Walmart’s power operates through securitization linking financial risk management to surveillance
Evidence
Walmart is not merely a corporation or a brand, it is an assemblage of capitalist power that reproduces this power in the field of everyday life and is also reproduced by quotidian participation. I argued that Walmart’s cultural and material politics rely on a logic of securitization, a term that binds together, on the one hand, the way in which all aspects of life can increasingly be understood as financial assets and risks to be managed and, on the other, the increased militarization, surveillance, and policing germane to a high-risk financialized society. Walmart succeeds not only because it ruthlessly mobilizes speculative and security logics to perfect its global operations, but because it offers to its customers and workers the illusion of security in a precarious world. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 558
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines the key bridging term ‘securitization’ as joining financial risk-management with militarized policing and surveillance — exactly the mechanism the reader wants for the deWaard cultural argument.
- XREF: The ‘securitization’ double-meaning (financial asset/risk vs. militarized security) is the bridge to deWaard’s argument about finance colonizing culture and everyday life. — connects to: Securitization couples financial risk management with surveillance and militarized security. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 47; Walmart shapes workers and shoppers into financialized risk-managing subjects. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 47; Securitization converts uncertainty into quantifiable, tradeable risk and shapes daily life — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 248 (+11 more)
Broader Connections
- Walmart’s security serves capital reproduction, not human autonomy
#corroborates(0.95) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 560 - Surveillance is a foundational mechanism in converting investment into profit.
#expands(0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 162 - Surveillance capitalism’s prediction imperative modifies behavior using secret means beyond awareness.
#corroborates(0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 612