David Graeber: Trending quotes

“The one thing that's clear is that new ideas won't emerge without the jettisoning of much of our accustomed categories of thought—which have become mostly sheer dead weight, if not intrinsic parts of the very apparatus of hopelessness—and formulating new ones. This is why I spent so much of this book talking about the market, but also about the false choice between state and market that so monopolized political ideology for the last centuries that it made it difficult to argue about anything else.”

David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Twelve, "1971–The Beginning…", p. 384

Books , Idea , Parting , Falseness

“Marxist schools have authors. Just as Marxism sprang from the mind of Marx, so we have Leninists, Maoists, Trotksyites, Gramscians, Althusserians… (Note how the list starts with heads of state and grades almost seamlessly into French professors.) … Now consider the different schools of anarchism. There are Anarcho-Syndicalists, AnarchoCommunists, Insurrectionists, Cooperativists, Individualists, Platformists… None are named after some Great Thinker; instead, they are invariably named either after some kind of practice, or most often, organizational principle. (Significantly, those Marxist tendencies which are not named after individuals, like Autonomism or Council Communism, are also the ones closest to anarchism.) Anarchists like to distinguish themselves by what they do, and how they organize themselves to go about doing it.”

David Graeber

Source: Fragments for an Anarchist Anthropology (2004), p. 5

School , Communication

“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.”

David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Ten, "The Middle Ages", p. 305

Sense

“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.”

David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Four, "Cruelty and Redemption", p. 80

God , Thinking

“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.”

David Graeber book The Utopia of Rules

The Utopia of Rules (2015)

“Power makes you lazy.”

David Graeber book The Utopia of Rules

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“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.”

David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Twelve, "1971–The Beginning…", p. 364

Money

“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.”

David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter One, "On The Experience of Moral Confusion", p. 4

Thinking

“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.”

David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Ten, "The Middle Ages", p. 256

Parting , Country

“It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor.”

David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Eleven, "Age of the Great Capitalist Empires", p. 350

Secret

“With the collapse of the old welfare states, all this has come to seem decidedly quaint. As the language of antibureaucratic individualism has been adopted, with increasing ferocity, by the Right, which insists on “market solutions” to every social problem, the mainstream Left has increasingly reduced itself to fighting a kind of pathetic rearguard action, trying to salvage remnants of the old welfare state: it has acquiesced with–often spearheaded–attempts to make government efforts more “efficient” though the partial privatization of services and the incorporation of ever-more “market principle,” “market incentives,” and market-based “accountability processes” into the structure of the bureaucracy itself.”

David Graeber book The Utopia of Rules

The Utopia of Rules (2015)

Problem , Effort , Fight

“A legitimate enterprise had to have some moral basis, and the only morality the company knew was debt.”

David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Eleven, "Age of the Great Capitalist Empires", p. 350

“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.”

David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Five, "A Brief Treatise on the Moral Grounds of Moral Relations", p. 89

Life , History

“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.”

David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Two, "The Myth of Barter", p. 40

Money , Way , History

““Policy” is the negation of politics; policy is by definition something concocted by some form of elite, which presumes it knows better than others how their affairs are to be conducted. By participating in policy debates the very best one can achieve is to limit the damage, since the very premise is inimical to the idea of people managing their own affairs.”

David Graeber

Source: Fragments for an Anarchist Anthropology (2004), p. 9

People , Idea

“How do we create only games that we actually feel like playing, because we can opt out at any time? In the economic field, at least, the answer is obvious. All of the gratuitous sadism of workplace politics depends on one’s inability to say “I quit” and feel no economic consequences.”

David Graeber book Bullshit Jobs

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018)

Feeling , Game , Time , Dependency

“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.”

David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Three, "Primordial Debts", p. 43

Question

“In many ways, it (capitalism) resembles classic medieval feudalism, displaying the same tendency to create endless hierarchies of lords, vassals, and retainers. In other ways—notably in its managerialist ethos—it is profoundly different. And the whole apparatus, rather than replacing old-fashioned industrial capitalism, is instead superimposed on top of it, blending together in a thousand points in a thousand different ways. Hardly surprising, then, that the situation seems so confusing that even those directly in the middle don’t really know quite what to make of it.”

David Graeber book Bullshit Jobs

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018)

Way , Fashion

“Thus money is almost always something hovering between a commodity and a debt-token. This is probably why coins—pieces of silver or gold that are already valuable commodities in themselves, but that, being stamped with the emblem of local authority, became even more valuable—still sit in our heads as the quintessential form of money. They most perfectly straddle the divide that defines what money is in the first place. What's more, the relation between the two was a matter of constant political conversation. In other words, the battle between state and market, between governments and merchants is not inherent to the human condition.”

David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Four, "Cruelty and Redemption", p. 75

Money

“The moment we begin to map the history of money across the last five thousand years of Eurasian history, startling patterns begin to emerge.”

David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Eight, "Credit versus Bullion", p. 212

Money , History