58+ David Graeber Quotes On Government, Education And Money

David Graeber is an American anthropologist and anarchist activist. He is best known for his 2011 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which examines the history and moral implications of money and debt. He is a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics and a leading figure in the anti-capitalist and Occupy Wall Street movements. Following is our collection on famous quotes by David Graeber on government, education, money.

Top 10 David Graeber Quotes

1. I think if the general exodus that seems to be going on occurs it's going to be a disaster,.
2. [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.
3. Direct action is, ultimately, the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.
4. Debt is the most effective way to take a relation of violent subordination and make the victims feel that it's their fault.
5. Anarchism and anthropology go well together because anthropologists know that a society without a state is possible because so many exist.
6. Neoliberalism isn't an economic program - it's a political program designed to produce hopelessness and kill any future alternatives.
7. Revolutionary constituencies always involve a tacit alliance between the least alienated and the most oppressed.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• Communism is the basis of all sociality and it's the basis of cooperation.
• It's a difficult business, creating a new, alternative civilization.
• Aristotle [would] probably conclude most Americans, for all intents and purposes, are slaves.

David Graeber Quotes About Debt

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

If you imagine that everything is an exchange, then we're supposed to just transact and walk away. If we haven't walked away and we still have a relationship, it's because there's a debt. — David Graeber

Debt - like sin - implies that one party in the transaction didn't live up to expectations, at least in the moment, and has done something wrong. — David Graeber

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

A debt ... is just an exchange that has not been brought to completion. — David Graeber

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

As it turns out, we don't "all" have to pay our debts. Only some of us do. — David Graeber

David Graeber Quotes About Capitalism

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

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. — David Graeber

The difference between capitalism and feudalism is that under capitalism, they make money directly through wages, manufacturing, and commerce and under feudalism, it's directly through juro-political means. — David Graeber

The working poor are the people suffering out subprime mortgages and fatal loans and more and more of our money - you know, capitalism is operated by extracting money, not so much directly being paid. — David Graeber

David Graeber Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

Free market ideology - does anyone know where it first comes from? It comes from medieval Islam, and specifically, Shari'a. Because Shari'a provided this commercial law that is independent from the state. — David Graeber

The best way to think about anarchism is as a combination of three levels. On the one hand, the sort of instinctual revulsion against forms of inequality in power; on the other hand, a reappraisal of what one is already doing in egalitarian relations; and then the projection of these principles on all sorts of relations. — David Graeber

You would think that if neoliberals were in any way honest, after the collapse of the Soviet Union the first thing to do is get rid of the Red Army and the KGB, and build up the economy. Instead, they just get rid of the economy and keep the military and the KGB. — David Graeber

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

Money has always been a particular problem for revolutionaries and anti-capitalists. What will money look like 'after the revolution'? How will it function? Will it exist at all? It's hard to answer the question if you don't know what money actually is. Proposing to eliminate it entirely seems utopian and naive. — David Graeber

Traditional hedonism...was based on the direct experience of pleasure: wine, women and song; sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll; or whatever the local variant. The problem, from a capitalist perspective, is that there are inherent limits to all this. People become sated, bored...Modern self-illusory hedonism solves this dilemma because here, what one is really consuming are fantasies and day-dreams about what having a certain product would be like. — David Graeber

Capitalism is like this fractal thing where anything that contains an element of capitalism anywhere inside it is just something that turns into capitalism. It is an incredibly defeatist attitude. If you choose to look at reality that way, I suppose you can, but you have to do enormous violence to reality to do so consistently. — David Graeber

What about precarious labor? It's actually not the most efficient form of labor at all. They were much more efficient when they had loyalty to their workers and people were allowed to be creative and contribute - you know that what precarious labor does is that it's the best weapon ever made to depoliticize labor. They're always putting the political in front of the economic. — David Graeber

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

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. — David Graeber

Look at labor policy. What's the point of making everybody work too much? It's not very useful. It is destroying the planet, actually. But it's great at keeping people off the streets. — David Graeber

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

Now, we're used to thinking of communism as being once-upon-a-time-all-things-were-owned-in-common, maybe-someday-this-will-come-again. And people agree that there is a sort of epic narrative going on here. I think we should just throw this narrative out, it's irrelevant anyway, and who cares who owns things? I don't. You know, we all own the White House. So what? I still can't go in, right? — David Graeber

We are usually told that democracy originated in ancient Athens - like science, or philosophy, it was a Greek invention. It's never entirely clear what this is supposed to mean. Are we supposed to believe that before the Athenians, it never really occurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all the members of their community in order to make joint decisions in a way that gave everyone equal say? — David Graeber

Meanwhile, the U.S. debt remains, as it has been since 1790, a war debt; the United States continues to spend more on its military than do all other nations on earth put together, and military expenditures are not only the basis of the government's industrial policy; they also take up such a huge proportion of the budget that by many estimations, were it not for them, the United States would not run a deficit at all. — David Graeber

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

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

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

We need each other to do things that we can't do for ourselves. If we are intimately connected with each other, we just give things to each other; if we don't know each other we find another way to handle it. If you think about it, each according to his or her abilities and each according to his or her needs is sort of the same thing as supply and demand. — David Graeber

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

The notion that a society could be regulated entirely by market forces is a utopian fantasy: an impossible dream generated by imagining what the world would be like if everyone's behavior was utterly consistent with some abstract moral ideal-in this case, economic theories that assume all human action is based on calculating, systematic, (but scrupulously law-abiding), greed. — David Graeber

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

Even in the most market-obsessed society, we're still spending half of our time on something other than just getting cash. — David Graeber

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

There are markets extending from Mali, Indonesia, way outside the purview of any one government which operated under civil laws, so contracts weren't, except on trust. So they have this free market ideology the moment they have markets operating outside the purview of the states, as prior to that markets had really mainly existed as a side effect of military operations. — David Graeber

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

The question we should be asking is not why people are sometimes cruel, or even why a few people are usually cruel (all evidence suggests true sadists are an extremely small proportion of the population overall), but how we have come to create institutions that encourage such behavior and that suggest cruel people are in some ways admirable-or at least as deserving of sympathy as those they push around. — David Graeber

It affects every aspect of our lives, is often said to be the root of all evil, and the analysis of the world that it makes possible - what we call 'the economy' - is so important to us that economists have become the high priests of our society. Yet, oddly, there is absolutely no consensus among economists about what money really is. — David Graeber

But in the years since the neoliberal project really has been stripped down to what was always its essence: not an economic project at all, but a political project, designed to devastate the imagination, and willing - with it's cumbersome securitization and insane military projects - to destroy the capitalist order itself if that's what it took to make it seem inevitable. — David Graeber

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

All societies are based on a sort of minimum level of communism. Otherwise, you couldn't have any social relations at all. — David Graeber

People don't have an ongoing relation unless it's a form of debt because everything is an exchange, so ongoing relationships are incomplete exchanges, and therefore one party is probably to blame - more likely than not, both are. Sociality itself seems to become like a matter of sin, and inherently wrong. — David Graeber

Life Lessons by David Graeber

1. David Graeber's work highlights the importance of understanding the social and cultural contexts of economic systems. He emphasizes the need to recognize the power dynamics that shape economic and political systems.
2. Graeber's work also highlights the importance of challenging the dominant narrative of economic and political systems, and of recognizing the potential for alternative forms of organization.
3. Finally, Graeber's work illustrates the importance of recognizing the role of human agency in shaping economic and political systems, and of understanding the ways in which people can create change.