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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

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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
State
Society
Together
Anthropologists
States
Anthropology
Wells
Anarchism
Without
Exist
Well
Many
Possible

More quotes by David Graeber

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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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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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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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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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Revolutionary constituencies always involve a tacit alliance between the least alienated and the most oppressed.
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What is debt anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence.
David Graeber
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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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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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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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Aristotle [would] probably conclude most Americans, for all intents and purposes, are slaves.
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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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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.
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Consensus isn't just about agreement. It's about changing things around: You get a proposal, you work something out, people foresee problems, you do creative synthesis. At the end of it, you come up with something that everyone thinks is okay. Most people like it, and nobody hates it.
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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.
David Graeber
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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
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It's a difficult business, creating a new, alternative civilization.
David Graeber
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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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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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We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt.
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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.
David Graeber