What is Looting?
“Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance.” — Guy Debord, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy.”
The photograph used in Andy Warhol’s 1964 print, “Race Riot” was taken by Charles Moore and was published in LIFE magazine in May of 1963. Warhol used it without permission and Moore sued. Eventually there was an out-of-court settlement. The scene depicted was not a “Race Riot” as Warhol’s presumably ironic title claimed. It was a police attack ordered by Police Commissioner “Bull” Connor on a nonviolent demonstration in Birmingham, Alabama.
I remember these photos well because they appeared at the dawn of my political awakening. I was 15. The Warhol print sold in 2014 for $62,885,000. I had to stop myself when I started to type $62,885.00. I thought the latter figure was a lot of money. No, $62,885,000.
Excuse me? Nonviolent protests invite police brutality? Where have we heard that legend before? Remember, though this was the voice of liberal journalism “sympathetic” to the civil rights cause.
Sometimes a moment of clarity strikes when I see an absolute denial that there can be any justification whatsoever for some action or expression. This happened in response to the outrage provoked by an NPR interview with the author of a recent book that offered a defense of looting. Intuitively, I would consider looting to be troubling, frightening — something I would rather have nothing to do with. But utterly, completely indefensible?
The virulence of the rejections made me curious. I’m familiar with affirmative historical analysis of other “indefensible” actions. People may be familiar with the writing on rioting by Charles Tilly, E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Peter Linebaugh, Nick Blomley and others. But these focus mainly on pre-modern or early modern episodes. As a phrase in Hobsbawm’s classic essay “The Machine Breakers” suggests “collective bargaining by riot” was seen by him as anticipatory of later trade union strikes.
I found the NPR interview somewhat flippant. Perhaps I’ll return to that eventually. But in searching for affirmative analyses of 21st century rioting and looting I found some very interesting leads: Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings by Joshua Clover, “Why is there no just riot theory?” by Jonathan Havercroft and, last but not least, the prophetic essay by Guy Debord alluded to in the title, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy.”
The latter article focuses on the Watts riot of 1965, which becomes eerily contemporary in the era following the murder of George Floyd. Just three weeks before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledged the inevitability, if not the legitimacy, of riots as “the language of the unheard.” Yet 55 years after Watts it remains politically obligatory to unequivocally denounce riots and looting as having nothing to do with legitimate, peaceful protest. Talk about your “political correctness” speech police! To even question this knee-jerk denunciation is seen as “glorifying violence.”
In an early Gallup question on the issue, Americans were asked whether tactics such as “sit-ins” and demonstrations by the civil rights movement had helped or hurt the chances of racial integration in the South. More than half, 57%, said such demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience had hurt chances of integration, while barely a quarter, 27%, said they had helped.
‘I Plan To Lead Another Non-Violent March Tomorrow’ is the caption of a 1964 cartoon from the Birmingham News by Charles Brooks. Judging from a wider sampling of Brooks’s work, he was a “moderate.”
A couple of novelists from back in the day wrote some interesting observations about questions. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon wrote, “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” “In the realm of totalitarian kitsch,” Milan Kundera wrote in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.” Kundera went on to define kitsch as causing “two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”
There is also a kitsch of righteous indignation: the denunciation of the cowardly terrorist or, closer to home, of the rapacious extractive corporation. Or maybe it’s the $62, 885,000 sale in 2014 of an Andy Warhol print titled “Race Riot.” This is not to say that corporations are not rapacious or terrorists not cowardly for targeting innocent civilians. But those actions are at least explicable even if they’re not justifiable. Rioting and looting are commonly denounced as not only violent and “counterproductive” but as mindless and incoherent.
But what does all this have to do with environmental sustainability? As Joshua Clover points out, “It matters little whether one conceives of climate collapse as cause of refugees, or refugees the source of resource burdens. In the present world, immigration has become an ecological fact, ecology a matter of immigration.” This is also true for racialized class stratification. Our present mode of circulation of commodities requires expansive policing, both of borders and of internal, “disadvantaged” communities. Mass incarceration is a feature of the Spectacle-Commodity economy, not a bug. And a print of a photograph of police attacking civil rights protesters can fetch $62,855,000. Sixty-two million, eight-hundred and fifty-five thousand U.S. dollars. And no cents.
It is logical to make legal appeals regarding legal questions,” Debord wrote, “What is irrational is to appeal legally against a blatant illegality as if it were a mere oversight that would be corrected if pointed out.
Much of the conversation of environmental sustainability revolves around the question of how to educate and persuade consumers, policy makers or industries to act more intelligently and responsibly toward the environment. What if we are asking the wrong questions?
But what does all this have to do with environmental sustainability?
[ Having read and reread this essay, I have no idea how to answer this question or even how the question relates to the rest of the essay. Suddenly the question was there, and seemingly left unanswered, and I am unable to guess at an answer.
Please offer an explanation. ]
Admittedly, the question comes out of nowhere. I am rhetorically playing the part of a distracted reader who is thinking about some other pressing issue. I could have as easily said, “But what does all this have to do with Covid-19” or non-binary gender identity, &c.
