Is Stealing From Corporations Morally Correct? (Yes.)
More propaganda, more moral gaslighting, more bullshit. Steal! Feed your children and yourself. Steal all you will! Just do not get caught.
‘It’s organised looting: UK in grip of a shoplifting epidemic,’ says the Guardian.
‘Shoplifting is surging across America with dangerous and costly consequences,’ proclaims CNN.
The question no author of such articles ever asks, however, is: “Who gives a shit?”
What is morality, eh? Is it an objective, definable thing? Something we can all agree on? Is there, somewhere out in space, lurking just beyond our horizon, a universal truth? God’s law? Men’s law? Whose fucking law, then?
I agreed to no such definition of morality.
Or is it not rather the case that morality, however one may define it — and here, again, we encounter something that can be either resolved in one sentence or else through centuries of philosophical discourse, but never, in no case, in a shallow Substack article such as this one — is a subjective thing, influenced by cultural, socioeconomic, and — the Marxist in me demands this — material circumstances?
What is a corporation but an abstract concept with so many meanings as to lose all meaning? A conglomeration of individuals who do business with each other and the outside world; on a cooperative basis within, on a mostly competitive one without. Authoritarian and centrally planned — corporations are socialist, yes. There is a good book about this. It’s called The People’s Republic of Walmart — yet always profit-oriented. And bent on growth, growth, growth, destruction.
So, people steal from Walmart, Aldi, Lidl, and all the others. Alright. So fucking what?
Those are all gigantic, multinational enterprises. Does that make stealing from them alright?
Yes, say I. No, say you perhaps.
We come back to morality. I may attempt, for argument’s sake, to hide the fierce anti-capitalist in me, but I'd hardly succeed, so much I have written here and in other places on my opinions to such matters. A radical leftist, of course, will say “Steal from the corporations, for the corporations are evil.” But I do not say that because corporations are not inherently evil. They are just not. Corporations are corporations. Disembodied, illusionary, abstract nothings. All a matter of collective imagination and belief. Corporations do exactly what we allow them to do, nothing more and certainly nothing less. They are just as real as the money they make. As with so many other things, I have written about this before.
I have never stolen because I am mostly a coward. I would certainly, without any moral dilemma whatsoever, steal if I were hungry or if a to me beloved person were so. I would steal as well if I saw some stranger dying of hunger in the streets and me having forgotten my purse.
Steal, steal, steal, your morality demands it so!
Steal not from your fellow human beings, steal not from those in need, no, steal from those disembodied nothings, those illusionary castles of soap, for they are many and they are so incredibly, awfully, disgustingly rich. Steal from their owners as well, for they have become their illusion; they who steal from the rest of humankind in a frenzy hitherto unwitnessed in this our short history. I do not believe in judgement and fate, but if I were to I would know that they would face it. As things stand, they will go unpunished if no revolution comes to fruition — I wish, desperately, for it to do.
Why steal? — Your morality demands it so!
Be absolved, for you have committed nothing.
I get sick to my stomach whenever I hear the bourgeois class, the liberal Bürger who has known no material hardship in his life, lament the awful doings of those who must resort to stealing from illusionary concepts. He will, for he is liberal, refrain often from specifying the exact kind of people he thinks most of those looters are, yet he knows, and we know, exactly what he thinks and how hard and thorough he inspects colors of skin and nations of origin. Look at the headlines of The Sun, or The Guardian for that matter, for fuck’s sake.
If there are groups of people who steal, morality aside, more often than other certain groups of people then, thinks the liberal, proclaims loudly the conservative, both so much more alike than either thinks, it must be that one group is, at the very least, morally superior to the other and the other, perhaps of no fault of their own, says the liberal, inferior in that regard. Yet is it not so that the superior group — white men, let’s name them — have committed unspeakable crimes against the other? Not on one occasion, not on two, but systematically and for centuries over centuries over centuries and more centuries to come, for we learn nothing.
What does history matter? It matters! Things are never forgotten, just pushed aside, until they appear again, unforeseen will say the liberal, and the same shit happens again and again until death do us part, or war and ethnic cleansing more like.
When pressed hard, when things get worse, as they inevitably do under capitalism, the liberal will find his solace in his superiority, join forces with the conservative and the conservative conservative, the fascist, as he always does, and preserve that thing which matters to him the most, namely his status, his capital, his white house with an even whiter fence and he will wage war on all who hunger in the street.
What does this have to do with stealing from corporations?
Everything, my friend. It’s all the same. All is connected and all has its causes, both material and ideological, and there is a system in which we all live, here in the holy Empire, which determines it all. A system that produces universes yet cannot, nay, will not, feed the beggar and house that homeless man you pity sometimes but more often ignore; sometimes he disgusts and revolts you. Why must he stink so and throw up by your door?
What of the small business owner? you may ask. I concur that this is a slightly different matter and I would, if truly pressed, prefer not to harm the small business owner nor steal from him, but if truly, truly pressed I would say, “Fuck him, who is the petty bourgeois, for he always turns, in the end, against his fellow man and stretches his ass toward those who feed and tolerate him in their midst until they eat him, too.” When he stands by my side, hungry and cold as well, we will go steal together until there is no unjustified, unearned, immoral, say I, God-fucking-given superior being looking down on us no more.
Equality will be achieved, and I will not be alive for it and neither will you in all likelihood, when there is no desire and temptation to steal, for human needs have been met and we all elevated beyond the dystopia we, the forsaken lot of this lost generation, must inhabit.
Steal from the corporations all you will for they are nothing. Just do not get caught. And, if you are, at least do not give in to the fierce temptation of punching that pig in uniform.
I’m author, writer, and activist Antonio Melonio, the creator of Beneath the Pavement. If you enjoyed… whatever this was, please consider becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack or over on Patreon. It’s the best way to support Beneath the Pavement and help me put out more and higher-quality content. One-time donations can be done over PayPal.
🕧 The After Hours: Thoreau
The old-timey, poetic language (I quite liked it) of this essay was ‘borrowed’ from Henry David Thoreau. (What are we but a sponge, regurgitating forever, with the occasional original perhaps, until we die?) I’m just in the midst of reading Walden and some of his other writings and this recent discussion on the morality of stealing to feed oneself or one’s family inspired me to write this piece.
I have not much more to say this time, really, for I feel that I have exhausted myself by writing this. I wanted to do a voice-over of this essay, so you could hear the anger in my voice, the passion of my trembling body, but I do not have the energy to do so. Next time. I promise.