I have 2. The People's Republic of Walmart is one. Maybe I feel this way because I work in the industry and I'm a little familiar with central planning techniques... but I just thought it was all fluff with little substance. I felt like more than one chapter was just "Walmart and Amazon do central planning so it's possible" without getting into a lot of the details. Very little about the nuts and bolts of central planning. Throw in a good dose of anti-Stalinism when the man oversaw successful central planning... I just didn't get anything out of it. Might be OK if you want a real basic introduction behind the ideas of planning but honestly I bet like 95% of you already know more about it than you realize.
And I love Graeber but jeez, I couldn't even finish Bullshit Jobs. It felt like a good article that was blown out into a book. Maybe my expectations were too high but I felt like he spent way too many pages getting into minutiae about what is/isn't a bullshit job without actually making a broader point.
Trotskyist literature is really hit and miss. Insofar as certain Trotskyists I’ve read or spent time with emphasize their Leninsit side or sick to relatively orthodox Marxist analysis it can be solid. It can also suck, but there’s some of that in every Marxist tradition.
I think you’ve definitely right that once it doesn’t apply to the imperial core it becomes weaker, but given their emphasis on capitalism as a global system, and the privileged role they place on the proletariat in said core, I don’t think the issues with their analysis of the global core is without fault when what they’re discussing clearly has relations to global struggles.
Federici I’m kind of on the fence about because, while good Marxist feminist analysis is essential, I found some historical issues with some parts of Caliban. Also from what I gather she’s very much in this post-70s Italian autonomismo tradition which I don’t really understand the appeal of.
Ditto on Weber. Never been more bored in my life.
I remember one of the first "theory" books I read was an introductory guide to Marxism by a trot org and one of the chapters was devoted to the orgs insistence that the theory of the Big Bang is essentially creationism laundered through science, unmarxist, undialectical, and therefore something that must be relentlessly fought against.
But then again as far as Trot orgs picking bizarre hills to die on there are probably worse things that a first time reader could be ambushed with, at least the book wasnt from the anti-MeToo/Pro-statutory rape org.
Marxists should understand what their lane is (political economy) and not try be a metanarrative reinventing art, science, etc.
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Yes, but the fact that those are always determined by material conditions, and more particularly by the fact that all art and science is materially produced in historically specific conditions, doesn’t mean that knowing a lot about those conditions as a Marxist social scientist gives much real knowledge about the theoretical content of a science or how a traditions types of arts are created. No investigation, no right to an opinion.
I think what the above comment is getting at is that some Marxist often speak too confidently on topics they don’t actually know much about, maybe because of some kind of vulgar materialism.
Most of the time that would be true. But Marxism doesn’t just contain political economy as a tradition. It also has a distinct philosophy of dialectical materialism and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be applied to topics in the natural sciences. Gould and Lewontin explicitly refer to Marx qnd dialectics in biological contexts and David Bohm’s philosophical reflections on his own thougt as a physicist were influenced by his readings of dialectical thinkers like Hegel and Whitehead. Engels wrote the Dialectics of Nature.
I think the problem is more that most times most Marxist who do apply it to those topics which, as Marxists, are not our immediate concern, do it poorly.
Yeah I’ve also encountered that Big Bang denial literature. There’s definitely a worrying amount that seems pretty dogmatic, and shows a misunderstanding of materialist dialectical thinking that is ironically more hegelian than marxist and leads to a-priori, speculative and not empirically or concretely grounded philosophy of science.
To be fair to some of them: the concept of the Big Bnag is actually discussed and debated philosophically and in the context of cosmology by cosmologists. There are cosmologie models with variations or which are very different to the popular idea of reh Big Bang. But yh normally they’re not referring to these.
Also there’s obviously a question of priorities like why tf is the cosmological concept of the Big Bang being brought up here as political before other (even philosophical) topics.