But the question was not left unanswered the rest of the paragraph referred to Joshua Clover’s argument about the interrelationship of climate collapse and the policing of immigration. The whole essay is about policing, as you may have noticed. And what Clover is getting at, with which I concur, is that policing is what the state does to ensure that it is not the powerful who suffer the consequences of the bad things done by the powerful.
done not “down”
The response is appreciated and fine, as is the entire essay. Now to think this through further.
https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4374-blockades-and-border-walls?fb_comment_id=2875236122491812_3423350327680386
July, 2019
As we have already seen in varying ways, perhaps most dramatically with the Gilets Jaunes movement, proletarians are cast on either side of both matters, immigration and ecology. But again we must recognize that these two matters are one. While border regimes will continue to provide a way for the capitalist class to manage labor markets, the international labor flow is already in the process of converging with the increase of climate refugees, a current which the inundation of coastal cities over the near future will only accelerate. When this phenomenon is viewed from the counterposition, the seeming need to husband diminishing “natural resources” provides a readymade rationale for intensified policing of borders. It matters little whether one conceives of climate collapse as cause of refugees, or refugees the source of resource burdens. In the present world, immigration has become an ecological fact, ecology a matter of immigration.
This is simple and absolute: immigration battles and climate collapse share a single basis in what we might call “exhaustion capitalism,” a capitalism worn thin, its engine casting off labor as the exhaust of hyperproductivity, voraciously exhausting resources necessary for its survival.
— Joshua Clover
As for migration and ecology, the matter is repeatedly discussed in the Chinese media as critical in the efforts being made to end severe poverty in the country in this very year as well as to make China increasingly and decisively green in coming years.
The traditional race riot involved whites attacking and destroying black areas. Like lynching, it was an unofficial police action to remind blacks of their place. In the 1960s, the blacks were actually the ones rioting. There were all sorts of proximate triggers, and the responses were often disproportionate.
Was rioting effective? It is hard to say. There had been little or no change before the riots in the1960s and little or no change since.
P.S. As for looting, most Americans know looting as something private equity firms do. It is completely legal, highly profitable and leaves unemployment and boarded businesses in its wake.
P.P.S. On the subject of race riots, the first city bombed from the air was not Guernica. It was the black neighborhood in Tulsa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World_War_I
Strategic bombing during World War I (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918) was principally carried out by the United Kingdom and France for the Entente Powers and Germany for the Central Powers. All the belligerents of World War I eventually engaged in strategic bombing, and, with the exception only of Rome and Lisbon, the capital cities of all the major European belligerents were targeted.
Kaleberg,
You need to differentiate between the protests and the actual riots.
Point taken, but it is a tough sale to make. OTOH, politically correct gestures are cheap, practically free to the powerful for so long as those gestures can be made within the confines of effective electoral triangulation.
So, the rednecks no longer have enough votes to preserve those Confederate memorials and they are coming down. Please note that no powerful people were killed nor harmed in the making of this mockumentary and that no ones standard of living has been changed.
Police need to get back to their core functions, supervising sex and drug trafficking.
https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/decline.html
August, 1965
The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy
By Guy Debord
Until the Watts explosion, black civil rights demonstrations had been kept by their leaders within the limits of a legal system that tolerates the most appalling violence on the part of the police and the racists — as in last March’s march on Montgomery, Alabama. Even after the latter scandal, a discreet agreement between the federal government, Governor Wallace and Martin Luther King led the Selma marchers on March 10 to stand back at the first police warning, in dignity and prayer. The confrontation expected by the demonstrators was reduced to a mere spectacle of a potential confrontation. In that moment nonviolence reached the pitiful limit of its courage: first you expose yourself to the enemy’s blows, then you push your moral nobility to the point of sparing him the trouble of using any more force. But the main point is that the civil rights movement only addressed legal problems by legal means. It is logical to make legal appeals regarding legal questions. What is irrational is to appeal legally against a blatant illegality as if it was a mere oversight that would be corrected if pointed out. It is obvious that the crude and glaring illegality from which blacks still suffer in many American states has its roots in a socioeconomic contradiction that is not within the scope of existing laws, and that no future judicial law will be able to get rid of this contradiction in the face of the more fundamental laws of this society. What American blacks are really daring to demand is the right to really live, and in the final analysis this requires nothing less than the total subversion of this society. This becomes increasingly evident as blacks in their everyday lives find themselves forced to use increasingly subversive methods. The issue is no longer the condition of American blacks, but the condition of America, which merely happens to find its first expression among the blacks. The Watts riot was not a racial conflict: the rioters left alone the whites that were in their path, attacking only the white policemen, while on the other hand black solidarity did not extend to black store-owners or even to black car-drivers. Martin Luther King himself had to admit that the revolt went beyond the limits of his specialty. Speaking in Paris last October, he said: “This was not a race riot. It was a class riot.”
But what does all this have to do with environmental sustainability?
[ Then the point to me is that environmental sustainability is an issue of equity, just as gender, ethnicity or class. ]
In an economy predicated on consumption that spends $billions on giving people the ‘wants’; there should be a way of giving those afflicted access to the wherewithal to assuage the engendered ‘wants’.
Absolutely! One of the common disclaimers attached to denunciations of looting is “if it were for necessities, I might understand, but…” This overlooks the extent to which full-spectrum marketing makes the mass consumption of superfluous goods “a matter of life or death.”
Wealthy people ought not to
be so wealthy. I get that.
But as long they have the means,
they will sell expensive art to one
another, and some even loan it to
museums for all to see.