Home / Quotes / Quote by David Graeber

Quote by David Graeber

“Bureaucracies, I've suggested, are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity--of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence.”

Book:The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

Work

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

David Graeber

David Graeber is an American anthropologist known for his research on economic anthropology, anarchism, and critical theory. His work explores the issues of economic relationships and power structures in modern society. more

“Power makes you lazy. Insofar as our earlier theoretical discussion of structural violence revealed anything, it was this: that while those in situations of power and privilege often feel it as a terrible burden of responsibility, in most ways, most of the time, power is all about what you don't have to worry about, don't have to know about, and don't have to do.”

Responsibility Power Privilege Structural Violence

Book:The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

Source: The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“The corporatization of U.S. agriculture and the growth of international free markets squeeze growers such that they cannot easily imagine increasing the pay of the pickers or improving the labor camps without bankrupting the farm. In other words, many of the most powerful inputs into the suffering of farmworkers are structural, not willed by individual agents. In this case, structural violence is enacted by market rule and later channeled by international and domestic racism, classism, sexism, and anti-immigrant prejudice. However, structural violence is not just a simple, unidirectional phenomenon; rather, macro social and economic structures produce vulnerability at every level of the farm hierarchy.”

Structural Violence Corporatization Of Agriculture

Book:Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States

Source: Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States

“By structural violence, I mean the violence committed by configurations of social inequalities that, in the end, has injurious effects on bodies similar to the violence of a stabbing or shooting. This is what the English working men described by Friedrich Engels called 'social murder'. Much of the structural violence is organized along the fault lines of class, race, citizenship, gender, and sexuality. (...) Symbolic violence works through the perceptions of the 'dominating' and the 'dominated' (in Bourdieu's words), while it tends to benefit those with more power. each group understands not only itself but also the other to belong naturally in their positions in the social hierarchy. (...) Structural violence - with its pernicious effects on health - and symbolic violence - with its subtle naturalization of inequalities on the farm, in the clinic, and in the media - form the nexus of violence and suffering through which the phenomenon of migrant labor in North America is produced.”

Violence Structural Violence Symbolic Violence

Book:Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States

Source: Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States