Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action (Hachette, 2020)
On Monday 25 May, at 8pm, an unarmed black man called George Floyd was killed by a white Minneapolis police officer. By midday on Tuesday, thousands of people were protesting at the site of the murder, incensed by the video which had emerged of Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd's neck for eight terrible minutes while he slowly suffocated. At dusk, the crowd marched to the third precinct police station, where the officers involved were presumed to work, and continued the demonstration. A few hours later, a group of protesters started attacking an empty police vehicle, eventually breaking into the station carpark, at which point the police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets. This triggered three days of unrest and insurgency. The third precinct police station was eventually overrun and destroyed; 1,500 businesses, largely in the restaurant and retail sector, were damaged; and images of a looted Target store became icons of a burgeoning insurrection.
These riots were immediately controversial, far more so than the traditional marches and demonstrations which they accompanied. Some of that critique was obviously in bad faith, conservatives complaining that violence “delegitimised” protests they would never have supported anyway. In other places, the criticism drew a false equivalence between endemic police brutality and impromptu destruction of property; an equivalence which became dangerously real when Donald Trump tweeted a quote from Miami’s notoriously racist 1960s police chief Walter Headley, "when the looting starts, the shooting starts". But the riots also attracted criticism from those within the movement. In a widely circulated and deeply moving video, the musician and activist, Killer Mike, drew a contrast between nihilistic rioting and properly political organising:
It is your duty not to burn your own house down for anger with an enemy. It is your duty to fortify your own house so that you may be a house of refuge in times of organization. And now is the time to plot, plan, strategize, organize and mobilize.
This is not a new fight. Tactical disagreements about the use of violence have been a recurring theme in U.S. protest history. In the 1930s, the Communist Party fought to restrain the riotous protests of the unemployed movement that it had done so much to build. In the 1960s, Martin Luther King was laughed at and heckled as he tried to stop riots in Watts and Detroit. Five years ago, the Nation of Islam and the New Black Panther Party were involved in containing the growing unrest in Baltimore. Vicky Osterweil's In Defense of Looting (Hachette, 2020) throws us into the heart of these debates. Building on an earlier essay of the same name, published just after the unrest in Ferguson in 2014, this book represents the culmination of her attempts to defend the justness and the efficacy of rioting from the anxious scepticism of her various comrades.
Osterweil’s defence of looting begins by rehashing the now common account of the entanglement of race and property in American history; a history that, for her, makes the “black looter” the central actor in the struggle against racial capitalism. Beginning with the English philosopher John Locke's famous definition of ownership as land mixed with labour, Osterweil shows how those terms came to be racialised. First, the land on which the United States was built was taken from Indigenous peoples in a project of genocidal settler colonialism. Then, the labour which worked the land was taken by force from slaves. Those two equivalences, property = land + labour, property = settler colonialism + slavery, made race foundational to American capitalism.
This equivalence between racial categories and property also plays out at the level of ideas. As Osterweil points out, the very word "looting" is derived from the Hindi word lūt, meaning roughly "plunder". Its first recorded appearance in English involves an eighteenth-century colonial officer using it to mark a particularly "deviant relationship to property", which in turn was the basis for the racialisation of an otherwise disparate group of Indian people. In the U.S. context, a similar privileging of White-European modes of property ownership was used to dismiss Indigenous claims to the land of North America, clearing the way for their expropriation. Meanwhile, proponents of slavery were increasingly involved in a circular logic, where the fact of enslavement racialised the bodies of the victims and thus justified their condition. In Osterweil's words, "Blackness marks a person as (potential) property... [While] Whiteness emerges as the race of people who are neither Indigenous nor enslavable".
This entanglement of race and property makes the "fugitive slave" a crucial actor in Osterweil's narrative and an important precursor to the "black looter". Osterweil argues that, by setting themselves free, former slaves destroyed themselves-as-property and so undermined the very institution of slavery in the course of making their individual escape. Her early examples of looting are therefore quite unexpected. They include Harriet Tubman, the escaped slave and abolitionist who engaged in daring military raids to rescue others from Southern plantations, and the social revolution of the 1860s, in which half a million slaves took advantage of the American Civil War to free themselves and force immediate abolition on a reluctant Abraham Lincoln. (The then Secretary of State, William H. Seward, reportedly responded to the Emancipation Declaration by saying “we have let off a puff of wind over an accomplished fact”.)
