An underrated engine for social justice
Lotta people talking about this “defense of looting” idea. Graeme Wood at the Atlantic for one:
Last week, NPR’s Code Switch published an interview with Vicky Osterweil, the author of In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action. NPR summarizes the book as an argument that “looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society.” If the real, lasting change you wish to effect is burning society to cinders and crippling for a generation its ability to serve its poorest citizens, then I suppose I am forced to agree. Osterweil sees an upside. Looting is good, she says, because it exposes a deep truth about the great American confidence game, which is that “without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.” She came to this conclusion six years ago, and in her book, which is written “in love and solidarity with looters the world over,” she defends this view as ably as anyone could.
Well, which things can we have for free? Not the ones people have to make, because people aren’t going to make things if other people just grab them as soon as they’re made, “for free.” We can have maybe dust for free, but other than that…
Osterweil’s argument is simple. The “so-called” United States was founded in “cisheteropatriarchal racial capitalist” violence.
…
The rest of the remedy is more violence, which she celebrates as an underrated engine for social justice. The destruction of businesses is an “experience of pleasure, joy, and freedom,” Osterweil writes. It is also a form of “queer birth.” “Riots are violent, extreme, and femme as fuck,” according to Osterweil. “They rip, tear, burn, and destroy to give birth to a new world.”
And guess what: Osterweil isn’t “Vicky” at all, but Willie. (Very willie. Cheap shot, but after “riots are femme as fuck” I really don’t care.)
By now you have guessed that I am not the audience for this book. I have a job, and am therefore invested in building a system where you get paid for your work and pay others for theirs, and then everyone pays taxes to make sure that if these arrangements don’t work out, you can still have a dignified life. (Easily my favorite line in the book was written not by the author but by her publisher, right under the copyright notice: “The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property,” it says. “Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.”)
Ha! Expensive shot, well placed.
Happily I see very few people sharing Osterweil’s NPR interview approvingly, and nearly everyone consuming it in that joyous and liberatory mode known as “hate reading.” I haven’t yet encountered anyone who has read the actual book, which combines tedium and indecency in ways I had not previously contemplated.
The combination of tedium and indecency reminds me of a couple of people who used to be colleagues on Freethought blogs but left soon after I did. More than a couple, actually.
Need I point out that the Trumpies want the same world he does? Maybe banditry (doing as you like because you have a gun) is qualitatively different from looting, but I don’t really think so.
Wasted a few moments searching for Willie Osterweil and came up with the fact that he lives with a real woman and so, yay, for the privilged young white heterosexuals. Also this bit from an article describing the lives of the young hip white kids who want to remake the world in their own image: “Willie Osterweil, 25, an aspiring novelist who graduated magna cum laude from Cornell in 2009, found himself sweeping Brooklyn movie theaters for $7.25 an hour.”
That article is https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/fashion/new-yorks-literary-cubs.html
Not too long ago, this bit from Common Ground describes Willie as “Willie Osterweil is a writer and punk singer based in Brooklyn, NY. When he’s not overseas taking part in revolutions, Willie edits the A/V section for The New Inquiry and fronts the band Vulture Shit.”
Can’t now recall where I read that his parents are in academia and fairly well off (so I may be wrong there) but it sure sounds like Willie has joined the trans-for-grifting-club.
I’m not going to bother to read anything by or about this guy, because I expect it would be a waste of my time, but this set of ideas intersects a bit with my academic work so I’m going to share a few links and ideas. Charles Tilly sets this kind of public disorder into a political context:
https://academic.oup.com/poq/article-abstract/47/4/461/1859037
This was written about a time and place in which most people didn’t have formal access to the ‘levers of power’—but we may in practice be back at this place, despite the public’s theoretical access through ‘elections, surveys and social movements’. E. P. Thompson describes the ‘moral economy’, and how it is enforced:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_economy
Social norms can also be enforced by behaviours like so-called ‘rough music’:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charivari
There has always been a place for this kind of public disruptive behaviour in society, as a way for the ‘common people’ to correct or redress the behaviour of elites when they transgress social or economic norms.
Sounds like a winner.
I daresay they deserve him.
(Apologies to decent academics.)
I wonder if Vicky Osterweil gave the manuscript to the publisher for free. I doubt it.
It should not be surprising to anyone that Osterweil’s spouse, Sophie Lewis, is the author of Full Surrogacy Now.
There was an outbreak of looting a few years back in English cities, starting in London and spreading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_England_riots
At the time people thought it would herald some kind of social change and it was cited as somehow significant in Jonathon Coe’s Middle England, a State of the Nation pro Brexit novel. In fact there wasn’t any social change, and unlike the Brixton riots in the 1980s, no reforms of police and other institutions.
Some riots are significant, and some are not, except at the personal level, as a few innocents were killed in the London riots.
In British history a load of riots were anti-Catholic. They were certainly enjoyed by those self-righteously taking part.
Anyone who has ever defende “resource extraction” from public lands is supporting looting.
Just because the entrenched powers that be could afford to buy enough legislatutors to lgitimize one form of looting does not make it any less looting.
It was looting that ruined the “commons” just as pirate fishing is destoying the commons of the sea by destroying the resource.