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Love and Treason table of contents
The Anti-Christmas:
Prices Reduced To Absolutely Nothing!
It's the holiday season, shoppers -- That time of year when commodity
fetishism goes ballistic, expressing what our most fundamental duty as
obedient American citizens is: feeding the profit-hunger of our master's
economy! Quick now, buy something! Buy anything, buy it all, and buy
all that it implies! From plastic reindeer on suburban lawns and corporate
office parties, charity concerts from millionaire rock stars and mawkish
television specials...to all this, I say "Bah Humbug!"
But the death-trip of the market economy that the Christmas Shopping
season expresses in frenzied form finds opposition from pissed-off proletarians
every day of the year. As Harry Cleaver noted in Reading Capital Politically:
"Among those hit hardest by rising prices and lowered availability
there has been growing militant direct action to counter the inevitable
reduction of their income. They have passed from anger to direct appropriation...Throughout
the United States, business losses, and working class gains, from shoplifting
have been rising steadily as more and more of the lowest paid workers
refuse to pay the rising prices...In places as diverse as Turin, Italy
and Crystal City, Texas, workers have refused to pay rising gas and electricity
bills and have practiced what has become known as the "self-reduction"
of prices. Ripping off Ma Bell has become a widespread practice in the
United States."
I'm dreaming of a Black Christmas
Tactics like shoplifting, "cheating" on bus and subway fares,
ripping off your boss and boosting from merchants are expressions of
our need to go beyond the rules and limits of an insane society where
everything is based on money and the market economy. These acts are
smaller versions of the massive breakdowns in capitalist social relations
that occurred during the uprisings in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and more
than a hundred other cities in the spring of 1992. Widespread looting
has often played a positive role in mass working class uprisings against
poverty and police repression from Britain, Nigeria and Brazil to Venezuela
and Morocco.
Shoplifting and looting are intelligent responses to the system
of exploitation that crushes our living conditions. In Italy in the
1970's looting was called "proletarian shopping." Class conscious rebels
knew that everything in this society has been created by the exploitation
of our labor power, and any goods we want to take or destroy should be
ours.
Anything that you see and want to have in any store -- take it
without paying. Have fun and don't get caught -- It's best to take some
friends with you, get together a big group, and do it all at the same
time. Go ahead. Take it. It should be yours.
HAVE A MERRY X-MAS SHOPLIFTING SEASON!
From
The Poor, the Bad and the Angry
Love and Treason table of contents
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