This post was originally going to be titled "Why the FUCK would you be against looting", but I figured since I'm trying to talk to libs (if there's any on this site, jokes apart), maybe I should be a little more understanding. Anyway:

Disclaimer: I'm not encouraging anyone to do illegal shit, except in Minecraft of course. Do whatever you want with what you hopefully learn from this post.

Now, I get it you've probably been conditioned to think "stealing is bad", we all have. But, not exactly, actually.

"Stealing" in the mainstream meaning of the term, almost always defines either someone shoplifting from a supermarket, a burglar stealing shit from your house or someone on a motorbike snatching your purse in the streets. Let's take a look at the actors of each cases:

In the first one, the thief is an individual like you and I ; not a crazy rich person, and probably someone poor enough to risk their freedom in order to eat or make their kids happy (not trying to say you shouldn't feel upset if someone ever steals your shit. Shit sucks of course). In the second and third cases, it's, very often, a working class person stealing from another working class person (rich people are harder to reach ofc). In these cases as well, it is the idea of someone desperate enough to risk going to jail in order to make some bucks. I will talk about how the second and third cases are more condemnable than the first one even if more understanding later. For now let's focus on the semantics.

All of these examples refer to a case of active stealing: someone acts out of their way to acquire someone else's property. However in today's society, the most important, and most revolting cases of stealing are ones of passive stealing. (See my other post about physical and social violence to get a slightly better grasp on where I'm heading here).

When you work, you produce something, wether it be goods or services; and this something will then be bought for a sum of money; hence when you work, you produce value. And when you work an employed job, where you are entitled to a salary (which is close to 100% of what us folks do), you do not actually receive the fruits of your production as a salary. The money you receive is basically what your employer is ready to pay you so that you can survive to come to work another day. If you're in charge of more important stuff in the company you're working in, your wage will probably be higher, since your employer will want to have you on their side. But regardless, you NEVER get the fruits of your labor. Read Marx's Wage Labour and Capital if you're interested in learning more about what I just said). This right here is theft, wage theft: not only is your wage not related to what you produce, but it's not even equal to the value you've been producing. Here's an interesting video about the topic. It's a very educative piece that you should definitely watch wether you're already a leftist or not.

So, where does the rest of the value you've produced go? To your employer. And more precisely, to the shareholders, to the people who own the equipment, building, products and everything else you've used and has hosted you to produce value. Basically, the stuff used to produce is called capital, hence why capital owners are called capitalists; Elon Musk is a capitalist, Bill Gates is a capitalist, your neoliberal cousin who thinks people should die for corporate profit is not (and obviously Karl Marx was not a capitalist, Elon Musk doesn't know whay that word even means lol). Part of it is re-invested in the production (buying better machines, more cost efficient products), but most of it goes to shareholders' profit ; to sum up: most of the value you produce goes to someone else's pocket.

This theft, right here, is the reason some people such as Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates are as rich. Stealing the value you produce.

So to go back to the main point of this post, if you're pissed when some poor people steal shit in order to survive, you should be even more pissed when already rich people steal actual production value from people who work hard without doing anything except owning shit. Oh sure you might say "CEOs and business men actually work a lot!". Sure. Depends what you call working. If it's watching a stock exchange graph all day long, I'm pretty sure it's way less exhausting than what Amazon workers go through (and doing this doesn't actually produce any value anyway). Regardless, no amount of actual work can earn you a fucking billion dollars, let alone several.

Wage theft is not even the most blatant kind of theft by rich people. I.e fiscal fraud, billionaires refusing to pay taxes for the benefit of the community and rich people stealing from public funds.

So, why shouldn't you be against shoplifting or looting? Well, unlike stealing from another poor person, in this case, the only ones to potentially lose money are a bunch of already rich af shareholders, who got rich by stealing the value you produce when working.

Plus, the argument of "looting" is almost always used as a way to dismiss protesters demands and deny their legitimacy, but do not be fooled. Fox News and MSNBC (and even CNN lmao let's not kid ourselves) will always find a way to make protesters look bad, by either lying or focusing their news reports on one even of the protests, like the burning of a trash bin, instead of literally everything else. Why? Because they are not your allies. As people of the working class (and whether you want it or not), mainstream medias serve the interest of big corporations and of the Status Quo, thus, they are not comitted to serving your interests.

So fuck this. You should not feel like you got anything to prove to the people in suits you see on TV, to Trump, to Biden or anyone else who works in politics. You do not want their approval, because these people are not your allies. A bunch of people want to steal shit from Walmart? Let them. If Walmart decides to fire their employees after this, that's Walmart's fault. Walmart isn't firing the employees of one of their looted shops because they feel like these employees are responsible, they're doing this in order to make an example of these employees, and to make you feel like the protesters' and looters' action are wrong. Because, if at the end of the day, the only one hurt is Walmart's board of shareholders, people may actually stop caring about rich people's property being destroyed. Firing your staff after your shop has been looted is an act of class warfare. Be mad at Walmart, not at protesters or looters.

