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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e542bb1 | The list of structures is pretty much the same list (racism, sexism, poverty, and the rest), but the implication is there could, for example, exist a system of patriarchy that operated in the total absence of domestic violence or sexual assault, or a system of racism that was in no way backed up by government-enforced property rights--despite the fact that, to my knowledge, no example of either has ever been observed.50 Once again, it's puz.. | David Graeber | ||
| 903e797 | Still, the introduction of numbers, the standardization of types of character, ability, monster, treasure, spell, the concept of ability scores and hit-points, had profound effects when one moved from the world of 6-, 8-, 12- and 20-sided dice to one of digital interfaces. Computer games could turn fantasy into an almost entirely bureaucratic procedure: accumulation of points, the raising of levels, and so on. There was a return to the comm.. | David Graeber | ||
| d796b37 | One of the popular fallacies in connection with commerce is that in modern days a money-saving device has been introduced called credit and that, before this device was known, all purchases were paid for in cash, in other words in coins. A careful investigation shows that the precise reverse is true. In olden days coins played a far smaller part in commerce than they do to-day. Indeed so small was the quantity of coins, that they did not ev.. | David Graeber | ||
| 6b483e8 | For me, this is exactly what's so pernicious about the morality of debt: the way that financial imperatives constantly try to reduce us all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money--and then tell us that it's only those who are willing to see the world as pillagers who deserve access to the resources required to pursue anything in life other than money. | David Graeber | ||
| 4e8a9a9 | Credit Theorists insisted that money is not a commodity but an accounting tool. In other words, it is not a "thing" at all. For a Credit Theorist can no more touch a dollar or a deutschmark than you can touch an hour or a cubic centimeter. Units of currency are merely abstract units of measurement, and as the credit theorists correctly noted, historically, such abstract systems of accounting emerged long before the use of any particular tok.. | David Graeber | ||
| a1363f6 | In other words, despite the dogged liberal assumption--again, coming from Smith's legacy--that the existence of states and markets are somehow opposed, the historical record implies that exactly the opposite is the case. Stateless societies tend also to be without markets. | David Graeber | ||
| 0e13da3 | But the moment you turn it around, you realize that claiming one's own political positions are based on "rationality" is an extremely strong statement. In fact, it's extraordinarily arrogant, since it means that those who disagree with those positions are not just wrong, but crazy. Similarly, to say one wishes to create a "rational" social order implies that current social arrangements might as well have been designed by the inhabitants of .. | David Graeber | ||
| 6033a85 | This history made it very easy to encourage workers to see their work not so much as wealth-creation, or helping others, or at least not primarily so, but as self-abnegation, a kind of secular hair-shirt, a sacrifice of joy and pleasure that allows us to become an adult worthy of our consumerist toys. | David Graeber | ||
| 495ee58 | Frank Baum's book the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1990, is widely recognized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the Free Silver platform- vowing to replace the gold standard with a bimetallic system that would allow the free creation of silver money alongside gold. As with the Greenbackers, one of the main constituencies for the movement was debtors: particularly.. | David Graeber | ||
| 3bd30b7 | For centuries now, explorers have been trying to find this fabled land of barter- none with success. Adam Smith set his story in aboriginal North America (others preferred Africa or the Pacific). In Smith's time, at least it could be said that reliable information on Native American economic systems was available in Scottish libraries. But by mid-century, Lewis Henry Morgan's descriptions of the six nations of the Iroquois, among others, we.. | David Graeber | ||
| 1857084 | The most remarkable thing is that even in Adam Smith's examples of fish and nails and tobacco being used as money, the same sort of thing was happening. In the years following the appearance of the Wealth of Nations, scholars checked into most of these examples and discovered that in just about every case, the people involved were quite familiar with the use of money, and in fact, were using money- as a unit of account. Take the example of .. | David Graeber | ||
| 795ba2e | How are workers supposed to find meaning and purpose in jobs where they are effectively being turned into robots? Where they are actually being told they are little better than robots, even as at the same time they are increasingly expected to organize their lives around their work? The obvious answer is to fall back on the old idea that work forms character; and this is precisely what seems to have happened. One could call it a revival of .. | David Graeber | ||
