On the Usefulness of Jobs and Small Businessess for Illegalist Anarchists

I steal because I’m hungry or need something I can’t afford comfortably or at all. I steal because some days I’m just bored and frustrated from either working on the clock or trying to prepare to clock back in (days off/ vacation) and it feels good. And I steal because I don’t have any real choices in most things I do in day to day life (work to pay for rent, feverishly try to decompress in my time off so I can be ready to go back to work, repeat) and stealing dumplings from Whole Foods might be the only thing I do today that was truly my own freely made decision.

Nothing compares to the feeling of elation, of burdens being lifted and constraints escaped, that I feel when I walk out of a store with their products in my pockets. In a world where everything already belongs to someone else, where I am expected to sell away my life at work in order to get the money to pay for the minimum I need to survive, where I am surrounded by forces beyond my control or comprehension that obviously are not concerned about my needs or welfare, it is a way to carve out a little piece of the world for myself—to act back upon a world that acts so much upon me.

Love this one:

Shoplifting is a refusal of the exchange economy. It is a denial that people deserve to eat, live, and die based on how effectively they are able to exchange their labor and capital with others. It is a denial that a monetary value can be ascribed to everything, that having a piece of delicious chocolate in your mouth is worth exactly fifty cents or that an hour of one person’s life can really be worth ten dollars more than that of another person. It is a refusal to accept the capitalist system, in which workers have to buy back the products of their own labor at a profit to the owners of capital, who thus get them coming and going.

It might seem weird to claim that shoplifting is a good thing, but really, shoplifting is just stealing from those who’ve stolen from all of us.

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Shoplifting gives a way for you to get what you need-or just want-without reinforcing capitalism, and instead hurting the bottom line of the corporations that exploit us and destroy our environment. It’s rarely seen as a tool to fight against your oppression, though, because unlike other actions, like voting or going to peaceful protests, it can’t be used and exploited by political parties or groups looking to convert your frustration and desire for a better world into support for their town self-serving goals. Instead, shoplifting affirms your own freedom. It shows that your needs aren’t being met in the current system and that you’ll seize what you want instead of waiting for somebody else to free you.