omniviolet

“However, there’s another way to use the word ‘communism’: not as a property regime but in the original sense of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’. There’s also a certain minimal, ‘baseline’ communism which applies in all societies; a feeling that if another person’s needs are great enough (say, they are drowning), and the cost of meeting them is modest enough (say, they are asking for you to throw them a rope), then of course any decent person would comply. Baseline communism of this sort could even be considered the very grounds of human sociability, since it is only one’s bitter enemies who would not be treated this way. What varies is just how far it is felt such baseline communism should properly extend.”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

“Equality here is a direct extension of freedom; indeed, is its expression. It also has almost nothing in common with the more familiar (Eurasian) notion of ‘equality before the law’, which is ultimately equality before the sovereign – that is, once again, equality in common subjugation.”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

“Any middle-class household in eighteenth-century Amsterdam or Grenoble would have been likely to have on its shelves at the very least a copy of the Jesuit Relations of New France (as France’s North American colonies were then known), and one or two accounts written by voyagers to faraway lands. Such books were appreciated largely because they contained surprising and unprecedented ideas.10 Historians are aware of all this. Yet the overwhelming majority still conclude that even when European authors explicitly say they are borrowing ideas, concepts and arguments from indigenous thinkers, one should not take them seriously. It’s all just supposed to be some kind of misunderstanding, fabrication, or at best a naive projection of pre-existing European ideas.”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

“if no compulsion was allowed, then obviously such social coherence as did exist had to be created through reasoned debate, persuasive arguments and the establishment of social consensus.”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity