Notes | Brutkey

David Graeber Institute
@DGI@graeber.social

We could house everyone. We could feed everyone. We could care for everyone. We could build devices designed to last as long as possible. We could align our manufacturing around the needs of the people and the planet.

We materially have the resources to do so.

That's why leftists are so angry. The resources we need to build a world everyone can thrive in literally already exist. We are just using them mostly to pamper the rich or murder the poor.

David Graeber Institute
@DGI@graeber.social

There are a lot of misconceptions about peoples' desire to work and to contribute.

UBI is expensive, but so is the system we have now
and there’s a major savings that you’ll have firing all
those people who are assessing who is worthy of what.
Philosophically, I think that it’s really important to bear in
mind two things. One is it’ll show people that you don’t
have to force people to work, to want to contribute. It’s
not that people resist work. People resist meaningless
work; people resist stupid work; and people resist humiliating
work. But I always talk about prisons, where people are fed,
clothed, they’ve got shelter; they could just sit around all day.
But actually, they use work as a way of rewarding them. You
know, if you don’t behave yourself, we won’t let you work in the
prison laundry. I mean, people want to work. Nobody just
wants to sit around, it’s boring.
.
- David Graeber

David Graeber Institute
@DGI@graeber.social

We recently published a lesser known article by David Graeber written in 2013 called - Buncombe.

Here is the piece and an extract.

https://davidgraeber.org/articles/buncombe

"America is a country made possible by hucksterism
and carnival buncombe. It's the birthplace of both
modern PR and advertising, the first place on earth to
apply techniques of commercial marketing to politics,
and a country where, for at least thirty years, the
economy has been driven by the engine of finance,
that is, by the magical creation of wealth through
financial securities and derivatives. When you
consider those U.S companies that still produce
commodities now devote themselves mainly to
developing brands and images, you realize that
American capitalism conjures value into being
chiefly by convincing everyone it’s there."
.
- David Graeber

David Graeber Institute
@DGI@graeber.social

There will be an online event by the David Graeber Institute on December 8th.

Cory Doctorow and Brian Eno will speak about poetic technologies and the work of David Graeber

Save The Date!

https://www.youtube.com/live/4-AlIT-GnQk

David Graeber Institute
@DGI@graeber.social

"Any system that reduces
the world to numbers can
only be held in place by
weapons, whether these
are swords and clubs, or
nowadays, smart bombs
from unmanned drones.”

- David Graeber

David Graeber Institute
@DGI@graeber.social

“Everyday we wake up
and collectively make
a world together; but
which one of us, left to
our own devices, would
ever decide they wanted
to make a world like this
one?”

— David Graeber, “Bullshit Jobs: A Theory”

David Graeber Institute
@DGI@graeber.social

Capitalism is not something imposed on us by some outside force.

David Graeber Institute
@DGI@graeber.social

This message is now more relevant than ever.

"Always look for the truth from the
ground up, rarely from the top down.
Journalists are never real journalists
if they are the agents of power, no
matter how they disguise that role.
Real journalists are agents of people."
.
- John Pilger
(1939 to 2023)

David Graeber Institute
@DGI@graeber.social

Instead of the daily stock market - we could have an indicator for the number of homeless people?

What if we defined "the economy" as "the way we take care of one another"?

Since that's what it ultimately is.

What would economic indicators then look like?

David Graeber Institute
@DGI@graeber.social

With Neo-liberalism, people lost healthcare, housing is unaffordable, debt ruins lives and Fascism emerges yet the media tells us its socialism that we should fear.