I get what the guy in OP’s pic is saying, but realistically the ones who are affected the most are small local businesses. If we loot stuff from big box retail stores like Target or WalMart, they can easily absorb the losses and they don’t really give a shit either - they’d most likely just consider it shrinkage. You steal the same kind of stuff from a small independent convenience store, and suddenly the owner has a very real chance of being forced to close down the store, even if it’s a local chain. And even if you looted exclusively from big box retailers or other big name corporations, you’re still not affecting the guys at the top because they make fuckloads of money elsewhere, and last I saw, you can’t actually steal from Amazon unless you’re fine with being a douche and stealing other people’s packages.
Looting doesn’t really do anything. Is it a form of protest? Sure, I can see the argument. Is it an effective form of protest? Fuuuuuuck no.
EDIT: morer clearer message
Didn’t this happen to a Walmart in a small town? The Walmart took over all the small business and employed most of them, so when they pulled out of the area because of theft it took all the remaining jobs away?
I found this article but it’s daily mail and doesn’t talk in depth about it.
I think this might be it? However it doesn’t comment on loss of local jobs…
And even then, you’re still not affecting the guys at the top because they make fuckloads of money elsewhere
Also, they’ve already made their money off of that convenience store, since the store will have already purchased said stolen product.
You loot the Walmart, it shuts down, a food desert starts, humans start to starve.
Or, gasp, big government invests some local taxpayer cash to build a grocery store that serves the community.
You know that the town existed before Walmart, right?
You know that Walmart crushed the small mom and pop shops that existed before Walmart?
You know that Walmart is a parasite?
I am aware it is a parasite.
I am also aware that after it shuts down because of crime, investors won’t be in a rush to start up another store. Leaving everybody in a small town fucked.
I am also trying to highlight that one Republican town fixed the problem by building a government owned grocery store after their dollar tree shut down.
Playing into looting as a means to an end for change we want to see on the left is a political dead end. I don’t care if Walmart gets robbed, neither does Walmart, their insurance may care, but Walmart and businesses like it are part of the biggest lobbying groups for increased police presence and these events are a gift to their narrative.
It’s fine to say I don’t care about retail theft on capital owners that rob workers every day. It’s a whole other thing to say this is how we go about change as a movement and that we actively support and encourage it. Just like abortions, the edge cases that barely happen are the only ones that will be talked about endlessly in media and if we’re simultaneously cheering on the more common cases where the “victim” is an oil baron it’s not a good look. Nuance ain’t America’s strongsuit.
Walmart and businesses like it are part of the biggest lobbying groups for increased police presence and these events are a gift to their narrative.
That’s kind of an argument you could make against any political activism, though. The civil rights marches were framed as riots in the media of their time, and obviously, they got at least some of what they were looking for, in the end, so their tactics were successful. Arguments about optics never really strike me as supremely convincing. They don’t argue about the merit of the act in general, they argue about the aesthetics of it, which is much more fraught, and theoretical, and doesn’t actually really have to do with the thing itself. I also don’t really find this whole like, strategic nihilism to be a convincing counterargument either. “oh, well, walmart as a whole won’t be toppled by any actions we take on the ground, our energy would be better spent doing something else”, and then you ask “what else” and people just kind of gesture in the direction of a nonprofit, or local politics, or something to that effect. That’s not to say those more organized forms of activism don’t have their place, but if we were just relying on easily corporate captured nonprofits and easily corruptible local politics for activism, we’d also be fucked.
Both things, to me, would seem to have their role. They are all mutually beneficial to one another in terms of political leverage.
To me, it undermines the message of people demanding equality when their main goal seems to be stealing shit from people just like them. When someone puts up signs begging not to be looted because they can’t afford repairs, you’re not a fucking hero or a revolutionary. You’re a piece of shit and you create enemies to your movement.
They would have more of a legitimate sounding argument if they just took food from stores and then gave it to food banks or something. When it is done to get free TVs (and people do take stuff like that) it rather undermines the message.
It’d be more legitimate sounding if yall stop pretending that the electronic section gets ravaged while grocery goes completely untouched. “Fuck the 237 people who grabbed some beef and diapers, run the footage of 4 people with tvs on loop for 2 years”
I have no idea what video footage you’re referring to, I’m talking about the people that actually said they did that, you know the people who bragged about it on Twitter and Facebook because they’re morons.
I mean, anyone can put up that sign, though, that doesn’t really mean it really has any bearing on reality.
I also don’t really think that “whether or not they can afford repairs or insurance” is on the foremost mind of looters. Well, foremost, I would think “hey this is easy money” for the vast majority, or “hey fuck everything”, maybe,
But I would also think that, in terms of political activism, you would want to target businesses which aren’t equitable, and which are leeching things out of the community. Gentrified businesses, businesses which are just kind of, external to the community, businesses where the owner is just a real piece of shit, stuff like that, I think, would be more in the realm of political activism. You know, if you’re doing any of that, then you would more likely want to target businesses that don’t have insurance or can afford repairs, actually, because you’d be more likely to get those businesses shut down, or driven out of the community.
Doesn’t looting only really affects the small shops and the people working at the shops? I don’t imagine big corpos losing their shit over one or two stores burned. Drop in the sea for them. Boycott at a massive scale would be more effective to bring those fuckers down, easier said than done though.
Looting or boycotts, you need a certain amount of people dedicated to the cause to make corpos sweat. Sporadic actions by varying groups for different reasons is a mild inconvenience and achieves little. Not to say we shouldn’t be doing both, we absolutely should, but it needs to be organized and I don’t think there’s a large enough political body that would adopt these tactics yet.
I’d also like to add the looting small shops for no reason other than fuck capitalism isn’t a great message. If the owner was a dick then go for it and make it known why. Large chains aren’t going to punish employees for shoplifting, at least there hasn’t been any real evidence to support that. They threaten to close stores all the time due to “crime” but it’s never once panned out to be the real reason if they do wind up closing a store. I wouldn’t worry about the employees, it’s a very slim chance that they’ll see any punishment for it and even then, that could be used as a radicalizing force to bring more people into the movement
Ah yes, destroying grandpa’s liquor store is really going to stick it to Elon Musk.
I believe it meant tongue in cheek but it made me laugh. I’m against theft but there is a big difference between stealing from Walmart and stealing from a local small business. Maybe I’m a hypocrite but I hate large chains like Walmart. I’m old. I remember pharmacies owned and run by pharmacist. They were part of the community and not just draining money from the community.
We had downtowns filled with local shops. Yes things were more expensive but I’m ok with that. The quality of life was much better.
BooHoo, Grandpa got rich selling addictive poison, he is still a part of the bourgeoisie and can get bent.
So everybody who runs a mom and pop shop or runs their own small little independent store is now part of the bourgeoisie and elite like Elongated Muskrat and Jeffrey Bezos?
Eh… It depends on how you apply the definition to modern times. As literally defined: yes. They are business owners and merchants.
However, realistically they are much, much closer to the proletariot as these people are also exploited by the Musks and Bezoses and there isn’t really much of a middle class anymore. On top of this they don’t hold any actual power politically which is an important part of being in the bourgeoisie.
This is how i understand it all, anyway. Feel free to correct me.
