>Is the only choice Wal-Marts or the petit bourgeoisie? Really? Is the
True
>Marxist Position to cheer on the heirs of Sam Walton? Has what Marx
called
>the civilizing power of capital been reduced to big retail boxes
surrounded
>by parking lots? There's nothing progressive about that - it's
fragmenting,
>alienating, exploitative, and ecocidal. It's barbarism in overdrive,
and
>the hell with it, I say.
>
I would agree that capitalism is alienating, exploitative and ecocidal, but not fragmenting. Capitalism is Janus-faced, it is progressive looking back, but not looking forward. It is progressive in relation to feudalism, but is not progressive in relation to socialism.
In the case of Wal-Mart, it is not fragmenting because capital in Department II, the means of subsistence is being centralized and concentrated. This creates more "pressure" on the wage worker, but it is not yet "intolerable," that is, enough to make a revolution over. The working class historical role is to take over Department I, the means of production, through mass-strike processes, but the more centralized the production and distribution of the means of subsistence, the more amenable it is to control through democratic planning.
Capital accumulation is alienating, exploitative, and ecocidal in both departments, but it also moves in contradictions, concentrating and centralizing, and preparing the platform for eventual expropriation by the direct producers, as sketched in the chapter in Volume I of Capital, "The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation."
The "eventual" here is the nub of the problem. Who wants to wait? But, the direct producers have to decide the issue. They create material wealth through application of their labor-power in the labor process. They have to bring the labor process under their conscious control, paying due regard to the human consequences of their actions.
Anyone who has a understanding of historical process has a role in furthering the organization of the direct producers for this "eventual" revolution.
RS
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