Who Are the Looters? (2006)

From the August 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

A year after hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans we look at what was a media obsession at the time.

What is the first priority of government in the wake of disaster? Saving lives? Looking after the survivors? Disposing of the dead and preventing epidemics? Think again. At best these things come second. The first priority of government in the wake of disaster is exactly the same as its first priority at other times: maintaining or restoring “order” – that is, its powers of coercion.

 Moreover, the first purpose of “order” is to protect and enforce property rights. From this point of view, the main threat posed by disasters like Hurricane Katrina is not the threat to human life and health, to the environment, or even to the economy. It is the threat of “chaos,” the threat to “order” and “civilization,” but above all to property, arising from the temporary breakdown of government.

 The “looter” symbolizes and dramatizes this threat, conjuring up images of Viking warriors on the rampage, barbaric violence, evil incarnate. Of course, these particular “Vikings” were all the more terrifying for being black. In the days that followed the hurricane, the media stirred up racist fears of the poor black people of New Orleans, spreading rumours (the fashionable expression is “urban myths”) later shown to be exaggerated out of all proportion, if not completely unfounded. For example, in the week following Katrina the number of murders was average for the city (four) (see Ivor van Heerden and Mike Bryan, The Storm, pp. 124-8).

 All in all, we shouldn’t be too shocked or too surprised to learn that at 7 p.m. on Wednesday August 31, 2005 martial law was declared in the flooded city. Mayor Ray Nagin told police officers to stop rescuing people and focus solely on the job of cracking down on looters. This was just two and a half days after the hurricane made landfall and with thousands of people still stranded in attics and on rooftops.

 In one typically heroic encounter, police officers chased down a woman with a cart of supplies for her baby, handcuffed her – and then didn’t know what to do with her. All the jails were flooded. By the end of the week that problem was solved. A new makeshift jail was set up at the Greyhound bus terminal, with accommodation for 750 prisoners. This was the first institution in the city to resume normal functioning.

 True, it could have been worse. After the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 people were shot dead as looters while foraging in the wreckage of their own homes (see G. Hansen and E. Condon, Denial of Disaster, 1989). .Why did people loot? Or to use less loaded language, why did they take things that didn’t belong to them without paying for them?

 One man answered a TV interviewer who had asked him why he was looting by asking in turn: “Can you see anyone to pay?” The stores had been abandoned by their operators, but people still needed the things stored there. They needed food and fresh water, dressings for their wounds, new clothes to replace those ruined by exposure to the “toxic gumbo” of the floodwaters. Most of the so-called looting was of this kind – for the satisfaction of desperate need. In any sane society that would be a good enough reason for taking things.

 

Two paramedics from San Francisco who found themselves trapped in New Orleans wrote about the Walgreens store on the corner of Royal and Iberville Streets in the French quarter. The owners had locked up and fled. Milk, yogurt, and cheese could be seen through the window in the dairy display case, spoiling in the heat.

 Should we expect the parents of hungry and thirsty children not to break in, even at the risk of being pursued by the police? Would they have been good parents had they failed to do all in their power to see to their children’s needs? And what of storeowners who choose to let food go to waste rather than give it to needy neighbours? My first impulse is to wax lyrical about the sheer meanness of their behaviour. But probably they made no such conscious choice. As businesspeople they must have thought of the food and drink in their store not as products for assuaging hunger and thirst, but merely as commodities for profitable sale. If they could no longer be sold they might just as well go to waste.

 There were looters who acted not just for themselves and their families but for the benefit of the local community. For instance, the young men who collected medical supplies from a Rite Aid for distribution among elderly neighbours. Or the man who distributed food from a Winn-Dixie store to the 200 or so people holed up at the Grand Palace Hotel. “He was trying to help suffering people, and the idea that he was looting never crossed his mind.”

Socially responsible people of this kind are sometimes described as “commandeering” or “requisitioning” the goods they seize. That may well be how they view their own actions. In legal terms, however, only government officials, as representatives of duly constituted authority, have the right to commandeer or requisition property in an emergency. Private citizens who do so, whatever their motives, are engaging in theft and may be penalized accordingly.

 

Consider the feat of Jabar Gibson. This resourceful young man, purely on his own initiative, found a bus that was still in working order (the city authorities assumed that all buses had been ruined by the floodwater), took charge of it, filled it up with evacuees, and drove them to Houston. This was the first busload of evacuees to reach Houston after the storm (at 10 p.m. on Wednesday August 31). The police were forewarned that a “renegade bus” was on its way; if they had intercepted it Jabar might have been arrested and charged with theft. Fortunately he was in luck: he got through to his destination, to be greeted by Harris County Judge Robert Eckels. Presumably his crime has been forgiven.

