„Power makes you lazy.“
— David Graeber, livro The Utopia of Rules
The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
Frases de David Graeber
0 0
David Graeber
Data de nascimento: 12. Fevereiro 1961
David Graeber é um anarquista, antropólogo e professor leitor de antropologia social, no Colégio Goldsmith da Universidade de Londres. Anteriormente foi professor associado na Universidade de Yale, instituição que, anteriormente, se negou a recontratá-lo após o término de seu contrato em junho de 2007, assunto em torno do qual se apresentam controvérsias e cartas de apoio ao professor e de repúdio à decisão da diretoria da universidade. Graeber participa ativamente em movimentos sociais e políticos, protestando contra o Fórum Econômico Mundial de 2002 e o movimento Occupy Wall Street. Ele é membro do Industrial Workers of the World e faz parte do comite da Organização Internacional para uma Sociedade Participativa .
Citações David Graeber
„We could no more have a universal world market than we could have a system in which everyone who wasn't a capitalist was somehow able to to become a respectable, regularly paid wage laborer with access to adequate dental care. A world like that has never existed and never could exist. What's more, the moment that even the prospect that this might happen begins to materialize, the whole system starts to come apart.“
Fonte: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Eleven, "Age of the Great Capitalist Empires", p. 355
„Who was the first man to look at a house full of objects and to immediately assess them only in terms of what he could trade them in for in the market likely to have been? Surely he can only have been a thief.“
Fonte: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Twelve, "1971–The Beginning…", p. 386
„The man who won the argument, however, was John Locke, the Liberal philosopher, at that time acting as advisor to Sir Isaac Newton, then Warden of the Mint. Locke insisted that one can no more make a small piece of silver worth more by relabeling it a "shilling" than one can make a short man taller by declaring there are now fifteen inches in a foot.“
Fonte: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Eleven, "Age of the Great Capitalist Empires", p. 340
„The essence of U. S. military predominance in the world is, ultimately, the fact that it can, at will, drop bombs, with only a few hours' notice, at absolutely any point on the surface of the planet. No other government has ever had anything remotely like this sort of capability. In fact, a case could well be made that it is this very power that holds the entire world monetary system, organized around the dollar, together.“
Fonte: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Twelve, "1971–The Beginning…", pp. 365–366
„In fact, our standard account of monetary history is precisely backwards. We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around.“
Fonte: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Two, "The Myth of Barter", p. 40
„It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor.“
Fonte: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Eleven, "Age of the Great Capitalist Empires", p. 350
„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.“
Fonte: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Twelve, "1971–The Beginning…", pp. 381–382
„What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence.“
Fonte: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Twelve, "1971–The Beginning…", p. 391
„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.“
Fonte: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Five, "A Brief Treatise on the Moral Grounds of Moral Relations", p. 126
„It is rather striking to think that the very core of the Christian message, salvation itself, the sacrifice of God's own son to rescue humanity from eternal damnation, should be framed in the language of a financial transaction.“
Fonte: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Four, "Cruelty and Redemption", p. 80
„One element, however, tends to go flagrantly missing in even the most vivid conspiracy theories about the banking system, let alone in official accounts: that is, the role of military power. There's a reason why the wizard has such a strange capacity to create money out of nothing. Behind him there is a man with a gun.“
Fonte: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Twelve, "1971–The Beginning…", p. 364
„“Policy” is the negation of politics; policy is by definition something concocted by some form of elite, which presumes it knows better than others how their affairs are to be conducted. By participating in policy debates the very best one can achieve is to limit the damage, since the very premise is inimical to the idea of people managing their own affairs.“
Fonte: Fragments for an Anarchist Anthropology (2004), p. 9
„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.“
Fonte: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Ten, "The Middle Ages", p. 256
„p>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.</p“
Fonte: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Eleven, "Age of the Great Capitalist Empires", pp. 319–320
„All societies based on slavery tend to be marked by this agonizing double consciousness: the awareness that the highest things one has to strive for are also, ultimately, wrong; but at the same time, the feeling that this is simply the nature of reality.“
Fonte: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Seven, "Honor and Degradation", p. 167
„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.“
Fonte: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Seven, "Honor and Degradation", p. 168
„If the existence of bullshit jobs seems to defy the logic of capitalism, one possible reason for their proliferation might be that the existing system isn’t capitalism—or at least, isn’t any sort of capitalism that would be recognizable from the works of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, or, for that matter, Ludwig von Mises or Milton Friedman.“
— David Graeber, livro Bullshit Jobs
Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018)
„Everyone knows how compromised the idea of bureaucracy as a meritocratic system is. The first criterion of loyalty to any organization is therefore complicity. Career advancement is not based on merit but on a willingness to play along with the fiction that career advancement is based on merit, or with the fiction that rules and regulations apply to everyone equally, when in fact they are often deployed as an instrument of arbitrary personal power. … As whole societies have come to represent themselves as giant credentialized meritocracies, rather than as systems of predatory extraction, we bustle about, trying to curry favor by pretending we actually believe it to be true.“
— David Graeber, livro The Utopia of Rules
The Utopia of Rules (2015)
„Direct action is the insistence, when faced with structures of unjust authority, on acting as if one is already free.“
— David Graeber, livro Direct Action
Direct Action: An Ethnography (AK Press: 2009), p. 203
