Quotes for All
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
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
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
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
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
Within a capitalist corporation, someone says, Lend me a wrench, and someone asks, Yeah, what do I get? You assume that the idea of each according to his or her abilities, each according to his or her needs – in solving a problem – is actually the only thing that works. And in situations of … Read more
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
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
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
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 … Read more