The People’s Republic of Walmart
The Jacobin series features short interrogations of politics, economics, and culture from a socialist perspective, as an avenue to radical political practice. The books offer critical analysis and engagement with the history and ideas of the Left in an accessible format.
The series is a collaboration between Verso Books and Jacobin magazine, which is published quarterly in print and online at jacobinmag.com.
Other titles in this series available from Verso Books:
Utopia or Bust by Benjamin Kunkel
Playing the Whore by Melissa Gira Grant
Strike for America by Micah Uetricht
The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff
Four Futures by Peter Frase
Class War by Megan Erickson
Building the Commune by George Ciccariello-Maher
Capital City by Samuel Stein
The People’s Republic
of Walmart
How the World’s Biggest
Corporations Are Laying the
Foundation for Socialism
LEIGH PHILLIPS AND
MICHAL ROZWORSKI
First published by Verso 2019
© Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski 2019
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-516-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-517-4 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-518-1 (US EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Monotype Fournier
Printed in the US by Maple Press
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
1.Introduction
2.Could Walmart Be a Secret Socialist Plot?
3.Islands of Tyranny
4.Mapping the Amazon
5.Index Funds as Sleeper Agents of Planning
6.Nationalization Is Not Enough
7.Did They Even Plan the Soviet Union?
8.Hardly Automated Space Communism
9.Allende’s Socialist Internet
10.Planning the Good Anthropocene
11.Conclusion: Planning Works
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The idea for this book was born of a beer or three at a scruffy Gastown pub early on in our friendship. Sharing our frustrations about the absence of democratic planning from political debate, we quickly realized that we were both thinking of writing the very same book. But a million grand schemes are nightly forged in the workshop that is the tavern, only for them to have vanished by morning. This time however, surprisingly to both of us, such an intrigue has actually obtained results.
For that to have happened, we owe a large debt in particular to Bhaskar Sunkara, publisher of Jacobin magazine, who helped fashion our rough idea into the book you hold in your hands, championing the project all along the way. Warm thanks are also due Ben Mabie, Andy Hsiao and Duncan Ranslem, our thoughtful editors at Verso.
We would both like to thank Cory Doctorow, Ross Duncan, Gemma Galdon, Sam Gindin, Scott Kilpatrick, Ken MacLeod, James Meadway, Derrick O’Keefe, Nick Srnicek, Nathan Tankus, Tadeusz Tietze and J. W. Mason for their suggestions at various phases of development. It would have been a much poorer work absent the generous gift of their time and their insightful comments. Any clanging errors that remain or laughably obvious lacunae that went unnoticed are nevertheless entirely the fault of the authors.
Leigh would like to thank the workers at the beverage-mongering establishments Habit, Oto, and Cenote, where much of his writing took place indifferent to hints that he really ought to buy another something given how long he’s been typing away while nursing that surely-by-now lukewarm coffee.
Michal’s biggest thanks goes to his brilliant wife Karolina, without whose encouragement and patience this book would not have been written, and who had to find out what it’s like to have someone in the house writing a book while you’re trying to finish a dissertation or, worse, trying to vacation.
We would also like to thank all our comrades and friends who offered encouragement, critique and other help at different stages; no book is an individual effort, however meticulously planned.
1
INTRODUCTION
“So you’re writing a book celebrating Walmart, eh?”
“Er, no. Not exactly. Or, well, yes, in a way. You see, the logistical marvel that is Walmart, we do quite like. But it’s so much more complicated than that.”
“Bit of an odd topic for a pair of socialists. How on earth can you defend Walmart, with all their union busting, low wages and destruction of communities? Are they not one of the most evil companies in the world?”
“We’re not defending Walmart, and certainly not union busting. We’re just intrigued by how this epitome of capitalism is also, paradoxically, a vast planned economy. Very intrigued.”
Variations on this conversational theme have repeated themselves since we started writing this book. Invariably among progressive friends of ours, concerned or suspicious eyebrows have been raised.
So let us be clear from the outset: Walmart is an execrable, sinister, low-down dirty villain of a company.
Lamentably, the word “flagitious”—meaning “horribly criminal or wicked,” but also sharing a root with the word “flagellate” or whip, the Latin term flagitium, meaning “shameful thing”—is uncommon these days; yet at the same time that it is apropos for such a flagrantly socially delinquent business, it only begins to express the piercing, wolf-like hatred we two authors feel for Walmart.
