David Graeber Quotes

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.

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.

The attentive reader may have noticed that the core period of Jasper's Axial age—the lifetimes of Pythagoras, Confucius, and the Buddha—corresponds almost exactly to the period in which coinage was invented.

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

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".

Honor is a zero sum game.

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.

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.

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.

Exchange is all about equivalence.

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

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

"Communist society"; in the sense of a society organized exclusively on that single principle—could never exist. But all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actually-existing communism.

To tell the history of debt, then, is also necessarily to reconstruct how the language of the marketplace has come to pervade every aspect of human life—even to provide the terminology for the moral and religious voices ostensibly raised against it.

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.