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.
This is just semantics, Braudel isn't a Marxist so he uses different terms. For Braudel and many historians a "capitalist" is somebody whose primary trade is the production of capital, whether that be industrial capital, merchant capital, financial capital, etc is not the point. For Marx in particular capital and capitalism has a distinctly industrial bent. It's not capitalism unless the capitalists are engaged in commodity production. What Braudel and many of the world system historians are trying to do is broaden this perspective, that industrial capital is a type of capital but is perhaps not necessary for capitalism or capitalists to exist. Capital is a wonderful account of industrial capitalism and the commodity, but it is decidedly not a historical account of the rise of capital, nor is Marx trying to do that. I find the world system theory of capital far more convincing for explaining how and why capital and capitalism came about than Marx, despite being a Marxist myself. It's an ongoing debate in the historical community, though, and there's no one "right" answer for sure.
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You're right, I meant productive and not industrial, my bad! Yeah for Marx capitalism is decidedly productive, and it's all about production of goods and commodities rather than just the enlargement of capital as capital. Braudel and others are just trying to say that capitalism predates productive capitalism, and that production is just one form in which capital accumulation can happen.