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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.

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
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Surprisingly
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Level
Anarchism
States
Problems
Anarchist
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Really
State
Largely
Anarchists
Way
Political
Ideology
Micro
Thought
Actual
Ideologies

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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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 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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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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Neoliberalism isn't an economic program - it's a political program designed to produce hopelessness and kill any future alternatives.
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It's a difficult business, creating a new, alternative civilization.
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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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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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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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Aristotle [would] probably conclude most Americans, for all intents and purposes, are slaves.
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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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I think if the general exodus that seems to be going on occurs it's going to be a disaster,.
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