David Graeber: Making

David Graeber is American anthropologist and anarchist. Explore interesting quotes on making.

David Graeber: 110 quotes5 likes

“Power makes you lazy.”

David Graeber book The Utopia of Rules

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

“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)

“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)

“The man who won the argument, however, was John Locke, the Liberal philosopher, at that time acting as advisor to Sir Isaac Newton, then Warden of the Mint. Locke insisted that one can no more make a small piece of silver worth more by relabeling it a "shilling" than one can make a short man taller by declaring there are now fifteen inches in a foot.”

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Eleven, "Age of the Great Capitalist Empires", p. 340

“To take what might seem an "objective", macro-economic approach to the origins of the world economy would be to treat the behavior of early European explorers, merchants, and conquerors as if they were simply rational responses to opportunities—as if this were just what anyone would have done in the same situation. This is what the use of equations so often does: make it seem perfectly natural to assume that, if the price of silver in China is twice what it is in Seville, and inhabitants of Seville are capable of getting their hands on large quantities of silver and transporting it to China, then clearly they will, even if doing so requires the destruction of entire civilizations. Or if there is a demand for sugar in England, and enslaving millions is the easiest way to acquire labor to produce it, then it is inevitable that some will enslave them.”

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Eleven, "Age of the Great Capitalist Empires", p. 314

“In fact, communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It is what makes society possible.”

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Five, "A Brief Treatise on the Moral Grounds of Moral Relations", p. 96

“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.”

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Seven, "Honor and Degradation", p. 168

“It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.... Hell is a collection of individuals who spend their time working on a task they don't like and are not especially good at.... Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.... Nurses, garbage collectors, mechanics, it's obvious were they to vanish, results would be catastrophic.... A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble.... It's not clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish.... Real productive workers are squeezed and exploited. The remainder are unemployed and a larger stratum paid to do nothing.”

Dr. David Graeber, "Bullshit Jobs," Aug 2013

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

David Graeber book The Utopia of Rules

The Utopia of Rules (2015)