Tác Giả David Graeber

Debt - Nợ - Sợi Xích Vô Hình 5000 Năm

Cuốn sách tái hiện hành trình 5.000 năm đầy kịch tính của nợ, từ Lưỡng Hà cổ đại, các cuộc Thập tự chinh Trung cổ, buôn bán nô lệ Đại Tây Dương cho đến vô số thời kỳ lịch sử khác. Tác phẩm không chỉ đan xen kiến thức nhân chủng học sâu sắc mà còn đưa ra những phân tích sắc bén về vai trò của nợ trong việc định hình xã hội loài người.

Graeber lật ngược quan niệm thông thường bằng luận điểm táo bạo: nợ, chứ không phải tiền tệ, là hình thức trao đổi đầu tiên, vừa là công cụ kinh tế vừa là vũ khí kiểm soát quyền lực, duy trì bất bình đẳng xã hội. Nợ và xóa nợ luôn trở thành trọng tâm của các cuộc tranh luận chính trị sôi nổi cũng như châm ngòi cho vô số cuộc nổi dậy.

Thách thức mọi giả định truyền thống về tiền tệ, nghĩa vụ và đạo đức, DEBT: NỢ mang đến góc nhìn mới mẻ về cách xã hội vận hành và bản chất của hệ thống kinh tế hiện đại, phần nào mở ra những dự đoán về tương lai.

Bullshit Jobs

Huge swathes of people spend their days performing tasks they secretly believe are not really necessary. This book shows why, and what we can do about it

Back in 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes prophesied that by the century's end, technology would see us all working fifteen-hour weeks. But instead, something curious happened. Today, average working hours have not decreased, but increased. And now, across the developed world, three-quarters of all jobs are in services or admin, jobs that don't seem to add anything to society: bullshit jobs. In Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber explores how this phenomenon - one more associated with the 20th-century Soviet Union, but which capitalism was supposed to eliminate - has happened. In doing so, he looks at how we value work, and how, rather than being productive, work has become an end in itself; the way such work maintains the current broken system of finance capital; and, finally, how we can get out of it.

The Dawn Of Everything: A New History Of Humanity

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution―from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality―and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike―either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.

Includes Black-and-White Illustrations