David Graeber Short Quotes

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As it turns out, we don't "all" have to pay our debts. Only some of us do.

David Graeber
The criminalization of debt was the criminalization of the very basis of human society.

David Graeber
In fact, communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It is what makes society possible.

David Graeber
A legitimate enterprise had to have some moral basis, and the only morality the company knew was debt.

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

David Graeber
Honor is the same as credit; it's one's ability to keep ones promises, but also, in the case of a wrong, to "get even".

David Graeber
What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence.

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

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
In the largest scheme of things, just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe.

David Graeber
The moment we begin to map the history of money across the last five thousand years of Eurasian history, startling patterns begin to emerge.

David Graeber
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
Before we can apply the tools of anthropology to reconstruct the real history of money, we need to understand what's wrong with the conventional account.

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
Medieval corporations owned property, and they often engaged in complex financial arrangements, but in no case were they profit-seeking enterprises in the modern sense.

David Graeber
Indeed, India has become notorious as a country in which a very large part of the working population is laboring in effective debt peonage to a landlord or other creditor.

David Graeber