this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2023
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What are some leftist books you dislike but everyone else seems to love? (hexbear.net)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by DoubleShot@hexbear.net to c/askchapo@hexbear.net
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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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[–] AssortedBiscuits@hexbear.net 1 points 2 years ago

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.