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on the other hand, walmart practices are a very strong argument for the need for unions--perhaps not the types of unions that have been particular to the american model of capitalism--but there we are.
this thread seems to address my inner marxist and so let's indulge him:
a worker sells his labor power to capital in return for a wage.
because the worker sells his labor power--not his skill, but his ability to perform a repetitive task--and walmart (like macdo) is a very highly deskilled type of service sector work---because the worker is selling his labor power, it follows any worker who possesses labor power is interchangeable with any other. from the viewpoint of capital, this is a basic feature of labor markets in deskilled sectors.
now ace, you might not like the language, but you cannot get around the basic claim.
this means that there is a fundamental assymetry of power within wage relations--and in general terms, so long as workers remain isolated, that is so long as they interact with capital as individuals, they will always always loose. this was a primary motivation for the formation of unions in the first place: while it is the case that individual workers acting as individuals will always loose in conflicts with capital, the same situation does not obtain is workers organize themselves. acting collectively, workers can develop weapons that to some extent counters the advantage in power capital enjoys: in particular they can shut down the workplace--they can strike. by shutting down the workplace, they can endanger the existence of the enterprise--they threaten profits.
walmart's practices are only possible in a reactionary political context that views all worker organization as a threat. because, frankly, it IS a threat--but it is a threat that i think in general a good thing because it is the ONLY way in which the power relations that obtain between capital and workers can be meaningfully altered. walmart knows this. you, ace, know this: that is why (at one level or another) you act as though worker organization is anathema.
i think working people should develop new forms of collective organization.
i think they need to develop new forms of organization--because if they dont, they are well and truly fucked and will always be well and truly fucked. this is one of the structuring features of the game of capitalism, one of the few things that is as true about that game in 2006 as it was in 1848.
caveat: i am not endorsing the american trade union model--the sector-monopoly model--i dont know how anyone in their right mind can endorse that model, which has was developed because it reduced the political threat of union organization by depoliticizing them, but which resulted in the worst types of unions that capitalism has yet seen: organizations that reproduced internally most of the forms of domination that they were set up to counter.
there is a complex history behind this that i could run out but i am ot sure that it is worth the space at this point...this not meant as any disrespect to a reader, but rather it just take alot of time to write and probably even more to read. besides, there are tons of books about this. and books are better than messageboards for complex historical information.
so walmart and its ilk are among the strongest arguments i know of for unionization of some kind. they are running demonstrations of what happens to working people when they pretend to themselves that capital's interests and their interests are the same--they aren't. they never have been, and they never will be so long as the game of capitalism is in effect.
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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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