“What Graeber chooses to ignore is that banks do not operate magically; they make loans and create deposits in seeking to earn profits; their decisions are not magical, but are oriented toward making profits. Whether they make good or bad decisions is debatable, but the debate isn’t about a magical process; it’s a debate about theory and evidence. Graeber describe how he thinks that economists think about how banks create money, correctly observing that there is a debate about how that process works, but without understanding those differences or their significance.”
“Direct action is the insistence, when faced with structures of unjust authority, on acting as if one is already free.”
David Graeber
“One could well argue that if there is any human essence, it is precisely our capacity to imagine that we have one.”
David Graeber
“Marxist schools have authors. Just as Marxism sprang from the mind of Marx, so we have Leninists, Maoists, Trotksyites , Gramscians, Althusserians... (Note how the list starts with heads of state and ...”
David Graeber
“At the very least, one would imagine being an openly anarchist professor would mean challenging the way universities are run—and I don’t mean by demanding an anarchist studies department, either—and t...”
David Graeber
“Egoism and altruism are ideas we have about human nature. Historically, one has tended to arise in response to the other. In the ancient world,for example, it is generally in the times and places that...”
David Graeber