| 7c51e81 | That is how the critique of Doug Henwood, David Graeber and others can be understood. 'The major frustration of the book is political', writes Henwood, publisher of the American newsletter Left Business Observer and author of Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom.32 Piketty does not deal with the question of which political forces affect inequality and the wage ratio. Piketty ignores 'the most obvious' reason for the lower capital-income r.. | Stephen Kaufmann | ||
| a608128 | He started showing up to work drunk and taking paid "business trips" for nonexistent meetings:" | David Graeber | ||
| 2768ab4 | For every subtle and complicated question, there is a perfectly simple and straightforward answer, which is wrong. -- H. L. Mencken (slightly rephrased) | David Graeber | ||
| 7b930e2 | here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs. | David Graeber | ||
| 421350d | As much as it flies in the face of our stereotypes about the origins of "Western" freedoms, women in democratic Athens, unlike those of Persia or Syria, were expected to wear veils when they ventured out in public.64" | David Graeber | ||
| 01d17c0 | All of this is a relatively recent innovation. The habit of always saying "please" and "thank you" first began to take hold during the commercial revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--among those very middle classes who were largely responsible for it. It is the language of bureaus, shops, and offices, and over the course of the last five hundred years it has spread across the world along with them. It is also merely one to.. | David Graeber | ||
| 5a96cb7 | Yet even in the best of cases, the need to be on call, to spend at least a certain amount of energy looking over one's shoulder, maintaining a false front, never looking too obviously engrossed, the inability to fully collaborate with others --all this lends itself much more to a culture of computer games, YouTube rants, memes, and Twitter controversies than to, say, the rock 'n' roll bands, drug poetry, and experimental theater created und.. | work millennials jobs pop-culture job culture working | David Graeber | |
| bb7fc7c | The burden of rights-scolding falls above all on the younger generations. In most wealthy countries, the current crop of people in their twenties represents the first generation in more than a century that can, on the whole, expect opportunities and living standards substantially worse than those enjoyed by their parents. Yet at the same time, they are lectured relentlessly from both left and right on their sense of entitlement for feeling .. | David Graeber | ||
| d8adb82 | But everywhere, managerial feudalism ensures that thousands of hours of creative effort will literally come to nothing. Take the domain of scientific research, or higher education once again. If a grant agency funds only 10 percent of all applications, that means that 90 percent of the work that went into preparing applications was just as pointless as the work that went into making the promo video for Apollonia's doomed reality TV show Too.. | David Graeber | ||
| 972f233 | There will always be at least a handful of people unscrupulous enough to take advantage of such a situation--and a handful is all it takes. | David Graeber | ||
| 3b21282 | The genealogy of the modern redistributive state--with its notorious tendency to foster identity politics--can be traced back not to any sort of "primitive communism" but ultimately to violence and war." | David Graeber | ||
| a05e297 | Nehemiah was a Jew born in Babylon, a former cup-bearer to the Persian emperor. In 444 BC, he managed to talk the Great King into appointing him governor of his native Judaea. He also received permission to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem that had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar more than two centuries earlier. In the course of rebuilding, sacred texts were recovered and restored; in a sense, this was the moment of the creation of what we .. | David Graeber | ||
| 5cc3d9b | We are all communists with our closest friends, and feudal lords when dealing with small children. It is very hard to imagine a society where this would not be true. | David Graeber | ||
| f4b9a04 | If someone fixing a broken water pipe says, "Hand me the wrench," his co-worker will not, generally speaking, say, "And what do I get for it?"--even if they are working for Exxon-Mobil, Burger King, or Goldman Sachs. The reason is simple efficiency (ironically enough, considering the conventional wisdom that "communism just doesn't work"): if you really care about getting something done, the most efficient way to go about it is obviously to.. | David Graeber | ||
| 5dd9326 | it's no coincidence that the more jobs requiring college degrees become suffused in bullshit, the more pressure is put on college students to learn about the real world by dedicating less of their time to self-organized goal-oriented activity and more of it to tasks that will prepare them for the more mindless aspects of their future careers. | David Graeber | ||
| 354c68a | This is presumably also why in the immediate wake of great disasters--a flood, a blackout, or an economic collapse--people tend to behave the same way, reverting to a rough-and-ready communism. However briefly, hierarchies and markets and the like become luxuries that no one can afford. Anyone who has lived through such a moment can speak to their peculiar qualities, the way that strangers become sisters and brothers and human society itsel.. | David Graeber | ||
| 809b886 | I am not speaking strictly of slavery here, but of that process that dislodges people from the webs of mutual commitment, shared history, and collective responsibility that make them what they are, so as to make them exchangeable--that is, to make it possible to make them subject to the logic of debt. Slavery is just the logical end-point, the most extreme from of such disentanglement. But for that reason it provides us with a window on the.. | war slavery commercial-markets social-imagination conquest property debt capitalism | David Graeber | |
