When you ask someone to pass the salt, you are also giving them an order; by attaching the word please, you are saying that it is not an order. But, in fact, it is.
What credit theorists like Mitchell-Innes were arguing is that even if Henry gave Joshua a gold coin instead of a piece of paper, the situation would be essentially the same. A gold coin is a promise...
We are all communists with our closest friends, and feudal lords when dealing with small children. It is very hard to imagine a society where this would not be true.
Through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves...working forty or even fifty hours...
Threatening others with physical harm allows the possibility of cutting through all this. It makes possible relations of a far more simple and schematic kind (cross this line and I will shoot you, one...
They had a much more fundamental problem with the market: greed. Market motives were held to be inherently corrupt. The moment that greed was validated and unlimited profit was considered a perfectly...
The promulgation of consumerism also coincided with the beginnings of the managerial revolution, which was, especially at first, largely an attack on pupular knowledge...the new bureaucratically organ...
Still, the ground was only really prepared for capitalism in the familiar sense of the term when the merchants began to organize themselves into eternal bodies as a way to win monopolies, legal or de...
Solitary pleasures will always exist, but for most human beings, the most pleasurable activities almost always involve sharing something: music, food, liquor, drugs, gossip, drama, beds. There is a ce...
Since one cannot know a radically better world is not possible, are we not betraying everyone by insisting on continuing to justify, and reproduce, the mess we have today? And anyway, even if we’re wr...
Recall an idea from earlier in the book: exchange, unless it’s an instantaneous cash transaction, creates debts. Debts linger over time. If you imagine all human relations as exchange, then insofar as...
Over the last thirty or forty years, anti-authoritarians around the world have been working on creating new, and more effective, modes of direct democracy--ones that might operate without any need for...
Of the many wonderful tales Moor told me, the most wonderful, the most delightful one, was Hans Röckle. It went on for months; it was a whole series of stories... Hans Röckle himself was a Hoffman-lik...
Jim Cooper, a former LAPD officer turned sociologist, has observed that the overwhelming majority of those who end up getting beaten or otherwise brutalized by police turn out to be innocent of any cr...
Insofar as there is a politics, here, it seems a variation on a theme seen since the dawn of capitalism. Ultimately, it’s sociality itself that’s treated as abusive, criminal, demonic. To this, most o...
In fact, it often happens that, at the very top of organizations, apparently crucial positions can go unfilled for long periods of time without there being any noticeable effect—even, on the organizat...
If we let everyone decide for themselves how they were best fit to benefit humanity, with no restrictions at all, how could they possibly end up with a distribution of labor more inefficient than the...
Here we come to the central question of this book: What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal? What does it mean when we...
Frank Baum’s book the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1990, is widely recognized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the Free...
Finally, once we start thinking of communism as a principle of morality rather than just a question of property ownership, it becomes clear that this sort of morality is almost always at play to some...