Quotes from David Graeber

Just as the United States had managed to largely get rid of the problem of political corruption by making the bribery of legislators effectively legal (it was redefined as "lobbying")

If mutual aid, social co-operation, civic activism, hospitality or simply caring for others are the kind of things that really go to make civilizations, then this true history of civilization is only just starting to be written.

If we have become a debt society, it is because the legacy of war, conquest, and slavery has never completely gone away.

asked. As a result, while credit systems tend to dominate in periods of relative social peace, or across networks of trust (whether created by states or, in most periods, transnational institutions like merchant guilds or communities of faith), in periods characterized by widespread war and plunder, they tend to be replaced by precious metal.

ÖrneÄŸin Ä°ngiliz liberalizmi devlet bürokrasisinin azalt?lmas?na deÄŸil, tam aksine yol açm??t?r; özerk bireyler aras?nda özgür sözleÅŸme ÅŸeklindeki liberal rüyay? mümkün k?lan hukuk görevlileri, sicil memurlar?, müfettiÅŸler, noterler ve polis memurlar? kadrolar?n?n durmaks?z?n ÅŸiÅŸmesine.

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a fifteen-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen.

Still, the ground was only really prepared for capitalism in the familiar sense of the term when the merchants began to organize themselves into eternal bodies as a way to win monopolies, legal or de facto, and avoid the ordinary risks of trade.

all imperial arrangements do, ultimately, rest on terror.

Let me explain what I mean by this. It is the peculiar feature of political life that within it, behavior that could only otherwise be considered insane is perfectly effective. If you managed to convince everyone on earth that you can breathe under water, it won't make any difference: if you try it, you will still drown. On the other hand, if you could convince everyone in the entire world that you were King of France, then you would actually be the King of France.

Dostoyevsky developed the theory that the worst torture one could possibly devise would be to force someone to endlessly perform an obviously pointless task.

Political power has to be constantly recreated by persuading others to recognize one's power; to do so, one pretty much invariably has to convince them that one's power has some basis other than their recognition.

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. Mafiosi understand this. So do the commanders of conquering armies.

If it is possible to have monarchs, aristocracies, slavery and extreme forms of patriarchal domination, even without a state (as it evidently was); and if it's equally possible to maintain complex irrigation systems, or develop science and abstract philosophy without a state (as it also appears to be), then what do we actually learn about human history by establishing that one political entity is what we would like to describe as a 'state' and another isn't?

The ultimate question of human history, as we'll see, is not our equal access to material resources (land, calories, means of production), much though these things are obviously important, but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together.

Equality here is a direct extension of freedom; indeed, is its expression. It also has almost nothing in common with the more familiar (Eurasian) notion of 'equality before the law', which is ultimately equality before the sovereign – that is, once again, equality in common subjugation.

The definitive anthropological work on barter, by Caroline Humphrey, of Cambridge, could not be more definitive in its conclusions: "No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing."16

From a world-historical perspective, it seems much more sensible to see Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as three different manifestations of the same great Western intellectual tradition

A man, being born, is a debt; by his own self he is born to Death

They think it unaccountable that one man should have more than another, and that the rich should have more respect than the poor. In short, they say, the name of savages, which we bestow upon them, would fit ourselves better, since there is nothing in our actions that bears an appearance of wisdom.

A warrior's honor is his willingness to play a game on which he stakes everything. His grandeur is directly proportional to how far he can fall.

We would like to suggest that these three principles - call them control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma - are also the three possible bases of social power. The threat of violence tends to be the most dependable, which is why it has become the basis for uniform systems of law everywhere; charisma tends to be the most ephemeral.

from China's point of view, this is the first stage of a very long process of reducing the United States to something like a traditional Chinese client state.

if no compulsion was allowed, then obviously such social coherence as did exist had to be created through reasoned debate, persuasive arguments and the establishment of social consensus.

In reality, there's every reason to believe that farming 'reached' California just as soon as it reached anywhere else in North America. It's just that (despite a work ethic that valorized strenuous labour, and a regional exchange system that would have allowed information about innovations to spread rapidly) people there rejected the practice as definitively as they did slavery.