These acts of proto-looting are crucial parts of Osterweil’s defence, her historical metaphor working to legitimise later acts of looting by their association with resistance to slavery. But, although contemporary language did recognise the propertarian dimension in its descriptions of slaves as "stealing themselves" or "stealing away", the historical analogy between the "black looter" and the "fugitive slave" clearly requires some conceptual stretching. Osterweil attempts this in three stages. She begins by asserting that all looting is a "method of direct redistribution of wealth". The end of slavery, for example, is estimated to have destroyed wealth equivalent to an astonishing two thirds of U.S. GDP. But, given that modern looting is largely in aid of immediate consumption, Osterweil then refines her assertion to focus on looting as a way of meeting “needs and desires… through direct struggle". As Osterweil recognises, the historical fact of sectarian rioting (most prominently in the U.S. case, lynching) makes the meeting of needs and desires on its own an unstable foundation for her ethical defence. The final turn in her argument is therefore to say that what justifies looting by "black, poor or Indigenous people" is that it forms a direct attack on the racialised system of private property and its legal defence by the armed state.
This requires some unpacking. If looting is a direct attack on racial capitalism, then that is because riots are, for Osterweil, moments when "the new world open[s] up… in all its chaotic frenzy", prefiguring a different economic system. One crucial element in this prefiguration is the collapse of the commodity: when goods are taken for free, their price essentially falls to nothing, and their value-as-a-commodity disappears. This argument was at the heart of Guy Debord's Situationist analysis of the Watts Rebellion and has been influential on the left ever since. But it's not clear how often this theoretical analysis matches the lived experience of rioters themselves. And if rioters don't see their own actions in those terms, then the effectiveness of that prefigurative work will be seriously undermined. The wave of riots which marked the culmination of the Civil Rights Movements are an interesting example. There, rage and grief led to prolonged fights with the police, extensive arson and property damage, more than it led to looting. Osterweil even quotes Charles Fuller’s description of the riots in Philadelphia in 1964, a description in which racial violence takes precedence over economic relations:
You slow down, and stop in front of the first store whose windows haven’t been smashed, and you read the sign: ‘THIS IS A BLACK WOMAN’S STORE!’ and somehow you feel good. You tell yourself again, you are safe because you are black.
These expressions of control over public space, of communal security and celebration are certainly radical, but it’s not clear that they represent an attack on a racialised system of private property in the same way that a fugitive slave does.
The second strand of Osterweil's defence of looting concerns their immediate tactical value. Her argument is framed around a scathing attack on the formula, organisation = power = victory. Against this supposed truism, she presents the long list of betrayals by the leaders of organised struggles, focussing in particular on Eugene Debs's betrayal of the Pullman strike in 1894. She even sketches the beginning of a theory of organisational decline. Building on a prestigious sociological lineage, which includes Max Weber, Robert Michels and Frances Fox Piven, Osterweil suggests that:
The logic of formal organizational power, no matter how noble or radical the organizations’ goals, will in crisis lead it to preserve itself for ‘the next fight’ rather than abandon it all for this one. But the organization that is preserved is one that, at the height of the people’s power, turned its back on them, and the people do not forget these betrayals. The organization will never again achieve the leverage it had during the conflict — in other words, the organization doomed itself all the same to collapse and crisis.
Osterweil uses this critique of organisation to clear the ground for an alternative history of the U.S. labour and Civil Rights movements, a history in which rioting and looting are responsible for their greatest victories. She begins with the insurrectionary railroad strikes of 1877. After three successive cuts to wages in less than a year, workers on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad walked out en masse. Drawing inspiration from the Paris Commune, the workers built a multiracial coalition which embarked on a series of violent, wildcat strikes across the country, eventually involving over 100,000 workers. Osterweil then skips past the famous “organised” struggles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (which she dismisses as largely reactionary and racist) moving straight to the unemployed workers’ movement of the 1930s. Borrowing from earlier research, particularly Piven and Cloward’s classic Poor People’s Movements (Pantheon Books, 1977), Osterweil argues that riots and insurrectionary activity played a key role in winning greater assistance from the state and were also successful as moments of direct action. She describes how unemployed workers seized food from shops and trucks when it was needed, defended their communities from bailiffs and stopped “literally one-third of the evictions in New York—seventy-seven thousand households!”.
But this polemical opposition between organisation and spontaneous rioting starts to break down when Osterweil turns to the Civil Rights Movement. There, one of the major legacies of the wave of riots in the late 1960s was precisely the birth of new organisations. Osterweil celebrates the emergence of Black Congress and the Black Panther Party from the ashes of the Watts Rebellion in 1965, the United Brothers from the riots in Newark, and D.R.U.M. from the uprising in Detroit in 1967. Osterweil also emphasises the other side of this dialectic. The successes won by rioters in the late 1960s were only possible because they were embedded in an already-existing movement and so could draw on the organising, strategising and theorising of the wider Civil Rights Movement. Riots without movements, on the other hand, are largely ephemeral; sudden storms which leave clear skies behind them. The looting during the 1977 New York City blackout, or the riot in Miami in 1980, are obvious examples. And, although Osterweil wants to defend both of those two uprisings as outbreaks of spontaneous opposition to racial capitalism, it is difficult to claim either as a successful moment of struggle.
