David Graeber
David Graeber
David Rolfe Graeberis a London-based anthropologist and anarchist activist, perhaps best known for his 2011 volume Debt: The First 5000 Years. He is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth12 February 1961
CountryUnited States of America
debt completion
A debt ... is just an exchange that has not been brought to completion.
thinking disaster exodus
I think if the general exodus that seems to be going on occurs it's going to be a disaster,.
suicidal energy viruses
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.
today states form
States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today.
military order years
But in the years since the neoliberal project really has been stripped down to what was always its essence: not an economic project at all, but a political project, designed to devastate the imagination, and willing - with it's cumbersome securitization and insane military projects - to destroy the capitalist order itself if that's what it took to make it seem inevitable.
jobs self generations
We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt.
civilization creating alternatives
It's a difficult business, creating a new, alternative civilization.
direct-action acting ifs
Direct action is, ultimately, the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.
alliances revolutionary oppressed
Revolutionary constituencies always involve a tacit alliance between the least alienated and the most oppressed.
philosophy believe mean
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?
dream law greed
The notion that a society could be regulated entirely by market forces is a utopian fantasy: an impossible dream generated by imagining what the world would be like if everyone's behavior was utterly consistent with some abstract moral ideal-in this case, economic theories that assume all human action is based on calculating, systematic, (but scrupulously law-abiding), greed.
dream song sex
Traditional hedonism...was based on the direct experience of pleasure: wine, women and song; sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll; or whatever the local variant. The problem, from a capitalist perspective, is that there are inherent limits to all this. People become sated, bored...Modern self-illusory hedonism solves this dilemma because here, what one is really consuming are fantasies and day-dreams about what having a certain product would be like.
debt way faults
Debt is the most effective way to take a relation of violent subordination and make the victims feel that it's their fault.
debt way violence
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.