David Graeber Quotes

We are usually told that democracy originated in ancient Athens - like science, or philosophy, it was a Greek invention. It's never entirely clear what this is supposed to mean. Are we supposed to believe that before the Athenians, it never really occurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all the members of their community in order to make joint decisions in a way that gave everyone equal say?

There seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.

We don't live in a capitalist totality. Capitalism couldn't survive as a totality anyway. We live in this complex system and we already live communism and anarchism in a million forms everyday.

Neoliberalism isn't an economic program - it's a political program designed to produce hopelessness and kill any future alternatives.

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 disaster, there are often communistic notions of improvisation, where you basically exchange hierarchies and all of a sudden all those things that are luxuries that you can't afford, you have them in an emergency.

All societies are based on a sort of minimum level of communism. Otherwise, you couldn't have any social relations at all.

Communism is the basis of all sociality and it's the basis of cooperation.

Debt is the most effective way to take a relation of violent subordination and make the victims feel that it's their fault.

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

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.

When you take away the violence from the market, even it starts shifting into something else - not exactly paradise, but it doesn't become the market in the way we see it now.