From r/CriticalTheory:

« This is a pretty poor article from a theory perspective. It never really coheres, but instead bounces around a series of hypotheticals (“what if looters shared their loot?”), fragmentary rebuttals (“franchise convenience stores aren’t really part of the community so it’s not as problematic to loot them”), and rank casuistry (“MLK was non-violent but they murdered him anyway!”). The closest it comes to a theoretical position is a quintessentially identitarian notion that the “foundational organizing principle” of the US is not capital, but rather anti-black racism: “That is because this country is built on the right to property, and there is no property, no wealth in the USA without the exploitation, appropriation, murder, and enslavement of black people.” Let’s just call it a pretty radical race-reductionism and leave it at that.

And that’s really all the article offers, unless we want to count the eye-for-an-eye logic of “white settlers did worse so it’s okay” that is also served up but never spelled out. Its fundamental problem is that it is trapped by an obviously fallacious assumption that, because critiques of looting come mostly from reactionaries and conservatives, the left must defend it. (Let’s also note here that the article is from 2014, though the dynamics described hasn’t really changed much.) This is clearly an unproductively moralistic approach to the whole subject, in which the author wants us to take up precisely the conservative position of a judge outside the struggle who has to decide whether to approve or condemn it. We must leave that position if we are to ask the really useful questions, which are the same as they’ve ever been: How to create solidarity in the present circumstances? What tactics, actions, slogans, ways of thinking and framing, etc., will be most effective? It is in the context of these kinds of questions that we can begin to ask: What is the place looting within the currently existing struggle? Can looting be part of a new, solidary politics? Put in these terms, it becomes clear that “looting” as such will never be part of a left politics, since by conceiving of an action as “looting,” we are already in the realm of individualistic opportunism, rather than coherent political action. »