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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
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45 quotes
"Communist society"; in the sense of a society organized exclusively on that single principle—could never exist. But all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actually-existing communism.
Hell is a collection of individuals who spend their time working on a task they don't like and are not especially good at.
One element, however, tends to go flagrantly missing in even the most vivid conspiracy theories about the banking system, let alone in official accounts: that is, the role of military power. There's a reason why the wizard has such a strange capacity to create money out of nothing. Behind him there is a man with a gun.
Even a modest Basic Income program could become a stepping-stone toward the most profound transformation of all: to unlatch work from livelihood entirely.
Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018)
To tell the history of debt, then, is also necessarily to reconstruct how the language of the marketplace has come to pervade every aspect of human life—even to provide the terminology for the moral and religious voices ostensibly raised against it.
It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.
Most of all, anarchism is just a matter of having the courage to take the simple principles of common decency that we all live by, and to follow them through to their logical conclusions.
Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You! (2000)
All societies based on slavery tend to be marked by this agonizing double consciousness: the awareness that the highest things one has to strive for are also, ultimately, wrong; but at the same time, the feeling that this is simply the nature of reality.
The attentive reader may have noticed that the core period of Jasper's Axial age—the lifetimes of Pythagoras, Confucius, and the Buddha—corresponds almost exactly to the period in which coinage was invented.
Even human relations become a matter of cost benefit calculation. Clearly this is the way the conquistadors viewed the worlds that they set out to conquer. It is the peculiar feature of modern capitalism to create social arrangements that essentially force us to think this way.
Throughout most of recorded history, the only people who actually did wage labor were slaves. ... It’s only now that we think of wage labor and slavery as opposite to one another.
It is rather striking to think that the very core of the Christian message, salvation itself, the sacrifice of God's own son to rescue humanity from eternal damnation, should be framed in the language of a financial transaction.
The reason that economic textbooks now begin with imaginary villages is because it has been impossible to talk about real ones. Even some economists have been forced to admit that Smith's Land of Barter doesn't really exist. The question is why the myth is perpetuated anyway.
In our society, 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.
Honor is a zero sum game.
Nowadays, nobody talks about bureaucracy. But in the middle of the last century, particularly in the late sixties and early seventies, the word was everywhere.
The Utopia of Rules (2015)
Consumer debt is the lifeblood of our economy. All modern nation states are built on deficit spending. Debt has come to be the central issue of international politics. But nobody seems to know exactly what it is, or how to think about it.
"Consensus is not just a set of techniques. When we talk about process, what we’re really talking about is the gradual creation of a culture of democracy. This brings us back to rethinking some of our most basic assumptions about what democracy is even about."
The Democracy Project (2013)
Anarchism is just the way people act when they are free to do as they choose, and when they deal with others who are equally free — and therefore aware of the responsibility to others that entails.
Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You! (2000)
Who was the first man to look at a house full of objects and to immediately assess them only in terms of what he could trade them in for in the market likely to have been? Surely he can only have been a thief.
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