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It's a difficult business, creating a new, alternative civilization.
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
Business
Alternative
Alternatives
Civilization
Creating
Difficult
More quotes by David Graeber
Revolutionary constituencies always involve a tacit alliance between the least alienated and the most oppressed.
David Graeber
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.
David Graeber
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.
David Graeber
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
Anarchism and anthropology go well together because anthropologists know that a society without a state is possible because so many exist.
David Graeber
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
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
Aristotle [would] probably conclude most Americans, for all intents and purposes, are slaves.
David Graeber
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.
David Graeber
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.
David Graeber
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
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
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
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
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
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.
David Graeber
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
I think if the general exodus that seems to be going on occurs it's going to be a disaster,.
David Graeber
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
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.
David Graeber
