On PBS’s Front Line recently, the world leading retailer Wal-Mart was investigated.  It was a fascinating story, not controversial in the facts, just controversial in the interpretation.

 

What Wal-Mart does is, as the biggest of the big box retailers, strong arm suppliers – by which is meant manufacturers – into giving them the cheapest product to Wal-Mart specifications and on Wal-Mart’s time schedule.   If one supplier won’t, another will.  This is capitalism, and nothing wrong with it within the same country, and maybe not ever, but the show raised the issue of whether or not producing things better and cheaper is a goal or a process to an unnamed goal. 

 

The show didn’t intend to, but it forces us – or forced me, anyway - to look at communism again and the reasons it appeared and spread for a while.  Not in a favorable light.  Not in some gossamer form that hides a secret agenda.  And not the communism of the thugs like Stalin and Mao, but the academic communism of Marx and Engels.   The conservatives, then and now, would contend there is no difference, but I don’t believe you can read Marx, look at Stalin, and say that with a straight face.   While their failure was spectacular, and their almost total obliviousness to what energizes people and makes people happy – people in general were a mystery to the academic as well as the scion of nobility – the conflicts they see are with us yet in different form and different purpose, and they aren’t happy ones.  And they aren’t solved, either.

 

Since the First World War, Americans have mostly and happily accepted the fact they are against socialism and are rugged individualists.  They accept it because it’s mostly true  and because they’re told this and because it feeds their vanity: they want to be superior to the new arrivals, who often felt differently.  Communism never had a chance here, because the communists never had a clue.  It was possible for poor people to become nauseatingly rich, and if not as often as portrayed, it surely did happen.  This was a golden ideal of the world for two centuries.  America: where you can live like a king, or at least your children will. 

 

Now, that dream is world wide and increasingly stagnant, in that people can see it happening more or less soon in the nation of their birth.  China is the most obvious example of this.  They have seen the future and want cell phones to talk about it and a drive in the SUV on super highways to shake it off.  Wal-Mart profits from this, and says the American consumer does as well.  The problem is, is the consumer the citizen?  And do the citizens or just the stockholders, all of whom may not be citizens, profit?

 

Marx divided economic value into three things.  Land, Labor, and Capital.  Things like stock and corporations, although certainly extant in 1848, didn’t meld entirely into his world view, and surely a world in cyber space doesn’t at all.  He could not imagine, outside of heaven, that a well paid worker (Labor) would own his stand alone home outright (yes, I know: fail to pay your property tax and see who owns it really…) in a nice neighborhood (Land), and own stock in the company that employed him, or many other companies, and that a common laborer through luck and/or work could strike it rich by investment. 

 

He saw a world with Land owning Labor and with Capital arising as a power that could further imprison Labor or be used to destroy Land and spread the wealth as, in his phrase, to each according to his need.  From each according to his ability or, as it turned out, from each according to what the Dictatorship of the Proletariat said was your ability and debt to society.

 

He did not – nobody could, really - imagine a democratically elected government in a capitalist society (that included incidentals like those not rich and, oh, you know, women….) that represented a majority, or at least a plurality, of the population, and that government willingly handed over power to an opposition party in election years.    He could not imagine, in short, that Labor, Land, and Capital could be more than he saw in his early life: peasantry (poverty for evermore), aristocracy (wealth inherited forever in land), and Capital (“excess” value skimmed off by thieves and/or bankers and the emerging middle class… same thing to him).  He could only imagine a violent revolution to finally give the average Joe a chance.

 

That much of what Marx and Engels wanted came about – and not by the means they predicted - has always threatened actual, old time Communists, even when in absolute power.   They wanted surety, a formula that they could grasp and understand and use as a club of demonstrable superior insight over anyone who disagreed.  It wasn’t just the money and stuff they wanted: they wanted moral credit and respect for figuring it all out and giving it – heroically – to the masses.  They wanted to be heroes.  But, they also wanted to be treated as heroes.  And that required an audience, which meant that most of the people had to be kept ignorant enough to be awed.

 

That only a few of them – very few, but some – were remotely worthy of that title didn’t dismay them.  Adoration, we now know, can be enforced.

