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.
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.