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

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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.

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.

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

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.

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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

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.

add me to that fbi watch list too thanks

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

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Looting the gucci to fund my juche

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.

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