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

David Graeber

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David Graeber
Age: 59 †
Born: 1961
Born: February 12
Died: 2020
Died: September 2
Anthropologist
Trade Unionist
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
David Rolfe Graeber
David R. Graeber
Slave
Americans
Probably
Intents
Purpose
Aristotle
Would
Conclude
Slaves
Purposes

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One of the fairly interesting things about money is that it makes certain things possible that wouldn't be possible otherwise - it doesn't make them inevitable. Hence the strange blindness of economists to what would actually happen when one does exchange things if there isn't money in such contexts.
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You can't have cutthroat competition when there's no one stopping you from actually cutting each other's throats. In order to build up trust we also have to think about each other's needs and it creates an entirely different dynamic.
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Capitalism is like this fractal thing where anything that contains an element of capitalism anywhere inside it is just something that turns into capitalism. It is an incredibly defeatist attitude. If you choose to look at reality that way, I suppose you can, but you have to do enormous violence to reality to do so consistently.
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States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today.
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I think we need to think of capitalism as a very bad way of organizing communism. Much of what we do is already communism, so just expand it.
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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.
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Look at labor policy. What's the point of making everybody work too much? It's not very useful. It is destroying the planet, actually. But it's great at keeping people off the streets.
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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.
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As it turns out, we don't all have to pay our debts. Only some of us do.
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Adam Smith actually took all his best ideas and lines from sources from medieval Persia. But one thing he doesn't take is the underlying assumption they have that the basis of a market is mutual aid.
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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.
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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.
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It's a difficult business, creating a new, alternative civilization.
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I think if the general exodus that seems to be going on occurs it's going to be a disaster,.
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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.
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When you take away the violence from the market, even it starts shifting into something else - not exactly paradise, but it doesn't become the market in the way we see it now.
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What we're already doing is communism. The first step we have to make is to realize that we're already closer to it than we think.
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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.
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The example of Russia reminds us that keeping up that enormous dead weight of the security apparatus required to enforce the ideological conformity to preempt anything that looks like an alternative or a social movement is destroying capitalism.
David Graeber
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Revolutionary constituencies always involve a tacit alliance between the least alienated and the most oppressed.
David Graeber