Matt Taibbi: Don't Steal This Book (on "In Defense of Looting”)

In Defense of Looting makes this exact case. Take a section on the New York City blackout on July 13, 1977. Unlike most of the other episodes she describes, there was no triggering episode, “no initiating event of police brutality.” This meant some other excuse had to be contrived for causing $300 million in damage, setting over a thousand fires, destroying 34 blocks of Broadway, injuring 450 police officers, teens stealing 50 Pontiacs out of a showroom, etc.

Osterweil concluded that defending the looting required “directly challenging class society, not just racism.” Additionally, defending the blackout looters meant “directly aligning with the ‘antisocial’ actions of the proletariat in making their own lives better at the expense of law and order,” even if they were not “legibly ‘protesting’” New York’s “white supremacist commodity society.”

This was another of those tautologies. The TL:DR version would have been, “We must even defend the selfish antisocial urge to take stuff without political reason.” And so, Osterweil explains, “people spilled onto the streets to help one another, to party, and to loot, burn, and fight with police.”

There’s no plan in the book. We’re repeatedly told stealing hurts the patriarchy and confronts whiteness — “a revolutionary movement must reduce the value of whiteness to zero,” the white author writes. There’s a long chapter denouncing the “organization-ist tendency” of labor movements, which leads to “reformism,” which of course is a stalking horse for counterrevolution. “The more ‘organized’ a movement is,” Osterweil complains, “the less likely there is looting.” So we need more looting, but what comes after looting? Organization? Nope:

The power of the attack on white settler society is seen instead in the broad lawlessness, property destruction, looting, and cop-free zones produced by the riot and is reflected in the attendant sense of freedom, unity, and radical safety felt by the rioters.

Sign me up for some of that “Radical Safety”! CHOP Zone, here I come!