact, one of the myths of the modern world
that has continued to anchor the grand narrative of the En-
glish state and its glorious revolution until the present day.
The myth depicts the glorious revolution of 1688 as a na-
tional uprising of an independent Protestant people against
a Catholic tyrant, James II, helped by the Dutch stadholder.
Research in Dutch archives by Jonathan Israel (2003), how-
ever, has established that the glorious revolution was in
reality a full-fledged Dutch military occupation decided in
Amsterdam. Admittedly, there was substantial internal En-
glish support for it, but it was largely driven by a delib-
erate Dutch-led propaganda campaign for the protection
of English liberties. More than an internal rebellion, 1688
was what Israel called the Anglo-Dutch moment: an in-
vasion by one of the largest war fleets that early modern
 American Ethnologist
Europe had ever seen, financed and ordered by the City
of Amsterdam. The burghers of Amsterdam did so with a
strategic design in mind that was as audacious as it was
desperate. Threatened by the rising clout of France and its
world-empire designs, and looking a decisive land-based
military battle in the eye, the leading burghers intended to
externalize their staggering protection costs with one sur-
prise seaborne move and quickly turn around the balance
of forces in Europe by forcing a military alliance with an
England that would now be commanded by the Dutch mili-
tary elite. With full control over the center of London (and
the channel), James II running, and an important gentry
segment in the provinces willing to collaborate on Dutch
terms, William made England responsible, militarily and
also financially, for defending the Low Countries, while his
own battle-hardened mercenaries were to unify the English
Isles against the counterrevolution led by James II with sup-
port of France. A perpetual Protestant alliance was forged
between the United Provinces and what was now Great
Britain.
The final crown on the Dutch design was not the crown
of James II but the creation of the Bank of England in 1693
and the consequent creation of the capitalist statefinance
nexus supported through public debt. The bank, mod-
eled on Dutch financial practices and heavily underwritten
by (Anglo-)Dutch financiers, guaranteed Amsterdam-based
capital higher fixed rents in English state bonds than even
the Dutch East India Company could deliver. It also made
the English state accountable for guaranteeing the value of
these investments, which were now backed by state revenue
based on the highest tax rates within Europe (except for
the United Provinces itself ). This move was explicitly linked
to the strengthening of a parliamentary regime that would
prevent the monarch from defaulting or inflating away the
debts of the Bank of England on his own account. Thus was
created the first credible alliance between territorial state
making, empire building, and capital accumulation since
the Roman Republic. The bank and its wider constitutional,
legal, and institutional environment was, in fact, a histori-
cally unique accumulation mechanism designed by Dutch
capital for global capital formation. It would work in tan-
dem with the English state, which would now have the fi-
nancing mechanisms in place for outcompeting France on
the North Atlantic and imposing capitalist relationships all
over the globe. The bank facilitated the recycling of Dutch
capital into the making of the Atlantic space of flows, creat-
ing a spatial division of labor among a commonwealth of
juridically free communities connected through the cir-
cuits of capital with London as its center and entrepot. Af-
ter the glorious revolution, the enclosure movement in
the English countryside, so essential for the Brenner thesis,
was accelerated and legally consolidated, and the internal
capitalist transition within England became now both hege-
monic and nonreversible.2
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American Ethnologist  Volume 40 Number 2 May 2013
In other words, the making of the modern British state
and the Bank of England, including its further internal and
external ramifications of capitalism at home and capitalist
imperialism abroad, was, in fact, the outcome of an inter-
vention by Amsterdam-based finance capital to first save
itself and then create a larger and secured space for its
own operation. Until late in the 18th century, the finan-
cial revolution (Brewer 1988) that drove English imperial-
ism forward was substantially financed from Amsterdam.
Over this period of a hundred years, the English state debt
multiplied more than ten times, but its revenues boomed
even more. The Anglo-Dutch moment therefore signaled
the world-historical transition from the precapitalist long
phase of city-state formation in the interstices of territo-
rial empiresthe period of capital as abstract wealth
to actual modern capitalism as a social, spatial, and insti-
tutionalized relationship, crystallized around formations of
state and empire, that could now be imposed on territories
and communities whose reproduction would subsequently
become not just dependent on it but structured by it. The
core of that relationship was composed of three elements:
the creation of dependent labor forces (free, bonded, or
enslaved), secured free and endless capital circulation, idea of capital derived from Weber. Second, I need this il-
and supremely militarized imperial state power focused on
enforcing contracts, property rights, debt obligations, and
the management of unequal exchange (the rule of law).
