People From New York City

"The idea of natural order, in effect, masks the state’s role. ... Robert Hale ... demonstrated the extent to which the distribution of income and wealth is the product of legal rules we choose to impose. Hale trained our attention on the foundational rules of property and contract law, showing how free, voluntary, compensated exchange is in fact a product of the legal coercion that the government establishes through its role in defining property rights."

"By an odd amalgam of liberal economic theory and Beccaria on punishment, nineteenth-century thinkers would replicate this exceptional relationship between markets and punishment: natural orderliness in the economic sphere, but government intervention in the penal realm. This is most evident in Jeremy Bentham’s work. The contrast between Bentham’s presumption of quietism in economic matters and his arch-interventionism in the penal domain effectively reproduced and reiterated the Physiocratic duality of economy and police. On the public economy side, Bentham tended toward Adam Smith’s liberalism. His Manual of Political Economy, written in the mid-1790s, rehearsed a presumption of governmental quietism based on his stringent belief in the superiority of individuals’ information and self-interest. But on the punishment side, Bentham embraced Beccaria’s philosophy whole cloth—especially Beccaria’s notion that policing is a sphere of human activity that must be shot through with government intervention. In fact, the criminal code, for Bentham, was precisely a “grand catalogue of prices” by means of which the government set the value of deviance. The penal code was a menu of fixed prices—the polar opposite of laissez-faire."

"The different strands of radical thought seek to lift a veil from our eyes in order to emancipate us from domination, cowardice, or repression. They unmask in order to liberate."

"At what price have so many of us come to believe that the economy is the realm of natural order and that the legitimate and competent sphere of policing—of administration and government—lies elsewhere? What flows from that sharp dichotomy between orderliness in the market and ordering in the penal sphere? At what price do we embrace these categories? And here, the answer is equally clear: at the price, first, of naturalizing the market and thereby effectively shielding from normative assessment the regulatory mechanisms in our contemporary markets and the wealth distributions that occur daily; and at the price, second, of easing, facilitating, and enabling the massive expansion of our penal sphere, or, to be more provocative, of making possible mass incarceration today."

"C'MON BERNARD! ...DELIVER THE MILK AND GO TO THE NEXT HOUSE!!!"

"If you only knew the dreams in that little boy's head all those years ago. You don't know how lucky I am. I will never retire because even if they retire me, I'll find something else to do."

"Willie, you might as well take out your money and spend it. Spend it on a cruise. A cruise around Andy Lee."

"One thing's for sure, if there's a blackout here in London, you'll find Warren with those boots... you might not see the rest of him!"

"...Jim ‘the Blue Panther’ Rock..."

"And there it is, the international symbol of peace – the pigeon!"

"They're going for silver, they’re going for gold. John Treacy has one hundred metres to go. In the past Ireland have won bronze medals with John Caldwell, Freddie Gilroy, ‘Socks’ Byrne, Jim McCourt, Hugh Russell. They've won golds with Pat O'Callaghan twice, Bob Tisdall, Ron Delaney. They've won silvers with John McNally, Fred Tiedt, Wilkins and Wilkinson and for the thirteenth time an Irish medal goes to John Treacy. The little man with the great heart."

"GREAT play by the Mexican there! He took on the whole shagbag lot o' them!"

"It's a rip-roarer, an absolutely titanic struggle if that's the right thing to say about a Belfast man... Make sure the rivets are tight and away you go!"

"Ardiles strokes the ball like it was a part of his anatomy."

"This is the 671st game in World Cup history, starting all the way back in 1930 in Uruguay … and no I haven't seen them all."

"I bet there's a tear in your eye wherever you're watching this. There's nothing wrong with tears; tears are often shed in joy."

"Different class … DIFFERENT CLASS!"

"A modest young lady with her head the same size as it was when she was a child."

"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."

""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."

"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."

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

"The reason that economic textbooks now begin with imaginary villages is because it has been impossible to talk about real ones. Even some economists have been forced to admit that Smith's Land of Barter doesn't really exist.The question is why the myth is perpetuated anyway."

"Exchange implies equality."

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

"Thus money is almost always something hovering between a commodity and a debt-token. This is probably why coins—pieces of silver or gold that are already valuable commodities in themselves, but that, being stamped with the emblem of local authority, became even more valuable—still sit in our heads as the quintessential form of money. They most perfectly straddle the divide that defines what money is in the first place. What's more, the relation between the two was a matter of constant political conversation. In other words, the battle between state and market, between governments and merchants is not inherent to the human condition."

