Most of us sell ourselves as commodities every day, yet it's not quite equivalent to how Grabber describes it historically. Through most of human history, the only way a person could be turned into a commodity was through massive debt and overt violence, but now we commodify ourselves routinely.
Graeber highlights how the first people to be commodified and enslaved are women. Does this history play into the objectification and trafficking of women today? Can a human being be purchased to satisfy one's own needs?
I love how Graber ends the chapter. "If we have become a debt society, it is because the legacy of war, conquest, and slavery has never completely gone away. It's still there, logged in our most intimate conceptions of honor, property, even freedom. It's just that we can no longer see that is it there."
I disagree with the last sentence, but I say Amen to the statement as a whole.
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