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In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action

Tekijä: Vicky Osterweil

JäseniäKirja-arvostelujaSuosituimmuussijaKeskimääräinen arvioKeskustelut
994272,344 (4.18)-
"Looting--a crowd of people publicly, openly, and directly seizing goods--is one of the more extreme actions that can take place in the midst of social unrest. Even self-identified radicals distance themselves from looters, fearing that violent tactics reflect badly on the broader movement. However, in this deftly argued corrective, Vicky Osterweil argues that while looting is often maligned in today's society, it is, and has always been, one of our most powerful tools of dismantling capitalism and white supremacy. Stealing goods and destroying property are a direct means of wealth redistribution and a practical, immediate way of improving life for the working class-- not to mention a brazen message to the police, the state, and an unjust society. All our beliefs about the innate righteousness of property and ownership, Osterweil explains, are built on the history of anti-Black and settler oppression--meaning that belief in the right to own property is innately, structurally white supremacist. From the slave revolts that started a social revolution in the South to the more recent #BlackLivesMatter and climate change movements, Osterweil makes a convincing case for rioting and looting as weapons that bludgeon the status quo while uplifting the poor and marginalized. In Defense of Looting is a history of violent protest sparking social change a compelling reframing of radical activism and a practical vision for the redistribution of wealth, a new relationship to property, and a radically restructured society"--… (lisätietoja)
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Written in the wake of the Ferguson protests, this book is intended to be a history and justification of looting and rioting in the context of the struggle for social justice in the United States. The author, Vicky Osterweil, argues that looting and other kinds of property destruction can be part of legitimate grassroots protest and serve the political objectives of oppressed peoples. While in the long expanse of history, this view is not especially controversial (e.g., see the role of peasant riots in the Middle Ages), more recently the conventional view is that, in a modern society, these forms of violence are counterproductive, a political mistake and opportunistic, and that nonviolence has achieved the main advances in U.S. social justice. Osterweil seeks to rebut this view by analyzing American history since the Civil War. In the process, she also recounts the use of violence in modern American history as a weapon to maintain white supremacy.

The book addresses the role of violence primarily in the history of racial struggle but also in other kinds of political movements (e.g., LGBTQ, the labor movement) and seeks to influence the contemporary debate on racial justice. The author believes revolution, a total transformation of society, is necessary to achieve racial justice in the United States, including abolishing police. In the wake of the Ferguson protests, she hopes her book will help radicals recognize the contribution of looting and riots as a tactic in achieving their goals. She writes: “The argument of this book is that when looting appears in an anti-police uprising, it is a radical and powerful tactic for getting to the roots of the system the movement fights against. The argument is not that all instances of looting increase freedom, are righteous or politically anti-propertarian. Rioting, property destruction and looting are all tactics and though they may be more favorable to certain forms of struggle, they can be and have been used to further differential and opposing political goals and objectives.” (p. 104.) However, in her commitment to radical goals, she may lose sight of the possibility that in some circumstances such actions may not be “favorable;” indeed, they may help fuel the current assault of the right on democracy in America. If that assault is successful, the state is likely to crush rioters rather than acknowledge the need for political change.

In the introduction, she provides counter arguments to common objections to looting and rioting. For example, she claims they are not stirred up by outside agitators. Nor should they be viewed as the destruction of the looters’ own neighborhoods, which typically are not owned by the local residents. (She says it is absurd to refer to “our” CVS.) She downplays the argument that looting makes protesters look bad in the media on the grounds that the media is never objective. (Indeed, she argues that the burning of the Quik Trip in Ferguson drew international attention to the protests there when it was shown on international media.) Rather, she sees rioting and looting as having the potential to be transformative experiences that contribute to a sense of community, political communication within the community and the beginning of historic movements, such as the Stonewall riots in New York which gave birth to the gay rights movement. With respect to Ferguson, she states in her conclusion: “When the rebels of Ferguson stood up for Michael Brown, when they fought back against continued police violence, domination and control, they gave birth to the most militant, sustained struggle seen in the United States since the seventies.” (p. 246.)

She does not directly address the common objection that looting and rioting alienates moderates and independents who may decide to vote against candidates associated with the movements for social justice, i.e., primarily the Democrats. However, it becomes clear later in the book that she generally views liberals and moderates as likely to betray movements for social justice before they have achieved their ends, and therefore she may be less concerned with the impact of rioting on elections.

The first chapter looks at the Western origins of property, wealth and capitalism in slavery, servitude and genocide. Slavery developed as a racial distinction because the color of skin was an easy test to define a person as a commodity. She states that New York City financial institutions were built before the Civil War by financing the slave trade.