 Of course, not all looters were responding to real personal, family, or community needs. Some were simply taking a rare opportunity to acquire coveted though non-essential consumer goods. For others looting (and shitting in) fancy stores was a form of social protest or “empowerment,” an outlet for pent-up anger against the endlessly advertised world of affluence from which they felt excluded.  

Finally, there was a phenomenon that I propose calling “entrepreneurial looting.” Entrepreneurial looters gathered assets with a view to later sale. As they got stuff for free, they could sell at any price and still make a profit. For example, “urban foresters” went after valuable lumber. Other entrepreneurs sold looted liquor. The cases of large-scale organized looting by armed groups (their weapons also probably looted) that received so much publicity must, I think, have been of this character. 

Brinkley reports an interesting conversation between Lieutenant Colonel Bernard McLaughlin of the Louisiana National Guard and a man selling liquor at a makeshift bar. When McLaughlin tells the bartender he is shutting him down, the man replies that he is “just being entrepreneurial.” Why shouldn’t he make some money? McLaughlin gets angry at this appeal to “true American” values. “This is looting. You looted that … That’s a 15-year felony. That’s a 3-year mandatory minimum sentence.” The man submits and McLaughlin proceeds to smash his bottles one by one. And yet the preceding account makes clear that McLaughlin’s real objection to such bars has nothing to do with the provenance of the alcohol. He doesn’t want the locals drinking alcohol because it makes them more quarrelsome and disorderly as well as further dehydrating their bodies. Would he have allowed the bar to stay open if it was selling – or giving away – only looted fruit juice, soda, and bottled water? Legally, however, looting remains “a 15-year felony,” be its social consequences good or bad. Property is sacred.

 The bartender might also have tried to point out in his defence that historically all capitalist enterprise is based on looting. Early capitalism looted land and other resources from peasants (in Europe) and from indigenous peoples (throughout the Americas and other colonial territories).The looting even extended to the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of human beings, such as the ancestors of most victims of Hurricane Katrina. Marx called it the primitive accumulation of capital.

 Looting is as American as cherry pie; the looters of New Orleans are keeping up an old American tradition and should surely receive all due credit as good patriots. But… it depends on whose possessions you loot, doesn’t it?

Stefan.

(WSPUS)

(Sources: Douglas Brinkley, The Great Deluge (New York: HarperCollins, 2006); Understanding Katrina website (understandingkatrina.ssrc.org), Kaufman.)

Kharkov under bombardment (2022)

From the April 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Kharkov is Ukraine’s second city, with a population of 1.4 million. Being in the country’s northeast, just 25 miles from the Russian border, its northern and eastern districts soon came under heavy shelling. The website of the Kharkov anarchist group ‘Assembly’(assembly.org.ua) describes life in the city at the end of February and beginning of March.

By March 3 the daily output of goods and services in Kharkov had fallen by about half. Many factories had come to a standstill. Many stores had closed their doors. Some firms were still paying wages to their workers, but many were not. Tens of thousands had taken shelter underground in the thirty metro stations, with the ‘Heroes of Labour’ station alone accommodating over 2,000.

How did people behave in these dire circumstances?

There were many who exploited the situation for their own profit. The ‘Assembly’ website provides a blacklist of employers who used the threat of unemployment to cut wages, lengthen hours and impose harsher working conditions. Taxi drivers demanded extra payment over and above the fixed tariffs. Thieves had a field day.

However, there were also many who volunteered to help others. Some voluntary efforts were initiated by the city administration. On February 28, for example, the mayor visited a bakery, where he called for volunteer drivers. But there was also a wide range of grassroots initiatives.

Oleg and Yulia Koval lived in Northern Saltivka, a residential district whose location on the northeastern edge of the city exposed it to especially heavy bombardment. They could have just got out and saved themselves. That would have been the ‘sensible’ thing to do. But instead they stayed on in order to help fellow residents evacuate, ferrying them to the railway station and supplying them with food and medicine. One day Oleg returned from a shopping trip to see that their home was now a pile of rubble. In the rubble he found his wife’s body. He resolved to continue the work in honour of her memory.

The ’Assembly’ website displays several photos of volunteers transporting, preparing or cooking food for free distribution or giving food away on the street or inside metro stations (where volunteers also set up public toilets). A man from the countryside with two boxes full of apples, handing them out to passersby. Packages of chicken, ground meat and liver being distributed from the back of a truck in the vicinity of Kharkov airport. Kitchen workers at the ‘Mafia’ Restaurant cooking meals for children’s hospitals and the military.

And advertising posters that inform the public what goods a firm has to give out, inviting would-be recipients to call so-and-so. Thus, ‘Mr. Bourbon Coffee’ café can provide 100—150 litres of distilled water a day. And there are also volunteers who bring food and medicine to people unable to leave home.

