Wal-Mart and the Strip-Mining of America

James Farmelant farmelantj at juno.com
Thu Nov 12 10:53:48 PST 1998


In Europe at least the championing of the interests of small shopkeepers against the big department stores was traditionally the provence of the political right. In Germany, the Nazis made a campaign issue out of the threat that the department stores posed to small shopkeepers (and they made use of the fact that some of the department stores were Jewish-owned to play the anti-Semitic card as well).

Jim Farmelant

On Thu, 12 Nov 1998 13:15:04 -0500 (EST) G*rd*n <gcf at panix.com> writes:
>Randy Stone wrote:
>> >The the general law of capitalist accumulation is amassing of
>wealth at
>> >one pole and poverty at another pole. Wal-Mart is developing
>according
>> >to this general law. Concentration and centralization of capital
>> >results in the gobbling up of merchants in small towns. Death by
>> >drowning can be set at the door of the law of gravity, but that
>will not
>> >negate its operation.
>
>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
>

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