Like any firm, Walmart is forced via competition in the market to reduce costs, notably labor costs—that most bendy and squishable portion of an enterprise’s expenditure. While none of this is very nice, it would hardly be fair to describe Walmart as uniquely evil. Sure, it pays poverty wages, depends upon Asian sweatshops and both child and prison labor, and disembowels high streets with all the relish and élan of the third-century torturers of Saint Elmo. But who doesn’t these days? Nevertheless, few other corporations seem to carry out their worker-immiserating, anti-union practices with quite such zeal, such crushing mastery; Walmart regards union busting not only as a necessary accompaniment to their enterprise, but places it at the very core of their business model. “I pay low wages,” said founder Sam Walton. “I can take advantage of that. We’re going to be successful, but the basis is a very low-wage, low-benefit model of employment.”
So no one should conclude, before reading a word of what we say (or indeed after reading every word but misapprehending what we say), that this book intends to be in any way a hip, contrarian apology for Walmart or Amazon or the Pentagon or for any of the other enterprises whose planning and logistics operations we investigate. That is not our purpose. Walmart should offer no inspiration for progressives.
With that throat-clearing out of the way, and now that everyone is content that we have no love for Walmart, we want to talk about how we nevertheless have admiration for Walmart, much as how an epidemiologist concedes an irrefutable genius to the wicked evolutionary dexterity of drug-resistant tuberculosis; or in the way that Milton finds Satan, rather than Jesus, to be the more
interesting character; or the manner in which Sherlock Holmes can simultaneously revile and admire the intricate, canny stratagems of the malign savant Professor Moriarty.
If only Walmart’s operational efficiency, its logistical genius, its architecture of agile economic planning could be captured and transformed by those who aim toward a more egalitarian, liberatory society!
But why should anyone care about so dry a subject as what is, in effect, a discussion about enterprise decision making, about the optimal allocation of goods and services? Why should we even favor democratic planning over the free market? Did the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union not put paid to the idea that socialism is viable? Isn’t curtailing the free market’s excesses the best that we can do?
Libraries’ worth of books have been written on the injustices and contradictions of capitalism, not least its ineluctable expansion of inequality (even as poverty can be reduced—as the most extremities of it certainly have been over the last 300 years or so, albeit not least as a result of the pressure of trade unions and the left broadly conceived, dating back to its origins in the French Revolution, to share the wealth), enclosure of democracy, perennial manufacture of economic crisis, and thereby unemployment and even war, but we have no desire to recount these arguments here. So let us restrict ourselves to alighting upon perhaps its central misadventure.
There is certainly overlap between the set of all goods and services that are useful to humanity, on the one hand, and the set of all goods and services that are profitable, on the other. You likely find underwear to be a useful product (though for commandos, this is no certainty); The Gap, meanwhile, finds it profitable to produce such a product—a happy coincidence, of which there are many. But the set of all useful things and the set of all profitable things are not in perfect correspondence. If something is profitable, even if it is not useful or is even harmful, someone will continue producing it so long as the market is left to its own devices.
Fossil fuels are a contemporary example of this irremediable, critical flaw. Wonderful though they have been due to their energy density and portability—freeing us energetically from the caprices of Mother Nature, who may or may not blow windmills or turn waterwheels when we want her to—we now know that the greenhouse gases emitted by fossil fuel combustion will rapidly shift the planet away from an average temperature that has remained optimal for human flourishing since the last ice age. Yet, so long as governments do not intervene to curtail the use of fossil fuels and build out (or at least incentivize the build-out of) the clean electricity infrastructure needed to replace them, the market will continue to produce them. Likewise, it was not the market that ended production of the chlorofluorocarbons that were destroying the ozone layer; instead it was regulatory intervention—planning of a sort—that forced us to use other chemicals for our fridges and cans of hair spray, allowing that part of the stratosphere that is home to high concentrations of ultraviolet ray–deflecting tripartite oxygen molecules to largely mend itself. We could recount similar tales about how the problems of urban air pollution in most Western cities or of acid rain over the Great Lakes were solved, or how car-accident mortality rates or airline crashes have declined: through active state intervention in the market to curb or transform the production of harmful—but profitable—goods and services. The impressive health and safety standards of most modern mining operations in Western countries were achieved not as a result of any noblesse oblige on the part of the owners of the companies, but rather begrudgingly, as a concession following their defeat by militant trade unions.
Conversely, if something is useful but unprofitable, it will not be produced. In the United States, for instance, where there is no universal public healthcare system, healthcare for all would be wonderfully useful. But because it is not profitable, it is not produced. High-speed internet in rural areas is not profitable, so private telecommunications companies are loathe to provide it there, preferring instead to cherry-pick profitable population-dense neighborhoods.