Okay, so this was long as fuck and went in too many different directions, but I hope I did get the point accross. Have a nice Monday and support the folks in Chicago's streets. If I forgot anything feel free to leave a comment scolding me.

  • BASED_BALL [none/use name]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence. What is a policeman? He is the active servant of the commodity, the man in complete submission to the commodity, whose job it is to ensure that a given product of human labor remains a commodity, with the magical property of having to be paid for, instead of becoming a mere refrigerator or rifle — a passive, inanimate object, subject to anyone who comes along to make use of it. In rejecting the humiliation of being subject to police, black people are at the same time rejecting the humiliation of being subject to commodities.

    Guy Debord, The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy, 1965

      • Phish [he/him, any]
        ·
        4 years ago

        "these people are scumbags taking advantage of the situation. It has nothing to do with social justice! We're gonna be the next Detroit!!!"

        City subs are all fucking trash.

  • Laika [none/use name]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    I literally cannot perceive of an order of operations that would lead to somebody earnestly posting on here while being against looting.

    But yeah. I think it's pretty cut and dry. Gentrification is when you flood a community with wealth in order to price out its inhabitants and colonize the space. THE best way to counter that is to either redistribute or destroy that wealth.

    • cummunist [he/him,they/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      4 years ago

      wouf wouf how's space

      Edit: now that my brain managed to understand your comment: hopefully some libs do lurk here, even if not post.

  • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Whenever a lib or chud is critical of looting, just post the MLK Jr speech below, I've done it on reddit a few times. You will break their brains and get smoothbrains saying that he was wrong, or that you are somehow taking him out of context somehow, because all they know is the whitewashed version of MLK Jr and his history.

    Urban riots must now be recognized as durable social phenomena. They may be deplored, but they are there and should be understood. Urban riots are a special form of violence. They are not insurrections. The rioters are not seeking to seize territory or to attain control of institutions. They are mainly intended to shock the white community. They are a distorted form of social protest.

    The looting which is their principal feature serves many functions. It enables the most enraged and deprived Negro to take hold of consumer goods with the ease the white man does by using his purse. Often the Negro does not even want what he takes; he wants the experience of taking. But most of all, alienated from society and knowing that this society cherishes property above people, he is shocking it by abusing property rights.

    There are thus elements of emotional catharsis in the violent act. This may explain why most cities in which riots have occurred have not had a repetition, even though the causative conditions remain. It is also noteworthy that the amount of physical harm done to white people other than police is infinitesimal and in Detroit whites and Negroes looted in unity.

    A profound judgment of today's riots was expressed by Victor Hugo a century ago. He said, 'If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.'

    The policymakers of the white society have caused the darkness; they create discrimination; they structured slums; and they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society. When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also demand that the white man abide by law in the ghettos .

    Day-in and day-out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; and he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions for civic services. The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society; Negroes live in them but do not make them any more than a prisoner makes a prison.

    Let us say boldly that if the violations of law by the white man in the slums over the years were calculated and compared with the law-breaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man. These are often difficult things to say but I have come to see more and more that it is necessary to utter the truth in order to deal with the great problems that we face in our society.

    • Nagarjuna [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Can you link the original? I want to compare and contrast it to the DeBord essay where he argues the Watts riots were revolutionary.

      • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
        ·
        4 years ago

        As far as I know that is the full part of the speech about rioting, if you want the entire speech here it is (I think) https://www.apa.org/monitor/features/king-challenge

  • cardamomo [none/use name]
    ·
    4 years ago

    hot take: shoplifting is the only possible form of ethical consumption under capitalism

  • xiaoping_showdown [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Good effort post.

    One of the main barriers to fixing libs understanding of looting is the way it is presented by media. Of course, those who loot are always presented as "thugs", "opportunists", "outside provocateurs", etc. whereas the victims of civil asset forfeiture are generally ignored or assumed to be guilty a priori.

    But more importantly, there are the specific cases of looting that they choose to publicize. News companies know that people are less willing to see companies like Walmart or Target as sympathetic victims, so they will tend to emphasize smaller "mom-and-pop" stores. This appeals to the "small business-owners" and those who aspire to be small business owners, who see themselves as just trying to "make it" in this system while following the rules. They are thus viewed more sympathetically.

    The fact that small businesses are often at least as exploitative as big businesses is ignored or rationalized. Employees of such businesses internalize this rationalization—they fear not only being fired, but also having their employer go out of business—which may lead to more wage violations or fewer of them being reported.

    Thus, you are fighting against the public conceptions of looting and who the victims of looting are.

  • quartz242 [she/her]M
    ·
    4 years ago

    Good post, a point I've heard is that when the state has limited all forms of expessing the anger, disgust and indignation at the current state many working class people have the only thing left is to use the protest and reclamation of goods from Walmart and etc. As a way of making themselves seen and heard.

    Thanks.comrade

  • DecolonizeCatan [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Great post!

