Quotes from David Graeber

A critique of bureaucracy fit for the times would have to show how all these threads—financialization, violence, technology, the fusion of public and private—knit together into a single, self-sustaining web.

In California in general, and its northwest corner in particular, the central role of money in indigenous societies was combined with a cultural emphasis on thrift and simplicity, a disapproval of wasteful pleasures, and a glorification of work that – according to Goldschmidt – bore an uncanny resemblance to the Puritan attitudes described by Max Weber in his famous 1905 essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

the Left's current inability to formulate a critique of bureaucracy that actually speaks to its erstwhile constituents is synonymous with the decline of the Left itself. Without such a critique, radical thought loses its vital center—it collapses into a fragmented scatter of protests and demands.

In fact, our standard account of monetary history is precisely backwards. We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around. What we now call virtual money came first. Coins came much later, and their use spread only unevenly, never completely replacing credit systems. Barter, in turn, appears to be largely a kind of accidental byproduct of the use of coinage or paper money.

It was deployed by a clique of outright racists, who in 1859 – as the British Empire reached its height of power – took over the British Ethnological Society and called for the extermination of inferior peoples.

One thing that will quickly become clear is that the prevalent 'big picture' of history – shared by modern-day followers of Hobbes and Rousseau alike – has almost nothing to do with the facts.

Jaspers became fascinated by the fact that figures like Pythagoras (570–495 BC), the Buddha (563–483 BC), and Confucius (551–479 BC) were all contemporaries, and that Greece, India, and China, in that period, all saw a sudden efflorescence of debate between contending intellectual schools, each group apparently unaware of the others' existence.

No True Scotsman' style of argument (also known to logicians as the 'ad hoc rescue' procedure).

Lilian testifies eloquently to the misery that can ensue when the only challenge you can overcome in your own work is the challenge of coming to terms with the fact that you are not, in fact, presented with any challenges; when the only way you can exercise your powers is in coming up with creative ways to cover up the fact that you cannot exercise your powers; of managing the fact that you have, completely against your choosing, been turned into a parasite and fraud.

Insofar as there is a politics, here, it seems a variation on a theme seen since the dawn of capitalism. Ultimately, it's sociality itself that's treated as abusive, criminal, demonic. To this, most ordinary Americans—including Black and Latino Americans, recent immigrants, and others who were formerly excluded from credit—have responded with a stubborn insistence on continuing to love one another.

At the time of the American Revolution, the terms 'left' and 'right' themselves did not yet exist. A product of the decade immediately following, they originally referred to the respective seating positions of aristocratic and popular factions in the French National Assembly of 1789.

But this has less to do with the nature of seed cultivation itself than with imperial and commercial expansion: seeds can spread very quickly if those carrying them have an army and are driven by the need endlessly to expand their enterprises to maintain profits.

History, in Renaissance Europe of the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, was not a story of progress.

We are dealing, again, with powerful modern myths. Such myths don't merely inform what people say: to an even greater extent, they ensure certain things go unnoticed.

There are, certainly, tendencies in history. Some are powerful; currents so strong that they are very difficult to swim against (though there always seem to be some who manage to do it anyway). But the only 'laws' are those we make up ourselves. Which brings us on to our second objection.

Knights" had originally been a term for freelance warriors, drawn from the younger or, often, bastard sons of the minor nobility.

There is a subtle snobbery at play here. It's not so much that anyone denies outright that accounts of deliberative politics reflect historical reality; it's just that no one seems to find this fact particularly interesting. What seems interesting to historians is invariably the relation of these accounts to European textual traditions, or European expectations.

That's what anarchism is for me: a community of purpose without a community of definition.

Most of these rituals have been gradually brushed aside as pagan superstition or repackaged as tourist attractions (or both). For the most part, all we're left with as an alternative to our mundane lives are our 'national holidays': frantic periods of over-consumption, crammed in the gaps between work, in which we entertain solemn injunctions that consumption isn't really what matters about life.

If you are not destroying your mind and body via paid work, you're not living right.

from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs'.

Modern bankac?l?k sistemleri de ilk önce savaÅŸlar? finanse etmek üzere oluÅŸturulmuÅŸtur.

Modern states are simply one way in which the three principles of domination happened to come together, but this time with a notion that the power of kings is held by an entity called 'the people' (or 'the nation'), that bureaucracies exist for the benefit of said 'people', and in which a variation on old, aristocratic contests and prizes has come to be relabelled as 'democracy', most often in the form of national elections.

if Pinker is correct, then any sane person who had to choose between (a) the violent chaos and abject poverty of the 'tribal' stage in human development and (b) the relative security and prosperity of Western civilization would not hesitate to leap for safety.25 But empirical data is available here, and it suggests something is very wrong with Pinker's conclusions.