america-wakiewakie:

eyegabs: america-wakiewakie: thekingsinbad: america-wakiewakie: alberich: cute-peridot: cute-peridot: cute-peridot: So-called “shoplifting” is a manufactured crime, designed by reactionaries to distract proletarians from the kleptocratic actuality of bourgeois late capitalist society. “To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.” Boost this Not stealing is equally as bad as stealing? No, but condemning people who do take back what was made with the stolen value of our labor is to align oneself with the moral apparatuses of oppression. That is, one becomes a conduit of oppressive power. STOP. JUST DON’T STEAL It’s NOT stealing. The actual theft happened on behalf of the monied class, by those who control the means of production when they extract the surplus value of working class people’s labor and then sell it back to us for profit. That’s called structural theft. It’s also more commonly known as poverty. There is a more nuanced conversation here which ought to be had though, one that recognizes some folks are passing and privileged enough to liberate property (“steal”) with minimal risk and minimal consequences while others cannot take those risks so cavalierly. For instance, black people’s hyper-visibility makes them especially vulnerable to consequences of “theft” that are institutionally far more severe than they are for white people. To a lesser degree, this can be true for brown Latinos and Natives too. A truly radical contextualizing of theft deconstructs it all the way to its origin, its structural root, and considers all people’s visibility and vulnerability in dismantling it. Idk how to verbalize how much I don’t like this post but imma rough draft it. Condemning one form of thievery and endorsing another doesn’t make thievery okay. The morals of your oppressors don’t need to equate to the morals of basic human decency. We can have a sense of morals that is outside a political realm. U can teach that employers stealing and undervaluing your work is bad while simultaneously teaching ppl not to steal, whether the ceo is satanism or just a douchebag. ^^^ Fail. The “theft is theft” rational is as vacuous as the “violence begets violence” slogan. Do people who must use violence to defend themselves commit the same atrocity as the people using violence to exterminate and oppress? Of course not. Violence is a tool. It can be wielded in the pursuit of liberation or it can be wielded in the service of domination. Failure to discern this crucial difference draws a false equivalence between the oppressor and the oppressed – which almost ALWAYS serves the oppressor (this is called victim blaming). Now, when theft is so structured and normalized that it can be wielded against oppressed people to deny them access to the material necessities of living, i.e. shelter, food, water, and when this denial results in disease, mental and physical trauma, and death, it is a constant stream of violence. At such a point we have to ask who is wielding this theft? Who benefits from it? And why, why would we equate taking what we need to survive with the structured theft that leaves us in poverty? Only the ignorant and foolish do this. The former can be fixed with education, the latter less so.

Why is this so hard to understand?

Maybe it’s because people come from the cultural-hegemony set point of believing in the sacredness of property, while not understanding how property relations got they way they are, and how that required repeated, deliberate violations of even the most basic of conceptions of the right of property (to say nothing of the myriad other rights violated as corollaries.)



For example, most would consider that “every man has a property in his own person…[t[he labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.” Thus, when someone has taken something naturally-occuring and “mixed his labor with [it]”, he has “joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.”There’s just one catch; you can only appropriate property from nature only so long as “there is enough, and as good, left in common for others”.



This is by no means part of some wacko foreign “ism” we’re trying to impose on American society. In fact, this is from the work of John Locke. Specifically, his Second Treatise of Government. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it should. His writings had massive influence and opened the doors to the Enlightenment – the intellectual womb from which the US Constitution sprang forth. A Constitution that, by the way, does NOT tell us to be capitalist, no matter how hard some people wish it did. Of course, the Constitution has never been an obstacle to oppression by the ruling class – they have ways of sidestepping pesky things like “democracy” and “freedom”.



In this political/economic climate, no rights are truly secure. People can go and tell us that we have a natural right to what we put our labor into, but under capitalism, your labor goes into thousands, maybe even millions of things that aren’t yours. You have no choice but to sell your labor, you have no control over the production or the product itself, and a landed elite class reaps the benefits while throwing you back enough of a pittance to keep you a well-oiled cog in their wealth accumulation machine. How is that fair? Don’t you deserve at least some say in this? How can anyone claim that our rights as human beings are being respected? This is the “estranged labor” that Marx and Engels lamented, the workers themselves becoming “the most wretched of commodities” – valued only by the wealth they produce for exploiters, and not as actual, human beings. How then, in such a system, can we demand “human rights” and not have it fall on deaf ears?



If we really want to secure the rights and freedoms that are due all people (and of course save the planet and suchlike), then we must do away with the current capitalist system and its institutional robbery and oppression, and establish democratic socialism.



Sling all the antiquated moralisms you want, but it won’t change the fact that “crimes” like shoplifting are how people compensate for inequality and survive poverty. That’s how it is, and that’s how it has been ever since the emergence of a ruling class. People will get what they need one way or another. The point of socialism is to enable everyone to do so without having to pay for it with debasement, mental and physical injury, torture, imprisonment, or death. To create a society where people won’t NEED to steal because they will have the means to live with dignity and reap the benefits of their labor.