Capital had become a space-making, indeed world-making,
and biopolitical force far beyond mere wealth.
While capital leaked away from the United Provinces,
local credit in Amsterdam became more abundant than
ever. Pockets of rentier wealth kept accumulating. But, over
time, unemployment, urban poverty, and the stagnation
of provincial middle classes became political issues, as
did protest. Inequality and oligopolization deepened all
through the period up to 1800 (Israel 1995). I now move
the focus back to the contemporary West, where similar,
though accelerated, processes began to occur in the 1970s.
In response to overaccumulation and a declining rate of
profit, Western capital was disinvested and turned liquid.
Abstract wealth flowed out, first to the Global South and
later, increasingly, to the Global East, where much larger,
more disciplined, and better-educated proletariats were
to be found as well as to be made. Western capitalism
meanwhile created for itself the global social relationships,
institutions, and mechanismsanalogous to the Bank of
England + English imperialism + enclosures formula of
the 17th and 18th centuriesfor deepening the global
divisions of labor, guaranteeing free trade, and securing
the value of its overseas investments, including the safe
repatriation of enough money capital to create Arrighis
belle e poque of postmodern consumption. Among the
analogous mechanisms were the Washington Consensus,
neoliberalism and its abbreviated version of democracy
and human rights, the WTO, the postBretton Woods roles
262
for the IMF and the World Bank as the toolbox for national
institutional reengineering and debt collection, the global
property rights regime, the new humanist militarism, the
depression of local social wages by developmentalist states
and competition states seeking to attract global capital
(Kalb 2005). These mechanisms also had consequences
analogous to those of the Anglo-Dutch moment: the de-
velopment of new spaces of capital, global imbalances,
oligopolization in the old core, growing inequality, and,
finally, crisis. Nothing new, the Friedmans would say. But
the specifics are new, and the important point is that they
are not anticipated by Webers abstract wealth. Abstract
wealth does not make new spaces of capital. Abstract
wealth is not by itself world-making. Only capitalism is.
Globallocal: Alliances or hierarchies?
The function of this digression into history and concepts is
not to argue the innate superiority of Marx over Weber or
anything else of a scholastic nature. The function is, first,
to illustrate the sort of global capitalist processes that were
overlooked in Friedmans otherwise foresighted 1978 arti-
cle and that are insufficiently developed in the AGS, with its
lustration to discuss the vision of the global, the local, and
their mutual articulations in AGS.
The global, the Friedmans argue repeatedly, is not
something tangible out there, not something hovering
above the local. It is not a supralocal organism (Ekholm
Friedman and Friedman 2008b:9), not an independent
sphere of activities and interests forcing itself on local life
(2008b:111). In particular, it is not transnational (Ekholm
Friedman and Friedman 2008b:9). For the Friedmans, it is
the sum of the properties of a global system of exchange
relationships and divisions of labor: The global is in em-
pirical terms the arena of interaction among localities
(Ekholm Friedman and Friedman 2008b:4).
Their vision is certainly consistent with a Weberian no-
tion of capital and exchange. But it ignores the possibility of
capitalism as an institutionalized large-scale system of un-
equal exchange, guaranteed and imposed by statelike and
imperial institutions that push people over time in different
ways and via different social forms into the networks of cap-
ital or that even produce literally capitalist spaces. Their vi-
sion of the global is at most Holland before 1688 but not the
English empire or the U.S.-led neoliberal, militarized, and
financialized globalization of the last three decades. Such
capitalist global systems have an identifiable set of very tan-
gible transnational institutions and networks in place that
penetrate deeply into the structure and dynamics of local-
ities and, indeed, tend to re-create localities in their own
image. Ergo: It does hover above the local in at least some
significant ways.
