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 GraeberIf history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong.
David GraeberIn 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.
David GraeberDebt - 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 GraeberNeoliberalism isn't an economic program - it's a political program designed to produce hopelessness and kill any future alternatives.
David GraeberThe best way to think about anarchism is as a combination of three levels. On the one hand, the sort of instinctual revulsion against forms of inequality in power; on the other hand, a reappraisal of what one is already doing in egalitarian relations; and then the projection of these principles on all sorts of relations.
David Graeber