2y ago

What are some leftist books you dislike but everyone else seems to love?

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.

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The Communist Manifesto is the big one. It's a half-assed statement of Marxism written in a hurry.

I like bullshit Jobs because it's a very lib-friendly way (it even has the quirky airport book cover and all) to introduce people to labor issues and the contradictions of late capitalism without the byzantine or inflammatory language we love in our more serious theory. That being said, I can't bring myself to take it seriously, or as seriously as Graeber's other work.
- I don’t think Graeber himself took it seriously since it was just an expanded article filled with anecdotes.

Walmart is meh, as was "Fully automated luxury communism."
I'm going to start the struggle session and say Stalin and Lenin's work on Nationalism. Frankly I'm fully on Rosa's side there, excepting only anti-colonial struggles. Even there it's a dangerous game.
Furr's stuff, because he provides shitloads of sources but cherrypicks the fuck out of them even though I agree with like 70% of his conclusions.
Bookchin's "Post-scarcity anarchism" was inspirational to me 15 years ago but has faded as I've gone deeper into theory. It's still useful though. Marcos' stuff still slaps though, despite a superficial similarity.
"The Coming Insurrection." Blergh, so many missteps of the 90s are this book's fault.

I never liked the idea some people have that Wal Mart and Amazon prove anything about central economic planning. For one, they're market actors ultimately, and their goals have nothing to do with fulfilling people's material needs and everything to do with consuming the universe in order to make numbers go up. No matter how big they are they're still just capitalist extraction devices.
Secondly, the Soviet Union already proved that planned economies work. That's like THE thing they did the best. The McCarthyist conditioning runs so deep that even leftists can`t point at the most obvious example of what we want to accomplish.
- Secondly, the Soviet Union already proved that planned economies work. That’s like THE thing they did the best. The McCarthyist conditioning runs so deep that even leftists can`t point at the most obvious example of what we want to accomplish.
  The book had a chapter shitting on the Soviet Union, so that's part of the reason why the book was written in the first place. I didn't get past the first chapter because it kept on trashing the Soviet Union. Kinda weird how the text would keep on inserting opinions on a Euroasian polity that hasn't existed in decades about a US company.

Walmart was written by the guy who got dunked on a few months ago for saying we shouldn’t have to sacrifice cruise ships to deal with climate change because it’s too extreme
Also I don’t know why Bullshit Jobs is a book either. You really only need like a 10 minute video or 500 word article about it which many oeoooe have already done
- Also I don’t know why Bullshit Jobs is a book either. You really only need like a 10 minute video or 500 word article about it which many oeoooe have already done
  Many people including Graeber lmao, he wrote an essay about it first.
- Is the P broken on your keyboard?
  
  poor bastard can't even ctrl c ctrl p without a p key

Counter Revolution of 1776.
Incredibly poor scholarship. Author obviously stretches really thin evidence to fit an idea he had before actually researching. Dude really dug through piles of letters from people you never heard of to justify the thesis.
Frames the British empire as radical abolitionists. Gimme a break.
- Frames the British empire as radical abolitionists. Gimme a break.
  It absolutely did not. His entire point was that Black and Indigenous peoples know where their bread is buttered, so they would side with the Spanish when the Spanish was at war with the British and side with the British when the British was at war with the Americans. He very much framed the British as a lesser evil compared to the Americans and the Spanish as a lesser evil compared to the British. Hardly a case of framing them as "radical abolitionists."

Not books per se but authors: I find both Marx and Fanon very tedious to read. Their prose is awkward and I feel like the text is fighting my brain when I try to read them.
This is not a slight against their ideas, just their writing.
It should also be noted I've read neither in their original language, just translations, so it's I entirely possible this is just the fault of translators. I don't think it is for Marx though, because even when I read Engels or Lenin and they block-quote Marx the text automatically gets :wtf-am-i-reading:
- I think it’s more a very specific style they each have, which some people find very cold, but which I find chillingly analytical and insightful in both. I don’t know what Fanon reads like in English but in French he’s definitely considered to have a powerful style. A great example of his text being used in English is in the documentary Concerning Violence. Big recommend but also CW for violence.

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