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ce97da1
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It's worth thinking about language for a moment, because one thing it reveals, probably better than any other example, is that there is a basic paradox in our very idea of freedom. On the one hand, rules are by their nature constraining. Speech codes, rules of etiquette, and grammatical rules, all have the effect of limiting what we can and cannot say. It is not for nothing that we all have the picture of the schoolmarm rapping a child acro..
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David Graeber |
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5863aa8
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The reasons why anthropologists haven't been able to come up with a simple, compelling story for the origins of money is because there's no reason to believe there could be one. Money was no more ever "invented" than music or mathematics or jewelry. What we call "money" isn't a "thing" at all; it's a way of comparing things mathematically, as proportions: of saying one of X is equivalent to six of Y. As such it is probably as old as human t..
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David Graeber |
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2d54c6b
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Where once universities, corporations, movie studios, and the like had been governed by a combination of relatively simple chains of command and informal patronage networks, we now have a world of funding proposals, strategic vision documents, and development team pitches--allowing for the endless elaborations of new and ever more pointless levels of managerial hierarchy, staffed by men and women with elaborate titles, fluent in corporate j..
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David Graeber |
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ff3adc3
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Instead, the situation has sparked an efflorescence of social media (Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter): basically, of forms of electronic media that lend themselves to being produced and consumed while pretending to do something else. I am convinced this is the primary reason for the rise of social media...
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social-media
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David Graeber |
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76d19c2
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Managerialism has become the pretext for creating a new covert form of feudalism, where wealth and position are allocated not on economic but political grounds
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David Graeber |
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f6599ac
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Just as the invention of new forms of industrial automation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had the paradoxical effect of turning more and more of the world's population into full-time industrial workers, so has all the software designed to save us from administrative responsibilities in recent decades ultimately turned us all into part or full-time administrators.
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David Graeber |
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726fde7
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It begins to be clear why there are no societies based on barter. Such a society could only be one in which everybody was an inch away from everybody else's throat; but nonetheless hovering there, poised to strike but never actually striking, forever. True, barter does sometimes occur between people who do not consider each other strangers, but they're usually people who might as well be strangers- that is, who feel no sense of mutual respo..
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David Graeber |
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368e021
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If you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they already know what they are going to discover.105 That's pretty much the system we have now.
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David Graeber |
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4e21ffa
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As the events of 2011 reveal, the age of revolutions is by no means over. The human imagination stubbornly refuses to die. And the moment any significant number of people simultaneously shake off the shackles that have been placed on that collective imagination, even our most deeply inculcated assumptions about what is and is not politically possible have been known to crumble overnight.
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David Graeber |
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90cfd09
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What credit theorists like Mitchell-Innes were arguing is that even if Henry gave Joshua a gold coin instead of a piece of paper, the situation would be essentially the same. A gold coin is a promise to pay something else of equivalent value to a gold coin. After all, a gold coin is not actually useful in itself. One only accepts it because one assumes other people will. In this sense, the value of a unit of currency is not the measure of t..
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David Graeber |
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1dd139d
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The "self-actualization" philosophy from which most of this new bureaucratic language emerged insists that we live in a timeless present, that history means nothing, that we simply create the world around us through the power of the will."
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David Graeber |
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d7376e9
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So what exactly was the point of extracting the gold, stamping one's picture on it, causing it to circulate among one's subjects--and then demanding that those same subjects give it back again?
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David Graeber |
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18a5e4d
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I once attended a conference on the crises in the banking system where I was able to have a brief, informal chat with an economist for one of the Bretton Woods institutions (probably best I not say which). I asked him why everyone was still waiting for even one bank official to be brought to trial for any act of fraud leading up to the crash of 2008. OFFICIAL: Well, you have to understand the approach taken by U.S. prosecutors to financial ..
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David Graeber |
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54d74ed
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Much of what bureaucrats do, after all, is evaluate things. They are continually assessing, auditing, measuring, weighing the relative merits of different plans, proposals, applications, courses of action, or candidates for promotion. Market reforms only reinforce this tendency. This happens on every level. It is felt most cruelly by the poor, who are constantly monitored by an intrusive army of moralistic box-tickers assessing their child-..
