Latest David Graeber Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• If 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

  Father, Drama, Army

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I came to the conclusion that most people in America would really like to be able to get a job where they think they're doing something noble and nice and good and it isn't just for the money. But the reason they hate what they call the cultural elite is that they see it as a class that's grabbed all the jobs where you can get paid to do something that isn't just for the money - if it's art, if it's charity, if it's intellectual, if it's political, whatever it might be.

  David Graeber

  Art, Hate, Nice

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• You would think that if neoliberals were in any way honest, after the collapse of the Soviet Union the first thing to do is get rid of the Red Army and the KGB, and build up the economy. Instead, they just get rid of the economy and keep the military and the KGB.

  David Graeber

  Military, Army, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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 Graeber

  Russia, Movement, Weight

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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.

  David Graeber

  People, Looks, Too Much

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• What about precarious labor? It's actually not the most efficient form of labor at all. They were much more efficient when they had loyalty to their workers and people were allowed to be creative and contribute - you know that what precarious labor does is that it's the best weapon ever made to depoliticize labor. They're always putting the political in front of the economic.

  David Graeber

  Loyalty, People, Political

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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.

  David Graeber

  Everyday, Communism, Form

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

  David Graeber

  Political, Neoliberalism, Alternatives

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• What we're already doing is communism. The first step we have to make is to realize that we're already closer to it than we think.

  David Graeber

  Thinking, Firsts, Steps

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Anarchism 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

  Political, Levels, Way

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The 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

  Thinking, Hands, Levels

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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.

  David Graeber

  Thinking, Needs, Way

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

  David Graeber

  Cooperation, Communism, Bases

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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.

  David Graeber

  Ideas, Luxury, Needs

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Now, we're used to thinking of communism as being once-upon-a-time-all-things-were-owned-in-common, maybe-someday-this-will-come-again. And people agree that there is a sort of epic narrative going on here. I think we should just throw this narrative out, it's irrelevant anyway, and who cares who owns things? I don't. You know, we all own the White House. So what? I still can't go in, right?

  David Graeber

  Thinking, Epic, White

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

  David Graeber

  Levels, Communism, Social

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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.

  David Graeber

  Paradise, Way, Shifting

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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 Graeber

  Cutting, Thinking, Order

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• We need each other to do things that we can't do for ourselves. If we are intimately connected with each other, we just give things to each other; if we don't know each other we find another way to handle it. If you think about it, each according to his or her abilities and each according to his or her needs is sort of the same thing as supply and demand.

  David Graeber

  Thinking, Giving, Needs

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Ideas, Lines, Assumption

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• There are markets extending from Mali, Indonesia, way outside the purview of any one government which operated under civil laws, so contracts weren't, except on trust. So they have this free market ideology the moment they have markets operating outside the purview of the states, as prior to that markets had really mainly existed as a side effect of military operations.

  David Graeber

  Military, Government, Law

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Capitalism is like this fractal thing where anything that contains an element of capitalism anywhere inside it is just something that turns into capitalism. It is an incredibly defeatist attitude. If you choose to look at reality that way, I suppose you can, but you have to do enormous violence to reality to do so consistently.

  David Graeber

  Attitude, Reality, Looks

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Independent, Law, Islam

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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.

  David Graeber

  Debt, Imagine, Walks

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Even in the most market-obsessed society, we're still spending half of our time on something other than just getting cash.

  David Graeber

  Half, Cash, Obsessed

  Source: www.guernicamag.com