Theft porn and the ideology of private property

Reactions to a viral video of a woman stealing from a clothes store show the bounds of mainstream debate about capitalism.

Seems like there’s been a conspicuous uptick of theft porn in circulation lately — videos of people stealing, or attempting to steal, or being punished for it. The latest is this clip from a local news affiliate outside of LA showing one TJ Maxx customer assaulting another, allegedly for attempted shoplifting. The media’s spin on the incident has been straightforward: ABC praises the vigilante as a “Good Samaritan” for taking “matters [read: the law] into his own hands”. Critical accounts, meanwhile, have mostly focused on the attack as an act of racism. The Root, for example, asks

Would the customer have reacted differently if the alleged shoplifter was white or a non-Black person of color? …Statistically, Black folks are more likely to be subjected to violence when they are suspected of criminal behavior; their guilt or innocence often doesn’t matter.

Quick digression: if you want to talk about the role racism played here, it’s very easy to make the intersectional point that even if the victim was shoplifting, capitalism has disproportionately impoverished black folks and thereby pressured them into theft. So instead of saying this, which is directly relevant since even The Root concedes that she “apparently” is guilty, why make a tangential point instead about how racism can lead to false accusations against innocent people? Both acknowledge broader roles that racism plays in our society, but only one engages with the role that racism demonstrably played here.

The explanation, of course, is that liberal media cannot justify theft as an acceptable response to racism, as that would violate the sanctity of private property. Nor can it admit, in the end, that the assailant had good reason to believe that she was engaged in theft — as this would admit that the assault may have been motivated not just by racism, but also by the customer’s commitment to private property rights. In other words, this is not actually an intersectional analysis in the sense of acknowledging both race and class as vectors of oppression. It’s another example of the identitarian reductionism that governs liberal media: the radical belief that class plays no role in political oppression, and that politics can always be simplified to conflicts of identity.

Liberal criticism of the incident is only worth highlighting since it is in dissent where we can see the extent of ideology; one can see just how thoroughly private property radicalism is baked into our discourse by noticing that even skeptics of ABC’s coverage remain fully committed to it. If you want to see the depth of ideology — just how extreme capitalist radicalism can actually get — you have to look at the vigilante’s defenders.

The neoliberal / anarcho-capitalist horseshoe

Here, in a deleted-in-under-two-hours reaction from attorney and media personality Warren Rhea, is an unusually frank example:

Warren’s a thoroughly typical right-wing media activist. Look at the globe emoji in his display name and his self-description as “chief neoliberal shill” and you might think that he’s a typical liberal Democrat. Do five seconds of Googling and you’ll discover that the man is actually a well-known figure among libertarians; he speaks at their conferences and streams under the handle of libertarian icon Bastiat. Like most libertarians, he has adopted the standard PR tactic of posing further to the left than he actually is.

But then look at what he’s actually saying and you’ll realize that he isn’t even doing libertarianism — Rhea has moved considerably to their right!

The standard libertarian position, after all, is that the government’s only legitimate role is to exercise a monopoly on violence in defense of private property. You can’t just have everyone playing Judge Dredd every time they decide that someone is stealing or violating a contract; so instead, you have a government that enforces minimalist ground rules of capitalism and otherwise stays out of the way. At the radical edge of libertarianism you will see castle-doctrine type arguments about how one can defend ones own property rights, or that this function of the state should be decentralized and delegated with oversight to private organizations; but libertarianism never does away with it altogether.

We have a name for the school of political thought that does: anarcho-capitalism. This is the world where, absent the state, society would (or should) just voluntarily organize itself into a functional capitalist system. So what at first looked like a standard defense of Clintonian Third Way neoliberalism, often considered in the US a center or even center-left position, was a vision of capitalism as extreme as you can possibly imagine. Right of Friedman, right of Nozick, right of Ayn Rand.

The bounds of capitalist ideology

So let’s review how this discourse actually works. On one hand, we have partisans who position themselves as “neoliberals” or “classical liberals”, Third Way moderate centrist types; read through Warren’s polemic and you’ll see a man proudly announcing himself as a spokesman of the establishment ridiculing marginal radicals with supposed common sense. But what these people are actually promoting is as radical a vision of capitalism as you can possibly get, a bellum omnium contra omnes fought exclusively in defense of private property. It’s hard right anarchy, and the reason it’s presented as moderate center-leftism is that this is what a lot of folks think moderate center-leftism actually is.

On the other hand, meanwhile, the mainstream opposition to the anarcho-capitalists are liberal identitarian reductionists. Rhetoric like we see in The Root is routinely vilified as extreme woke leftism, but The Root goes out of its way to suggest that the ideology of private property may have played no role here whatsoever. Instead of condemning violence as a categorically illegitimate response to theft, the author gets hung up on circumstantial objections: “he was much bigger than the woman he attacked” who was “much smaller than him”, and he was not just violent but “appallingly” violent.

Contemporary American politics plays out almost exclusively within the bounds of these two positions. When the grotesque violence of capitalism isn’t being celebrated in as extreme terms as possible, it’s dismissed as completely unrelated to capitalism. The notion that you just can’t ever justify violence against people over private property is completely off the table.