In the second chapter on emancipation, she argues that the slaves resisted oppression by escaping from their masters both before and during the Civil War, which she calls a kind of emancipation by looting, because by freeing themselves the slaves “stole” property from their masters. The Fugitive Slave Act made harboring an escaped slave a crime but also galvanized the abolitionist movement in the North. 100,000 slaves escaped to the North before the Civil War, and many also went to Mexico. She argues that enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act was a major impetus for the formation of the New York Police Department. Noting the initial objectives of the North to save the Union rather than free the slaves, she argues that the Confederacy was defeated more by the breakdown of the southern plantation economy and the loss of the escaped slaves than by the Union Army. While at first the North was reluctant to recruit ex-slaves as soldiers, eventually more than 200,000 black soldiers served in the Union Army. The significance of the Emancipation Proclamation was not freeing the slaves, which they were doing themselves, but a change in the rationale of the war that precluded European powers from intervening once the war was declared to be about slavery.

Chapter 3 turns to the history of policing. The book argues that modern US police forces are descended from slave patrols and that many policing techniques were developed from experience with the Fugitive Slave Act and police forces in southern cities such as Charleston, South Carolina. Osterweil makes broad statements that the purpose of the police is not to protect people but to keep them down, and that the police should be abolished because reform is hopeless.

Chapter 4, entitled “White Riot,” ushers in the Jim Crow period that is characterized by white riots and lynchings as tools of violence to reverse Reconstruction and maintain white supremacy. In response, many blacks migrated from the South and began to engage in self-defense. Major white riots included Atlanta in 1906 and Tulsa in 1921. The media incited riots and lynchings against blacks and were always a steadfast ally of the white supremacist forces. Rioting reached a peak in the Red Summer of 1919. Black veterans became radicalized and defended their communities against white riots and lynchings. Osterweil labels the white riot in Elaine, Arkansas at the end of the Red Summer as one of the worst white race riots in history. More than 150 black sharecroppers (and possibly up to 850) were murdered because they organized a union and took other steps to defend their community. She emphasizes the role in this period of leaders like Ida B. Wells, who not only reported on lynching but also urged black people in the South to migrate North, boycott white businesses and organize themselves for armed self-defense. W.E.B. Du Bois and Philip Randolph also called for self-defense.
She puts an interesting slant on the Tulsa Riots of 1921, when white rioters, with the support of the police, destroyed the black section of Tulsa and killed approximately 300 of the inhabitants. She suggests that the fact that the black community rallied in defense of a young black man falsely accused of attempted rape and then fought to defend its community taught the white community the limits of the value of violence. Many whites were also killed in the conflict and many of the buildings destroyed were owned by whites. There were no further lynchings in Tulsa until, she writes, in recent years police began killing blacks.

Chapter 5 addresses the role of violence in the labor movement from the 1870’s through the New Deal. Her theme is that labor unions, in their efforts to “organize” workers, dampen spontaneous protest and in particular rioting and looting. She tells the story of the Great Unrest of 1877, before railroad workers had a strong union, when railroad strikes sparked labor riots across the country, including the takeover of St. Louis by a “commune” inspired by the Paris Commune. Federal troops and deputized police put an end to the St. Louis experiment. The National Guard from Philadelphia was used to put down strikes in Pittsburgh, and, in response to the 1877 Unrest, armories, which still exist today, were established in many cities. Blacks participated in the Great Unrest but as unions got stronger they tended to exclude blacks. During the initial stages of the Great Depression, workers’ riots were successful, but the unions and the New Deal coopted protest. The labor movement, like many other reform movements, including the New Deal, shied away from insurrection and the use of violence as a strategy to achieve political goals, with the result that many objectives, including racial justice, were stymied. She points out the Communist Party was multiracial and strongly antiracist during the 1930s, but shared the penchant for “organizing” which opposed spontaneous action. FDR made big promises but accomplished only a little. Once the revolutionary movement weakened, relief was cut back. She argues that “the historical narrative [was left] in the hands of FDR and his New Deal, which did nothing more than strangle a revolutionary movement in its cradle but which is now remembered as having saved the poor of the Great Depression. We can’t afford to repeat those mistakes.” (p. 147-48.)

A major focus of the book is the role of nonviolence in the civil rights movement. Osterweil recognizes nonviolence as a tactic that can be effective under certain circumstances, and points specifically to desegregation movements in the South such as the bus boycott initiated in response to Rosa Parks’ protest, the sit down strikes in restaurants and the Freedom Riders. But she also emphasizes that in other circumstances nonviolent tactics were inadequate and positive results have only been achieved as a result of riots. Between 1964 in 1971, there were 750 black riots and rebellions in the United States.