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David Graeber |
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126f4e7
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Jim Cooper, a former LAPD officer turned sociologist, has observed that the overwhelming majority of those who end up getting beaten or otherwise brutalized by police turn out to be innocent of any crime. "Cops don't beat up burglars," he writes. The reason, he explained, is simple: the one thing most guaranteed to provoke a violent reactions from police is a challenge to their right to, as he puts is, "define the situation." (p. 80)"
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David Graeber |
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c401222
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One of the central arguments of this essay so far is that structural violence creates lopsided structures of the imagination. Those on the bottom of the heap have to spend a great deal of imaginative energy trying to understand the social dynamics that surround them--including having to imagine the perspectives of those on top--while the latter can wander about largely oblivious to much of what is going on around them. That is, the powerles..
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David Graeber |
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a96305a
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When you ask someone to pass the salt, you are also giving them an order; by attaching the word "please", you are saying that it is not an order. But, in fact, it is."
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David Graeber |
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59feda4
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Common sense dictates that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them alone for a while. Most will probably turn up nothing, but one or two may well discover something completely unexpected. If you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resou..
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David Graeber |
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1bb7538
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Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which tings really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, on can never acknowledge this: it may be true that, if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this wa..
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David Graeber |
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0be773d
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Defenders of capitalism generally make three broad historical claims: first, that it has fostered rapid scientific and technological development; second, that however much it may throw enormous wealth to a small minority, it does so in such a way that increases overall prosperity for everyone; third, that in doing so, it creates a more secure and democratic world. It is quite clear that in the twenty-first century, capitalism is not doing a..
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David Graeber |
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327a4cf
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the Holy Land. The crusader army then proceeded to commission the Venetian fleet for transport in exchange for a promise of a 50-percent
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David Graeber |
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0e1ce5d
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There is no consensus amongst philosophers about what the word "rationality" even means. According to one tradition, for instance, rationality is the application of logic, of pure thought untempered by emotions; this pure, objective thought is then seen as the basis of scientific inquiry. This has attained a great deal of popular purchase, but there's a fundamental problem: scientific inquiry itself has proved it cannot possibly be true. Co..
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David Graeber |
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05599ec
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We are used to speaking of "the state" as a single entity but actually, I think, modern states are better seen as the confluence of three different elements, hose historical origins are quite distinct, have no intrinsic relation with one another, and may already be in the process of finally drifting apart. I will call these sovereignty, administration, and politics. (p. 175)"
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David Graeber |
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4a78ca4
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on a political level, where every arbitrary act of power tends to reinforce a feeling that it's not power, but arbitrariness--that is, freedom itself--that is the problem.
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David Graeber |
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7ed659a
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Max Weber famously pointed out that a sovereign state's institutional representatives maintain a monopoly on the right of violence within the state's territory. Normally, this violence can only be exercised by certain duly authorized officials (soldiers, police, jailers), or those authorized by such officials (airport security, private guards...), and only in a manne explicitly designated by law. But ultimately, sovereign power really is, s..
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David Graeber |
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c3d9ed6
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It's worth thinking about language for a moment, because one thing it reveals, probably better than any other example, is that there is a basic paradox in our very idea of freedom. On the one hand, rules are by their nature constraining. Speech codes, rules of etiquette, and grammatical rules, all have the effect of limiting what we can and cannot say. It is not for nothing that we all have the pictures of the schoolmarm rapping a child acr..
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David Graeber |
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cda468e
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Of the many wonderful tales Moor told me, the most wonderful, the most delightful one, was "Hans Rockle." It went on for months; it was a whole series of stories... Hans Rockle himself was a Hoffman-like magician, who kept a toyshop, and who was always "hard up." His shop was full of the most wonderful things--of wooden men and women, giants and dwarfs, kings and queens, workmen and masters, animals and birds as numerous as Noah got into th..
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David Graeber |
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1d149f3
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one could certainly make the argument that there's a deep structural affinity between wasteful extravagance and bullshit...
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David Graeber |
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082af7b
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Why is it that languages always change? It's easy enough to see why we need to have common agreements on grammar and vocabulary in order to be able to talk to one other. But if that's all that we need language for, one would think that, once a given set of speakers found a grammar and vocabulary that suited their purposes, they'd simply stick with it, perhaps changing the vocabulary around if there was some new thing to talk about--a new tr..
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David Graeber |
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15ca5cc
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people, everywhere, are prone to two completely contradictory tendencies: on the one hand, a tendency to be playfully creative just for the sake of it; on the other, a tendency to agree with anyone who tells them that they really shouldn't act that way. This latter is what makes the game-ification of institutional life possible. Because if you take the latter tendency to its logical conclusion, all freedom becomes arbitrariness, and all arb..
