David Graeber Quotes

Quotes about:

• Direct action is, ultimately, the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.

  David Graeber

  Direct Action, Acting, Ifs

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• There seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.

  David Graeber

  People, Benefits, Paid

  "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant". www.strikemag.org. August, 2013.

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• Neoliberalism isn't an economic program - it's a political program designed to produce hopelessness and kill any future alternatives.

  David Graeber

  Political, Neoliberalism, Alternatives

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• [A] great embarrassing fact… haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft.

  David Graeber

  Facts, Embarrassing, Form

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• Student loans are destroying the imagination of youth. If there’s a way of a society committing mass suicide, what better way than to take all the youngest, most energetic, creative, joyous people in your society and saddle them with, like $50,000 of debt so they have to be slaves? There goes your music. There goes your culture. There goes everything new that would pop out. And in a way, this is what’s happened to our society. We’re a society that has lost any ability to incorporate the interesting, creative and eccentric people.

  David Graeber

  Suicide, People, Imagination

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• We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.

  David Graeber

  Suicidal, Energy, Viruses

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• Anarchism and anthropology go well together because anthropologists know that a society without a state is possible because so many exist.

  David Graeber

  Together, States, Anthropology

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• As it turns out, we don't "all" have to pay our debts. Only some of us do.

  David Graeber

  Debt, Pay, Turns

  David Graeber (2014). “Debt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years”, p.505, Melville House

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• Debt is the most effective way to take a relation of violent subordination and make the victims feel that it's their fault.

  David Graeber

  Way, Faults, Debt

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• It's a difficult business, creating a new, alternative civilization.

  David Graeber

  Civilization, Creating, Alternatives

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• If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong.

  David Graeber

  Debt, Way, Violence

  David Graeber (2014). “Debt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years”, p.16, Melville House

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• Traditional hedonism...was based on the direct experience of pleasure: wine, women and song; sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll; or whatever the local variant. The problem, from a capitalist perspective, is that there are inherent limits to all this. People become sated, bored...Modern self-illusory hedonism solves this dilemma because here, what one is really consuming are fantasies and day-dreams about what having a certain product would be like.

  David Graeber

  Dream, Song, Sex

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• Anarchism is surprisingly effective in solving actual problems largely because anarchists have thought a lot about solving actual problems on a micro level in ways that other political ideologies don't really feel they have to until after they seize state power.

  David Graeber

  Political, Levels, Way

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The notion that a society could be regulated entirely by market forces is a utopian fantasy: an impossible dream generated by imagining what the world would be like if everyone's behavior was utterly consistent with some abstract moral ideal-in this case, economic theories that assume all human action is based on calculating, systematic, (but scrupulously law-abiding), greed.

  David Graeber

  Dream, Law, Greed

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• Within a capitalist corporation, someone says, "Lend me a wrench," and someone asks, "Yeah, what do I get?" You assume that the idea of each according to his or her abilities, each according to his or her needs - in solving a problem - is actually the only thing that works. And in situations of disaster, there are often communistic notions of improvisation, where you basically exchange hierarchies and all of a sudden all those things that are luxuries that you can't afford, you have them in an emergency.

  David Graeber

  Ideas, Luxury, Needs

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Aristotle [would] probably conclude most Americans, for all intents and purposes, are slaves.

  David Graeber

  Purpose, Slave

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• I would like, then, to end by putting in a good word for the non-industrious poor. At least they aren’t hurting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking time off from work is being spent with friends and family, enjoying and caring for those they love, they’re probably improving the world more than we acknowledge.

  David Graeber

  Hurt, Caring, Family And Friends

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• We are usually told that democracy originated in ancient Athens - like science, or philosophy, it was a Greek invention. It's never entirely clear what this is supposed to mean. Are we supposed to believe that before the Athenians, it never really occurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all the members of their community in order to make joint decisions in a way that gave everyone equal say?

  David Graeber

  Philosophy, Believe, Mean

  "Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology". Book by David Graeber, 2004.

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• The question we should be asking is not why people are sometimes cruel, or even why a few people are usually cruel (all evidence suggests true sadists are an extremely small proportion of the population overall), but how we have come to create institutions that encourage such behavior and that suggest cruel people are in some ways admirable-or at least as deserving of sympathy as those they push around.

  David Graeber

  People, Population, Asking

  "The Bully’s Pulpit". thebaffler.com. July 2015.

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• I came to the conclusion that most people in America would really like to be able to get a job where they think they're doing something noble and nice and good and it isn't just for the money. But the reason they hate what they call the cultural elite is that they see it as a class that's grabbed all the jobs where you can get paid to do something that isn't just for the money - if it's art, if it's charity, if it's intellectual, if it's political, whatever it might be.

  David Graeber

  Art, Hate, Nice

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• We don't live in a capitalist totality. Capitalism couldn't survive as a totality anyway. We live in this complex system and we already live communism and anarchism in a million forms everyday.

  David Graeber

  Everyday, Communism, Form

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Free market ideology - does anyone know where it first comes from? It comes from medieval Islam, and specifically, Shari'a. Because Shari'a provided this commercial law that is independent from the state.

  David Graeber

  Independent, Law, Islam

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• In the largest scheme of things, just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe.

  David Graeber

  Schemes, True Value, Values

  David Graeber (2014). “Debt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years”, p.505, Melville House

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• If you look at history, there seems to be a regular pattern: the country with the most powerful military also happens to be the one with the world trade currency. That gives them an enormous economic advantage, which causes goods to flow into their country.

  David Graeber

  Country, Powerful, Military

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• If you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.

  David Graeber

  People, Want, Unexpected

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