Unfortunately, the website does not explain how all this production and distribution for use – the commentators call it ‘disaster communism’ – came about. Did the owners of the firms involved give their consent? Or had the workers taken control after the owners fled the country?

A few of the photos on the website reveal a less inspiring aspect of life in besieged Kharkov. One shows a man tied to a lamppost and with the word marodyor scrawled across his face. Others show men lying half-naked on the ground, tied up in rather uncomfortable postures and with the same word painted on their backs.

We are not told exactly what these men had done to deserve such humiliation and discomfort or who had imposed their punishment on them. Marodyor can mean looter, marauder or – more colloquially – profiteer. It is unlikely that it means ‘looter’ because public opinion in Kharkov does not condemn theft or looting as such. Indeed, we are told that an elderly woman who shoplifted food right in front of a surveillance camera became ‘heroine of the day’. It was alright to steal food if you were hungry. And it was alright to loot from abandoned stores or street kiosks in order to distribute the stuff freely to others. Otherwise, after all, it would only have gone to waste. Presumably looting became unacceptable when conducted with a view to selling the loot and making a profit out of it.

The experience of Kharkov under bombardment confirms the conclusions drawn by writers who have investigated the social impact of other disasters – for instance, Rebecca Solnit in her book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (Penguin Books, 2010). Disaster sometimes brings out the worst in people, but very often it brings out the best – a greatly enhanced willingness to cooperate and help others. ‘Human nature’ is not an insuperable obstacle to socialism. On the contrary, socialism is the natural way of life of our species.

Stefan

Letters: Barmy Lammy (2012)

Letters to the Editors from the May 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Barmy Lammy

Dear Editors

In the March Greasy Pole – Baby David Speaks – Ivan wrote a witty and perceptive account about the August Riots and Tottenham’s MP David Lammy.

Lammy is a typical reformist Labour professional politician. It is bewildering that Lammy links the riotous behaviour to legal restraints on parents smacking children. It is quite obvious the anti-social behaviour by young people is caused by poverty and alienation endemic in the capitalist system (1 million 16 to 24 year olds unemployed also 50 percent of young black men are unemployed) and also harassment by the guardians of the state and private property, the police. I would like to add that as a Socialist I do not condemn the young people who ‘looted’ goods like Apple I-Phones and expensive trainers from shops last August. These are the branded goods/commodities that are fetishised in the capitalist consumer society and young people were only desiring the same commodities that the affluent can afford. Young people are surrounded daily by images of get rich quick, cutting corners, quasi- legal means of making money like in the banking sector and their “looting” is chicken feed compared to the financial looting/terrorism of the financial capitalist class.

Steve Clayton,

London SW8.

Sinking wages

Dear Editors

The crew members of the Titanic were employed by the ship and not by White Star Line. This meant their pay stopped when the ship sank. If they died and a next of kin had not been named on the ship’s articles (employment contract) any pay earned would be retained by White Star Line.

Fred Moore, 

Canterbury.

Economic power?

Dear Editors

Thank you for the Lloyd George commentary in the March edition of Socialist Standard. It is certainly important to get our historical lessons straight. I had thought that the upheaval in Russia, and the subsequent rebellious state of the interventionist force of England, France and the United States, would have had some influence on Lloyd George’s attitude when he reputedly referred to the army as “disaffected”. Indeed, I had heard that there was even strong sympathy for the Bolsheviks and that some British troops declared themselves the “Yorkshire Soviet.” If this is true, it tends to demonstrate that at a time of extreme stress of the capitalist system state control of the engines of oppression can falter in their commitment to act as instruments of class rule. Perhaps this is what rattled your “windbag”. But he was as “innocent” of the power of industrial unionism as the union leaders were ignorant.

Aside from that, I found in my collection of dusty pamphlets a small item called Craft Unionism versus Industrial Unionism, by F.S. Budgen and L. Cotton. They wrote for the SLPGB, and in the1934 edition of their pamphlet they had some relevant commentary to offer in a chapter entitled “The Wage War of 1921 and the Triple Alliance Fiasco.” The thrust of their argument was that the reason the “Alliance” folded was precisely because the prevailing structure of unionism at the time was based upon archaic craft divisions that divided workers rather than uniting them. “Intrigue and treachery of the trade union leaders characterize ‘Black Friday’”, they wrote, but did not explain it. “By the masses it wields, and the political atmosphere it can create by setting them in motion, trade unionism is potentially capable of challenging capitalist rule in the workshops and the State, but it is entirely incapable of backing up that challenge with any effective action. All of their class instincts awakened by the approach of such a situation, the capitalists entrench themselves behind their ownership of the tools and their possession of State power; and trade unionism, having totally unfitted the working class to assume control of the productive machinery, and having rendered them morally and physically incapable of facing the power of the State, has only the choice between a forlorn hope or surrender at discretion. In their own interests the trade union leaders capitulated.”

