David Graeber Institute

@davidgraeberinst.bsky.social

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A platform for projects related to David Graeber’s legacy, developing his ideas and projects that will take on a life of their own, continuing and contributing to his work. https://davidgraeber.institute

"Unless you get very lucky, your choices are largely limited to two options. You can get a basically bullshit job, which will pay the rent but leaves you wracked with the guilty feeling that you are being forced, against your will, to be a fraud and a parasite. Or, you can get a helpful, useful job taking care of people, making, moving or maintaining things that people want or need - but then, likely you'll be paid so little you won't be able to take care of your own family." — David Graeber
"You need two flames burning in the human heart: the flame of anger against injustice, and the flame of hope you can build a better world." . - Tony Benn (1925 - 2014)
"Some of the least intelligent & most obnoxious people in our society are treated as its paragons of virtue while the most decent and caring people are not only made to do all the essential work but made to feel that they are of no account and that their lives and their feelings don't matter. This is a system of incredible violence that we live under." — David Graeber
"It’s become fashionable lately to say that capitalism has entered a new phase in which it has become parasitical to forms of creative cooperation. This is nonsense. It has always been parasitical." - David Graeber
"Those born to working-class families invariably score far better at tests of gauging others’ feelings than scions of the rich, or of the professional classes. In a way it’s hardly surprising after all, what “powerful” is largely about is not having to pay a lot of attention to what those around one are thinking and feeling." . - David Graeber
"There are essentially 2 types of society, mixed economies with public checks and balances, and oligarchies that dismantle and privatize the state, taking over its monetary and credit system, the land and basic infrastructure." . - Prof Michael Hodson
"In fact, most of the economic innovations of the last few decades years make more sense politically than economically. For example, eliminating guaranteed life employment for precarious contracts doesn’t really create a more effective workforce, but it is extraordinarily effective in destroying unions and otherwise depoliticizing labor. The same can be said of endlessly increasing working hours. No one has much time for political activity if they’re working 60-hour weeks."
"Not only does the market assessment of the value of different forms of work not correspond to popular conceptions of what they actually contribute to society, but there seems to be an inverse relation: with few exceptions, the principle seems to be, the more one’s work is seen as socially useful, the more it is recognized as helping others, the less one is likely to be paid for it. For instance, the US has been experiencing an acute shortage of trained nurses, and a glut of law school graduates. Yet the relative salaries of nurses and corporate lawyers remains unchanged. Clearly the real reasons for the price of labor, as with the price of most things actually, have little to do with market forces, and much to do with various forms of institutional power." - David Graeber
"Student loans are destroying the imagination of the youth. If there’s a way of a society committing mass suicide, what better way than to take all the youngest, most energetic, creative and joyous people in your society and saddle them with huge amounts of debt so they have to be slaves? There goes your music, your culture and everything new that'd pop out. And in a way, this is what’s happened to our society. We’re a society that has lost any ability to incorporate the interesting, creative and eccentric people. - David Graeber
"We often hear about Capitalism's contradictions, but I think the most tragic one is that we teach children pro-social behaviors: to share, to be kind, to cooperate, and to work together. We try to raise them to be decent human beings. But then, when they grow up, they are rewarded for outcompeting others, being cutthroat and ruthless in the workplace, and if they achieve wealth and power, they are often rewarded for many anti-social behaviors." - David Graeber
If you sell clothes, you need customers. An economy where the poor have money is good as then you will have customers. An economy where the Billionaires have everything may mean you'll struggle to have customers.
We have the stock market figures everyday. Maybe also we could have figures on the number of homeless people too. And the media can report daily on those homeless figures.
David Graeber opposed Keir Starmer back in 2020, warning he'll lead to the rise of the Far-Right and the rise of hate/racism. And look where we are now. Labour having abandoned its principles to become just another Neo-liberal party has been a total disaster.
Universal Basic Income is a policy we need to be discussing. Whether you are for it, against it, not sure about it.......at the very least, we need to be discussing it.
“Together we create the world we inhabit. Yet if any one of us tried to imagine a world we'd like to live in, who would come up with one exactly like the one that currently exists? We can all imagine a better world. Why can't we just create one? Why does it seem so inconceivable to just stop making capitalism?” ― David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
Fascism is the rejections of the very principle of rational debate. You cannot have a fair and constructuve debate with a nazi
I STILL HATE THATCHER
"I think that we should take the ideas of production and consumption, throw them away, and substitute for them the idea of care and freedom. We need to care for each other that will make each other more free? And who’re the people who are providing that care? And how can they be compensated themselves with greater freedom? To do that we need to like, actually scrap almost all of the discipline of economics as it currently exists." . - David Graeber
"There’s absolutely no reason a modern state should fund itself primarily by appropriating a proportion of each citizen’s earnings. . There are plenty of other ways to go about it such as land, wealth, commercial, or consumer taxes, any of which can be made more or less progressive, and which are considerably more efficient (than income tax), since the bureaucratic apparatus monitoring citizens’ personal affairs to the degree required by an income tax system is itself enormously expensive." . - David Graeber