Her examples of the power of looting are also more uncertain than they first appear. Despite its impressive size, the 1877 railroad strikes were defeated and their major legacy was a reorganisation of the National Guard (including the construction of armouries in many cities) to better enable the use of violence against strikers. When it comes to the Civil Rights Movement, although Osterweil claims that riots were fairly effective in terms of winning greater relief spending from local authorities, recent research suggests that they were also crucial in enabling Reagan’s landslide victory in the 1968 presidential election by giving greater resonance to his ‘law and order’ rhetoric.
Ultimately, Osterweil’s dialectical understanding of the interplay between riots and organisation is much closer to the historical record, but it also reduces the force of her argument. In fact, in the book’s later chapters, she seems to shift from a defence of a particular tactic, to the more general argument that the job of radicals is to escalate conflicts wherever possible. Set against Osterweil’s list of betrayals by supposedly radical unions and parties, this is a fairly compelling argument. But it is also a risky one. The common sense of many workplace and community organisers suggests that defeats can have devastating consequences. That’s why so much training is focussed on learning how to identify winnable fights and how to know when to retreat and preserve one’s strength. (The week before the lockdown began in Britain, I helped to facilitate a training session for students who were occupying a small section of University College London in solidarity with striking lecturers. One of the exercises featured a role play of the Melian Dialogues, where an openly self-interested Athenian army asked the people of Melos to surrender or else face total annihilation. In four rounds of role play, the students chose the route of noble martyrdom every time.) Osterweil seems to want to offer a corrective to the supposedly cautious tendencies of organisers, but she acknowledges that the decision to escalate will ultimately depend on an assessment of the balance of forces in a particular conflict. In the end, Osterweil seems to be caught between rehabilitating looting as a particular tactic and turning riots into a strategic imperative. And while she is fairly persuasive on the first count, the second remains largely polemical.
Osterweil submitted the manuscript for this book just as the most recent wave of Black Lives Matter protests began. It's still far too early to tell how successful they will be, or to draw up a balance sheet of tactical missteps and strategic advances, but Osterweil’s defence of looting could hardly be more timely. As protests have spread across Europe, they also raise the question of whether her arguments can help us to make sense of rioting beyond the United States. Apart from a brief section on the imperial origins of London's Metropolitan Police, Osterweil's narrative is highly specific. And in some senses that specificity might be an improvement on recent attempts to theorise riots from the left. For example, Joshua Clover's widely cited Riot.Strike.Riot (Verso, 2016) constructed a sweeping global narrative which moves from the eighteenth century age of riots, to the era of the strike, and then back to a new age of twenty-first century riots. Despite its elegance, this schema is ultimately quite unsatisfactory. It suggests that modes of struggle are directly determined by underlying economic conditions (eras dominated by the production of commodities are associated with strikes, eras dominated by their circulation are associated with riots), and so it largely ignores the tactical debates in which Osterweil is engaged. It's also never made clear how the three eras (of riots, strikes and riots) map onto the five cycles of production and circulation that the historian Giovanni Arrighi finds in the same period.
But there might be a fruitful way to join Clover's theoretical speculations with Osterweil's historical narrative. Clover argues that there is an intimate relationship between the surplus populations produced by capitalism and riots, one which mirrors the relationship between the industrial proletariat of classical Marxism and strikes. That link is buried in Marx's own use of the term 'proletariat'. Going back to its Latin roots, the proletarius were associated with an "impoverished, disorderly, and possibly dangerous array of paupers and hangers-on" (the words are James Ferguson's). The proletariat of antiquity were, therefore, the riotous city mob. When Marx redefined that term to refer to the industrial wage-earners who produced the wealth of society, he was concerned with their strategic power, in particular the power of the strike. That link between specific classes and their tactics might allow us to imagine Osterweil's narrative as the starting point for a wider comparative-historical project. Her account of the economic collapse of the 1870s, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the early onset of deindustrialisation amongst African American communities in the 1950s, tells the story of how specific surplus populations came to rioting. At a time where half of the global workforce is eeking out a precarious existence of semi-formal employment in ever-growing urban sprawls, there are clearly many more of these historical narratives to tell.