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davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
David Graeber Institute
@davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
18K followers 2.7K following 960 posts
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
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davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
Today is David Graeber's birthday. He'd have been 65 years old today.

His ideas are still here and his message is more important than ever before which must remind us that a better world is possible.
“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently,”
February 12, 2026 at 4:02 PM
davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
Interesting quote from David Graeber.
"One of the things that we have discovered, which is quite interesting, is that human beings have a psychological need to be cared for, but they have an even greater psychological need to care for others, or to care for something. . If you don’t have that you basically fall apart. It’s why old people get dogs. We don’t just care for each other because we need to maintain each other’s lives and freedoms, but our own psychological happiness is based on being able to care for something or someone." . - David Graber
February 12, 2026 at 4:35 AM
davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
We need to be talking about Universal Basic Income.
“Being poor is actually a full-time job and being broke is like a full-time job with the amount of paperwork and the time going from office to office proving what you have done. . With Universal Basic Income all that would be eliminated with the time liberated to do something socially productive.” — David Graeber
February 9, 2026 at 3:36 AM
davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
David Graeber explained why jobs that often do quite a lot of damage to society, those jobs tend to be very highly paid.
February 8, 2026 at 8:11 PM
davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
As a society, we need to stop treating people in debt as if they are criminals who committed a crime.
The wealthy have a million ways to wriggle out of their debts, and as a result, when government debt is transferred to the private sector, that debt always gets passed down on to those least able to pay it: into middle-class mortgages, payday loans, and so on. The people running the government know this but they’ve learned if you just keep repeating, “We’re just trying to behave responsibly! Families have to balance their books. Well, so do we,” people will just assume that the government running a surplus will somehow make it easier for all of us to do so too. But in fact the reality is precisely the opposite: if the government manages to balance its books, that often means you can’t balance yours. – David Graeber
February 7, 2026 at 5:06 PM
davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
From David Graeber's Utopia Of Rules.
Women are always expected to imagine the world from a male point of view. Men are almost never expected to do the same for women. This runs so deep that many men react to any suggestion that they might do otherwise as if it were itself an act of violence."
February 3, 2026 at 6:14 PM
davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
It never ends well when one person has a lot of power over another.
"Anarchism is just the way people act when they are free to do as they choose, and when they deal with others who are equally free, and therefore aware of the responsibility to others that entails. This leads to another crucial point: that while people can be reasonable and considerate when they are dealing with equals, human nature is such that they cannot be trusted to do so when given power over others. Give someone such power, they will almost invariably abuse it in some way or another." . - David Graeber
February 1, 2026 at 4:01 PM
davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
We’ve just set up on UpScrolled. Twitter friends, if you’re around, come say hi and show us around.
graeber@social on upscrolled.
February 1, 2026 at 3:34 AM
davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
Story from the book Bullshit Jobs about how David Graeber learnt a lesson regarding the world of work.
"I remember my first job as a dishwasher in a seaside Italian restaurant. I was one of three teenage boys hired at the start of the summer season, and the first time there was a mad rush, we naturally made a game of it, determined to prove that we were the best and most heroic dishwashers of all time, pulling together into a machine of lightning efficiency, producing a vast and sparkling pile of dishes in record time. . We then kicked back, proud of what we'd accomplished, pausing to smoke a cigarette until, of course, the boss showed up to ask us what the hell we were doing just lounging around. "I don't care if there are no more dishes coming in right now, you're on my time! You can goof around on your own time. Get back to work." Of course, we learned our lesson: if you're on the clock, do not be too efficient. You will not be rewarded, not even by a gruff nod of acknowledgment. Instead, you'll be punished with meaningless busywork." ... - David Graeber
January 31, 2026 at 4:42 PM
davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
Most work is caring for other people.
“I would propose that we just rip up the discipline of economics as it exists and start over. This is my proposal in this regard: I think we should take the ideas of production and consumption, throw them away, and substitute for them the idea of care and freedom. As feminists point out, even if you are making a bridge, you are making a bridge because you care that people can get across the river. You make a car because you care that people can get around. So even production is just one subordinate type of care as what we do as human beings is take care of each other.” — David Graeber
January 31, 2026 at 1:06 AM
davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
The actor, Edward Norton, calls for a General Strike!