Jonathan Friedman has regularly rejected the premises
of the cultural globalization school in anthropology for
 Financialization and the capitalist moment
assuming that globalization was something new and had
generally transformative consequences on local culture
everywhere. AGS magisterially demonstrates that local
societies have always been dependent for their social
reproduction through time on exchange relationships
with others within global systems. At the same time, it
claims, against the cultural globalizers, that such local
cultures, through time, have remained distinct, have kept
forms of sociality and intentionality of their own, and
tend to assimilate circulating items according to their
own strategies in order to practice coherence (Ekholm
Friedman and Friedman 2008b:1124). AGS strongly argues
against a diffusionist anthropology focused on circulating
signifiers. U.S. anthropology, it reminds us, had always
rejected diffusionism in favor of an interest in how cultural
elements were structured into larger schemes of life
(Ekholm Friedman and Friedman 2008b:13). AGS defends
Franz Boas against the return of the Kulturkreislehre, and it
does so on Boass culturally holist grounds.
This view connects with a general property of local
global articulations in global systems a` la the Friedmans. In
AGS, while localities will always depend on wider spheres
of exchange for their social reproduction, they are explicitly
not shaped or determined by them. Their actual social log-
ics and forms of development are ultimately local. Global
systems in this vision are always constraining (Ekholm
Friedman and Friedman 2008b:2) for local possibilities
and evidently also enablingbut never more than that.
They remain external to local strategies, socialities,
intentionalities, and practices. Global systems thus
set limits but never really exert pressures of a radically
qualitative kind. The work the Friedmans use to illustrate
this localglobal articulation is that of Claude Levi-Strauss
on alliances. But why not turn to Eric Wolf, for example,
whose work (1982, in particular) could be said to be funda-
mentally about such relationships? Alliances have a taint of
horizontalism about them. They are not automatically as-
sociated with profound hierarchy, inequality, unevenness.
Friedmanian notions such as commerce, exchange,
and alliances do not well describe capitalist imperialism,
exploitation, structural violence, and the dispossession that
also tend to come, cyclically, with capitalism.
It is tempting to say that this conception of localglobal
articulation fits the Friedmans ethnographic cases well.
Their cases are not located in the spaces made directly
by capital. They are not, say, Gerald Siders (1986) New-
foundland fishing communities, which were historically
hidebound vis-`a-vis English merchant capital and therefore
deeply contradictory rather than coherent, instances of
people forced inevitably to struggle within and against
their own histories. They are not Susanna Narotzky and
Gavin Smiths (2006) Vega Baja in Spain, where class rebel-
lion and civil war, fascism, and the European Union have
created continuous havoc and taken away any chances
 American Ethnologist
of local coherence and cultural autonomy; where local
culture is actually explicitly used against the people who
live there. They are deeply unlike my own Dutch and east
European 20th-century urban industrial locations where
local histories are both selectively appropriated on behalf of
capital against local daughters and presented as barbarism
that must be unlearned by shock therapy and dispossession
(Kalb 1997, 2009). I cite these particular cases because
they deal with the local ramifications and contradictions of
capital and have led to a reimagining within anthropology
of class in relational, spatialized, dynamic, and situated
ways. One could make a case that the Friedmans culturalist
localglobal reimagining sprang from their debate with
the cultural globalist school on the latters diffusionist
terms. But I would argue that the difference with the class
approaches is not random. It is a difference that stems from
the contrast between a Marxist and a Weberian conception
of capital and class. There is a set of pressing theoretical
debates involved here that go far beyond the descriptive
question of local cultural difference: They are about the
mechanisms of insertion and subjection of locales and
peoples in capitalist power projects as well as about their
cultural intentionalities. And they lead, for example, to
rethinking Boasian ideas such as cultural coherence in
the light of lived contradictions. Class was always meant as
a notion pinpointing the mechanisms of unequal exchange
as well as describing the unequal cultural negotiations by
which they are surrounded. And I do not just mean class
from below but, in particular, also class from above, the
class-structured relational articulation over time, including
the recurrent Anglo-Dutch moments.
Hegemony and identity: Logic of capital or
structured contingencies of class?
