[lbo-talk] Comments on NY Times article: How Did Walmart Get Cleaner Stores and Higher Sales? It Paid Its People More.

Mark Wain wtkh at comcast.net
Sun Oct 16 16:31:01 PDT 2016


How Did Walmart Get Cleaner Stores and Higher Sales? It Paid Its People More.

Can the answer to what ails the global economy be found in the people in blue vests at your neighborhood Walmart?

<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/upshot/how-did-walmart-get-cleaner-stores -and-higher-sales-it-paid-its-people-more.html?hpw&rref=upshot&action=click& pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/upshot/how-did-walmart-get-cleaner-stores- and-higher-sales-it-paid-its-people-more.html

My comments:

The answer to what ails the global economy can be found not in raised wages or up- and down-adjusted tax rates, filled tax loopholes, deficit spending, income redistribution, infrastructure and renewable energy investments, and a host of other palliatives to the disasters that capital creates, rather can be found in the root of the "economic arteriosclerosis" - capital itself. Any measure hostile or adverse to profit maximization will not be allowed and most likely short-lived when squeaked through. Raised wages, corporate income taxes, social program, training, education, health, safety, environmental protection, anti-climate-change, paid vacation and shorter work week spending, etc. all cut into profit by which capital lives. Walmart's days of "investments" are numbered, because as a labor-intensive (hence low-labor-productivity) sector Walmart doesn't have the luxury of automation that the industrial capital (manufacturing and service sectors, etc.) have in their production for the purpose of using less labor power but enjoying higher labor productivity in order to save production cost.

Capital is the true barrier to capitalist production that ails the global economy of which the falling social average rate of profit (or investment return) fills the major role. Retail sector belongs to merchant capital which works with, but does not belong to, the industrial capital whose only mission is to make profit through production or by manufacturing goods for merchants to buy below value and sell at value so as to earn a handsome profit. Merchant capital shares the industrial capital's profit as a reward to do the circulation for the latter including tasks such as advertisement, transportation, display, sale, and reduced turn-over time, etc. Workers in retail business create no new value contrary to those in industrial business who do create new value for industrial capital by spending what's known as (unpaid) surplus labor which then turns the new value into profit after being realized. (The equally no-new-value-creating fictitious capital - stock shares, securities, bonds, and other speculative [or in-expectation] instruments on the capital market - just like the retail capital also share with the industrial capital the profit. Productive [or industrial] capital is the mother of all other [unproductive] capital, without which a capitalist society would cease to exist.)

When production barrier leads to a long depression after the Great Recession, workers have to pay through the nose for the existential tenet, and its grave practice, of profit maximization of capital. A potent way-out is surgical rather than leechcraftic, i.e. on behalf of the laboring masses' fundamental and long-term interests, state has to degrade and confine capital's mission to unproductive sectors such as retail and F.I.R.E. (finance, insurance and real estate) and own all productive sectors. Industrial capital will be nationalized and become state capital through buyouts and paid off. The production under state's ownership and management then will proceed with the experiment from state capitalism moving on to the socialist principle: "From each according to his ability and to each according to his work" and periodically adjust for the better. Impenitent capital personified can still mind their investment and practice their own craft in F.I.R.E business, for instance, but then industrial capital as we know it will be transformed to state capital from their corporate capital rising above self toward the public at large.

Mark Wain (https://www.facebook.com/andrew.colesville/)

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