The Peoples Republic Of Walmart

Author : Leigh Phillips
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1786635186
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The People's Republic of Walmart written by Leigh Phillips and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the demise of the USSR, the mantle of the largest planned economies in the world has been taken up by the likes of Walmart, Amazon and other multinational corporations For the left and the right, major multinational companies are held up as the ultimate expressions of free-market capitalism. Their remarkable success appears to vindicate the old idea that modern society is too complex to be subjected to a plan. And yet, as Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski argue, much of the economy of the West is centrally planned at present. Not only is planning on vast scales possible, we already have it and it works. The real question is whether planning can be democratic. Can it be transformed to work for us? An engaging, polemical romp through economic theory, computational complexity, and the history of planning, The People’s Republic of Walmart revives the conversation about how society can extend democratic decision-making to all economic matters. With the advances in information technology in recent decades and the emergence of globe-straddling collective enterprises, democratic planning in the interest of all humanity is more important and closer to attainment than ever before.

Author : Leigh Phillips
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 178663516X
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The People's Republic of Walmart written by Leigh Phillips and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are multi-national corporations like Walmart and Amazon laying the groundwork for international socialism? For the left and the right, major multinational companies are held up as the ultimate expressions of free-market capitalism. Their remarkable success appears to vindicate the old idea that modern society is too complex to be subjected to a plan. And yet, as Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski argue, much of the economy of the West is centrally planned at present. Not only is planning on vast scales possible, we already have it and it works. The real question is whether planning can be democratic. Can it be transformed to work for us? An engaging, polemical romp through economic theory, computational complexity, and the history of planning, The People’s Republic of Walmart revives the conversation about how society can extend democratic decision-making to all economic matters. With the advances in information technology in recent decades and the emergence of globe-straddling collective enterprises, democratic planning in the interest of all humanity is more important and closer to attainment than ever before.

Author : Eden Medina
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262525968
Total Pages : 343 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cybernetic Revolutionaries written by Eden Medina and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historical study of Chile's twin experiments with cybernetics and socialism, and what they tell us about the relationship of technology and politics. In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile's experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile's economy. Neither vision was fully realized—Allende's government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented—but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics. Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government—which was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and modeling the behavior of dynamic systems. She also describes, and documents with photographs, the network's Star Trek-like operations room, which featured swivel chairs with armrest control panels, a wall of screens displaying data, and flashing red lights to indicate economic emergencies. Studying project Cybersyn today helps us understand not only the technological ambitions of a government in the midst of political change but also the limitations of the Chilean revolution. This history further shows how human attempts to combine the political and the technological with the goal of creating a more just society can open new technological, intellectual, and political possibilities. Technologies, Medina writes, are historical texts; when we read them we are reading history.

Author : Oskar Lange
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780816671670
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book On the Economic Theory of Socialism written by Oskar Lange and published by . This book was released on 1938 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the Economic Theory of Socialism was first published in 1938. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.Is socialism workable on economic grounds? "No," say the chief European critics of socialism - von Mises, Robbins, and von Hayek. "Yes," say Lange and Taylor in these two papers - the first refutation in English of the objections of these economists.There has been consistent demand for this book since it went out of print in 1944. This reprint is in response to that demand.

Author : Leigh Phillips
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1786635178
Total Pages : 227 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The People's Republic of Walmart written by Leigh Phillips and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the left and the right, major multinational companies are held up as the ultimate expressions of free-market capitalism. Their remarkable success appears to vindicate the old idea that modern society is too complex to be subjected to a plan. And yet, as Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski argue, much of the economy of the West is centrally planned at present. Not only is planning on vast scales possible, we already have it and it works. The real question is whether planning can be democratic. Can it be transformed to work for us? An engaging, polemical romp through economic theory, computational complexity, and the history of planning, The People's Republic of Walmart revives the conversation about how society can extend democratic decision-making to all economic matters. With the advances in information technology in recent decades and the emergence of globe-straddling collective enterprises, democratic planning in the interest of all humanity is more important and closer to attainment than ever before.

