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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.
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
Realizing
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First
Communism
Make
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More quotes by David Graeber
Aristotle [would] probably conclude most Americans, for all intents and purposes, are slaves.
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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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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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Revolutionary constituencies always involve a tacit alliance between the least alienated and the most oppressed.
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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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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.
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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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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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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 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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It's a difficult business, creating a new, alternative civilization.
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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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When you take away the violence from the market, even it starts shifting into something else - not exactly paradise, but it doesn't become the market in the way we see it now.
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