With their tools based on ethnography, archaeology, Lux-
emburg, Weber, Levi-Strauss, and Boas, the Friedmans
have generated a sparkling oeuvre, peppered with debates
with eloquent adversaries such as Marvin Harris, Mar-
shall Sahlins, and, recently, the cultural globalists. The
excitement of AGS lies in how the Friedmans bring to-
gether three different specialist interests: in the expansion
and contraction of global systems throughout human his-
tory, the formation and demise of centers and peripheries
through time, and within those processes the cyclical and
dialectical relations between cultural identity and global
hegemony (Ekholm Friedman and Friedman 2008b:11).
Their work thus stands out as probably the most ambi-
tious effort at large-scale theory formation in anthropology
today.
In AGS, these three strands come synthetically to-
gether in the theory of modernity as the cultural and iden-
tity space of all commercial capitalisms in human his-
tory. This is succinctly represented in three complementary
263
American Ethnologist  Volume 40 Number 2 May 2013
Figure 1. The ramifications of hegemonic decline in the Friedmans glob-
alization framework. Figure courtesy of Jonathan Friedman.
graphs in AGS (Ekholm Friedman and Friedman 2008a:255,
2008b:204, 215), of which one is shown in Figure 1.
The theory argues that hegemonic expansions within
global systems and cycles, as capital flows into core local-
ities and local manufacturing grows, tend to increase the
capitalization of social relationships, which, in turn, in-
creases the likelihood that people will develop modernist,
individualist, and future-oriented outlooks within their own
specific cultural cosmologies. Conversely (see Figure 1), it
predicts that hegemonic declines, with capital flowing out
from the former cores and local manufacturing collapsing,
lead to a decapitalization of social relations, generating a
new search for cultural roots in the form of primitivist, post-
modern, or fundamentalist identities (see Nonini, this is-
sue, for further discussion of identity spaces as suggested by
the Friedmans). Expansion brings a combined sparkling of
progress, consumption, and individualism within the eth-
nonational framework, whereas decline helps to nurture a
retrospective narcissism, a search for authenticity, and a
drift toward communalism. Having started out as Marxist
critics of Marx, the Friedmans have thoroughly anthropol-
ogized and universalized Max Weber on Protestantism and
individualism.
The West these days is in such a phase of compre-
hensive decline: The rerouting of capital away from the old
core leads to a rerooting of our cultural sensibilities. The
strength of this jumbo vision resides once more in its hit-
ting at tendencies springing from markets and the money
form, and the weakness emerges again from its lack of par-
ticularity on capitalism. Until recently, Western capitalism
had succeeded in bringing back enough money capital
to sustain high consumption and high credit levels among
the upper-middle to middle classes in the countries of the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD), even though members of these classes are going
to need to save more in the near future. It has also, until
now, by and large succeeded in keeping control over tech-
nology and property rights, thus again feeding its owners
264
and cadres in the old core by the work of the proletariats
in the Global South and East, the knowledges of indigenous
peoples, and the devalued living standards of the reserve
army of labor, wherever it is found (see Smith 2011 for an
important discussion of surplus populations and selec-
tive hegemony). It is hard to maintain that modernism has
completely lost its sway among Western citizenries. We are
not back in the Middle Ages yet, even though our optimism
for the future is fading. This is not to say that the Friedmans
predictions are mistaken: Nationalist and Christian funda-
mentalisms are structurally on the rise. A neonationalism
of the dispossessed and disenfranchised lower-middle and
working classes in the OECD as well as in the new produc-
tion spaces such as eastern Europe seems vibrant in many
places and might become hegemonic in an unfortunate set-
ting here or there (Kalb 2009; Kalb and Halmai 2011). Ret-
rospective narcissism does abound. But it is not yet of the
thoroughly ritualistic kind; rather, it takes the form of a se-
ries of serious pun-pricks in an otherwise slowly crumbling
cake of modernism, sunk deeply in the institutions of the
capitalist (national and transnational) state. After 30 years
of that states declining hegemony, the future clearly is not
so hopeful anymore and the present is fearful, but neither is
entirely swallowed by the imaginary attractions of the past.
