If 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.