47 years of thatcherism is why everyone is miserable.
"It’s really something how Billionaires have rigged the rules to let them vacuum up all of society’s wealth and then fund think tanks and buy media properties that blame poverty and homelessness and despair on literally everything other than Billionaires vacuuming up all the wealth." . - David Sirota
From David Graeber's 'Revolutions in Reverse' (2011). Graeber book around the time of the occupy movement, written back in 2011
From the book, Bullshit Jobs.
"What would happen if we stopped acting as if the primordial form of work is laboring at a production line, or wheat field, or iron foundry, or even in an office cubicle, and instead started from a mother, a teacher, or a caregiver? . We might be forced to conclude that the real business of human life is not contributing toward something called the economy but the fact that we are all, and have always been, projects of mutual creation." . - David Graeber
Twitter is awful, uninstall it and read david graeber books
The Reform party have made big gains in the UK.
“It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.”
“The major western democracies are moving towards corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan,with a bottom line for every human activity,every dream, every decency, every hope.The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies – socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor – and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.” ~ JOHN PILGER
“Nobody learns communism from a book. We’re born communist and then get indoctrinated into capitalism. Don’t believe this is true? Go ask a 7 year old if we should give homeless people houses, hungry people food, and sick people medicine. Theory later just helps us unlearn the bullshit.”
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
“I've always resented the smug statements of politicians, media commentators, corporate executives who talked of how, if you worked hard you would become rich. The meaning of that was if you were poor it was because you hadn't worked hard enough. I knew this was a lie, as I saw my father and millions of others, men and women who worked harder than anyone, harder than financiers and the politicians, - harder than anybody, still struggle in poverty." . - Howard Zinn.
David Graeber's book, Pirate Enlightenment, is coming out soon in Portugese. Em breve em português!
“The problems in our society are not caused by migrants or refugees. They are caused by an economic system rigged in favour of Corporations and Billionaires. . If Government wanted to improve people’s lives, it would tax the rich and build an economy that works for us all.” . Jeremy Corbyn
"When you see homelessness in a world of empty houses, hunger in a world of wasted food, or people working three jobs while Billionaires contemplate buying a 3rd yacht, something inside you recoils. . You are not reacting to a technical problem of policy failure; you are reacting to a moral obscenity. Your body knows what the media refuse to say: nobody has the right to create scarcity in a world of abundance. The hoarding of resources by a tiny few is not natural, inevitable, or efficient; it is enforced with violence, deception, and political manipulation. Anarchism is simply the refusal to accept that arrangement." . - David Graeber
"The AI bubble is about to burst because the hyperscalers as they are called have used up all their own cash and are now borrowing money. They are effectively net-debtors at a time when they are spending huge volumes of money on data centres without having the guarantee that they are going to make profits. And it is that worry that actually there isn't money to be made in the business which is gradually dawning on investors, which is going to be why they are going to pull away. Infact there are already signs of people withdrawing from the AI sector because they fear that this is indeed a bubble. It seems to me utterly inevitable, the only question is only when." - Ann Pettifor
"If you want a career pursuing any form of value other than monetary value - if you want to work in journalism, and pursue truth, or in the arts, and pursue beauty, or in some charity or international NGO or the UN, and pursue social justice, well, even assuming you can acquire the requisite degrees, for the first few years they won’t even pay you. So you’re supposed to live in New York or some other expensive city on no money for a few years after graduation. Who else can do that except children of the elite?" David Graeber
"But at this point, we can see War for what it really is: as the flailing and obviously doomed effort of a declining power to make its peculiar combination of bureaucratic war machines and speculative financial capitalism into a permanent global condition." . - David Graeber
Id like to end put in a good word for the non-industrious poor. At least they are not hurting anyone insofar as the time they take off from work is spend with friends and family enjoying and caring for those they love. They are probably improving the world more than we acknoledge.
"If there is anything scarier than a fascist who denies climate change, it’s one who doesn’t, because we know what kind of “solutions” they would implement. . We have to assume that the right has been brainstorming plans for when the climate crisis gets to genuine emergency levels. There are plenty of people employed to brainstorm contingencies and agencies tasked with predicting and modeling bad things that may eventuate, some of which are secret and some of which are not." . - David Graeber
This Friday! Come and watch out livestream.
Modern Capitalism resembles Feudalism more and more.
"With Universal Basic Income, one could well imagine people who didn't have to work to survive still choosing to become dental assistants, or toymakers, or movie ushers, or tugboat operators, or even sewage treatment plant inspectors. It's even easier to imagine them choosing to become some combination of several of these. . It's extremely difficult to imagine someone living without financial constraints choosing to spend any significant amount of their time highlighting forms for a Medical Care Cost Management company, let alone in an office where underlings were not allowed to speak." . - David Graeber