Publishers Weekly
08/24/2020
The New Inquiry contributor Osterweil debuts with a provocative, Marxist-informed defense of looting as a radical and effective protest tactic. Osterweil argues that the surplus wealth that allowed capitalism and modern property rights to flourish only existed because European colonialists in the New World stole land from and committed genocide against Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans in order to produce the commodities (silver, sugar, tobacco, cotton) that created that surplus. Therefore, Osterweil contends, when protestors loot and riot as part of an anti-police uprising, they are confronting and exposing the inextricable links between America’s economic and social structures and white supremacy. Moreover, in her analysis, the “threat” that looting and rioting pose to the established order is necessary “to overturn this miserable world of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, empire, and property.” Osterweil supports her claims with close looks at 1960s uprisings in Detroit, Newark, and Watts and the 1992 L.A. riots that broke out after police officers accused of brutalizing Rodney King were acquitted. Her inflammatory rhetoric (she calls police a “despicable occupying army”) and vague conception of what her called-for revolution would look like undermine her more credible historical interpretations. Still, this is a bracing rethink of the goals and methods of protest. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
"Osterweil debuts with a provocative, Marxist-informed defense of looting as a radical and effective protest tactic...a bracing rethink of the goals and methods of protest."
—Publishers Weekly
"A reflection on violence as a form of social protest that can lead to social change."
—New York Journal of Books
"[In Defense of Looting] is as much an argument for the possibilities of a riot as it is a reckoning between history as it happens and history as it is read.... [Osterweil's] readings of history lend the book its exhilarating quality and make anything seem possible."—Frieze
"In Defense of Looting is a clear and damning indictment of the origins and evolution of property rights, race, and policing in the United States. Ultimately, Osterweil demands we not only overcome the respectability politics animating our desire for 'peaceful protests,' but that we ambitiously work to abolish the racial capitalist logics at the heart of American empire."—Zoé Samudzi, coauthor of As Black As Resistance
"In engaging and accessible prose, Vicky Osterweil lays out an intellectual defense of looting that is as thorough and compelling as it is necessary and revolutionary. The history here is alive and vital, and Osterweil's grasp of it pushes any reader who has doubted the legitimacy of looting as a political action to search deeply and reconsider their position."—Mychal Denzel Smith, author of Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream
"With the right ideas at the right time, Vicky Osterweil has given us a powerful tool for resistance in the 21st century. In Defense of Looting could change American politics forever."—Malcolm Harris, author of Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials
"A passionate, in-depth study of one of history's most radical-and reviled-forms of direct action. In clear, precise prose, Osterweil lays bare the racialized settler-colonial roots of policing and property in the US, outlines the possibilities of militant resistance, and emphasizes the necessity of Black and Indigenous liberation. In Defense of Looting is a bracing and necessary read, written with great care and radical hope. As Osterweil herself says, 'The future is ours to take. We just need to loot it.'"—Kim Kelly, labor columnist, Teen Vogue
"In this book the act of looting is the starting point for challenging the conventional beliefs around people, property, and justice. How we treat looting, whose acts are considered looting, and what is looted frame essential interventions in understanding uprising. The stakes are not of 'stuff,' TVs, and clothes; they're about ourselves and our communities. Whether at the policy level or in our personal daily politics, the historical insights and moral clarity of this book illuminate a way forward from the real crimes that structure our society."—Ayesha A. Siddiqi, writer and emeritus editor-in-chief of The New Inquiry
“In Defense of Looting incisively explores the history of revolution, breaking down the myths that not only reinforce white supremacy, but also whitewash civil rights struggles and revolutionary acts, removing valuable tools from the arsenals of those who need them most…In Defense of Looting is not merely playing devil’s advocate or being provocative for the sake of being provocative, it is full-force challenging everyone to take a hard look at a hard subject, to stare slavery and injustice square in the eyes and not blink.”—San Francisco Book Review
Kirkus Reviews
2020-07-07
A charged, controversial manifesto in support of rioting and looting as instruments of rebellion.
Rioting and looting, writes Osterweil, bring liberals and conservatives into agreement: Conservatives root for the police while liberals, “because their love for law and order is much greater than their belief in freedom,” dismiss looters as bringing destruction on their own community. The thought that liberals are more committed to law and order than to freedom seems inapposite, the kind of thing radicals say to denigrate those less fervently committed to the cause. However, Osterweil scores points by noting, with particular respect to the weekslong riots in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, that the inner-city proletariat seldom owns any real property in their own communities and that “the same white liberals who inveigh against corporations for destroying local communities are aghast when rioters take their critique to its actual material conclusion.” Considering looting to be an impromptu means of wealth redistribution that she likens, curiously and unpersuasively, to the potlatch of Native peoples in the Pacific Northwest, Osterweil also describes it as an undeniable way to draw attention. Mounting a so-called peaceful protest will simply result in being ignored, and regardless, “there is no such thing as peace under current conditions. Social peace is just the condition under which patriarchal white supremacist violence is acting most fluidly and most thoroughly and is distributed most invisibly. When the white supremacist violence appears in the streets, it is not an aberration or a dramatic change of direction: it is a continuation of the world as it is in more direct, open terms.” The author’s long disquisitions on the history of slavery and lynching are accurate but not entirely necessary to her argument that nonviolence plays into the hands of the powerful.
An argument that, while debatable and occasionally strident, is worth hearing out.
