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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[–] HoChiMaxh@hexbear.net 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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:

[–] StalinForTime@hexbear.net 1 points 2 years ago

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.