What American academics expect from France is an intellectual high, the ability to feel one is participating in wild, radical ideas – demonstrating the inherent violence within Western conceptions of truth or humanity, that sort of thing – but in ways that do not imply any program of political action; or, usually, any responsibility to act at all. It’s easy to see how a class of people who are considered almost entirely irrelevant both by political elites and by 99 percent of the general population might feel this way. In other words, while the U.S. media represent France as silly, U.S. academics seek out those French thinkers who seem to fit the bill.

As a result, some of the most interesting scholars in France today you never hear about at all…

(from “Debt: The First Five Thousand Years”)

Debt was the hinge that made it possible to imagine money in anything like the modern sense, and therefore, also, to produce what we like to call the market: an arena where anything can be bought and sold, because all objects are (like slaves) disembedded from their former social relations and exist only in relation to money.

(from “The Twilight of Vanguardism” in Possibilities: essays on hierarchy, rebellion and desire)

…anarchist-inspired groups tend to operate on the assumption that no one could, or probably should, ever convert another person completely to one’s own point of view, that decision-making structures are ways of managing diversity, and, therefore, that one should concentrate instead on maintaining egalitarian process and on considering immediate questions of action in the present.

The author: 20 minute video conversation with David Graeber on Charlie Rose … he’s chiefly interested in “human possibilities.” What a nice way to put a name to an interest that’s been dancing vaguely around my life for decades.

It wasn’t until the 17th C that people asked “how do we produce the most money,” before then most people were concerned with “how do we produce the best people”:

“Utopianism gets a bad rap” – definitely. And though he worked from a Marxist paradigm, it’s why I loved Kim Stanley Robinson so much, and always will, despite his writing having deteriorated since 1999 or so.