What underlies the actual contingencies at this point
is, again, the power balances between classes, the global
and local configurations of class that allow capitalist glob-
alization to happen but not without forms of complex ne-
gotiation in which alliances as well as antagonisms of class
are articulated. These negotiations are about the dollar
yen exchange rate as well as about GermanGreek relation-
ships on the Euro. They are about employment and benefits
in China, India, and Poland as well as in Belgium and the
United States. They are about the Occupy Wall Street and
Indignados movements and worker and peasant rebellions
in China and India. And they are about the class charac-
ter of global governance, about international labor organiz-
ing and social standards. And, of course, about global finan-
cial flows and their regulation. These and other institutional
fields are the terrain of wars of position and maneuver. The
outcome of those wars, globally and locally, determines the
fate of modernism in an era of globalization and declining
hegemony of an older core. These are the structured contin-
gencies not worked out in the AGS.
Here we touch at the missing slot in the various possi-
ble subject positions provided for in the Friedmans vision
of modernity as the identity space of commercial civiliza-
tions. The genuinely modern position in this vision is ex-
clusively an individualist one driven by consumerism and
encapsulated in the modern nation-state, with its civic na-
tionalism. A mark of Weber again here. The Friedmans, sig-
nificantly, do not provide for a collectivist modernist posi-
tion that is expressed in rational collective claims on states
and capital (see, again, Nonini, this issue). Collectivism only
 Financialization and the capitalist moment
appears in the regressive search for roots under conditions
of decline. Rational collective action based on rational col-
lective insights is not expected. Capitalism, as I have argued
throughout, is about the making of capitalist relations, insti-
tutions, and spaces. But, historically, in Marxism, it was also
about the possibility of the dictatorship of the proletariat,
which, in Marx, served as a metaphor for the attainment
through class struggle of collective rationality against the
destruction wrought by capital left to its own devices. Later,
it was about planning, welfare, development, and a bal-
anced international order. Collectivist modernist counter-
hegemony against national states captured by financialized
capital and cosmopolitan elites, in short, is a missing slot in
the Friedmans grid of possible subjectivities. This absence
is homologous to the absence of a relationalinstitutional
spatial vision of capitalism. Weber usurps it all.
The graphs in AGS are elegant and insightful, but they
have a certain agencyless finalism and a taint of science
fiction. That is so because they are based on the cover-
ing laws of commercial capitalism and the universality
of Weberian abstract wealth and not on the dynamic so-
cial, geographic, and institutional relationship of classes, al-
ways in the (un)making, called capitalism, a relationship
at once crystallized within and structured by the forms of
the state. The latter is at once more revolutionary, more
fixed, and more contradictory then the Weberian ver-
sion and therefore, ultimately, more dynamic and open-
ended. The Friedmans exclusively provide for a Weberian
individualist modern subjectivity within the ethnonational
state, whereas modernity has, in fact, been the transna-
tional fountain from which (transnational) social move-
ments for collectiveas well as individualemancipation
have sprung. These two missing elements together produce
much more structured contingency, and, indeed, politics,
than the graphs allow. But who would deny that the ques-
tions posed by the Friedmans are the fundamental ques-
tions of our time? Nothing new, they would say. Which is
only one of the reasons why an engagement with their work,
so singularly ambitious as macroanthropological theory, is
so immensely exciting.
Notes
Acknowledgments. I thank Gus Carbonella, Gavin Smith, Steve
Reyna, Don Nonini, and, of course, Jonathan and Kajsa Ekholm
Friedman for sustained debate. This article has given rise to a sub-
stantially longer discussion entitled Deep Play: Finance, Demos
and Ethnos in the New (Old) Europe (Kalb in press).
1. Arjun Appadurai (2011) takes up Weber too in search of The
Ghost in the Financial Machine. He offers fascinating insights on
the culture of finance and its embrace of complexity and uncer-
tainty rather than mere calculable risk. However, one does not
need a ghost to make a financial machine, as the AGS makes per-
fectly clear. It is the other way around.
2. Marx seemed aware of the importance of the Anglo-Dutch
moment and the Dutch-imposed management practices of the
national debt for the actual consolidation of capitalism as a mode
 American Ethnologist
of production. See, for example, Marx 1977:883884, 919 and Pat-
terson 2009:124127.
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Don Kalb
Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology
Central European University
Budapest, Hungary
kalbd@ceu.hu
Department of Cultural Anthropology
Central European University and Utrecht University
Utrecht, The Netherlands

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