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.
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.