| fb48ac5 | Lilian testifies eloquently to the misery that can ensue when the only challenge you can overcome in your own work is the challenge of coming to terms with the fact that you are not, in fact, presented with any challenges; when the only way you can exercise your powers is in coming up with creative ways to cover up the fact that you cannot exercise your powers; of managing the fact that you have, completely against your choosing, been turne.. | pretentiousness challenge job miserable | David Graeber | |
| 880485c | One extreme possibility might be the situation the French anthropologist Jean-Claude Galey encountered in a region of the eastern Himalayas where as recently as the 1970s, the low-ranking castes--they were referred to as "the vanquished ones," since they were thought to be descended from a population once conquered by the current landlord caste many centuries before--lived in a situation of permanent debt dependency. Landless and penniless,.. | David Graeber | ||
| 30be7c3 | Finally, once we start thinking of communism as a principle of morality rather than just a question of property ownership, it becomes clear that this sort of morality is almost always at play to some degree in any transaction--even commerce. If one is on sociable terms with someone, it's hard to completely ignore their situation. Merchants often reduce prices for the needy. This is one of the main reasons why shopkeepers in poor neighborhoo.. | David Graeber | ||
| e1b4720 | Even in the most impersonal shopping mall or supermarket, clerks are expected to at least simulate personal warmth, patience, and other reassuring qualities; in a Middle Eastern bazaar, one might have to go through an elaborate process of establishing a simulated friendship, sharing tea, food, or tobacco, before engaging in similarly elaborate haggling--an interesting ritual that begins by establishing sociality through baseline communism--.. | David Graeber | ||
| 5097903 | Someone once figured out that the average American will spend a cumulative six months of her life waiting for the light to change. | David Graeber | ||
| 36d6ad1 | Olaudah Equiano, born sometime around 1745 in a rural community somewhere within the confines of the Kingdom of Benin. Kidnapped from his home at the age of eleven, Equiano was eventually sold to British slavers operating in the Bight of Biafra, from whence he was conveyed first to Barbados, then to a plantation in colonial Virginia. Equiano's further adventures--and there were many--are narrated in his autobiography, The Interesting Narrat.. | David Graeber | ||
| f3951a6 | Kingdoms rise and fall; they also strengthen and weaken; governments may make their presence known in people's lives quite sporadically, and for many people in history, it was not at all clear whose government they were actually in. Even until quite recently, many of the world's inhabitants were not quite sure of what country they were citizens, or why it should matter. | David Graeber | ||
| 1fd0954 | If being forced to pretend to work is so infuriating because it makes clear the degree to which you are entirely under another person's power, then bullshit jobs are...entire jobs organized on that same principle. You're working, or pretending to work--not for any good reason, at least any good reason you can find--but just for the sake of working. | David Graeber | ||
| db52aae | top-down chains of command are not particularly efficient: they tend to promote stupidity among those on top and resentful foot-dragging among those on the bottom. | David Graeber | ||
| 9597a18 | States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, | David Graeber | ||
| 488d65f | Consider the custom, in American society, of constantly saying "please" and "thank you." To do so is often treated as basic morality: we are constantly chiding children for forgetting to do it, just as the moral guardians of our society--teachers and ministers, for instance--do to everybody else. We often assume that the habit is universal, but as the Inuit hunter made clear, it is not.62 Like so many of our everyday courtesies, it is a kin.. | David Graeber | ||
| 271cf5c | Credit money is based on trust, and in competitive markets, trust itself becomes a scarce commodity. | David Graeber | ||
| 22e77c2 | In English, "thank you" derives from "think." It originally meant, "I will remember what you did for me"--which is usually not true either--but in other languages (the Portuguese obrigado is a good example) the standard term follows the form of the English "much obliged"--it actually does mean, "I am in your debt." The French merci is even more graphic: it derives from "mercy," as in begging for mercy; by saying it you are symbolically plac.. | David Graeber | ||
| b9c3669 | 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 - or rather, where every day it's more difficult to tell the difference between what can be considered 'economic' and what is 'political. | jobs managers capitalism | David Graeber | |
| bf052d4 | The promulgation of consumerism also coincided with the beginnings of the managerial revolution, which was, especially at first, largely an attack on pupular knowledge...the new bureaucratically organized corporations and their 'scientific management' sought as far as possible to literally turn workers into extensions of the machinery, their very move predetermined by someone else. | David Graeber |