In Defense of Looting | The Anarchist Library

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/vicky-osterweil-in-defense-of-looting

Looting is so unpopular not because it is an error or bad for the movement but because it is often a movement’s most radical tactic. Looting attacks some of the core beliefs and structures of cisheteropatriarchal racial capitalist society, and so frightens and disturbs nearly everyone, even some of its participants. After all, we have all been raised and trained to hold, follow, and reproduce those beliefs every day. Looting rejects the legitimacy of ownership rights and property, the moral injunction to work for a living, and the “justice” of law and order. Looting reveals all these for what they are: not natural facts, but social constructs benefiting a few at the expense of the many, upheld by ideology, economy, and state violence.

That looting is one of the most racially loaded, morally abhorred, and depoliticized concepts in modern society should come as no surprise. From its very first usages, the word has served to re-enforce the white supremacist juncture of property and race.