“We are all communists with our closest friends,” David Graeber writes, “and feudal lords when dealing with small children.” We move between different systems of moral accounting, he writes, but all social systems, including capitalism, rest on a bedrock of everyday communism. By everyday communism he means the principle: “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” An entire economy couldn’t be organized this way, Graeber argues, but many of our daily interactions already are. This is how we exchange information, for instance, in conversation.
