David Graeber

It's a difficult business, creating a new, alternative civilization.

— David Graeber

As it turns out, we don't "all" have to pay our debts. Only some of us do.

— David Graeber

Direct action is, ultimately, the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.

— David Graeber

“IMF is really designed to protect creditors not debtors.”

— David Graeber

I think if the general exodus that seems to be going on occurs it's going to be a disaster,.

— David Graeber

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

— David Graeber

“About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.”

— David Graeber

Aristotle [would] probably conclude most Americans, for all intents and purposes, are slaves.

— David Graeber

If you imagine that everything is an exchange, then we're supposed to just transact and walk away. If we haven't walked away…

— David Graeber

There seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid…

— David Graeber

The working poor are the people suffering out subprime mortgages and fatal loans and more and more of our money - you…

— David Graeber

“In this sense, the value of a unit of currency is not the measure of the value of an object, but the…

— David Graeber

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

— David Graeber

Revolutionary constituencies always involve a tacit alliance between the least alienated and the most oppressed.

— David Graeber

Debt - like sin - implies that one party in the transaction didn't live up to expectations, at least in the moment,…

— David Graeber

“As Pierre Bourdieu was later to point out in describing a similar economy of trust in contemporary Algeria: it’s quite possible to…

— David Graeber

People don't have an ongoing relation unless it's a form of debt because everything is an exchange, so ongoing relationships are incomplete…

— David Graeber

Consensus isn't just about agreement. It's about changing things around: You get a proposal, you work something out, people foresee problems, you…

— David Graeber

If you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend…

— David Graeber

But in the years since the neoliberal project really has been stripped down to what was always its essence: not an economic…

— David Graeber

Capitalism is like this fractal thing where anything that contains an element of capitalism anywhere inside it is just something that turns…

— David Graeber

Meanwhile, the U.S. debt remains, as it has been since 1790, a war debt; the United States continues to spend more on…

— David Graeber

The question we should be asking is not why people are sometimes cruel, or even why a few people are usually cruel…

— David Graeber

“Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to…

— David Graeber

The fascinating thing about standard economic stories is exactly that: they assume that everybody wants that kind of closure. That all human…

— David Graeber

Within a capitalist corporation, someone says, "Lend me a wrench," and someone asks, "Yeah, what do I get?" You assume that the…

— David Graeber

If your father is an air-conditioner repairman from Nebraska, its conceivable that you might become a CEO, but you can't imagine being…

— David Graeber

“The criminalization of debt, then, was the criminalization of the very basis of human society. It cannot be overemphasized that in a…

— David Graeber

“What if freedom were the ability to make up our minds about what it was we wished to pursue, with whom we…

— David Graeber

“If you have the power to hit people over the head whenever you want, you don’t have to trouble yourself too much…

— David Graeber

I came to the conclusion that most people in America would really like to be able to get a job where they…

— David Graeber

Traditional hedonism...was based on the direct experience of pleasure: wine, women and song; sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll; or whatever the…

— David Graeber

“Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping…

— David Graeber

“In fact this is precisely the logic on which the Bank of England—the first successful modern central bank—was originally founded. In 1694,…

— David Graeber

“A revolution on a world scale will take a very long time. But it is also possible to recognize that it is…

— David Graeber

“At this point we can finally see what's really at stake in our peculiar habit of defining ourselves simultaneously as master and…

— David Graeber

“Here we come to the central question of this book: What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality…

— David Graeber

“What it mainly revealed was that one of the most insidious of the “hidden injuries of class” in North American society was…

— David Graeber

“Political economy tends to see work in capitalist societies as divided between two spheres: wage labor, for which the paradigm is always…

— David Graeber

“Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom—that the current economic and political system is the only possible one—the first reaction you are…

— David Graeber