David Graeber

About the author

David Graeber, influential anarchist theorist

David Graeber was born on 12 February 1961 and died on 2 September 2020. He was an American anthropologist, anarchist activist, and author known for his books 'Debt: The First 5000 Years' and 'The Utopia of Rules'. Besides his work on economic and political theory, Graeber was influential in the anti-globalization and direct democracy movements, most notably in his role in helping to organise the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Graeber's writings and ideas have greatly contributed to contemporary anarchist theory, introducing and developing concepts such as 'everyday communism' and 'direct action'. His works challenged traditional economic thought, criticizing capitalism for its dehumanizing effects and espousing a more communal, less hierarchical form of social organization based on mutual aid and direct democracy. Therefore, David Graeber’s contributions to anarchism and his influence on anarchist movements around the world are significant.

Date of Birth: 12 February 1961

Date of Death: 2 September 2020

Country of Birth: United States

Political Ideas: Anarchism, Direct Democracy

Quotes Available: 23

Quotes by David Graeber

We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself.

Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried.

It’s hard to imagine a surer sign that one is dealing with an irrational economic system than the fact that the prospect of eliminating drudgery is considered to be a problem.

The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.

Police are bureaucrats with weapons.

Money has no essence. It's not really anything; therefore, its nature has always been and presumably always will be a matter of political contention.

Efficiency' has come to mean vesting more and more power to managers, supervisors, and presumed 'efficiency experts,' so that actual producers have almost zero autonomy.

"Communist society"; in the sense of a society organized exclusively on that single principle - could never exist. But all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actually-existing communism.

We no longer like to think about bureaucracy, yet it informs every aspect of out existence. It's as if as a planetary civilization, we have decided to clap out hands over our ears and start humming whenever the topic comes up.

The critical human flaw is not that as a species we're particularly aggressive. It's that we tend to respond to aggression very poorly.

It's one thing to say, "Another world is possible." It's another to experience it, however momentarily.

Take the principle that two wrongs don't make a right. If you really took it seriously, that alone would knock away almost the entire basis for war and the criminal justice system.

The criminalization of debt was the criminalization of the very basis of human society.

Marxist schools have authors. Just as Marxism sprang from the mind of Marx, so we have Leninists, Maoists, Trotksyites, Gramscians, Althusserians... Now consider the different schools of anarchism. There are Anarcho-Syndicalists, Anarcho-Communists, Insurrectionists, Cooperativists, Individualists, Platformists... None are named after some great thinker; instead, they are invariably named either after some kind of practice, or most often, organizational principle.

At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions. The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how. The second is that power corrupts.

Direct action is the insistence, when faced with structures of unjust authority, on acting as if one is already free.

It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor.

In fact, communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It is what makes society possible.

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 is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence.

Anarchism is just the way people act when they are free to do as they choose, and when they deal with others who are equally free.

If the existence of bullshit jobs seems to defy the logic of capitalism, one possible reason for their proliferation might be that the existing system isn't capitalism.

Consumer debt is the lifeblood of our economy. All modern nation states are built on deficit spending. Debt has come to be the central issue of international politics. But nobody seems to know exactly what it is, or how to think about it.

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