this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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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.
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.