She focuses on the importance of self-defense against white violence, pointing out how in the late 1950s the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina backed off of its violence against blacks once they began to defend their houses with guns. Then she recites the many cases in the 1960s and 1970s where urban riots contributed to achieving concessions from the white establishment. The Birmingham riot is one of her prime examples. By contrast to the contemporaneous nonviolent protest in Albany, Georgia, where nonviolence failed to achieve reforms and violence did not break out because of the prudent management of the situation by the Albany Police Commissioner, the nonviolent protests in Birmingham quickly turned violent because of the violent response of the police and whites. She emphasizes that Martin Luther King recognized the importance of self-defense and of tactics other than pure nonviolence. She addresses interesting questions concerning the very definition of nonviolence.

Many of the civil riots during the 1960s and 1970s included episodes of looting, which played an important role in obtaining government concessions. She discusses the successful desegregation of Cambridge, Maryland in which rioting played a part. The three largest riots in this time period (Watts, Newark, and Detroit) founded political movements. (As noted above, she also cites the example of the role of the Stonewall riots in New York in creating the gay rights movement.) After Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968 and the riots that occurred in its wake, civil rights riots ended, as did further progress in racial justice. In the post-MLB period, black solidarity weakened as the black middle class separated from the black poor. Miami riots in May 1980 which were triggered by the killing of a black man who went through a red light were almost ignored by the national media. In 1992, Los Angeles exploded after the police were exonerated in the death of Rodney King. Street gangs ended their conflict and joined the revolt against the police. (As one of the tactics to put down the revolt, the police tried to reignite fighting between the gangs.) In 2014, the Ferguson riots put the question of nonviolence and the efficacy of rioting back on the table.

Osterweil’s book is not a disinterested history of the use of violence in political movements in the United States but rather an analysis of its efficacy with an eye to influencing contemporary developments. Whether one agrees with her political views or not, her book makes an important contribution to understanding the origin and role of violence in racial justice and other political movements. ( )
  drsabs | Jun 19, 2021 |
This summer, as protestors gathered in the streets across the country following the unlawful murder of George Floyd, white liberals and conservatives alike, including myself, lamented the acts of rioting and looting.

This white response is problematic and dismissive of what our Black and Brown neighbors have endured since settler colonialism stripped them of their innate freedoms, lands, and safety. [b:In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action|50999303|In Defense of Looting A Riotous History of Uncivil Action|Vicky Osterweil|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1590674289l/50999303._SY75_.jpg|75846187] is a thoughtful social and political history that provides us context for the revolutionary act of looting used by Black folks since the transatlantic slave trade.

Capitalism, property, and white supremacy are braided together and uphold the violent and impoverished system we continue to praise as the greatest nation on earth, the greatest economy ever, etc, etc. I recommend this book to anyone looking to fully understand the history and logic behind the rioting tactics we've seen in 2020, and what needs to change systemically before we even begin to expect peace in the streets. Hint: it starts with valuing human life over property.

Many Goodreads users came across the title of this book and rated it one star, which is truly a shame. I urge anyone grappling with the current moment to keep an open mind while scrutinizing information in order to form your own unique opinions and questions. ( )
  sjanke | Dec 9, 2020 |
This was a really well-researched, approachable exploration of the history of looting and its place in revolutionary movements. Osterweil starts with the origin of the term and moves all the way into the present moment and movements like Black Lives Matter whose protests have included looting and all of the arguments that have sprung up around them. I very much appreciated the clarity and nuance of Osterweil's work and I will definitely be coming back to it for further insight and a greater exploration of the sources she uses throughout. ( )
  irasobrietate | Aug 31, 2020 |
Note: I accessed a digital review copy of this book through Edelweiss.
  fernandie | Sep 15, 2022 |
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Englanninkielinen Wikipedia

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"Looting--a crowd of people publicly, openly, and directly seizing goods--is one of the more extreme actions that can take place in the midst of social unrest. Even self-identified radicals distance themselves from looters, fearing that violent tactics reflect badly on the broader movement. However, in this deftly argued corrective, Vicky Osterweil argues that while looting is often maligned in today's society, it is, and has always been, one of our most powerful tools of dismantling capitalism and white supremacy. Stealing goods and destroying property are a direct means of wealth redistribution and a practical, immediate way of improving life for the working class-- not to mention a brazen message to the police, the state, and an unjust society. All our beliefs about the innate righteousness of property and ownership, Osterweil explains, are built on the history of anti-Black and settler oppression--meaning that belief in the right to own property is innately, structurally white supremacist. From the slave revolts that started a social revolution in the South to the more recent #BlackLivesMatter and climate change movements, Osterweil makes a convincing case for rioting and looting as weapons that bludgeon the status quo while uplifting the poor and marginalized. In Defense of Looting is a history of violent protest sparking social change a compelling reframing of radical activism and a practical vision for the redistribution of wealth, a new relationship to property, and a radically restructured society"--

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