David Graeber Quotes

Margaret Thatcher in Britain and soon after Ronald Reagan in the United States - both hard-line advocates of market fundamentalism - announced that there was no such thing as society and that government was the problem not the solution. Democracy and the political process were all but sacrificed to the power of corporations and the emerging financial service industries, just as hope was appropriated as an advertisement for a whitewashed world in which the capacity of culture to critique oppressive social practices was greatly diminished.

Like Marxism, Thatcherism is, in fact, riddled with contradictions. Mrs. Thatcher, on the other hand, is free of doubt; she is the label on the can of worms.

Neoliberal ideology is enormously powerful.

Thatcherism has become bigger than she ever was.

Since the 70s and the 80s you see the rise of neoliberalism. The central dogma of neoliberalism was that most people are selfish. So, we started designing our institutions around that idea, our schools, our workplaces, our democracies. The government became less and less important.

Look, in neoliberalism the ruling elite understand something.

Today's neoliberalism has a number of byproducts. We have massive forms of inequality developing because there are no longer any concessions. There's a war being waged on democracy and all social spheres and institutions that tend to defend it.

Neoliberalism has taken new forms since the demise of the Fordist concept of labor and with the emergence of what is understood as flexible labor. This has really come to be the dominant form for about the last 20 years.

Under the notion that unregulated market-driven values and relations should shape every domain of human life, the business model of governance has eviscerated any viable notion of social responsibility while furthering the criminalization of social problems and cutbacks in basic social services, especially for the poor, young people and the elderly.

Neoliberalism considers the discourse of equality, justice, and democracy quaint, if not dangerous and must be either trivialized, turned into its Orwellian opposite, or eviscerated from public life.

The dominant economic approach of the last thirty years is now on its last legs. Letting the market rip and an indifference to inequality are now seen as important causes of the greatest economic crash since the 1930s.

The move towards neoliberalism in Britain was intimately bound up with the embrace of the U.S. as the country to be aped and copied.

Most policy makers embrace a religious-like belief that the market can and should solve every problem.

Europe’s conservative parties, like Republicans in the United States, have for the most part, turned into shrill apostles of austerity at almost any social cost.

Under Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., there was a rewriting of the basic rules of capitalism. These two governments changed the rules governing labour bargaining, weakening trade unions, and they weakened anti-trust enforcement, allowing more monopolies to be created.

The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.

You know, I'm a free market politician and I think I'm the only one who worked for think-tanks like the Montreal Economic Institute.

During the 1980s, many people mistook Thatcherism and Reaganism - actually a wild form of liberalism - for conservatism.

Neoliberalism emerged by defining itself against what it labelled as an unrealistic and unsustainable programme of social welfare and public spending.

In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.

Where neoliberalism thrives is in having done something that we haven't seen before. There is a merging of culture, politics, and power under neoliberalism that's unprecedented. They control the cultural apparatuses. And what I mean by "cultural apparatuses" is all those institutions that are about the production of knowledge, values, dispositions, and subjectivities. They control them.

Under a neoliberal regime, the language of authority, power and command is divorced from ethics, social responsibility, critical analysis and social costs.

The analysis in the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher was that government was interfering with the efficiency of the economy through protectionism, government subsidies, and government ownership. Once the government "got out of the way," private markets would allocate resources efficiently and generate robust growth. Development would simply come.

Within neoliberal narratives, the message is clear: Buy/ sell/ or be punished.

[There is] is all part of the whole neoliberal shift in the economy. But the parties have shifted to the right.