David Graeber Quotes

I think if the general exodus that seems to be going on occurs it's going to be a disaster,.

[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.

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

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.

Debt is the most effective way to take a relation of violent subordination and make the victims feel that it's their fault.

Direct action is, ultimately, the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.

Anarchism and anthropology go well together because anthropologists know that a society without a state is possible because so many exist.

Neoliberalism isn't an economic program - it's a political program designed to produce hopelessness and kill any future alternatives.

It's a difficult business, creating a new, alternative civilization.

Revolutionary constituencies always involve a tacit alliance between the least alienated and the most oppressed.

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.

Communism is the basis of all sociality and it's the basis of cooperation.

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

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.

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

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.

States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Aristotle [would] probably conclude most Americans, for all intents and purposes, are slaves.

IMF is really designed to protect creditors not debtors.

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.