"The right's approach is to release the dogs of the market, throwing all traditional verities into disarray; and then, in this tumult of insecurity, offer themselves up as the last bastion of order and hierarchy, the stalwart defenders of the authority of churches and fathers against the barbarians they have themselves unleashed."

"Consumer debt is the lifeblood of our economy. All modern nation states are built on deficit spending. Debt has come to be the central issue of international politics. But nobody seems to know exactly what it is, or how to think about it."

"In societies based around small communities, where almost everyone is either a friend, a relative, or an enemy of everyone else, the languages spoken tend even to lack words that correspond to "self-interest" or "altruism" but include very subtle vocabularies for describing envy, solidarity, pride, and the like. Their economic dealings with one another likewise tend to be based on much more subtle principles. ... The work of destroying such ways of life is still often done by missionaries—representatives of those very world religions that originally sprang up in reaction to the market long ago. Missionaries, of course, are out to save souls; but they rarely interpret this to mean their role is simply to teach people to accept God and be more altruistic. Almost invariably, they end up trying to convince people to be more selfish and more altruistic at the same time. On the one hand, they set out to teach the "natives" proper work discipline, and try to get them involved with buying and selling products on the market, so as to better their material lot. At the same time, they explain to them that ultimately, material things are unimportant."

"Before we can apply the tools of anthropology to reconstruct the real history of money, we need to understand what's wrong with the conventional account."

"“Policy” is the negation of politics; policy is by definition something concocted by some form of elite, which presumes it knows better than others how their affairs are to be conducted. By participating in policy debates the very best one can achieve is to limit the damage, since the very premise is inimical to the idea of people managing their own affairs."

"In fact, our standard account of monetary history is precisely backwards. We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around."

"Exchange is all about equivalence."

"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 one sees the emergence of money and markets that one also sees the rise of world religions—Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. If one sets aside a space and says, "Here you shall think only about acquiring material things for yourself," then it is hardly surprising that before long someone else will set aside a countervailing space and declare, in effect: "Yes, but here we must contemplate the fact that the self, and material things, are ultimately unimportant.""

"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."

"Every time you treat another human with consideration and respect, you are being an anarchist. Every time you work out your differences with others by coming to reasonable compromise, listening to what everyone has to say rather than letting one person decide for everyone else, you are being an anarchist. Every time you have the opportunity to force someone to do something, but decide to appeal to their sense of reason or justice instead, you are being an anarchist. The same goes for every time you share something with a friend, or decide who is going to do the dishes, or do anything at all with an eye to fairness."

"Every time you reach an agreement by consensus, rather than threats, every time you make a voluntary arrangement with another person, come to an understanding, or reach a compromise by taking due consideration of the other person’s particular situation or needs, you are being an anarchist — even if you don’t realize it."

"No anarchist claims to have a perfect blueprint. The last thing we want is to impose prefab models on society anyway. The truth is we probably can’t even imagine half the problems that will come up when we try to create a democratic society; still, we’re confident that, human ingenuity being what it is, such problems can always be solved, so long as it is in the spirit of our basic principles — which are, in the final analysis, simply the principles of fundamental human decency."

"Many people seem to think that anarchists are proponents of violence, chaos, and destruction, that they are against all forms of order and organization, or that they are crazed nihilists who just want to blow everything up. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to."

"At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions. The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how. The second is that power corrupts."

"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 grades almost seamlessly into French professors.) ... Now consider the different schools of anarchism. There are Anarcho-Syndicalists, AnarchoCommunists, Insurrectionists, Cooperativists, Individualists, Platformists... None are named after some Great Thinker; instead, they are invariably named either after some kind of practice, or most often, organizational principle. (Significantly, those Marxist tendencies which are not named after individuals, like Autonomism or Council Communism, are also the ones closest to anarchism.) Anarchists like to distinguish themselves by what they do, and how they organize themselves to go about doing it."

"Most of all, anarchism is just a matter of having the courage to take the simple principles of common decency that we all live by, and to follow them through to their logical conclusions."

"Direct action is the insistence, when faced with structures of unjust authority, on acting as if one is already free."

"One could well argue that if there is any human essence, it is precisely our capacity to imagine that we have one."

"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 that, of course, is going to get one in far more trouble than anything one could ever write."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Honor is a zero sum game."

"So, if we had the kind of disciplinary modesty richly merited by our performance as a profession over the past few years, economists would recognise that we owe an intellectual debt to Graeber. From now on, we can treat money primarily as a store of value, and stop worrying about how it works as a medium of exchange."