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the american economy is dominated by transnationals.
the claim above from ustwo that small business is central is ideological, not fact.
transnationals can be defined around their supply chain.
a supply chain is a purchasing system that is made up of a system of subcontractors/suppliers who produce specific objects in specific quantities and specific times--these outputs are co-ordinated by the purchser/tnc.
supply chains are not transparent.
the relationship between a tnc/purchaser and its suppliers has been one of the most contentious issues in the politics that surround corporate activity in the globalizing captialist context.
for a while, supply chains were used to simply externalize the most oppressive aspects of contemporary production...but over the past 3-4 years, political pressure has become so intense that most tncs are moving to treating suppliers as extensions of themselves, rather than as independent entitites...
take walmart.
the center of walmart is a VERY highly rationalized supply chain.
the logic of the chain extends all the way to the stocking of shelves, to the functions of registers (which track inventory, which shapes product movement, etc.)..tasks are bundled in a manner that is completely dependent of very extensive use of computer technology to rationalize commodity flows and eliminate human skills and human beings when possible.
working for walmart then is fundamentally different from working for a traditional store.
theirs is probably the most extensive and expensive development of the logic of supply chain organization and technology in the whole of retail.
this supply chain is the center of all their competitive advantages, in the bland speech of such profit uber alles operations.
walmart is the absolute embodiment of all the "race to the bottom" tendencies within globalizing capitalism.
to think otherwise is to be chumped by the appearance of the stores.
walmarts buying practices are notorious: the effects of these pricing practices is routine worker abuse throughout its supply chain.
walmart tries to deal with this by refusing to release information.
you can find information about walmart's business practices, but it is not easy. the corporation places little value in transparency.
tncs are not transparent to themselves. in walmart's case, there is an apparent willingness to allow organizational structure and corporate culture to completely sever cause/effect relations when it comes to linking pricing structures to worker abuse within its supply chain. in this, walmart falls into a variant of the "banality of evil" problem--ethical questions that its own practices generate are bracketed because the corporation refuses to look at its chains and to accept responsibility for what happens within that chain.
this kind of problem is what the long post above was trying to get to.
i dont think that the individuals who run the show at walmart arenecessarily bad people--but they work within an environment that encourages a total compartmentalization of thinking: their pricing practices directly result in oppressive work conditions---within walmart, those conditions are simply the supplier's problems--no linkage is made between how walmart conducts its business and these abusive practices--so normal people can go about their normal jobs in a normal way and one set of results is systematic abuse of workers throughout its supply chain--and within walmart there is no problem about this. why? because of the characteristics of its organization and the effects of this organization on how management see itself and its tasks.
is this evil?
say a massive p.r. problem were to surface concerning walmart's business practices that they could not simply stonewall away.
if everything were to remain the same as it is now in that context, you would expect to see versions of the nuremburg defense: i was just following orders, man.
no-one need take responsibility for anything.
yay capitalism.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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