Union-wise, things haven’t changed much but should.

Bernard Bortnick, 

Texas

Reply:

The old pamphlet you dug out exaggerates the power of workers’ unions vis-à-vis the state. In the end, any government can, if it so chooses, see off any challenge to its authority by unions, whether these are organised on a craft or an industry basis. This is because they control the state machine and because workers can’t hold out for more than a few weeks. In this particular case the leaders of the unions in the Triple Alliance backed down because they realised this and because they did not want to overthrow the government. Neither did their members. The lessons to draw from this failure are (1) the imperative need to first gain control of political power before trying to change the basis of society from class to common ownership, and (2) the equally imperative need for the majority of workers to want to do this and to be organised politically as well as industrially – Editors.

From America: "Making it" v World Socialism (1977)

A Letter from America from the September 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the entertainment business, good lines that catch the attention of the viewer are not easy to come by and many a Show Biz personality—whatever the field —must sweat blood to hold interest. Happily, though, there is one tried-and-true exception to this rule and any number of movie, radio and TV stars have used it to good advantage. It is the reminiscing by a successful one of his and his family’s earlier bout with poverty. If there is one tale that never goes stale with most audiences it is the saga of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps, as the saying goes, or making it against the world on one’s merit. Having been the butt of capitalist propaganda from nursery school times, it is little wonder that the average worker continues to get a vicarious thrill from the rags-to- riches story.

Not that we would challenge the argument that it is still possible to work one’s way up the “ladder.” It is being done and we are more apt to hear of it now because of the growth of the media, particularly TV. But unlike news broadcasting, which features disasters, plain-and-simple entertainment does not generally deal with those who fall off the “ladder” or get stuck on the bottom rungs. It is the exceptional success that gets the play. For the entire philosophy and rationale of modern capitalism rests on the possibility of rising from rags to riches or, at the very least, the opportunity to combat and overcome economic adversity.

True, there is widespread admiration, even veneration—in America as in the “old countries"—for those who have inherited their wealth and status and who have never been compelled to do a day’s “honest” work in their entire lives. We have our “royalty,” too — the Rockefellers, Fords, Du Ponts, Kennedys, etc., almost any of whom have been or could be represented in the elective bodies of the land. But this is somewhat of an aberration in the general scheme of American capitalism. Lurking behind all of the professional representation of “black and city poor” in the USA by organizations—such as National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League is the philosophy of an individual’s right to “make it” if he has “what it takes” and is not being deliberately shut out by those in political control.

Item: The writer, James Baldwin, appearing recently on an educational Network broadcast, defended the looters in the recent NY City blackout, most of whom were black (as were their small-business victims). The looters had been conditioned, he contended, by the advertizing of a “consumer oriented” society to acquire status items so, when the opportunity presented itself, they took advantage of it. The problem, according to Baldwin, is that black workers are being deliberately deprived of the opportunity to live a good life by being denied good jobs with “decent” wages. The fault does not lie with the organization of society on the basis of wage-labor and capital, it would seem, but with those who are in a position to shut out blacks, especially, from opportunities to “make it.” An interesting aspect of that affair was the fact that those who committed arson as well as theft, did their victims a favour—at least those who were covered by fire insurance. On the other hand, and also of academic interest, was the response of horror from the authorities at the magnitude of the crime of looting. Hundreds of the culprits were incarcerated in cells with no facilities, and with no communication with lawyers or family permitted, during a record heat-wave while awaiting for days for arraignment. “Let the punishment fit the crime!” One example of “Human Rights” in the USA.

Now, Socialists maintain a “hands off” stance in regard to activity such as helping the city poor to “make it.” It is not that we object, in any way, to individual workers beating this jungle system. We all must live until we die and certainly it is easier to live under capitalism when one enjoys comparative affluence. Nor are we concerned, as an organization, with the manner in which one “makes it”—whether through inheritance or by one’s wits, legally or otherwise. Our goal is to spread a different gospel. It no longer makes sense to maintain a society wherein individuals have the need to acquire economic or political power in any degree whatsoever. Capitalist mass production techniques have long since made possible a world in which every man, woman and child can be secure by having the right to access to the goods and services that provide security. Modern capitalism must concern itself more and more with damning this potential by slamming production floodgates to accommodate a market. It is possible, given a sane system of society, to change the meaning of “making it.” When brain power no longer must be wasted on “beating the system” the frontier of the future will be unlimited.

Harmo, WSP, Boston.