David Graeber - Capitalism Quotes

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Even human relations become a matter of cost benefit calculation. Clearly this is the way the conquistadors viewed the worlds that they set out to conquer. It is the peculiar feature of modern capitalism to create social arrangements that essentially force us to think this way.

David Graeber
One might even say that it's one of the scandals of capitalism that most capitalist firms, internally, operate communistically.

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

David Graeber
There is very good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism itself will no longer exist—most obviously, as ecologists keep reminding us, because it's impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet, and the current form of capitalism doesn't seem to be capable of generating the kind of vast technological breakthroughs and mobilizations that would be required for us to start finding and colonizing any other planets. Yet faced with the prospect of capitalism actually ending, the most common reaction—even from those who call themselves "progressives"—is simply fear. We cling to what exists because we can no longer imagine an alternative that wouldn't be even worse.

David Graeber
"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.

David Graeber