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I think if the general exodus that seems to be going on occurs it's going to be a disaster,.

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
Going
Think
Thinking
Exodus
Occurs
Disaster
General
Seems

More quotes by David Graeber

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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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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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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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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
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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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Revolutionary constituencies always involve a tacit alliance between the least alienated and the most oppressed.
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.
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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.
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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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.
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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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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.
David Graeber
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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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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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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
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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
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It's a difficult business, creating a new, alternative civilization.
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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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
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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.
David Graeber