David Graeber citations (55 citations, Page 2)

“What I have been trying to do in this book is not so much to propose a vision of what, precisely, the next age will be like, but to throw open perspectives, enlarge our sense of possibilities; to begin to ask what it would mean to start thinking on a breadth and with a grandeur appropriate to the times.”

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David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Twelve, "1971–The Beginning…", p. 383

“In societies based around small communities, where almost everyone is either a friend, a relative, or an enemy of everyone else, the languages spoken tend even to lack words that correspond to "self-interest" or "altruism" but include very subtle vocabularies for describing envy, solidarity, pride, and the like. Their economic dealings with one another likewise tend to be based on much more subtle principles. … The work of destroying such ways of life is still often done by missionaries—representatives of those very world religions that originally sprang up in reaction to the market long ago. Missionaries, of course, are out to save souls; but they rarely interpret this to mean their role is simply to teach people to accept God and be more altruistic. Almost invariably, they end up trying to convince people to be more selfish and more altruistic at the same time. On the one hand, they set out to teach the "natives" proper work discipline, and try to get them involved with buying and selling products on the market, so as to better their material lot. At the same time, they explain to them that ultimately, material things are unimportant.”

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David Graeber

Army of Altruists (2007)

“We could no more have a universal world market than we could have a system in which everyone who wasn't a capitalist was somehow able to to become a respectable, regularly paid wage laborer with access to adequate dental care. A world like that has never existed and never could exist. What's more, the moment that even the prospect that this might happen begins to materialize, the whole system starts to come apart.”

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David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Eleven, "Age of the Great Capitalist Empires", p. 355

“Exchange implies equality.”

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David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Three, "Primordial Debts", p. 63

“The right's approach is to release the dogs of the market, throwing all traditional verities into disarray; and then, in this tumult of insecurity, offer themselves up as the last bastion of order and hierarchy, the stalwart defenders of the authority of churches and fathers against the barbarians they have themselves unleashed.”

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David Graeber

Army of Altruists (2007)

“Karl Marx, who knew quite a bit about the human tendency to fall down and worship our own creations, wrote Das Capital in an attempt to demonstrate that, even if we start from the economists' utopian vision, so long as we also allow some people to control productive capital, and, again, leave others with nothing to sell but but their brains and bodies, the results will be in very many ways barely distinguishable from slavery, and the whole system will eventually destroy itself.”

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David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Eleven, "Age of the Great Capitalist Empires", p. 354

“If we insist on defining all human interactions as matters of people giving one thing for another, then any ongoing human relations can only take the form of debts.”

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David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Five, "A Brief Treatise on the Moral Grounds of Moral Relations", p. 126

“Direct action is the insistence, when faced with structures of unjust authority, on acting as if one is already free.”

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David Graeber livre Direct Action

Direct Action: An Ethnography (AK Press: 2009), p. 203

“Everyone knows how compromised the idea of bureaucracy as a meritocratic system is. The first criterion of loyalty to any organization is therefore complicity. Career advancement is not based on merit but on a willingness to play along with the fiction that career advancement is based on merit, or with the fiction that rules and regulations apply to everyone equally, when in fact they are often deployed as an instrument of arbitrary personal power. … As whole societies have come to represent themselves as giant credentialized meritocracies, rather than as systems of predatory extraction, we bustle about, trying to curry favor by pretending we actually believe it to be true.”

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David Graeber livre The Utopia of Rules

The Utopia of Rules (2015)

“Even a modest Basic Income program could become a stepping-stone toward the most profound transformation of all: to unlatch work from livelihood entirely.”

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David Graeber livre Bullshit Jobs

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018)

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

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David Graeber

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

“If the existence of bullshit jobs seems to defy the logic of capitalism, one possible reason for their proliferation might be that the existing system isn’t capitalism—or at least, isn’t any sort of capitalism that would be recognizable from the works of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, or, for that matter, Ludwig von Mises or Milton Friedman.”

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David Graeber livre Bullshit Jobs

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018)

“Before we can apply the tools of anthropology to reconstruct the real history of money, we need to understand what's wrong with the conventional account.”

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David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Two, "The Myth of Barter", p. 22

“By the end of World War II, the specter of an imminent working class uprising that had so haunted the ruling classes of Europe and North America for the previous century had largely disappeared. This was because class war was suspended by a tacit settlement. To put it crudely: the white working class of the North Atlantic countries, from the United States to West Germany, were offered a deal. If they agreed to set aside any fantasies of fundamentally changing the nature of the system, then they would be allowed to keep their unions, enjoy a wide variety of social benefits (pensions, vacations, health care …), and, perhaps most important, through generously funded and ever-expanding public educational institutions, know that their children had a reasonable chance of leaving the working class entirely. One key element in all this was a tacit guarantee that increases in workers' productivity would be met by increases in wages: a guarantee that held good until the late 1970s. Largely as a result, the period saw both rapidly rising productivity and rapidly rising incomes, laying the basis for the consumer economy of today.”

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David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Twelve, "1971–The Beginning…", p. 373

“We no longer like to think about bureaucracy, yet it informs every aspect of out existence. It’s as if as a planetary civilization, we have decided to clap out hands over our ears and start humming whenever the topic comes up.”

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David Graeber livre The Utopia of Rules

The Utopia of Rules (2015)

“There is very good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism itself will no longer exist—most obviously, as ecologists keep reminding us, because it's impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet, and the current form of capitalism doesn't seem to be capable of generating the kind of vast technological breakthroughs and mobilizations that would be required for us to start finding and colonizing any other planets. Yet faced with the prospect of capitalism actually ending, the most common reaction—even from those who call themselves "progressives"—is simply fear. We cling to what exists because we can no longer imagine an alternative that wouldn't be even worse.”

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David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Twelve, "1971–The Beginning…", pp. 381–382

“Honor is a zero sum game.”

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David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Seven, "Honor and Degradation", p. 175

“What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence.”

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David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Twelve, "1971–The Beginning…", p. 391

“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.”

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David Graeber

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

“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.”

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David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Nine, "The Axial Age", p. 224

“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.”

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David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Seven, "Honor and Degradation", p. 167

“Egoism and altruism are ideas we have about human nature. Historically, one has tended to arise in response to the other. In the ancient world, for example, it is generally in the times and places that one sees the emergence of money and markets that one also sees the rise of world religions—Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. If one sets aside a space and says, "Here you shall think only about acquiring material things for yourself," then it is hardly surprising that before long someone else will set aside a countervailing space and declare, in effect: "Yes, but here we must contemplate the fact that the self, and material things, are ultimately unimportant."”

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David Graeber

Army of Altruists (2007)

“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.”

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David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Eleven, "Age of the Great Capitalist Empires", pp. 319–320

“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.”

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David Graeber

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.”

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David Graeber livre The Utopia of Rules

The Utopia of Rules (2015)

David Graeber citations
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David Graeber: Citations en anglais

David Graeber citations Page 2

David Graeber: Citations en anglais

David Graeber citations
Page 2