And amid a growing global crisis of antimicrobial resistance, in which microbial evolution is defeating antibiotic after antibiotic and patients are increasingly dying from routine infections, pharmaceutical companies have all but given up research into new families of the life-saving drugs, simply because they are not profitable enough. That amputation or surgery to scrape out infected areas might return as common medical responses is not a pleasant thought. But this course of action was the only one left to the doctors of nineteen-year-old David Ricci of Seattle when they surgically removed part of his leg, following repeated infections from drug-resistant bacteria—acquired in a train accident in India—that could not be treated, even with highly toxic lastresort antibiotics. Each time the infection returned, more and more of the leg had to be cut off. Although Ricci has since recovered, he has lived in perpetual fear of the reappearance of the bugs that can’t be fought. As a 2008 “call to arms” paper from the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) put it, “[Antibiotics] are less desirable to drug companies and venture capitalists because they are more successful than other drugs.” Antibiotics are successful if they kill off an infection, at which point—days or weeks, or at most months, later—the patient stops taking the drug. For chronic diseases, however, patients may have to take their medicine every day, sometimes for the rest of their lives. Thus, the paper concluded, it is long-term therapy—not cures—that drives interest in drug development. Policy proposals from the likes of the IDSA, the World Health Organization and the European Union amount to begging and bribing the pharmaceutical companies to lift a finger; but even here, however unambitious the approach, it is still external to the market. (Socialization of the pharmaceutical industry would be cheaper, and a much more rapid and effective approach, but most pundits deem it too radical, giving off too much of a whiff of socialism).
Beyond this one sector, we might note that basic research in any field—that blue-sky stuff, where scientists are led by simple curiosity and have no expectation of developing any marketable product, and which is the basis of technologies and medicines that later turn out to be very marketable indeed—simply cannot be done by the private sector. This type of research is extremely expensive but makes no guarantee of any return on such spending. Such research thus is almost entirely a phenomenon characteristic of public institutions or private charities rather than market actors. Similarly, it was not the market that got us to the moon, but a grand public-sector enterprise called NASA. Today, if we are to be honest, we must recognize that due to the vast costs associated with a viable Mars colony such as the one proposed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX (even if the cost of escaping Earth’s gravity is significantly reduced, for instance, through the use of reusable rockets), there still has to be a profitable commodity resulting from that colony that can be sold back on Earth. If there is one, bully for him. If not, his investors will quickly abandon him. So the colonization of Mars will be a public-sector endeavor or it will not happen.
But for many progressives, the story of logistics and planning seems musty and old. Are there not fresh arguments required to convince that barricades must be mounted, forgotten stories of wretched oppression yet to be recounted? It is true that there is little drama or romance to the story of planning—few riveting tales of selfless heroism, brave suffering or righteous fury (although there are not a few episodes of heartbreaking defeat, failure and ruin). But in essence, the story of injustice and its correction is a chronicle of efforts across all time to reduce inequality of all types: of haves and have-nots, of who works and who rests, of who has a say and who does not. And inequality is, in the end, a question of unfair allocation of things themselves or the result of such unfair allocation.
Put simply, a poor person has not been allocated the stuff (or the ability to buy it) that a rich person has. The needs of the rich and poor are met and unmet in wildly different ways: the potential to fully articulate their humanity is cut off at the root for some, while others a
re granted space to flourish. Inequality limits what a person, and indeed society, could otherwise do; it delimits our freedom. Past generations have fought to expand the realm of freedom—to ensure all adult humans have the same rights and to ensure that any new capabilities delivered through technological advance are to be made available to all. And if we are to continue this battle to correct the titanic, manifest unfairness of the way things are, we must therefore wage a struggle over which method for the allocation of things we want as a society.
So when we ask whether another world is possible, we are also asking: Is there an alternate method to allocate things? How would we distribute things differently? And who would decide how they are distributed? Could the plans that capitalists use every day to get goods and services into the hands of those who can pay for them be transformed to instead ensure that what we produce gets to those who need it most? And in transforming the way we distribute stuff, could we also start to transform everything else about the economy—from what stuff we make and how, to who works and for how long?
Once we have identified alternative ways to distribute things, the planning everywhere around us may telegraph aspects of another mode of production. More urgently, such extant planning may also suggest features of transitional stages on the way to a more all-encompassing transformation of our economy.
Under capitalism, our current mode of production (in essence, the way our society organizes the economy), the primary method used to allocate things is the free market. Ours is a world where prices for goods and services are, in principle, determined in response to supply and demand. Free market advocates claim this leads to a situation where the amount of stuff demanded by buyers matches the amount of stuff produced by suppliers: a condition they describe as “economic equilibrium.”
For a mode of production to be called capitalism, it is not sufficient for a free market to exist; there are, after all, other essential features of capitalism, including exploitation in the workplace and the need to sell one’s labor in order to survive. Nevertheless, the free(-ish) market is a necessary condition for capitalism—one that, as a method of allocation, leads to growing inequality via disparities in the distribution of income. Market interactions inevitably produce winners and losers, leading to concentrations of wealth. Over time, these disparities grow, a product of these same market interactions.
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