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David Graeber |
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218c3a1
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Over the last thirty or forty years, anti-authoritarians around the world have been working on creating new, and more effective, modes of direct democracy--ones that might operate without any need for a bureaucracy of violence to enforce them. I've written about these efforts extensively elsewhere. A lot of progress has been made. But those working on such projects often find themselves having to deal with exactly this sort of horror of "ar..
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David Graeber |
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9dd6836
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a tacit cosmology in which the play principle (and by extension, creativity) is itself seen as frightening, while game-like behavior is celebrated as transparent and predictable, and where as a result, the advance of all these rules and regulations is itself experienced as a kind of freedom.
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David Graeber |
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897624a
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The English, American, and French revolutionaries changed all that when they created the notion of popular sovereignty--declaring that the power once held by kings is now held by an entity that they called "the people." This created an immediate logical problem, because "the people" are by definition a group of individuals united by the fact that they are, in fact, bound by a certain set of laws. So in what sense can they have created those..
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David Graeber |
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964171a
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a "negative correlation," as David Apter put it,55 between coercion and information: that is, while relatively democratic regimes tend to be awash in too much information, as everyone bombards political authorities with explanations and demands, the more authoritarian and repressive a regime, the less reason people have to tell it anything--which is why such regimes are forced to rely so heavily on spies, intelligence agencies, and secret p..
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David Graeber |
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2e6e255
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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.
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David Graeber |
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ecfcf02
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One day when Nasruddin was left in charge of the local tea-house, the king and some retainers, who had been hunting nearby, stopped in for breakfast. "Do you have quail eggs?" asked the king. "I'm sure I can find some," answered Nasruddin. The king ordered an omelet of a dozen quail eggs, and Nasruddin hurried out to look for them. After the king and his party had eaten, he charged them a hundred gold pieces. The king was puzzled. "Are quai..
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David Graeber |
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f890d8e
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Esli istoriia chemu-nibud' uchit, to ee urok takov: net luchshego sposoba opravdat' otnosheniia, osnovannye na nasilii, i pridat' im nravstvennyi oblik, chem vyrazit' ikh iazykom dolga, -- prezhde vsego potomu, chto eto srazu sozdaet vpechatlenie, budto sama zhertva delaet chto-to ne tak. Eto ponimaiut mafiozi. Tak postupaiut komanduiushchie pobedonosnymi armiiami. Na protiazhenii tysiach let agressory mogli govorit' svoim zhertvam, chto t..
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David Graeber |
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ea92286
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Competition forces factory owners to mechanize production, so as to reduce labor costs, but while this is to the short-term advantage of the individual firm, the overall effect of such mechanization is actually to drive the overall rate of profit of all firms down.
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David Graeber |
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e1c1432
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As Pierre Bourdieu was later to point out in describing a similar economy of trust in contemporary Algeria: it's quite possible to turn honor into money, almost impossible to convert money into honor.
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David Graeber |
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8a6ac5d
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Recall an idea from earlier in the book: exchange, unless it's an instantaneous cash transaction, creates debts. Debts linger over time. If you imagine all human relations as exchange, then insofar as people do have ongoing relations with one another, those relations are laced with debt and sin. The only way out is to annihilate the debt, but then social relations vanish too. This
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David Graeber |
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572c37f
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We can observe the process in the very earliest records from ancient Mesopotamia; it finds its first philosophical expression in the Vedas, reappears in endless forms throughout recorded history, and still lies underneath the essential fabric of our institutions today--state and market, our most basic conceptions of the nature of freedom, morality, sociality--all of which have been shaped by a history of war, conquest, and slavery in ways w..
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David Graeber |
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65d2778
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most Amazonians don't want to give others the power to threaten them with physical injury if they don't do as they are told. Maybe we should better be asking what it says about ourselves that we feel this attitude needs any sort of explanation.
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politics
anarchist
anarchism
political-philosophy
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David Graeber |
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07348a9
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It's those who do not have the power to hire and fire who are left with the work of figuring out what actually did go wrong
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David Graeber |
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997153f
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If artistic avant-gardes and social revolutionaries have felt a peculiar affinity for one another ever since, borrowing each other's languages and ideas, it appears to have been insofar as both have remained committed to the idea that the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently. In this sense, a phrase like "all power to the imagination" expresses the very quintesse..
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revolutionaries
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David Graeber |