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 GraeberAnarchism is surprisingly effective in solving actual problems largely because anarchists have thought a lot about solving actual problems on a micro level in ways that other political ideologies don't really feel they have to until after they seize state power.
David Graeber[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.
David GraeberOne of the fairly interesting things about money is that it makes certain things possible that wouldn't be possible otherwise - it doesn't make them inevitable. Hence the strange blindness of economists to what would actually happen when one does exchange things if there isn't money in such contexts.
David GraeberIf your father is an air-conditioner repairman from Nebraska, its conceivable that you might become a CEO, but you can't imagine being the drama critic for the New York Times. So if you come from a background like that and you want to actually have a career which involves doing something noble in the world, what can you do? You can join the army. That's about it. Or you can work for the church. That explains a lot of the focus of right-wing populism. The right wing figured that out, that people want enough to survive and to do good.
David Graeber