We Need Accessible Books

At a moment when hyper-capitalism is ferociously extracting surplus value from workers and producing new extremes of inequality, while also driving growth past what our planet can bear, we very much need highly accessible books for broad audiences that build on Sahlins’s critical insights.

In this regard, David Graeber’s Debt: The first 5,000 years (2011) and Jason Hickel’s Less Is More: How degrowth will save the world (2020) are far more than either Jan Lucassen’s or James Suzman’s studies of the history of work

Daniel A. Segal is Professor of Anthropology and History at Pitzer College