David Graeber
police bureaucracy weapon
“Police are bureaucrats with weapons.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
origin democratic outside government church
“The real origin of the democratic spirit - and most likely, many democratic institutions - lies precisely in those spaces of improvisation just outside the control of governments and organized churches.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
Piaget mature intelligence violate bureaucracy
“if one accepts Jean Piaget’s famous definition of mature intelligence as the ability to coordinate between multiple perspectives (or possible perspectives) one can see, here, precisely how bureaucratic power, at the moment it turns to violence, becomes literally a form of infantile stupidity.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
politics deregulation
“About the only policies that can’t be referred to as “deregulation” are ones that aim to reverse some other policy that has already been labeled “deregulation,” which means it’s important, in playing the game, to have your policy labeled “deregulation” first.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
freedom granted insist exercise
“Insofar as we have freedoms, it’s not because some great wise Founding Fathers granted them to us. It’s because people like us insisted on exercising those freedoms—by doing exactly what we’re doing here—before anyone was willing to acknowledge that they had them.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
rule work benefit pay
“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.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
power lazy
“Power makes you lazy.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
debt pay
“As it turns out, we don't "all" have to pay our debts. Only some of us do.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
market human freedom theft commercial
“[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 Graeber (1961-2020)
democracy origin athens greek invention community decision
“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?”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
money essence nothing political contention
“money has no essence. It's not "really" anything; therefore, its nature has always been and presumably always will be a matter of political contention.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
non-industrious poor hurt friends family improve world
“I would like, then, to end by putting in a good word for the non-industrious poor. At least they aren’t hurting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking time off from work is being spent with friends and family, enjoying and caring for those they love, they’re probably improving the world more than we acknowledge.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
truth world make differet
“the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
rich country functionaries poor people feel bad
“All rich countries now employ legions of functionaries whose primary function is to make poor people feel bad about themselves.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
bullshit job blue collar white collar salary
“Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
imagine catastrophe
“About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
obvious work benefit people less likely paid
“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.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
civiization work productive end meaning
“We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
solitary pleasure sharing music food liquor drug gossip bed
“Solitary pleasures will always exist, but for most human beings, the most pleasurable activities almost always involve sharing something: music, food, liquor, drugs, gossip, drama, beds.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
bullshit job emploment pointless unnessecary pernicious
“Provisional Definition 2: a bullshit job is a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
appeal bureaucracy fear play
“What ultimately lies behind the appeal of bureaucracy is fear of play.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
young people europe america prepared useless jobs pretend
“Young people in Europe and North America in particular, but increasingly throughout the world, are being psychologically prepared for useless jobs, trained in how to pretend to work, and then by various means shepherded into jobs that almost nobody really believes serve any meaningful purpose.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
bullshit job honor prestige professionals achiever
“Those who work bullshit jobs are often surrounded by honor and prestige; they are respected as professionals, well paid, and treated as high achievers”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
place without clock time measure action
“In places without clocks, time is measured by actions rather than action being measured by time.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
efficiency power manager supervisor expert producer autonomy
“Efficiency' has come to mean vesting more and more power to managers, supervisors, and presumed 'efficiency experts,' so that actual producers have almost zero autonomy.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
student loan destroy imagination youth suicide slaves debt
"Student loans are destroying the imagination of youth. If there’s a way of a society committing mass suicide, what better way than to take all the youngest, most energetic, creative, joyous people in your society and saddle them with, like $50,000 of debt so they have to be slaves? There goes your music. There goes your culture. There goes everything new that would pop out. And in a way, this is what’s happened to our society. We’re a society that has lost any ability to incorporate the interesting, creative and eccentric people."
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
debt relation violent subordination victim fault
"Debt is the most effective way to take a relation of violent subordination and make the victims feel that it's their fault."
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
neoliberalism economic program political hopeless kill future
"Neoliberalism isn't an economic program - it's a political program designed to produce hopelessness and kill any future alternatives."
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
anarchism anthropology society without state exist
"Anarchism and anthropology go well together because anthropologists know that a society without a state is possible because so many exist."
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
free market ideology islam sharia
"Free market ideology - does anyone know where it first comes from? It comes from medieval Islam, and specifically, Shari'a. Because Shari'a provided this commercial law that is independent from the state."
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
plague earth fossil energy third world consumption landscape
"We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along."
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
adam smith idea persia market mutual aid
"Adam Smith actually took all his best ideas and lines from sources from medieval Persia. But one thing he doesn't take is the underlying assumption they have that the basis of a market is mutual aid."
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
The Iron Law of Liberalism
“The Iron Law of Liberalism:
Any market reform, government initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces will have the ultimate effect of increasing the total number of regulations, the total amount of paperwork, and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
capitalism feudalism wages juro-political
"The difference between capitalism and feudalism is that under capitalism, they make money directly through wages, manufacturing, and commerce and under feudalism, it's directly through juro-political means."
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
bullshit job finance capital power
"If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it's hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value."
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
sign irrational economic system eliminate drudgery problem
"It's hard to imagine a surer sign that one is dealing with an irrational economic system than the fact that the prospect of eliminating drudgery is considered to be a problem."
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
automation value caring work quantify quality
"So the more automation proceeds, the more it should be obvious that actual value emerges from the caring element of work. Yet this leads to another problem. The caring value of work would appear to be precisely the element that cannot be quantified."
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
university professor overpaid administrator feudal
"University professors have to spend increasing proportions of their days performing tasks which exist only to make overpaid academic managers feel good about themselves. These managers surround themselves with officious armies of functionaries who are little more than the kind of feudal retainer a medieval knight might employ to tweeze his mustache or polish the stirrups on his saddle before a joust."
― David Graeber (1961-2020)