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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7ed659a | 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.. | David Graeber | ||
| c3d9ed6 | 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.. | David Graeber | ||
| cda468e | 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.. | David Graeber | ||
| 1d149f3 | one could certainly make the argument that there's a deep structural affinity between wasteful extravagance and bullshit... | David Graeber | ||
| 082af7b | 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.. | David Graeber | ||
| 15ca5cc | 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.. | David Graeber | ||
| 218c3a1 | 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.. | David Graeber | ||
| 9dd6836 | 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. | David Graeber | ||
| 897624a | 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.. | David Graeber | ||
| 964171a | 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.. | David Graeber | ||
| 2e6e255 | 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. | David Graeber | ||
| ecfcf02 | 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.. | David Graeber | ||
| f890d8e | 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.. | David Graeber | ||
| 88992c5 | I gave you three proofs of witchcraft. A cat that drinks blood! A horse that talks! And a man who propagates POODLES! | humor historical satire witchcraft | Richard Curtis | |
| ea92286 | 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. | David Graeber | ||
| e1c1432 | 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. | David Graeber | ||
| 8a6ac5d | 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 | David Graeber | ||
| 572c37f | 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.. | David Graeber | ||
| 65d2778 | 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. | politics anarchist anarchism political-philosophy | David Graeber | |
| 07348a9 | 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 | David Graeber | ||
| 997153f | 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.. | revolutionaries | David Graeber | |
| 80d9a09 | To this day, this loan has never been paid back. It cannot be. If it ever were, the entire monetary system of Great Britain would cease to exist. | David Graeber | ||
| d93f3c6 | if we're going to actually come up with robots that will do our laundry or tidy up the kitchen, we're going to have to make sure that whatever replaces capitalism is based on a far more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power--one that no longer contains either the super-rich or desperately poor people willing to do their housework. Only then will technology begin to be marshaled toward human needs. And this is the best reason to break.. | David Graeber | ||
| dd298d1 | Since one cannot know a radically better world is not possible, are we not betraying everyone by insisting on continuing to justify, and reproduce, the mess we have today? And anyway, even if we're wrong, we might well get a lot closer. | David Graeber | ||
| 1ee689e | In America, the fifties were the heyday of a certain ideal of the one-income patriarchal family, and among the more affluent, the ideal was often achieved. Women with no access to their own income or resources obviously had no choice but to spend a great deal of time and energy understanding what their menfolk thought was going on. | David Graeber | ||
| c0fb844 | Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one 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 .. | David Graeber | ||
| aba3da1 | The most famous of these is the Law of Jubilee: a law that stipulated that all debts would be automatically cancelled "in the Sabbath year" (that is, after seven years had passed), and that all who languished in bondage owing to such debts would be released." | David Graeber | ||
| 03bd8bd | One of the perennial complaints of the progressive left is that so many working-class Americans vote against their own economic interests--actively supporting Republican candidates who promise to slash programs that provide their families with heating oil, who savage their schools and privatize their Medicare. To some degree the reason is simply that the scraps the Democratic Party is now willing to throw its "base" at this point are so pal.. | David Graeber | ||
| ee862d5 | If taxes represent our absolute debt to the society that created us, then the first step toward creating real money comes when we start calculating much more specific debts to society, systems of fines, fees, and penalties, or even debts we owe to specific individuals who we have wronged in some way, and thus to whom we stand in a relation of "sin" or" | David Graeber | ||
| dded53b | 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. | David Graeber | ||
| ecae61e | 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. | David Graeber | ||
| 2ec03cf | It was said that trials were what made the victory so sweet, but Herbert never bought that. From where he sat, he'd settle for having the victories come a little easier now and then. . . . | Jeff Rovin | ||
| b1290e4 | Esli vzglianut' na istoriiu dolga, to v pervuiu ochered' obnaruzhivaetsia, chto rech' idet o polnoi nravstvennoi putanitse. Naibolee iavno ona proiavliaetsia v tom, chto povsiudu bol'shinstvo liudei polagaet, chto (1) vyplata deneg, vziatykh v dolg, -- eto vopros elementarnoi poriadochnosti i chto (2) vsiakii, kto imeet obyknovenie davat' den'gi vzaimy, est' voploshchennoe zlo. | David Graeber | ||
| 59f4444 | Pravitel'stva trebuiut uplaty nalogov, potomu chto khotiat nalozhit' ruku na den'gi liudei. No esli Smit byl prav i zoloto i serebro stali den'gami blagodaria estestvennomu funktsionirovaniiu rynka, kotoryi nikak ne zavisel ot pravitel'stv, to ne bylo by dlia nikh estestvennym zakhvatit' kontrol' nad zolotymi i serebrianymi rudnikami? Togda koroli smogli by chekanit' stol'ko deneg, skol'ko im bylo by nuzhno. Sobstvenno, eto koroli obychno i.. | David Graeber | ||
| a93d9d6 | wage-labor contracts in the ancient world were primarily a matter of the rental of slaves--a | David Graeber | ||
| 3c72aee | It is a testimony to the genuine lingering power of leftist ideals that anyone would even consider voting for a party that promoted this sort of thing--because surely, if they do, it's not because they actually think these are good policies, but because these are the only policies anyone who identifies themselves as left-of-center is allowed to set forth. | David Graeber | ||
| 9f132b1 | In a broader sense, the value of heirlooms is always, as I have said, an historical value, derived from acts of production, use, or appropriation that have involved the object in the past. The value of an heirloom is really that of actions: actions whose significance has been, as it were, absorbed into the object's current identity--whether the emphasis is placed on the inspired labors of the artist who created it, the lengths to which some.. | David Graeber | ||
| 3fd8384 | Visible alternatives shatter the sense of inevitability, that the system must, necessarily, be patched together in the same form -- this is why it became such an imperative of global governance to stamp them out, or, when that's not possible, to ensure that no one knows about them. To become aware of it allows us to see everything we are already doing in a new light. To realize we're all already communists when working on a common projects,.. | revolution communism | David Graeber | |
| 9feed30 | 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.. | David Graeber | ||
| f939779 | Horror stories, whether about vampires, ghouls, or flesh-eating zombies, always seem to reflect some aspect of the tellers' own social lives, some terrifying potential, in the way they are accustomed to interact with each other, that they do not wish to acknowledge or confront, but also cannot help but talk about. | David Graeber | ||
| e5f78d6 | the more we allow aspects of our everyday existence to fall under the purview of bureaucratic regulations, the more everyone concerned colludes to downplay the fact (perfectly obvious to those actually running the system) that all of it ultimately depends on the threat of physical harm. | David Graeber | ||
| b0e866a | Here we come to the central question of this book: What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal? What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts? What changes when the one turns into the other? And how do we speak about them when our language has been so shaped by the market? | David Graeber | ||
| b152290 | End of work arguments became increasingly popular in the late seventies and early eighties, as radical thinkers pondered what would happen to traditional working-class struggle once there was no longer a working class. (The answer: it would turn into identity politics.) | David Graeber | ||
| 99b4816 | Gradually, subtly, without anyone completely understanding the full implications of what was happening, what had been the essence of moral relations turned into the means for every sort of dishonest stratagem. | David Graeber |