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

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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 if the general exodus that seems to be going on occurs it's going to be a disaster,.
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Revolutionary constituencies always involve a tacit alliance between the least alienated and the most oppressed.
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Aristotle [would] probably conclude most Americans, for all intents and purposes, are slaves.
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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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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 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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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It's a difficult business, creating a new, alternative civilization.
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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.
David Graeber