I have one preliminary observation about the book that is just based on looking at the bibliography. There are almost no citations of the major players in Marxist anthropology... at least not of the North American political economy tradition. Eleanor Leacock, Stanley Diamond, Eric Wolf, Sidney Mintz, Richard Lee, etc. are all completely absent in the citations.
Given his subject matter, I cannot think that this is an accident. I'm wondering if this is not an oversight, but rather a way of saying that, in his opinion, these anthropologists do not have a perspective that can help shed light on his subject matter.