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.
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.