Top 81 David Graeber Quotes
#1. It's those who do not have the power to hire and fire who are left with the work of figuring out what actually did go wrong
David Graeber
#2. It is a strange, repetitive feature of action movies that the infuriating go-by-the-rules boss of the maverick hero is almost invariably Black.)
David Graeber
#3. In other words, despite the dogged liberal assumption - again, coming from Smith's legacy - that the existence of states and markets are somehow opposed, the historical record implies that exactly the opposite is the case. Stateless societies tend also to be without markets.
David Graeber
#4. Insofar as we have freedoms, it's not because some great wise Founding Fathers granted them to us. It's because people like us insisted on exercising those freedoms - by doing exactly what we're doing here - before anyone was willing to acknowledge that they had them.
David Graeber
#5. Even logic and conversation are really just forms of trading, and as in all things, humans will always try to seek their own best advantage, to seek the greatest profit they can from the exchange.
David Graeber
#6. Then you ask: what, within this cosmos, is the opposite of a vampire? The answer is obvious. The opposite of a vampire is a werewolf.
David Graeber
#7. In most important ways, this world is explicitly antibureaucratic: that is, it evinces an explicit rejection of virtually all the core values of bureaucracy.
David Graeber
#8. While opposing injustice nonviolently, he (Gandhi) insisted, is always morally superior to opposing it violently, opposing injustice violently is still morally superior to doing nothing to oppose it at all.
David Graeber
#9. 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
#10. In the largest scheme of things, just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe.
David Graeber
#11. All rich countries now employ legions of functionaries whose primary function is to make poor people feel bad about themselves.
David Graeber
#12. IMF is really designed to protect creditors not debtors.
David Graeber
#13. What ultimately lies behind the appeal of bureaucracy is fear of play.
David Graeber
#14. Many hold that by floating the dollar, Nixon converted the U.S. currency into pure "fiat money" - mere pieces of paper, intrinsically worthless, that were treated as money only because the United States government insisted that they should be.
David Graeber
#15. the taste for Victorian-era sci-fi futures is more than anything else a nostalgia for the last moment, before the carnage of World War I, when everyone could safely feel a redemptive future was possible.
David Graeber
#16. The "self-actualization" philosophy from which most of this new bureaucratic language emerged insists that we live in a timeless present, that history means nothing, that we simply create the world around us through the power of the will.
David Graeber
#17. If one accepts Jean Piaget's famous definition of mature intelligence as the ability to coordinate between multiple perspectives (or possible perspectives) one can see, here, precisely how bureaucratic power, at the moment it turns to violence, becomes literally a form of infantile stupidity.
David Graeber
#18. It's not that we owe "society." If there is any notion of "society" here - and it's not clear that there is - society is our debts.
David Graeber
#19. End of work arguments became increasingly popular in the late seventies and early eighties, as radical thinkers pondered what would happen to traditional working-class struggle once there was no longer a working class. (The answer: it would turn into identity politics.)
David Graeber
#20. The result often leaves those forced to deal with bureaucratic administration with the impression that they are dealing with people who have for some arbitrary reason decided to put on a set of glasses that only allows them to see only 2 percent of what's in front of them.
David Graeber
#21. [Superheroes] aren't fascists. They are just ordinary, decent, super-powerful people who inhabit a world in which fascism is the only political possibility.
David Graeber
#22. About the only policies that can't be referred to as "deregulation" are ones that aim to reverse some other policy that has already been labeled "deregulation," which means it's important, in playing the game, to have your policy labeled "deregulation" first.
David Graeber
#24. top-down chains of command are not particularly efficient: they tend to promote stupidity among those on top and resentful foot-dragging among those on the bottom. The greater the need to improvise, the more democratic the cooperation tends to become.
David Graeber
#25. For thousands of years, violent men have been able to tell their victims that those victims owe them something. If nothing else, they "owe them their lives" (a telling phrase) because they haven't been killed.
David Graeber
#26. 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
#27. Still, the ground was only really prepared for capitalism in the familiar sense of the term when the merchants began to organize themselves into eternal bodies as a way to win monopolies, legal or de facto, and avoid the ordinary risks of trade.
David Graeber
#28. The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.
David Graeber
#29. Freedom has to be in tension with something, or it's just randomness.
David Graeber
#30. Money's capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic - and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene. The
David Graeber
#31. 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
#32. Revolutionary constituencies always involve a tacit alliance between the least alienated and the most oppressed.
David Graeber
#33. The real origins of money are to be found in crime and recompense, war and slavery, honor, debt, and redemption. That,
David Graeber
#34. Usury was seen above all as an assault on Christian charity, on Jesus's injunction to treat the poor as they would treat the Christ himself, giving without expectation of return and allowing the borrower to decide on recompense (Luke 6:34
David Graeber
#35. Since one cannot know a radically better world is not possible, are we not betraying everyone by insisting on continuing to justify, and reproduce, the mess we have today? And anyway, even if we're wrong, we might well get a lot closer.
David Graeber
#36. If you look at history, there seems to be a regular pattern: the country with the most powerful military also happens to be the one with the world trade currency. That gives them an enormous economic advantage, which causes goods to flow into their country.
David Graeber
#37. As it turns out, we don't "all" have to pay our debts. Only some of us do.
David Graeber
#38. For every subtle and complicated question, there is a perfectly simple and straightforward answer, which is wrong. -
David Graeber
#39. Solitary pleasures will always exist, but for most human beings, the most pleasurable activities almost always involve sharing something: music, food, liquor, drugs, gossip, drama, beds.
David Graeber
#40. Bureaucracies, I've suggested, are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity
of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence.
David Graeber
#41. The real origin of the democratic spirit - and most likely, many democratic institutions - lies precisely in those spaces of improvisation just outside the control of governments and organized churches.
