Excerpt:
Banksy isn’t happy with Guess’ latest collaboration.
The legendary anonymous graffiti artist had a directive for his followers on Friday, encouraging them—possibly tongue in cheek, possibly not—to visit the Regent Street Guess store in London and steal the brand’s new collection that features his artwork.
“Attention all shoplifters. Please go to Guess on Regents Street. They’ve helped themselves to my artwork without asking, how can it be wrong for you to do the same to their clothes?”
If you really want to know, you should read Abby Hoffman’s “Steal This Book”.
Brief and lazy summary: capitalism is at war with the poor, capitalism is structural violence against the poor, business owners are part of the machine of capitalism and foot soldiers in that war, and shoplifting is a non-violent way for the poor to fight back.
Businesses make profit by exploiting the labor of the working class. Shoplifting reclaims that profit for the working class.
All property is theft and property rights are bullshit.
And that’s why a socialist instance dedicated to environmental utopia hosts a shoplifting community.
Not saying I agree with it but there it is.
But I sincerely doubt that this community is thinking only about poor who steal from the rich in order to survive. Since this is a community for celebrating shoplifting, kids who feel they’re entitled to everything are based, actual examples are just taking what you want without paying and the pinned post explaining what this community is about ends with “let’s steal some shit”.
This community looks like it’s just about stealing what you want, while using the plight of the poor as an excuse to steal nail polish.
I think you are disingenuous here. You are using arguments and motivations from different people and just mix them together because they where posted in the same online space.
My opinion as the mod and the one that started the community does not represent everyone participating here.
I need to steal funko pops to feed my children
Do you mean that no one should own anything?
The word ‘Property’ has a particular meaning in Socialist theory, and it makes a distinction between personal property (stuff that you own for your own use) and private property, which includes things like the means of production (think factories), natural resources, etc.
Tl;dr version.
Long version:
Thanks for this.
You’re quite welcome. ^^
Yeah, but the person in the replies said “All property is theft”, they didn’t make any distinction (not sure whether that is their actual view, or whether they were just trying to explain this community, but that’s besides the point). And nobody is going to shoplift factories or natural resources, so that distinction doesn’t seem to play a major (or at least direct) role in the context of OP’s question about why this community exists here.
But I have a genuine question about your post, how does personal property differ from the explanation given for private property?
Wouldn’t that apply completely to personal property as well? I always thought that private property was just a special class of things being treated as personal property, when it shouldn’t due to their importance to society. So someone treating a factory the same way they treat a teapot they have in their house, where the former is private and the latter is personal because the former affects the lives of others in a significant way. Or have I got it wrong?
Taken from a reddit post on the subject that I think did a good job of explaining it:
In the case of a grocery store, the argument could be made that the owners of the grocery store chain are exploiting their employees with low wages, and selling the products of other owners who are exploiting their employees as well with their private property, thus justifying ‘taking back’ what was deprived.
On the flip side, It would be very difficult to morally justify shoplifting from a co-op grocery store that sells products from other cooperatives, as at that point no one would be being exploited.
As the person ranting in the replies about how all property is theft, I was explaining why some strains of socialist thought support shoplifting as a form of redistribution from capital to labor, so, yes, you can presume I’m using a socialist definition of property. 😆
It never hurts to specify, presumptions are a shortcut to misunderstandings.
Does anyone stop at “reclaiming profits for the working class” and not go all the way to removing property rights entirely? Owning my own home would be nice…
I’m enough of a hippie environmentalist to believe that land cannot be owned, and the very concept is insulting to the planet itself, but let’s leave that aside and talk socialism and economics.
I think the “American dream of home ownership” is, frankly, based on fear.
People are afraid if they lose their jobs or get old or sick and can’t pay rent their landlords will evict them.
People are afraid their landlord will harass them, or demand extra money from them, or otherwise extort them under the threat of eviction.
People are afraid if they have a medical crisis or extended period of unemployment they’ll end up broke, and want equity in a home as insurance against poverty.
And people are afraid their children will be broke or homeless or living in a slum and want to leave their children equity in a home to protect them as well.
And this is all a result of capitalism. This is because we treat basic shelter as a privilege the poor have to earn by working instead of a basic human right. And we don’t trust government to provide us with the basic right to housing, and we don’t trust government to protect us from abuses by landlords, and we don’t trust ourselves to be able to pay constantly increasing rent if we get fired or get sick, so owning our own home is the only way to protect ourselves from homelessness.
And American capitalism, in particular, enforces the fear of homelessness by abusing and brutalizing and dehumanizing people experiencing homelessness, so that the average American believes homelessness is one of the worst fates someone in America can endure. And it is. Because we make it that way.
Anyone who doesn’t own their own home in the US is at far greater risk of homelessness than someone who does. And the fear of homelessness is the fundamental drive behind American idealization of home ownership. And that is sick and wrong and unfair.
In a socialist society where housing is a human right and guaranteed to all, where people have no fear of losing their homes because they trust their government to ensure their basic right to shelter, where people don’t fear landlords abusing their power because apartment buildings and housing complexes aren’t owned, but managed, by committees which themselves are monitored by government to prevent abuses, I think home ownership would be not only unnecessary but irrelevant.
Because what does owning a home represent, in America, except shelter and security and protection? And if all that is guaranteed to you by right, what need is there for personal ownership?
In a perfect world, owning land would be as unnecessary and foolish as owning the air we breathe or the water we drink.
Most of the things you’re attributing to capitalism could be solved in a capitalism society, but the real cause is just because survival is hard. We probably agree that too much land is private (I wont go so far to say it shouldn’t be owned), but even when people could find some space in the wilderness and make a home, it was a constant struggle just to survive. Not saying it was worse than modern society for some people, but it wasn’t easy for anyone.
And I’m not saying capitalism is a “good” system, but using American capitalism as an example of the problems with the theoretical implementation of capitalism is as misleading as using China as an example of communism. Both are flawed and corrupt, both have the issues you pointed out, and both could solve them in their own ways. If the upper class wasn’t constantly attacking workers’ rights, most of the problems you listed either wouldn’t exist or wouldn’t be nearly as bad.
The difference is that the ideal form of capitalism as defined by its advocates doesn’t even attempt to solve these issues. A theoretically pure free market capitalist society would still have homeless.
That’s not to say that solutions to homelessness can’t be implemented within a larger capitalist society—clearly they can and I would argue should be. But those solutions will not really be compatible with the ideology of pure capitalism.
I want my own space.
You can absolutely have your own house. Your own personal dwelling is not Private Property, it would be Personal Property. See my comment here to see the distinction between the two.
Long winded, smelling your own farts way of saying, “I’m pissed that minimum wage isn’t enough to get a single family building in downtown Los Angeles”. You’re right dude, Mao would have given us great living conditions for free.
Socialist theory makes a distinction between personal property and private property (which is what is being referenced there),
Personal property, you own it to use it.
Private property, you own it to extract value by owning it, necessarily this means you are using your ownership of this thing to exploit others.
Example: your house is personal property if you live in it but is private property if you rent it to someone else. You can see from this that things can change from personal property to private and vice versa.
Owning your own home and having your own space is perfectly reasonable within socialism.
Interesting, that’s definitely not the definition of “private” that I was thinking of when I read that post. Still not sure I completely agree, but it sounds reasonable enough.
There’s like one guy and you’re only hurting yourself, you’re not supporting a cause in an incredibly stupid way.