Value and Worthlessness
Book • 2025
Don Kalb's 'Value and Worthlessness' examines how capitalist processes interact with everyday use values, exchange values, and surplus value, centering hidden histories and life narratives across Europe.
Drawing on long-form interviews and ethnographic work in Western and Eastern Europe, Kalb traces how political and economic transformations produce feelings of worthlessness and social devaluation.
The book mixes microhistory, autobiography, and theoretical synthesis to propose a Marxist anthropology attentive to relational use values and the political consequences of devaluation.
Kalb develops a 'theory from the East' to explain post-socialist disillusionment and the rise of right-wing politics where welfare collapse and abandonment shaped popular responses.
Through careful qualitative work, the book argues for engaged scholarship that returns concepts to interlocutors as tools for thinking about their lives.
Drawing on long-form interviews and ethnographic work in Western and Eastern Europe, Kalb traces how political and economic transformations produce feelings of worthlessness and social devaluation.
The book mixes microhistory, autobiography, and theoretical synthesis to propose a Marxist anthropology attentive to relational use values and the political consequences of devaluation.
Kalb develops a 'theory from the East' to explain post-socialist disillusionment and the rise of right-wing politics where welfare collapse and abandonment shaped popular responses.
Through careful qualitative work, the book argues for engaged scholarship that returns concepts to interlocutors as tools for thinking about their lives.
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Don Kalb
Don Kalb
Hidden Histories: Use Value and Theories from the East