David Graeber
#42. In American prisons, which are extraordinarily violent places, the most vicious form of punishment is simply to lock a person in an empty room for years with absolutely nothing to do. This emptying of any possibility of communication or meaning is the real essence of what violence really is or does.
David Graeber
#43. Aristotle [would] probably conclude most Americans, for all intents and purposes, are slaves.
David Graeber
#44. It is assumed in many parts of the world that democracy is a group of people facing a certain problem, who come together to solve it in a way where everyone has an equal say.
David Graeber
#45. So what are people actually referring to when they talk about "deregulation"? In ordinary usage, the word seems to mean "changing the regulatory structure in a way that I like.
David Graeber
#46. wage-labor contracts in the ancient world were primarily a matter of the rental of slaves - a
David Graeber
#47. 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
#48. Debt is the most effective way to take a relation of violent subordination and make the victims feel that it's their fault.
David Graeber
#49. The hidden reality of human life is the fact that the world doesn't just happen. It isn't a natural fact, even though we tend to treat it as if it is - it exists because we all collectively produce it.
David Graeber
#50. Competition forces factory owners to mechanize production, so as to reduce labor costs, but while this is to the short-term advantage of the individual firm, the overall effect of such mechanization is actually to drive the overall rate of profit of all firms down.
David Graeber
#51. [A] great embarrassing fact ... haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft.
David Graeber
#52. Direct action is, ultimately, the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.
David Graeber
#53. The more we allow aspects of our everyday existence to fall under the purview of bureaucratic regulations, the more everyone concerned colludes to downplay the fact (perfectly obvious to those actually running the system) that all of it ultimately depends on the threat of physical harm.
David Graeber
#54. I think if the general exodus that seems to be going on occurs it's going to be a disaster,.
David Graeber
#55. But if Smith was right, and gold and silver became money through the natural workings of the market completely independently of governments, then wouldn't the obvious thing be to just grab control of the gold and silver mines?
David Graeber
#56. As Max Weber long ago pointed out, once one sets up a genuinely effective bureaucracy, it's almost impossible to get rid of it.
David Graeber
#57. Most Amazonians don't want to give others the power to threaten them with physical injury if they don't do as they are told. Maybe we should better be asking what it says about ourselves that we feel this attitude needs any sort of explanation.
David Graeber
#58. There was a time when academia was society's refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical: it would seem society now has no place for them at all.
David Graeber
#59. A debt ... is just an exchange that has not been brought to completion.
David Graeber
#60. The organization of the Soviet Union was directly modeled on that of the German postal service.
David Graeber
#61. 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
#62. Gradually, subtly, without anyone completely understanding the full implications of what was happening, what had been the essence of moral relations turned into the means for every sort of dishonest stratagem.
David Graeber
#63. Banks are institutions to which the government has granted the power to create money - or,
David Graeber
#64. 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
#65. It's not just that some people get to break the rules - it's that loyalty to the organization is to some degree measured by one's willingness to pretend this isn't happening.
David Graeber
#66. What "the public," "the workforce," "the electorate," "consumers," and "the population" all have in common is that they are brought into being by institutionalized frames of action that are inherently bureaucratic, and therefore, profoundly alienating.
David Graeber
#67. What is the difference between a gangster pulling out a gun and demanding you give him a thousand dollars of "protection money," and that same gangster pulling out a gun and demanding you provide him with a thousand-dollar "loan"? In
David Graeber
#68. The most famous of these is the Law of Jubilee: a law that stipulated that all debts would be automatically cancelled "in the Sabbath year" (that is, after seven years had passed), and that all who languished in bondage owing to such debts would be released.
David Graeber
#69. About the only thing we can imagine
is catastrophe.
David Graeber
#70. impudicitia in ingenuo crimen est, in servo necessitas, in liberto officium ("to be the object of anal penetration is a crime in the freeborn, a necessity for a slave, a duty for a freedman").
David Graeber
#72. if you really care about getting something done, the most efficient way to go about it is obviously to allocate tasks by ability and give people whatever they need to do them.
David Graeber
#73. I am well known by my friends to be a workaholic - to their often justifiable annoyance. I am therefore keenly aware that such behavior is at best slightly pathological, and certainly in no sense makes one a better person.
David Graeber
#74. Anarchism and anthropology go well together because anthropologists know that a society without a state is possible because so many exist.
David Graeber
#75. It's true that most American citizens think of themselves as living in a democratic country. But when was the last time that any Americans actually sat down and came to a collective decision? Maybe if they are ordering pizzas, but basically never.
David Graeber
#76. The most profound legacy of the dominance of bureaucratic forms of organization over the last two hundred years is that it has made this intuitive division between rational, technical means and the ultimately irrational ends to which they are put seem like common sense.
David Graeber
#77. ... one must oneself, in relations with one's friends and allies, embody the society one wishes to create.
David Graeber
#78. As Pierre Bourdieu was later to point out in describing a similar economy of trust in contemporary Algeria: it's quite possible to turn honor into money, almost impossible to convert money into honor.
David Graeber
#79. Capitalism, he noted, is not something imposed on us by some outside force. It only exists because every day we wake up and continue to produce it. If we woke up one morning and all collectively decided to produce something else, then we wouldn't have capitalism anymore.
David Graeber
#80. One of the most effective ways for a system of authority to tout its virtues is not to speak of them directly, but to create a particularly vivid image of their absolute negation - of what it claims life would be like in the total absence of, say, patriarchal authority, or capitalism, or the state.
David Graeber
#81. Honor is Surplus Dignity: Honor, at its simplest, is that excess dignity that must be defended with the knife or sword. Wherever honor is at issue, it comes with a sense that dignity can be lost, and therefore must be constantly defended.
David Graeber
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