Doug Henwood:
> This is all true, but what do you do with it? Just watch Wal-Mart take over
> the landscape and wait for the revolution? The damn thing goes to the heart
> of what America is all about - chewed up landscapes, shrouds of concrete,
> cars, sweatshop labor, phony Made In USA labels, low wages, and boosterism.
In the passage of the _Manifesto_ I quoted, Marx clearly sees capitalism as revolutionary: it destroys the old order of power and replaces it with new and yet newer arrangements until "man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind." If Marx is correct here, then the Wal-Mart juggernaut should be producing revolutionary opportunities. One would think, for instance, that low wages and deracination would interest workers and consumers in unions, cooperatives, and the like: anti-bourgeois modes of organization.
If not, why not? That's what I think needs to be looked at. Maybe Marx was wrong -- maybe capitalism, instead of compelling man to face his real condition of life, always succeeds at mass hypnosis. That's not what I hear walking through the Wal-Mart parking lot, though.
In any case, I would think conserving small towns and the petit-bourgeoisie, only a generation or two ago so harshly deprecated by leftists and the avant-garde, would probably be best left to conservatives, who would at least have their hearts in what will almost certainly turn out to be a lost cause.
Gordon