In a city where winter temperatures drop well below freezing and some 39,000 people spend their nights in homeless shelters, Wal-Mart and H&M have been destroying and dumping perfectly good clothing that they could not sell.
The despicable and wasteful practice carried out by the two major chains in New York City was publicized in the About column of the Jan. 6 issue of the New York Times after graduate student Cynthia Magnus brought it to the newspaper’s attention. Magnus discovered the clothing discarded in trash bags, with virtually all of the garments intentionally slashed so that they would be rendered useless.
Both Wal-Mart and H&M representatives told the New York Times that their policy is to donate unsold clothing, and that the incidents did not reflect “normal practice.”
But, in fact, destruction of unsold goods is indeed a normal practice throughout the entire for-profit production system. Clothing is destroyed. Crops are burned. Empty buildings are left to decay. All this even as people go cold, hungry and homeless.
In a rational economic system, these abominable practices would never take place. But capitalism is not a rational system.
Under capitalism, production is entirely driven by the search for maximum profits—a pursuit that pits capitalist enterprises against each other, relentlessly seeking to outproduce and outsell their competitors. The anarchy of capitalist production eventually results in more being produced than can be sold for a profit.
Such an abundance of goods would be a blessing were all this production geared toward providing the necessities of life to human beings—as it would be in a socialist system. Under capitalism, the absence of a profit opportunity instead leads to the slashing of production, the idling of factories, the halting of construction, the shuttering of retail stores and the firing of workers.
These recurring crises of overproduction are an inherent feature of capitalism. By the time they play themselves out, untold suffering has been wrought upon poor and working-class people. Bloated inventories of unsold goods, quite often, are destroyed.
This destruction still takes place on a smaller scale even in the absence of a widespread crisis, as exemplified by the scrapping of perfectly good clothing by retailers to clear out unsold inventory.
Whether those goods are needed is immaterial in the absence of profits; the needs of human beings are not factored in the logic of capitalist production and distribution. That alone should suffice to indict and condemn the continued existence of capitalism as a crime against humanity.
It is high time that the rule of private capital and the anarchy of for-profit production be abolished, and be replaced with a planned economic system where the interests of a wealthy few no longer trump the interests of the many.