Author : Bethany Moreton
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674256468
Total Pages : 396 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book To Serve God and Wal-Mart written by Bethany Moreton and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-07 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades after World War II, evangelical Christianity nourished America’s devotion to free markets, free trade, and free enterprise. The history of Wal-Mart uncovers a complex network that united Sun Belt entrepreneurs, evangelical employees, Christian business students, overseas missionaries, and free-market activists. Through the stories of people linked by the world’s largest corporation, Bethany Moreton shows how a Christian service ethos powered capitalism at home and abroad. While industrial America was built by and for the urban North, rural Southerners comprised much of the labor, management, and consumers in the postwar service sector that raised the Sun Belt to national influence. These newcomers to the economic stage put down the plough to take up the bar-code scanner without ever passing through the assembly line. Industrial culture had been urban, modernist, sometimes radical, often Catholic and Jewish, and self-consciously international. Post-industrial culture, in contrast, spoke of Jesus with a drawl and of unions with a sneer, sang about Momma and the flag, and preached salvation in this world and the next. This extraordinary biography of Wal-Mart’s world shows how a Christian pro-business movement grew from the bottom up as well as the top down, bolstering an economic vision that sanctifies corporate globalization. The author has assigned her royalties and subsidiary earnings to Interfaith Worker Justice (www.iwj.org) and its local affiliate in Athens, GA, the Economic Justice Coalition (www.econjustice.org).

Author : W. Paul Cockshott
Publisher : Spokesman Books
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.47/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Towards a New Socialism written by W. Paul Cockshott and published by Spokesman Books. This book was released on 1993 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Everest Media,
Publisher : Everest Media LLC
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 34 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Summary of Leigh Phillips & Michal Rozworski's The People's Republic of Walmart written by Everest Media, and published by Everest Media LLC. This book was released on 2022-05-25T22:59:00Z with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 While we do not defend Walmart, we do admire the company’s efficiency and logistical genius. #2 The free market is not the only way to allocate resources. democratic planning, while not perfect, is better than free market capitalism. There are many overlap between the set of all goods and services that are useful to humanity and the set of all goods and services that are profitable. #3 The same principle applies to fossil fuels, which were not produced because they are harmful to the environment. However, as long as governments do not intervene and build out the clean electricity infrastructure needed to replace them, the market will continue to produce them. #4 Antibiotics are successful if they kill off an infection, but they are not profitable enough for pharmaceutical companies to continue developing them. Thus, it is long-term therapy that drives interest in drug development.

Author : Micah Uetricht
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1781683255
Total Pages : 145 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Strike for America written by Micah Uetricht and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2014-03-11 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chicago Teachers Union strike was the most important domestic labor struggle so far this century—and perhaps for the last forty years—and the strongest challenge to the conservative agenda for restructuring education, which advocates for more charter schools and tying teacher salaries to standardized testing, among other changes. In 2012, Chicago teachers built a grassroots movement through education and engagement of an entire union membership, taking militant action in the face of enormous structural barriers and a hostile Democratic Party leadership. The teachers won massive concessions from the city and have become a new model for school reform led by teachers themselves, rather than by billionaires. Strike for America is the story of this movement, and how it has become the defining struggle for the labor movement today.

Author : Adam Reich
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 023154782X
Total Pages : 418 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Working for Respect written by Adam Reich and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-24 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walmart is the largest employer in the world. It encompasses nearly 1 percent of the entire American workforce—young adults, parents, formerly incarcerated people, retirees. Walmart also presents one possible future of work—Walmartism—in which the arbitrary authority of managers mixes with a hyperrationalized, centrally controlled bureaucracy in ways that curtail workers’ ability to control their working conditions and their lives. In Working for Respect, Adam Reich and Peter Bearman examine how workers make sense of their jobs at places like Walmart in order to consider the nature of contemporary low-wage work, as well as the obstacles and opportunities such workplaces present as sites of struggle for social and economic justice. They describe the life experiences that lead workers to Walmart and analyze the dynamics of the shop floor. As a part of the project, Reich and Bearman matched student activists with a nascent association of current and former Walmart associates: the Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart). They follow the efforts of this new partnership, considering the formation of collective identity and the relationship between social ties and social change. They show why traditional unions have been unable to organize service-sector workers in places like Walmart and offer provocative suggestions for new strategies and directions. Drawing on a wide array of methods, including participant-observation, oral history, big data, and the analysis of social networks, Working for Respect is a sophisticated reconsideration of the modern workplace that makes important contributions to debates on labor and inequality and the centrality of the experience of work in a fair economy.