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.
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.