We can’t burn our way to a better Walmart

The case of the Veterans Order is more evidence that lone wolf vigilantism is a poor substitute for strategic battles against capital.

It’s an uncomfortable truth, one that’s voiced rather frequently on the Internet in recent years: The Unabomber’s manifesto made some salient points about society and technology.

As adults, we can hold two opposing ideas in our minds at the same time. It’s possible to admit that violent lone-wolf actors like Ted Kaczynski can harbor some sound political ideas while also having awful and counterproductive methods of promoting them. 

So it goes with the wayward anti-capitalist Walmart arsonists who call themselves “The Veterans Order.” Last month, a federal grand jury in Alabama charged five men with a conspiracy to maliciously destroy stores by fire after they were arrested for setting a series of blazes in four Walmart over two weeks last summer. The quintet of Kearney, Nebraska natives allegedly set fires inside four Gulf Coast area Walmarts by dousing clothing racks with lighter fluid and setting merchandise ablaze. The group then sent local media outlets a document, marked with a wax seal, that the FBI refers to as “The Walmart Manifesto.”

The plan as stated was to give Walmart 48 hours to publicly acknowledge and fulfill a wide range of demands or else face future destruction of property. The Veterans Order insisted that they weren’t intending to harm anything but Wal-Mart’s bottom line, enough that the retail giant’s corporate owners would concede to their ultimatum. The letter has seven demands, most of which admittedly sound ripped from a rough draft of a Bernie Sanders speech.

“Wal-Mart is the largest Fortune 500 company in the United States, yet they pay its employees the lowest wages among its peers,” reads the first demand. “It’s time for Wal-Mart to pay their workers a fair wage. Wal-Mart must increase their pay of every employee to $18 an hour regardless of work status, full or part-time.”

The six other requests include free healthcare, six months of parental leave for Walmart’s workers, and a $187,000 salary cap for the company’s CEO. In addition, Walmart would have to start manufacturing all of its goods in America, serve 900 free and healthy meals to families in poverty, and adopt a climate-friendly plan to make the business carbon-neutral over the course of a decade.

It’s difficult to argue with the moral logic of these demands or The Veterans Order’s claim that Walmart is “the largest soul-sucking capitalist business in our country.” According to the FBI, the group also had manifestos ready to target Amazon and Wells Fargo as well, corporations that also rank high on the soul-sucking list. 

But clearly, The Veterans Order’s strategy to burn their way to a kinder, gentler Walmart was doomed from the start. Creating the conditions for a more humane version of corporate capitalism isn’t just a moral question, it’s also a tactical one. As we’ve seen from recent labor battles—such as the strike at John Deere and Kellogg’s—the best way to win concessions from bosses is convincing rank-and-file workers to demand it and using the threat of withholding their labor as leverage. It’s hard—sometimes futile—work but there are no worthwhile shortcuts.

The Walmart arsonists weren’t a cadre representing a mass movement of workers, they’re a tiny ragtag bunch who’ve declared a personal war on a mega-corporation. In that, they have a lot in common with the quixotic aims of the Unabomber and the Weather Underground, the ‘60s radicals who abandoned class struggle and tried and failed to strategically bomb America into a political transformation instead. It’s an alienating tactic that often leads to severe blowback and backlash—even among those of us sympathetic with the aims. That’s true of some of the George Floyd racial justice protests in 2020 as well. Those trying to burn their way, or tear down statues of Abraham Lincoln, in the name of equality found a less sympathetic public.

Ultimately, the Veterans Order’s manifesto is full of reasonable ideas about corporate malfeasance distributed very unreasonably. And their efforts seem all for naught. Even if Walmart didn’t comply with their demands, they expressed hope that their guerilla campaign would be disseminated by the media, which would in turn “bring these issues to the forefront of the American people’s minds.”

But the few that have read their case against Walmart are FBI agents and prosecutors seeking an indictment. Though you can also read it here.