People Twitter

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

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.

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.

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.

Ah yes, destroying grandpa's liquor store is really going to stick it to Elon Musk.

It definetly doesn't help, if the small business corner shop owner gets looted. It just eliminates big corpos competition.

Maybe in an abstract way. I don't think looters are typically thinking about anything but stealing stuff for themselves. It's also bad optics, as the media always tries to conflate looters and people destroying random people's property with protestors to paint movements in a bad light.

No, the ultimate strike is asceticism and going without unnecessary shit.

Looting is buying into the idea that the shit has value but declaring that the people downstream in the supply chain don't deserve to make a living off that value.

Looting a store doesn't rob the producer of the product exploiting child labor in slavery conditions. They likely already got paid much earlier in the supply chain.

It's just taking money out of the pocket of the local reseller who now is out both the principle and markup of the goods. It's theft of distribution, not of production, and arguably provides a greater case for disintermediating the supply chain towards Amazon which is environmentally worse and likely worse for labor.

This is just rationalizing shitty behavior with pseudo-intellectual BS when really the 'ultimate' rejection of capitalism is reduction of consumption and communal support structures for necessities, not equal or even increased consumption while simultaneously stealing from one's local community.

I learned my lesson from Hurricane Katrina. Black people "loot." White people "find food."

Except they're always looting the wrong people, the victims are so far off that I don't doubt the theorists who say it's all false-flag psyops doing the organizing and directing useful idiots.

Loot Microsoft's, Google's, and Amazon's offices and data centers. They're at the root of a lot of this mess. Google controls the flow of information. There are next to no people at data centers and each graphics card in the AI training servers is worth many thousands of dollars, better than anything you'll get from a CVS.

Hell, loot an Amazon warehouse if you lack the imagination and need it to be something you can use at home.

Loot real estate holding company offices. Burn those down if you MUST burn anything down at all. Those are key culprits.

And don't forget about the people who rubber stamp all the evil systems.

The mom and pops and chain retail stores have nothing to do with it.

You can tell this is a 2020 post even without the time stamp.

This is crazy. Any given business isn't the one who "commodifies every aspect of living" even if that was a thing that really happened. Maybe you consider looting as a form of protest, maybe you don't, but it has absolutely nothing to do with hypocrisy from people acting as described.

All right but they're not looting rich districts (because those places are armed to the teeth), so realistically anybody who loots is only damaging infrastructure local to the disadvantaged.

If anything I think the majority of looting and arsons during protests are by counter-protestors, such as when Denis Molla staged a fire in 2020 before blaming it on BLM protestors. In fact, I doubt very many people even know that the George Floyd protests were statistically the most peaceful protests in US History, because of how easy it is to discredit those protests in the eyes of the public.

I SAW HER WHEN SHE CAME OUT SHE WAS GETTING SOME PAMPERS! -Brad

You know, I think looting maybe gets a bad rap. I think maybe stealing is actually cool. Reminds me of how people are chill with diogenes shitting on the sidewalk, but then as soon as someone does that in real life, they're gross and weird. Everyone is cool with robin hood, or some gentleman thief or rogue, but as soon as it happens in real life, everyone turns into the sheriff of nottingham's little armored men.

I would like to see the statistics on what percentage of post-looting walmarts stayed in the neighborhood, because I think it would be a pretty clear win if those walmarts left those neighborhoods. Worse in the short term, as jobs won't automatically get propped up, and even in some long terms you can see things turn into food deserts, ghettos, or ghost towns as other forms of capital just get pulled out, and people get nothing. Sort of a choice between shit and shit, there.

Other alternative that people bring up is locally owned stores, but plenty of locally owned stores, ones that are easier to topple over and more vulnerable to looting, are/can be owned by shitheels. Being a small business owner doesn't preclude you from doing active harm to your community/not actually being a part of that community (this is more often the case than not), and it isn't inherently a good thing. It isn't inherently beneficial to society at large, and you still have just as well a chance of being a parasite and running your local business in an exploitative and shitty way, and in a way where that shit needs to get thrown out of the community. The only thing that being a "small business" means is that you're potentially just doing less damage than walmart, not that your actual structure, or existence, is better, or more well justified. Which, to be fair, is an advantage. Small business owners are specifically going to be more likely to see pathways to mutual benefit because they're more vulnerable.

So the alternatives to walmart, in the common conception, are kind of a mixed bag, or are negative. More on that later.

In any case, looting will probably not topple walmart anytime soon, unless it maybe every walmart in america got looted of everything they had, like, seventeen times in a row. But the point isn't to topple the corporation as a whole, the point is just to drive them out of the local community (potentially), and take back something in the process. You can even use this as leverage against local governments, like with the george floyd protest. It's an "objective legal decision", or whatever, to send derek chauvin to prison, but it's also a decision that the local government is forced to make, because if they don't, there will be more protests/riots/lootings, more large businesses will pull out of the community, and be less likely to invest in the community in the future, which damages the municipalities bottom line, and could potentially even put them in jeopardy. d

Again, you could argue against this, on the basis that, if less tax money is being put into the local government, they will be more likely to cut everyone's benefits and resources, over, say, dropping police budgets, right, but again, is that an argument in favor of the status quo, or is that just saying we need to redo some of the shittier parts of the local government as a whole? It's just like with walmart pulling out of the local community, and then everyone loses jobs and, it turns into a food desert ghost town situation.

I also kind of really doubt that walmart is providing more to the local government than they take, in a lot of cases. They're eating up lots terms of tax revenue, to maintain the ability to travel there. Yuuuuuge parking lots, car-centric design, which means they're more likely to be farther away and require more public infrastructure to subsidize them. This is going to be more the case for your appalachian municipalities, though, your rural communities, I think your urban communities are gonna make a little more money on walmart, maybe enough to break even.

So, to me, it would seem kind of obvious that the toppling of walmart isn't necessarily the big problem here, it's the lack of good alternatives.

I.e. give me aldis, give me costco. Give me a sustainable and equitable co-op that can provide local jobs, while reinvesting excess funds into the community from which the people who run it are hired. Give me a credit union that's willing to give that co-op a loan to start their business. Gentrification is potentially not a bad deal, for reinvestment into these communities, as long as it doesn't price out the existing residents, and push them into a lower cost suburban hellscape, where they will be atomized, and taken advantage of even further, with even less recourse to escape. Which will always be the case, of course, the primary investors into these communities are always predatory business interests, and not co-ops, which are basically nonexistent in america and typically have less capital to invest in ventures like this. Race to the bottom.

It always seems like a problem, that people need to somehow construct an entire alternative world, and start from basically scratch, in order to make a better society, right, but realistically people just need like. The most basic investments, which they aren't getting. This is why dual power is pretty important. I would be willing to wager that people are pushed more into this anti-social self-destructive nihilism, because it's very easy for people to burn out in it/become just cynical mercenaries, you can more easily justify their arrest or murder, and because you control the systems and avenues they would otherwise use to build that real dual power. So, you can more easily lock them out and force them down the other path. That's just kind of my rampant speculation, though. Why you see a lot of screaming disillusioned people who know that the system is wrong but don't know why or what to do about it except try to tear shit down.

I dunno. The discourse around this issue really bugs me still.

also lemmy really needs paragraph indentation and line breaks hoo lee this shit is hard to structure after I've written it all out in a rambling garbage sort of way. had i more time I woulda written a shorter letter probably though

No it's not, looting isn't organized. It's just people taking advantage of an emergency to steal a bench of stuff for themselves. It's completely selfish.