Quote

Neoliberalism isn't an economic program - it's a political program designed to produce hopelessness and kill any future alternatives.

David Graeber

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Political
Hopelessness
Designed
Alternatives
Program
Kill
Produce
Economic
Future

More quotes by David Graeber

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
David Graeber
Image
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
Image
It's a difficult business, creating a new, alternative civilization.
David Graeber
Image
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
Image
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
Image
As it turns out, we don't all have to pay our debts. Only some of us do.
David Graeber
Image
Aristotle [would] probably conclude most Americans, for all intents and purposes, are slaves.
David Graeber
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Anarchism and anthropology go well together because anthropologists know that a society without a state is possible because so many exist.
David Graeber