Home › Authors › David Graeber
David Graeber Quotes
1961–2020 United States
David Rolfe Graeber (February 12, 1961 – September 2, 2020) was an American anthropologist and anarchist who was a Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths. In addition to his academic work, Graeber has a history of both direct and indirect involvement in political activism, including membership in the labor union Industrial Workers of the World, a role in protests against the World Economic Forum in New York City in 2002, and support for the 2010 UK student protests movement.
United States Academics Activists Anarchists Anthropologists Also known as: Dave Graeber
Random David Graeber quote
45 quotes
It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor.
Slavery is the ultimate form of being ripped from one's context, and thus from all the social relationships that make one a human being.
Before we can apply the tools of anthropology to reconstruct the real history of money, we need to understand what's wrong with the conventional account.
Exchange is all about equivalence.
Honor is the same as credit; it's one's ability to keep ones promises, but also, in the case of a wrong, to "get even".
One might even say that it's one of the scandals of capitalism that most capitalist firms, internally, operate communistically.
The moment we begin to map the history of money across the last five thousand years of Eurasian history, startling patterns begin to emerge.
Direct action is the insistence, when faced with structures of unjust authority, on acting as if one is already free.
Direct Action: An Ethnography (2009)
In fact, communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It is what makes society possible.
The criminalization of debt was the criminalization of the very basis of human society.
One could well argue that if there is any human essence, it is precisely our capacity to imagine that we have one.
Direct Action: An Ethnography (2009)
If we insist on defining all human interactions as matters of people giving one thing for another, then any ongoing human relations can only take the form of debts.
A legitimate enterprise had to have some moral basis, and the only morality the company knew was debt.
"The essence of consensus process is just that everyone should be able to weigh in equally on a decision, and no one should be bound by a decision they detest."
The Democracy Project (2013)
Medieval corporations owned property, and they often engaged in complex financial arrangements, but in no case were they profit-seeking enterprises in the modern sense.
In fact, our standard account of monetary history is precisely backwards. We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around.
What is debt anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence."
What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence.
Indeed, India has become notorious as a country in which a very large part of the working population is laboring in effective debt peonage to a landlord or other creditor.
The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.
The Utopia of Rules (2015)
Topics David Graeber is quoted on
Works