Like ideology, language creates false separations and objectifications through its symbolizing power. This falsification is made possible by concealing, and ultimately vitiating, the participation of the subject in the physical world. Modern languages, for example, employ the word “mind” to describe a thing dwelling independently in our bodies, as compared with the Sanskrit word, which means “working within,” involving an active embrace of sensation, perception, and cognition. The logic of ideology, from active to passive, from unity to separation, is similarly reflected in the decay of the verb form in general. It is noteworthy that the much freer and sensuous hunter-gatherer cultures gave way to the Neolithic imposition of civilization, work and property at the same time that verbs declined to approximately half of all words of a language; in modern English, verbs account for less than 10% of words.
-David Graeber

"Strong communities make all division of labor obsolete."
-David Graeber

"The consequences of industrialism have greatly increased the life expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries. The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it may eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. "Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy. If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later. We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence; it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We can’t predict any of that."
-David Graeber

"Agriculture, the indispensable basis of civilization, was originally encountered as time, language, number and art won out. As the materialization of alienation, agriculture is the triumph of estrangement and the definite divide between culture and nature and humans from each other.

Agriculture is the birth of production, complete with its essential features and deformation of life and consciousness. The land itself becomes an instrument of production and the planet’s species its objects. Wild or tame, weeds or crops speak of that duality that cripples the soul of our being, ushering in, relatively quickly, the despotism, war and impoverishment of high civilization over the great length of that earlier oneness with nature."
-David Graeber

"The solarpunk, municipalist, and social ecologist position is essentially that we are fucked. That the current manifestation of human society (civilization, leviathan, industrial society, global capitalism, whatever) is beyond salvation, and so our response to it should be one of unmitigated hostility. There are no demands to be made, no utopic visions to be upheld, no political programs to be followed — the path of resistance is one of pure negation. In short, “that conditions in the social organization are so bad as to make destruction desirable for its own sake independent of any constructive program or possibility.""
-David Graeber

"Undoubtedly, Civilization (a human invention) has taken over all aspects of non-life, has created this and more to the point that computerized biochemical weapons with intelligence-devices are already tested in the Middle East conflict, with an excellent pretext to seize the black gold (oil) from Arab nations.

Day by day, we see the eyes terrorized by the irresponsible attitude of humanity toward the wilderness, we realize that we live in a technological nightmare, birth-consumption-death is the torturous cycle within the cities, the last reserves of wild environment are converted into “protected ecological zones” and the destruction advances moment by moment, this can be seen in oil spills in the Amazon in South America and the Gulf of Mexico, in the radioactive water in the Sea of ​​Japan, the devastation of entire forests in Russia, the super-exploitation of minerals in Africa, the large-scale production of cars in Europe, the extinction of thousands of animals per year, the construction of super-highways, subways and residential complexes through rough woodland, technological progress is bringing an end to the world in which we subsist for now, which is always decaying."
-David Graeber

"There is no sustainable way to maintain this way of life and even if there was it wouldnt necessarily stop the destruction of the rarest thing in the universe, the relatively tiny complex living crust of earth we all rely on to survive. If you disagree, we have nothing to say to eachother."
-David Graeber
#anarchy #anarchism #anarchist #communist #communism #socialist #socialism #socialecology #solarpunk #SolarPunkSunday #DavidGraeber

"World trade is a death machine."
-David Graeber

David Graeber sier at anarkisme ikke handler om kaos, men om at vanlige folk kan styre seg selv, uten at noen bestemmer over oss. Kanskje du allerede tenker som en anarkist, uten å vite det? Svar på disse fem spørsmålene:

1. Venter du på tur i køen, selv om ingen passer på deg?
- Da tror du at folk kan ordne ting selv, uten tvang. Det er det anarkismen handler om!

2. Er du med i en gruppe eller vennegjeng hvor dere bestemmer sammen, uten at en sjef bestemmer alt?
- Da har du sett at samarbeid uten sjef faktisk fungerer – slik anarkister mener samfunnet bør være.

3. Synes du politikere og sjefer ofte bryr seg mer om makt enn om folk flest?
- Da er du enig med anarkister som mener makt ofte korrumperer.

4. Lærer du barna dine å dele, være rettferdige og løse problemer uten vold?
- Hvis ja, følger du anarkismens grunnleggende verdier.

5. Tror du at alle kan ta ansvar og bry seg om andre, hvis de blir behandlet rettferdig?
- Da avviser du den ideen som makthavere bruker for å kontrollere oss.

Hvis du svarte ja på flere av disse, lever du allerede etter mange anarkistiske tanker: tillit, samarbeid, rettferdighet og frihet. Da kan det være interessant å sjekke ut noen norske anarkistiske media for å lære mer.

Norsk syndikalistisk forbund-IAA (NSF-IAA) følger opp de anarkosyndikalistiske tradisjonene i Norge: https://nsf-iaa.org

Motmakt er en frihetlig sosialistisk og revolusjonær organisasjon: https://www.motmakt.no

Folkebladet er en norsk side om anarkisme og anarkistisk teori: https://anarchy.no

Etter alt dette er det kanskje nettopp deg som er anarkist, uten at du har tenkt over det før!

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled "The Original Affluent Society." They work a lot less than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we regard as play. Sahlins concluded that "hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society." They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they were "working" at all. Their "labor," as it appears to us, was skilled labor which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities...
-David Graeber
#anarchy #anarchism #anarchist #communist #communism #socialist #socialism #socialecology #solarpunk #SolarPunkSunday #DavidGraeber

Are You an Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You! - Based on David Graeber's Essay | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6-027_d_8Y&t

In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques. A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called "insubordination," just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation… The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it's not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or -- better still -- industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are "free" is lying or stupid.
-David Graeber
#anarchy #anarchism #anarchist #communist #communism #socialist #socialism #socialecology #solarpunk #SolarPunkSunday #DavidGraeber

You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education.
-David Graeber
#anarchy #anarchism #anarchist #communist #communism #socialist #socialism #socialecology #solarpunk #SolarPunkSunday #DavidGraeber

Useless quote for 24 May:

"Today, it is easy to forget that, when labor unions first appeared, they were seen as extremely radical organizations. They represented, in fact, a kind of claim to revolutionary dual power."

~ David Graeber, in "Direct Action: An Ethnography" (AK Press, 2009)

“Our society is organized in such a way that access to power is conditioned on access to violence. People who are busy taking care of other people have minimal access to make decisions, but army chiefs, CEOs of big corporations, and so on are the ones who decide how we all live our lives. [...] Do we really want to live in a society organized according to the ideals of such people?”

From the Introduction by @nikadubrovsky to: #DavidGraeber - The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World...

in his 2013 lecture, the revolt of the caring classes, #DavidGraeber noted “in fact there has never been a time most workers worked in factories.” given this, he suggested organizing labor around the work of care, which he said is really the work of helping others be free to play or do whatever, to simply exist, as it were, whole and happy

Gillian Tett (Financial Times) interviewed by Ezra Klein, just plugged David Graeber's "Debt"

(And in case you're curious, yes I am in fact binging Klein today. He's good, but ye gads do I have to brace myself for political commentary. Given his podcast's slipping further behind the NYT paywall, where episodes are unpublished after a couple of weeks, this means having to store a large number of long, large, space-consuming episodes until I can stand to hear them. And am done hearing them (they're usually worth a 2nd listen, at least).)