David Graeber - Form Quotes

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States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today.

David Graeber
If we insist on defining all human interactions as matters of people giving one thing for another, then any ongoing human relations can only take the form of debts.

David Graeber
Thus money is almost always something hovering between a commodity and a debt-token. This is probably why coins—pieces of silver or gold that are already valuable commodities in themselves, but that, being stamped with the emblem of local authority, became even more valuable—still sit in our heads as the quintessential form of money. They most perfectly straddle the divide that defines what money is in the first place. What's more, the relation between the two was a matter of constant political conversation. In other words, the battle between state and market, between governments and merchants is not inherent to the human condition.

David Graeber
Slavery is the ultimate form of being ripped from one's context, and thus from all the social relationships that make one a human being.

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