You know, I think looting maybe gets a bad rap. I think maybe stealing is actually cool. Reminds me of how people are chill with diogenes shitting on the sidewalk, but then as soon as someone does that in real life, they're gross and weird. Everyone is cool with robin hood, or some gentleman thief or rogue, but as soon as it happens in real life, everyone turns into the sheriff of nottingham's little armored men.

I would like to see the statistics on what percentage of post-looting walmarts stayed in the neighborhood, because I think it would be a pretty clear win if those walmarts left those neighborhoods. Worse in the short term, as jobs won't automatically get propped up, and even in some long terms you can see things turn into food deserts, ghettos, or ghost towns as other forms of capital just get pulled out, and people get nothing. Sort of a choice between shit and shit, there.

Other alternative that people bring up is locally owned stores, but plenty of locally owned stores, ones that are easier to topple over and more vulnerable to looting, are/can be owned by shitheels. Being a small business owner doesn't preclude you from doing active harm to your community/not actually being a part of that community (this is more often the case than not), and it isn't inherently a good thing. It isn't inherently beneficial to society at large, and you still have just as well a chance of being a parasite and running your local business in an exploitative and shitty way, and in a way where that shit needs to get thrown out of the community. The only thing that being a "small business" means is that you're potentially just doing less damage than walmart, not that your actual structure, or existence, is better, or more well justified. Which, to be fair, is an advantage. Small business owners are specifically going to be more likely to see pathways to mutual benefit because they're more vulnerable.

So the alternatives to walmart, in the common conception, are kind of a mixed bag, or are negative. More on that later.

In any case, looting will probably not topple walmart anytime soon, unless it maybe every walmart in america got looted of everything they had, like, seventeen times in a row. But the point isn't to topple the corporation as a whole, the point is just to drive them out of the local community (potentially), and take back something in the process. You can even use this as leverage against local governments, like with the george floyd protest. It's an "objective legal decision", or whatever, to send derek chauvin to prison, but it's also a decision that the local government is forced to make, because if they don't, there will be more protests/riots/lootings, more large businesses will pull out of the community, and be less likely to invest in the community in the future, which damages the municipalities bottom line, and could potentially even put them in jeopardy. d

Again, you could argue against this, on the basis that, if less tax money is being put into the local government, they will be more likely to cut everyone's benefits and resources, over, say, dropping police budgets, right, but again, is that an argument in favor of the status quo, or is that just saying we need to redo some of the shittier parts of the local government as a whole? It's just like with walmart pulling out of the local community, and then everyone loses jobs and, it turns into a food desert ghost town situation.

I also kind of really doubt that walmart is providing more to the local government than they take, in a lot of cases. They're eating up lots terms of tax revenue, to maintain the ability to travel there. Yuuuuuge parking lots, car-centric design, which means they're more likely to be farther away and require more public infrastructure to subsidize them. This is going to be more the case for your appalachian municipalities, though, your rural communities, I think your urban communities are gonna make a little more money on walmart, maybe enough to break even.

So, to me, it would seem kind of obvious that the toppling of walmart isn't necessarily the big problem here, it's the lack of good alternatives.

I.e. give me aldis, give me costco. Give me a sustainable and equitable co-op that can provide local jobs, while reinvesting excess funds into the community from which the people who run it are hired. Give me a credit union that's willing to give that co-op a loan to start their business. Gentrification is potentially not a bad deal, for reinvestment into these communities, as long as it doesn't price out the existing residents, and push them into a lower cost suburban hellscape, where they will be atomized, and taken advantage of even further, with even less recourse to escape. Which will always be the case, of course, the primary investors into these communities are always predatory business interests, and not co-ops, which are basically nonexistent in america and typically have less capital to invest in ventures like this. Race to the bottom.

It always seems like a problem, that people need to somehow construct an entire alternative world, and start from basically scratch, in order to make a better society, right, but realistically people just need like. The most basic investments, which they aren't getting. This is why dual power is pretty important. I would be willing to wager that people are pushed more into this anti-social self-destructive nihilism, because it's very easy for people to burn out in it/become just cynical mercenaries, you can more easily justify their arrest or murder, and because you control the systems and avenues they would otherwise use to build that real dual power. So, you can more easily lock them out and force them down the other path. That's just kind of my rampant speculation, though. Why you see a lot of screaming disillusioned people who know that the system is wrong but don't know why or what to do about it except try to tear shit down.

I dunno. The discourse around this issue really bugs me still.

also lemmy really needs paragraph indentation and line breaks hoo lee this shit is hard to structure after I've written it all out in a rambling garbage sort of way. had i more time I woulda written a shorter letter probably though