-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan. 4/11, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
Everything is done for profit under capitalism. So why should Kwanzaa, Christmas and Hanukkah be exceptions?
The assembled magi of Wall Street are howling about their rotten shopping season. According to retail trade analysts, there were too many low-price sales and not enough profits.
In other words, people were able to purchase too many items at too cheap a price.
Yet these merchants have a deeper problem than just one bad December.
Take K-Mart. For months there have been rumors that this huge retail chain--with sales of $34 billion in 1994--would file for voluntary bankruptcy.
Already such outfits as Bradlees, Caldor and Jamesway have gone into such a "Chapter 11" bankruptcy. All these discount-store chains--like K-Mart--sell the vast majority of their goods to the working class.
That's their problem. Average real wages--that is, wages after accounting for inflation--have fallen 20 percent since 1973.
The real value of the federal minimum wage has fallen by more than 40 percent since 1968.
Who's going to buy all these stores' goods? It sure isn't going to be the clerks or warehouse workers who are lucky to make $6 per hour in these overwhelmingly non-union stores.
While K-Mart is in trouble, Gucci--a luxury retailer--had an 85 percent sales increase in July-September sales.
Few other statistics are a better reflection of the tremendous wealth piling up in the coffers of the few while working and poor people suffer.
"The nation is clearly overstored," Kurt Barnard told the New York Times (Dec. 25). Barnard publishes a retail-trade newsletter in New York.
Are there too many stores on 125th Street in Harlem, Mr. Barnard?
There's not one real department store on this main street of the most famous community in Black America. For so many goods, people have to leave Harlem in order to buy.
It's the same story around the country. Take Detroit.
It's been over a decade since the Dayton-Hudson corporation closed its flagship Hudson's department store on Woodward Avenue in downtown Detroit. This store was comparable in size to Macy's on 34th Street in Manhattan or Marshall Field's on State Street in Chicago.
The upshot is that many Detroiters--70 percent of whom are African Americans--have to travel outside that big city in order to shop.
Among the beneficiaries are the retailers of Dearborn, which is the headquarters of Ford Motors. Henry Ford founded Dearborn as a segregated suburb.
Even today this town--right next to Detroit--has few Black families among its 89,000 inhabitants. The Fords and their company fostered the political fortunes of the notoriously racist Hubbard family that ran Dearborn for years.
Dearborn has shopping malls. Detroit doesn't. So half of the retail sales in Dearborn are to Detroiters--the overwhelming number of whom are African Americans forced to spend their money in this racist town.
It's the big banks and insurance companies that make the lending decisions that lead to shopping malls being built in the suburbs.
One of the biggest of these malls--the "Mall of America," located in a Minneapolis suburb--is so big that rain actually forms inside.
Yet virtually all these malls have vacant stores. This is because there's no overall economic plan under capitalism.
When Barnard talks about there being too many stores, what he's really talking about is that there are not enough stores making a profit.
In other words, there's an "overproduction" of stores.
Overproduction is a problem that exists only in capitalist society. From a worker's point of view, it is an oxymoron. How can there be overproduction when people need so many things, from decent food to housing to all the services being cut back? Yet capitalism again and again develops toward overproduction, followed by a crisis and contraction of the economy.
Capitalism has vastly enlarged the means of production, but keeps them bottled up in private ownership. They can only be liberated when the working class takes them over and operates them to satisfy the needs of all.
This transition from production for the market and for profits to production for human needs requires a socialist revolution--a real uprising of the working class and all progressive people.
- END -
(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: ww@wwpublish.com. For subscription info send message to: ww-info@wwpublish.com.)