"What they are doing in Minnesota with the strike needs to expand. We should be talking about a national General and Economic Strike."
January 26, 2026 at 7:08 AM
davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
"Direct action means insisting on your right to act as if you’re already free. If someone is doing something bad, you try to stop them, in the way you’d hope anyone would act in a free and just society. If a bunch of cops intervene, you do not treat them like authorities, you act as if they were a bunch of guys in blue costumes with weapons — that is, basically, a violent street gang." . - David Graeber
January 26, 2026 at 4:19 AM
davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
They want you to feel hopeless and believe that nothing can improve.
"Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced. If we really want to understand this situation, we have to begin by understanding that for decades we have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures." . - David Graeber
January 23, 2026 at 6:39 PM
davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
the way a government treats refugees is very instructive as it shows you how they would treat the rest of us if they thought they could get away with it.
January 20, 2026 at 2:52 AM
davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
'What finance really is, is playing around with other peoples' debts.'
January 18, 2026 at 8:27 PM
davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
Why are we not working 15-hours a week as John Maynard Keynes predicted?

This is related to what David Graeber calls: 'Bullshit Jobs.'
"Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed in industry and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, professional, managerial, clerical, and sales workers tripled, growing from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment:' In other words, productive jobs have been largely automated away. But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world's population to pursue their own projects, pleasures and ideas, we have seen the ballooning of the admin sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, human resources and PR." "And these numbers do not even reflect all those whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries These are what I propose to call Bullshit Jobs." .... . - David Graeber
January 16, 2026 at 8:10 PM
davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
Conservative Christians may not mention this, but Debt Forgiveness is an important part of the Bible.
January 16, 2026 at 3:37 PM
davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
"If the lawyers come over to our side, we don't need the police to defect. We used to joke at protests about a lawyer's bloc standing between us and the cops where the lawyers would just stare at them in their riot gear and say "I dare you to even think about it."

- David Graeber
January 14, 2026 at 7:48 PM
davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
Our generation can learn from those like Erich Fromm who lived through Nazi Germany.
when facism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propsensities for evil, such lust for power such disregard for the rights of the weak or such yearning for sbumission. Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak.
January 14, 2026 at 4:30 PM
davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
They want us to think mental health issues are not related to our economic system.
when you educate an entire generation to believe that anything is possible with hard workd, and then build an economic system that is rigged against the most hard-working people ever achieving any notable wealth or succss, how can widespread anxiety not be an inevitable result?
January 10, 2026 at 5:17 PM
davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
Yes
We cant just vote fascism away. the time has come to disobey.
January 10, 2026 at 4:19 AM
davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
Hannah Arendt was in Germany during the start of the Nazi terror in the 1920s and 30s. She knew it was just the start.

We need to stand up now to ICE and to Fascism before its too late.
Terror becomes total when it becomes independent of all opposition; it rules supreme when nobody any longer stands in its way.
January 9, 2026 at 1:00 AM
davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
At some point Americans are going to need to behave like the French.
In the US, the people are scared of the Government. In France, the Government is scared of the people.
January 8, 2026 at 5:59 PM
davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
Don't forget too the role of FoxNews and other media platforms in all this.
"Journalists have a fairly idiosyncratic definition of violence. This has the effect that if even just one protestor damages a Starbucks window, one can speak of “violent protests”, but if police then proceed to attack everyone present with tazers, sticks and plastic bullets, this cannot be described as violent." . - David Graeber
January 8, 2026 at 3:54 PM
davidgraeberinst.bsky.social
When you see comments on Social Media defending the violence of ICE, it is worth keeping this quote in mind.
"Violence is so often the preferred weapon of the stupid: indeed, one might say it is one of the tragedies of human existence that this is the one form of stupidity to which it is most difficult to come up with an intelligent response.". . - David Graeber
January 8, 2026 at 1:25 AM