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I think both Louis and Clay make excellent and are not contradictory. I think the same can be said of any Big Box/On line store as it relates to small town America (or anywhere for that matter). Amazon didn't start this. Barne's and Nobel did. Shortly after swallowing NYC based Marboro Books, it expanded nationally. Both had large brick-and-mortar stores in NYC. B&N was a 'cool' place to stop on lower 5th avenue as it was "ginormous" and had 'everything'. It was a real NY institution, like the Strand, for different reasons, is today. B&N, simply by being a big box book store, put out *thousands* of independent book sellers around the U.S. Those that remain either are niche genre booksellers (sci-fi, antique, etc) or have very, very loyal customer bases. Now Amazon is doing to B&N what B&N did to Dalton (smaller book chains) and the independents. I suppose others such as bookfinders.com and abebooks.com, by offering rarer books, are doing the same thing. But I want to focus on Clay's point. I think he's 100% right. And this harkens back to Andy Pollack's most excellent set of essays on something called "B2B" software, or "Business to business" software that allows manufacturing companies to completely remove the human element from production decisions and inventory/parts control, from primary processing to sales/distribution to the user/customer. Andy noted (10 or more years ago??) that B2B allows for the "software basis for socialism". I agreed with him then and I do so again now, in light of Clay's comments about the 'model' for online distribution. When we talk about the "administration of production and distribution" under socialism, the various models that are set up by capitalism today, such as Amazon and, brick-and-mortar big box stores like Home Depot and Costco show the vast efficiencies in that can be achieved by lowering the labor power value in this distribution. Using my own family's shopping habits I can even see how instead of being competitors doesn't necessarily mean the demise of one form of distribution over another but allows choice (something that is hardly ever mentioned in books on socialism except in the last chapters of Mandel's Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory). We live in a suburb of San Francisco. We live about 3 miles from every big box store imaginable, plus Trader Joe's and SF's Alemeny Farmers Market. We shop at all 3 depending on what we want. For bulk items or expensive tools, we go to a big box store like Loews or Costco. For better quality *processed* foods we go to Trader Joe's and for really good produce we go to the Farmers Market or the local workers Co-op, Rainbow Grocery. We also go to the local Ace Hardware franchise for smaller items in that vein. Under socialism there is simply no reason that any of these distribution forms would have to disappear. B2B software could be used even in the smaller mom and pop brick-and-mortar stores as well as the big online stores or box stores. B2B is used by Amazon and B&N's online store, in fact their whole business model is organized around B2B. So can socialisms. The *tools* exist to vastly increase efficiency and lower costs. David ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
