Browsing Quotes By David Graeber
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If democracy is to mean anything, it is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:38 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
whenever there are some people calling for the elimination of the class that lives by collecting interest, there will be others to object that this will destroy the livelihood of widows and pensioners.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:37 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
[The] great embarrassing fact that haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft. More than anything else, the endless recitation of the myth of barter, employed much like an incantation, is the economists’ way of fending off any possibility of having to confront it.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:37 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:36 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
To begin to free ourselves, the first thing we need to do is to see ourselves again as historical actors, as people who can make a difference in the course of world events. This is exactly what the militarization of history is trying to take away.
Even if we are at the beginning of the turn of a very long historical cycle, it’s still largely up to us to determine how it’s going to turn out. For instance: the last time we shifted from a bullion economy to one of virtual credit money, at the end of the Axial Age and the beginning of the Middle Ages, the immediate shift was experienced largely as a series of great catastrophes. Will it be the same this time around? Presumably a lot depends on how consciously we set out to ensure that it won’t be.Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:35 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Just as the United States had managed to largely get rid of the problem of political corruption by making the bribery of legislators effectively legal (it was redefined as “lobbying”), so the problem of loan-sharking was brushed aside by making real interest rates of 25 percent, 50 percent, or even in some cases (for instance for payday loans) 120 percent annually, once typical only of organized crime, perfectly legal — and therefore, enforceable no longer by just hired goons and the sort of people who place mutilated animals on their victims’ doorsteps, but by judges, lawyers, bailiffs, and police.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:33 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Capitalism is a system that enshrines the gambler as an essential part of its operation, in a way that no other ever has.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:29 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Such imaginary constructs are of course what scientists refer to as “models,” and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with them. Actually I think a fair case can be made that we cannot think without them. The problem with such models — at least, it always seems to happen when we model something called “the market” — is that, once created, we have a tendency to treat them as objective realities, or even fall down before them and start worshiping them as gods. “We must obey the dictates of the market!”
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:29 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:27 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Money always has the potential to become a moral imperative unto itself. Allow it to expand, and it can quickly become a morality so imperative that all others seem frivolous in comparison.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:25 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Debt peonage, it would appear, is far more likely to inspire outrage and collective action than is a system premised on pure inequality.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:24 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Through most of history, when overt political conflict between classes did appear, it took the form of pleas for debt cancellation, the freeing of those in bondage, and usually a more just reallocation of the land.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:23 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment!