When I called Weissman to ask for an interview, he at first seemed reluctant to talk about shoplifting as part of Freeganism. He e-mailed me to set the terms of the conversation. “Well, I don’t drink coffee and don’t buy beverages/food in general, but am fine with meeting you.” I said I would like to meet with him, since he was the spokesman for the website Freegan.info. Like Oakes, Weissman said that although he was a spokesperson for the website, he did not speak for the Freegans. He spoke as “an individual.”
I arrived early for our rendezvous at noon in the café at the McNally Jackson bookstore in SoHo, but the tables were too close for a chat about shoplifting. So I decamped to a stoop across the street and waited. Forty-five minutes later, a disheveled Weissman appeared, apologizing. He had not known where the bookstore was, and since he didn’t own a cell phone, he could not call.
Thirty-one, slight, with pale skin, Weissman, his black hair stuffed into a short ponytail, arrived at our meeting wearing a full beard, a blue coat, rumpled khakis, and a heavy, grayish sweater. He spread his dusty coat out over the hot stoop and we sat down on it. Except for Metro-Cards, Weissman has not bought more than a potato chip since he was seventeen. Spending money equals wasting it. But shoplifting is another matter. “Shoplifting is the most controversial topic in the Freegan community,” he told me. “Even to have the discussion [about whether shoplifting was a legitimate Freegan act] is controversial.”
The son of a pediatrician and a teacher, Weissman grew up in Woodcliff Lake, a prosperous town in Bergen County, New Jersey. He attended four high schools. In ninth grade, “private school was forced upon me,” because at public school he kept getting beaten up. He didn’t know why. In 1999, instead of applying to college, he began to coordinate political evenings at the Environmental Justice and Social Activist Center at Wetlands, a nightclub and forum in Tribeca. He has been doing little else since then. His parents accepted his vocation, more or less. “It’s not what they would have chosen. They keep suggesting I go to law school. At my age, it’s too late.”
Weissman launched into the history of the Freegan attitude toward shoplifting, which he saw as part of the movement’s attitude toward property, with gusto. The Freegans, he said, claim as antecedents Depressionera hoboes; the Diggers, the seventeenth-century Protestant utopians who believed that they, like the nobility, should have the right to own land; the back-to-the-land movement; and Eastern philosophy.
Were they organized? I interrupted. He looked startled. The Freegans were against organization. Their organization was an antiorganization. To ask if they were organized was to miss the point. And Weissman’s “guidelines” for Freegan shoplifting could not be construed as “rules,” he cautioned: Food was okay, even organic food. Fur coats and iPods were not okay, because they were luxury products. “Fur coats should be burned,” Weissman said, chuckling. “Ninety percent of the stuff we buy we don’t need.” Reselling shoplifted merchandise was not okay. “We don’t want anyone to make a profit.” To the Hoffmanesque credo that it was okay to shoplift from a “corporate monolith” but not a mom-andpop business, he added that shoplifting from thrift stores was not okay unless the owners exploited their salespeople or mislabeled the store “vintage.” Coca-Cola, coffee, and chocolate could be shoplifted anytime because the companies manufacturing them exploit their workers.
Like Oakes, Weissman said that shoplifting is one “strategy”—Dumpster-diving, graffiti, and squatting are others—to finance a life free from obligation, “like Thoreau’s.” And like many self-described anarchists I met, Weissman not only gave these “strategies” equal weight, he proselytized for them. “We shouldn’t ask, Is it ethical to shoplift? Rather we should ask, Is it ethical to buy?”
Not all Freegans agreed that this was the question. Madeline Nelson, a Freegan who in a former life had worked for Barnes & Noble, asked rhetorically, “Is shoplifting a Freegan issue? I think not.”
But on the stoop, Weissman had an answer for everything. He mentioned Proudhon as an inspiration, and when I wondered aloud if Proudhon really advocated shoplifting, he turned to Peter Kropotkin, the nineteenth-century Russian anarchist and colleague of Emma Goldman who advocated the “right” to expropriation.
Could I use his real name? I interjected.
If I was going to say that he supported shoplifting philosophically, I could. But not if I was going to say he actually shoplifted.
Had he actually shoplifted?
He tilted his head to the right like a bird looking at the ground to see if a worm was there. “I don’t want to say I never have.”
Shoplifting, he said, posed a theoretical problem for Freegans most concerned with consuming less. “By shoplifting we are creating more demand for products. So unless you set out to shoplift or destroy a particular item because you believe it is evil, shoplifting can be seen as working counter to Freegan aims.”
It was nearly 2:00 p.m. I left Adam Weissman and walked down the street to Savoy, a restaurant in a brick town house, to meet an old friend. I arrived first and settled in. The interior of Savoy looks like a well-oiled yacht. Even though it was summer, a fire burned in the fireplace behind the bar, where a well-groomed couple sat feeding each other olives with their fingers. My table was set with heavy silver cutlery. The menu arrived, printed on thick, creamy paper. Duck rillettes or Spanish mackerel?
I ordered a glass of wine. The large windows were open onto Prince Street. Sipping my wine, I looked out at the people walking by. A few feet away, Weissman was suspended over the rim of a metal trash can. Standing on tiptoe, he stretched the upper half of his body into the can and pulled out a half-eaten Danish wrapped in wax paper. He held up the Danish, examining it. And then he took a bite. I pushed my silver fork off the table and ducked to retrieve it. I counted to ten. When I reemerged, Weissman was gone.
Weissman is hardly alone in his belief that shoplifting for survival is legitimate. Adbusters, a magazine from a Vancouver-based international group of socialist artists and anarchists known for its spoof advertisements, such as Buy Nothing Day, inspired a Montreal-based group to launch Steal Something Day, whose slogan, according to one website, is “Diranger les riches dans leurs niches!” (Knock rich people from their perches!) The American radical collective CrimethInc., whose every move is hidden from all but the most devoted followers, celebrates shoplifting from behind pseudonyms. “Good luck in your shoplifting quest,” a CrimethInc.-er wrote on a piece of corrugated cardboard enclosed in the packaging of my copy of the paperback manifesto Evasion, which I purchased over the Internet for $12.95. Written by Anonymous, Evasion tracks its hero shoplifting, Dumpster-diving, and train-hopping across “Amerika.” Another CrimethInc. tome, written by the CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective, Days of War, Nights of Love: Crimethink for Beginners, containing the essay “Why I Love Shoplifting from Big Corporations,” has attracted even more acclaim in these circles.
Many anarchists asked if I had read it—their Das Kapital, apparently. Did I like it? One self-described “online organizer” and curator smiled, went to her bookshelf, tipped Days of War, Nights of Love from a high shelf, and pulled it down. She read the first paragraph:
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.
The essay ending with the command “Shoplifters of the World, Unite!” was so admired in this community that the Canadian radical filmmaker, “media jammer,” and activist Franklin Lopez adapted it into a short narrative video. Using the text as a voice-over, Lopez follows a mustached shoplifter on a spr
ee through CVS and other stores. The video is full of comic-book effects; Lopez slaps words like “Shaazam!” on the screen as Superboy Shoplifter scrambles through the aisles, grabbing household items. But (spoiler alert) the shoplifting hero turns out to be a single mom trying to make ends meet. She removes her disguise in the car. The security guard chasing her is only doing so to give her a candy bar she dropped in the parking lot.
In May 2008, Adam Weissman posted the video on the Web. It sparked an angry conversation about whether shoplifting was a legitimate form of breaking eggs. The arguments CrimethInc., the Freegans, and other anarchists use to justify shoplifting from multinational corporations are not new. They are Industrial Revolution ideas run through the situationists and tarted up in Gen X clothing. At first, I found these ideas rhetorically and imaginatively jejune. “Why I Love Shoplifting from Big Corporations” read more like a summa of adolescent grudges than a sophisticated political treatise. As I continued to think about it, I began to reconsider. Was living outside of capitalism really impossible?
Weissman forwarded me an e-mail sent by Cookie Orlando, the nom de e-mail of James Trimarco, a former doctoral candidate in anthropology at the City University of New York, a student of the sociologist and political activist Stanley Aronowitz, and a writer who publishes in alternative magazines. To research an article about political shoplifting he was writing for Fifth Estate, an online “antiauthoritarian magazine of ideas and action,” Cookie/James posted the following e-mail on anarchist academic and activist listservs.
I am not taking a side in the debate about whether shoplifting is revolutionary or not, or whether it is good or bad. Instead, I am trying to see what role it plays in the lives of activists. Does [shoplifting] help keep a sense of direct action alive? Does it develop skills that can come in handy in other forms of political work? Does it provide a kind of “euphoria of disobedience” against private property that’s not easily found elsewhere?
