[...] While Walmart offers itself (to employees, to consumers, to investors) as a shining example of security, it is, ironically, both benefiting from and driving a global paradigm whose ultimate effects are increased insecurity and precariousness. And it is here that we might look to the overarching cultural politics of Walmart’s idiom, a circuit within which capital is accumulated by externalizing insecurities and, conversely, security itself (or its simulacrum) is commodified. Recent and ongoing efforts to tame or scold Walmart for its hypocrisy or excesses will not and cannot answer the deeper, more paradigmatic question the firm’s success poses. Efforts to improve its working conditions or environmental behaviour, or to pass bylaws prohibiting its growth, will meet with only limited success. Should they be able to overcome the firm, its allies and the powerful lobbyists it employs (Lichtblau 2012), they can only hope to constrain the firm’s adaptability to fluctuating market signals, allowing another more efficient and voracious retailer, more adept at securitization, to come to the fore. Without the overturning of the paradigm of securitization as a whole, a paradigm that stretches from Bentonville to Wall Street to the Pentagon, Walmart will continue to be symptomatic of deeper problems, and efforts to save society from it merely palliative.

As such, Walmart offers an instructive case for cultural critics. To the extent that the ongoing financial crisis is both deeply rooted in and productive of a culture of insecurity, the politics of securitization are likely only to intensify through the emerging “age of austerity.” Certainly, right-wing and neoliberal forces have long leveraged the everyday material insecurities of capitalism into the political capital necessary to pursue increased military budgets, new policing and surveillance techniques, and increased corporate “freedoms” (Haiven 2014, 28–73). What the case of Walmart can teach us is that, in the financialized economy, the line between ideology and material relations is thinner than ever. In an age when we are all instructed to minimize risk and maximize the opportunities for future profitability, when securitization has become (among) the key cultural imperatives of capitalism, we cannot simply dismiss consumers’ “partnerships” with Walmart as the result of false consciousness or ideological confusion. Walmart offers itself as an ally of the sorts of consuming/investing securitized subjects it helps create. This is why efforts that limit themselves to revealing Walmart’s (many) evils will have only limited success. In order to confront and overcome securitizing capitalism, cultural critics and their allies will need to offer a vision of a plausible future that provides those things that securitization falsely promises.