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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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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
Always
Tacit
Alienated
Alliance
Alliances
Involve
Oppressed
Revolutionary
Least
Constituencies

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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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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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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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It's a difficult business, creating a new, alternative civilization.
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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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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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Aristotle [would] probably conclude most Americans, for all intents and purposes, are slaves.
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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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Anarchism and anthropology go well together because anthropologists know that a society without a state is possible because so many exist.
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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 think if the general exodus that seems to be going on occurs it's going to be a disaster,.
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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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As it turns out, we don't all have to pay our debts. Only some of us do.
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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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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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What is debt anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence.
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