Banksy told his followers to shoplift from the Regent Street Guess store in London after it displayed a collection that used his artwork without permission.

Excerpt:

Banksy isn’t happy with Guess’ latest collaboration.

The legendary anonymous graffiti artist had a directive for his followers on Friday, encouraging them—possibly tongue in cheek, possibly not—to visit the Regent Street Guess store in London and steal the brand’s new collection that features his artwork.

“Attention all shoplifters. Please go to Guess on Regents Street. They’ve helped themselves to my artwork without asking, how can it be wrong for you to do the same to their clothes?”

  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    The word ‘Property’ has a particular meaning in Socialist theory, and it makes a distinction between personal property (stuff that you own for your own use) and private property, which includes things like the means of production (think factories), natural resources, etc.

    Tl;dr version.

    Long version:

    In a private property system, property rules are organized around the idea that various contested resources are assigned to the decisional authority of particular individuals (or families or firms). Thomas Merrill (2012) calls this ‘the property strategy’ and contrasts it with bureaucratic governance or the management of resources through group consensus. In a system of private property, the person to whom a given object is assigned (e.g., the person who found it or made it) has control over the object: it is for her to decide what should be done with it. In exercising this authority, she is not understood to be acting as an agent or official of the society. She may act on her own initiative without giving anyone else an explanation, or she may enter into cooperative arrangements with others, just as she likes. She may even transfer this right of decision to someone else, in which case that person acquires the same rights she had. In general the right of a proprietor to decide as she pleases about the resource that she owns applies whether or not others are affected by her decision. If Jennifer owns a steel factory, it is for her to decide (in her own interest) whether to close it or to keep the plant operating, even though a decision to close may have the gravest impact on her employees and on the prosperity of the local community.

    Though private property is a system of individual decision-making, it is still a system of social rules. The owner is not required to rely on her own strength to vindicate her right to make self-interested decisions about the object assigned to her: if Jennifer’s employees occupy the steel factory to keep it operating despite her wishes, she can call the police and have them evicted; she does not have to do this herself or even pay for it herself. So private property is continually in need of public justification—first, because it empowers individuals to make decisions about the use of scarce resource in a way that is not necessarily sensitive to others’ needs or the public good; and second, because it does not merely permit that but deploys public force at public expense to uphold it.

    • AccountMaker@slrpnk.netEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, but the person in the replies said “All property is theft”, they didn’t make any distinction (not sure whether that is their actual view, or whether they were just trying to explain this community, but that’s besides the point). And nobody is going to shoplift factories or natural resources, so that distinction doesn’t seem to play a major (or at least direct) role in the context of OP’s question about why this community exists here.

      But I have a genuine question about your post, how does personal property differ from the explanation given for private property?

      In a system of private property, the person to whom a given object is assigned (e.g., the person who found it or made it) has control over the object: it is for her to decide what should be done with it. In exercising this authority, she is not understood to be acting as an agent or official of the society. She may act on her own initiative without giving anyone else an explanation, or she may enter into cooperative arrangements with others, just as she likes.

      Wouldn’t that apply completely to personal property as well? I always thought that private property was just a special class of things being treated as personal property, when it shouldn’t due to their importance to society. So someone treating a factory the same way they treat a teapot they have in their house, where the former is private and the latter is personal because the former affects the lives of others in a significant way. Or have I got it wrong?

      • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        Taken from a reddit post on the subject that I think did a good job of explaining it:

        I like to link the word “private” with “privation” or “deprivation”. Private property is easily identifiable by its effects on others, specifically, it’s deprivation. There are hundreds of thousands of hammers. Having one doesn’t deprive anyone of anything. At most only one person can use the hammer.

        A house is usable by an entire family, and if I own it but don’t use it myself, my ownership deprives an entire family of its use. That scales to apartment buildings pretty easily. Then there’s farms where basically it’s impossible for one person to do all of the work on a farm or eat all of the products of a farm, but my ownership has the effect of depriving anyone the right to work there or the right to consume its products. A factory is truly impossible for one person to use, but my ownership of it allows me to deprive everyone of its products unless they meet my price demands and also allows me to deprive everyone of use of the factory to make anything at all.

        Private property entails a deprivation of society of socially necessary commodities.

        In the case of a grocery store, the argument could be made that the owners of the grocery store chain are exploiting their employees with low wages, and selling the products of other owners who are exploiting their employees as well with their private property, thus justifying ‘taking back’ what was deprived.

        On the flip side, It would be very difficult to morally justify shoplifting from a co-op grocery store that sells products from other cooperatives, as at that point no one would be being exploited.

      • stabby_cicada@slrpnk.netEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        As the person ranting in the replies about how all property is theft, I was explaining why some strains of socialist thought support shoplifting as a form of redistribution from capital to labor, so, yes, you can presume I’m using a socialist definition of property. 😆