askchapo

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.

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 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.

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.

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:

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