• FnordPrefect [comrade/them, he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      This reminds me of a book called The People's Republic of Wal-Mart. In particular this excerpt about when SEARS decided to run its internal operations as a competitive free market is pretty eye-opening

      (TLDR stonks-down)

      • SteamedHamberder [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        I think Richard-D-Wolff had an episode about SEARS: essentially they had departments competing with each other with advertising as the reward. Power tools ended up as the cover for the Mother’s Day newspaper insert.

    • EnsignRedshirt [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Two folks have already suggested “People’s Republic of Wal-Mart”, which is defintiely what was on my mind when I wrote this post and is a much more fulsome analysis of this specific subject, but if this is interesting to you as an angle for viewing the world, I highly recommend the book “Thinking in Systems: A Primer” by Donella Meadows. It’s not an explicitly socialist text, but it’s a concise and very accessible introductory work on systems thinking, and it puts a lot of the key concepts in place to think about the world in these terms.