    In my experience, the hard part in reaching liberals on the "wage labor is theft" argument is that liberals inherently see wage labor as voluntary, and so they respond with something like: "Well, if the workers feel they are being exploited, then they shouldn't have signed the contract with their employer in the first place. How can it be theft if they agreed to their wages?"

    My response to that is along the lines of "Well, capitalism requires exploitation in order to exist. If all workers were able to *voluntarily * band together and join a union that could then voluntarily negotiate high enough wages to cover the value the workers produce, the economy would collapse overnight. The more capitalism can collectively suppress wages towards subsistence level, the healthier it is as a system. The more labor can collectively bargain for higher wages, the weaker and more stagnant/precarious the system becomes."

    Basically, they believe that wage labor is ethical because it's voluntary. It's very hard to change someone's ethical beliefs, especially by arguing for a different set of ethics, which is essentially what the "wage labor is theft" argument is doing. So when I reach out to liberals, I try a dialectic argument instead of an ethical argument, where I assume their ethics and try to show how capitalism contradicts them. If capitalism was truly voluntary, it would collapse. If capitalism works, then it can't be truly voluntary. That cuts through all the complicated ethical philosophy crap, and they are either forced to change their ethics or accept that capitalism is unethical.

    • penguin_von_doom [she/her]
      ·
      edit-2
      4 years ago

      Basically, they believe that wage labor is ethical because it’s voluntary

      I've been trying to argue with some free market type of people (mostly cause they're old friends) and they simply cant grasp that no, it actually isn't voluntary, and that no, most people dont have the chance or possibility to quit and go find a better job.

      • DecolonizeCatan [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        I have friends like that too, and pointing out that wage labor is involuntary almost never works. In my experience, I have to tacitly agree with them that wage labor is voluntary--that the negotiation between worker-capitalist is a mutually beneficial agreement. Then I try and apply their exact same logic to worker-worker relationships, and show that if workers voluntarily worked together in a mutually beneficial way that it would destroy the economy. Capitalism can only survive by actively suppressing the ability of workers to work together in their own self-interest. The only voluntarism permitted in capitalism is between worker-capitalist and capitalist-capitalist, while worker-worker voluntarism on the other hand is actively suppressed by every lever of power available to capital.

    • d_cagno [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      "There is here, therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges. Between equal rights force decides. Hence it is that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e. the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e. the working-class."

    • trax [none/use name]
      ·
      4 years ago

      choosing to work OR die is technically a choice, in the most specious sense of the word. that is, i volunteer to pick the option that isn't literally starve, be homeless, or be in destitution until my body gives out. but this forced choice is much closer to coercion than the autonomy and liberty required of an active choice. capitalism holds a gun to our head, commands us to work, then goes "SEE? THEY LOVEEEE IT. THEY CHOSE IT." it's a situation most people would object to and say no, obviously the guy didn't volunteer, he was clearly victimized and agreed under duress. so ya fuck the choice discourse, the accurate term is wage slavery

  • trax [none/use name]
    ·
    4 years ago

    you can't be 'violent' towards inanimate insentient buildings. violence implies the infliction of a mental, psychic, or physical toll of some kind, things buildings cannot experience. you can't be violent towards property for the same reason. if we expand violence to represent concepts like looting (whenever feds say protestors are acting violently towards a court house, or a cnn office), we have to go further back in history to understand how the very notion of 'looting' itself cannot exist outside the framework of a private property regime, that sutures property relations into all objects and commons, which is itself violent and should be done away with. for looting as an idea to gain coherence, it must assumes private property relations are the essential and immutable good, which itself relies on a prior obliteration of indigenous life, the enclosure of and exclusion from the commons, etc

  • _else [she/her,they/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    good post, want to make this copypasta, but:

    tie up your grammar, point out that collective punishment (explain the concept) is technically against the geneva conventions, and literally illegal to do to PRISONERS OF WAR who recently SHOT GUNS AT YOU WITH INTENT TO KILL YOU.

    • cummunist [he/him,they/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      4 years ago

      Sorry I'm not a native English speaker. Could you point out the most important mistakes I made?

      • _else [she/her,they/them]
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        4 years ago

        uh... there are a lot of little awkward bits, like the first 'okay but no' is a little unclear. I might go with "except we're not." or "except we're not. not really.". a lot of this. it doesn't immediately out you as a second language speaker (god I wish I was that good at any of my second languages), but it is sometimes ambiguous where I wouldn't expect it to be. do you want me to just rewrite it?

        • cummunist [he/him,they/them]
          hexagon
          ·
          4 years ago

          Eh, nah I think I'm good. I'll try to proofread myself more in the future. I don't do that nearly enough, that's my main flaw when it comes to writing.

  • SSJBlueStalin [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    I want to contribute in this thread but your effort post is already better than anything I could say so i have nothing of value to add

    • cummunist [he/him,they/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      4 years ago

      Nah lol my writing is terrible. Just read my post again and surely you'll find stuff that you can clarify or explain way better than I did