 

In the Front Line show, we saw the fruits of capitalism, which are often sour and harsh as well as necessary.  What was clearly shown if not stated was that the workers of American companies have come to the conclusion that they are owed a good paying job – a useful, non-make work job – local to themselves they could count on, apparently forever.  They shouldn’t have to move to get such a job elsewhere.  This circumstance should be provided for them.

 

This isn’t the American ideal as professed.  It’s socialism.  And those espousing this solution should admit it for what it is.  This, while the economic theory currently extolled throughout the world was forcing people to work longer for less in order than they can buy often unnecessary and disposable crap for less. 

 

What the workers fear is that the pennies companies like Wal-Mart save in their strong arm purchasing tactics aren’t going into lower prices (do we really care that a plastic Jack-o-Lantern costs $.67 rather than $.72?) but into the stockholders’ checks.  Which they are.  Stock which, at workers’ new income level, they cannot afford to buy in amounts to make a difference.

 

And further, they resent – as we all should – that in making a notional consortium of individuals (a corporation) into an entity with legal standing as another different type of individual, that such a massive being would be able to be, well, more equal than others when it comes to socialized benefit.   And that’s fine with the American worker so long as he/she/transgendered being is working for this corporation receiving the benefits of an otherwise regressive taxation or trade guild tax exception.  It’s when their particular corporation loses out that they suddenly become economically patriotic and demand others buy their more expensive product.

 

In fact, America and western civilization, despite all the self-congratulatory nonsense about individualism, has always been a combination of socialism and capitalism and some, face it, anarchism as well.  Each serves a purpose and each needs to lose out for its arguments to be refined and updated. 

 

It would surprise most Americans to learn that The West of old – by which is normally meant the years between the Civil War’s end and the close of the Frontier (a phrase designed so nobody would have to talk about Wounded Knee) and the area between San Franciso and Kansas City – is conceded by conservative social historian Garry Wills as  having been won by gun control laws and by a population of independents trying hard to become dependent on Washington in a hurry.  All railroads demanded passengers disarm before boarding.  Most towns did, sooner or later, as well.  That ain’t the West of lore.

 

The biggest market for the farms of the deep west, mused General Sherman, was the army of the deep west which was only there to ……protect the farmers.  No army, no cities.  No problems.  At least, for a while.  Creating a product, a market, and a social horror to solve the ensuing problem defined capitalism for a generation in rural America.

 

And here again with Wal-mart we have a not dissimilar issue.  In order for Americans to buy women’s underwear for pennies, the manufacturing job has to be sent where manufacturing labor is cheap, thus mandating that more women can only afford underwear for pennies and solidifying the market.  At least, according the anti-NAFTA crowd, which its proponents insist is not true but a temporary flux that will even out.   

 

What gave America relative quality products for over a century at more or less favorable prices to farmers and manufacturers was a tariff on foreign imports.  But that’s mercantilism and anti-free trade and not real capitalism.  Socialism – government acting in concert to protect the economic well being of the most – is bad, we’re told.  It’s un-American.

 

But our history shows that the two theories working in stable competition often provide the advance and the surety our economic life demands.  Pretending socialism somehow isn’t American or that it doesn’t protect the stockholders more than the workers and often the citizenry as now set up is just bonkers. 

 

It’s a problem, but you start solving such a problem with the truth.  And the truth is that socialism, in one form or another, has been part of our economic makeup from the beginning, and is no more un-American than, well, liquor distributorships, which are absolute monopolies.  Or child labor laws.  Or any laws that refuse to let ‘the market’ find rock bottom. 

 

It puts a great deal of responsibility on the workers that used to be with management and Capital, a desired goal for generations.  But as those who lose out to Wal-Mart now know, it’s not fun or easy to choose between better days for yourself now or better lives for not only your children but those who’d be less likely to make war on your children later.   Efficiency to lower prices is good, but it isn’t the only thing about which to be concerned.

 

I think we all know this, but we can’t articulate the argument because it might require them to say socialism of some sort has a role to play.  And they just won’t admit it.