The post inspired another debate on the Freegan.info listserv. “My concern is that if you need to eat or feed your children, and you do not have money to pay for the items, the only moral thing to do is get the food any way you can,” one poster wrote. Another exclaimed, “As far as I’m concerned there is no argument to be made that stealing from a bunch of murderers and con-artists is immoral . . . the WHOLE POINT is that they are stealing from us and we have to take back the world from them.”
One of the shoplifters in Trimarco’s article was an activist trying to support his family. Another was a self-described kleptomaniac-anarchist who had shoplifted $10,000 worth of food from Key Foods over the years. A third amped up his shoplifting during the Republican National Convention in New York as if to achieve through stealing what he could not through voting. But however devoted they were to their crime, these shoplifters were too ashamed to use their real names. Trimarco concluded that shoplifting arises from “a missing place in the battery of activism. There’s a lust for direct action and even though this is futile, people do it.”
David Graeber, an American cultural anthropologist who has taught at the University of London since 2007, defended shoplifting in even stronger terms.
One doesn’t destroy (or steal) people’s personal property, in the sense of things they own to use themselves. One doesn’t deprive people of their means of livelihood. Almost all anarchists I know don’t feel it’s morally wrong to steal from a large corporate store, but wouldn’t think of stealing from a mom and pop grocer. I feel that way, though I don’t think I’ve ever shoplifted anything myself. . . .
It’s really hard to imagine a scenario where we can overcome capitalism without breaking or taking anything that the law says doesn’t belong to us. So then it comes down to a question of tactics: When is it helpful and when isn’t it? . . . But then for me at least the question becomes: Who gets to say? Is there some central authority that can dictate what are appropriate revolutionary tactics? On what basis?
Although some ethical shoplifters use Abbie Hoffman’s word “liberating,” their fascination with the crime springs from seismic shifts in technology and culture in the last two decades. The phrase “ethical shoplifting” itself indicates an ironic stance toward an act that is descended from Hoffman’s idea of stealing to beat the Man, yet is also quite different. Ethical shoplifting is a practical joke—a postmodern, plugged-in, hipster crime. It is a powerful moral glue holding together groups of radicals who don’t believe in anything in a post-Internet age.
ART FOLLOWS LIFE
At the Point of Purchase exhibit at the Dumbo Arts Center in Brooklyn in 2006, organized by Gretchen Wagner, then a curatorial assistant in the prints department at the Museum of Modern Art, few artists were older than thirty, and like Adam Weissman, many of them regarded shoplifting as a necessary populist, intellectual, and creative protest against consumer culture.
Standing in the crowded gallery, I wondered if this was the first time in history artists had committed “fake” shoplifting. Some of the artists exhibiting here called themselves “shop-droppers”—or “reverse shoplifters.” They buy an item, alter it, and return it to the store to send up consumerism or lament the absence of individuality in mass culture. Ryan Watkins-Hughes did photo collages of abandoned buildings, which he then glued onto cans of peas. The idea, he said, was to assert “the individual’s rights over those of mass culture by making the peas unbuyable.” Zoë Sheehan Saldaña shoplifted some candy once, but as an artist, she, like Watkins-Hughes, was into shop-dropping. For her this meant buying an article of clothing at Walmart, remaking it by hand, and sneaking the one-of-a-kind garment, complete with tags, back onto the rack. “Gen Y all watched Winona Ryder movies and they’re all interested in shopping. . . . The store is my gallery,” she told me.
The shop-droppers reminded me of a Dada prank. As did urban sprinting, kids miming shoplifting so that security guards would chase them for nothing. The fake thieves’ most ambitious stunts borrowed from the theater.
Andrew Lynn is a slight man with an MFA in integrated electronic art from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, New York. At age twenty-four, he invented Whirl-Mart, a ritual in which “shoppers”—wearing shirts emblazoned with the words “Whirl-Mart” or aprons designed to resemble salespeople’s smocks—push empty shopping carts through a Walmart store in what Lynn calls “a silent protest of commercialism.”
At the Point of Purchase exhibit, Lynn was embarrassed to find his Whirl-Mart photos hanging in a traditional gallery. Still photos, he said, failed to capture Whirl-Mart’s dynamic radicalism, which came to life when in 2001, still a graduate student, he answered a call from Adbusters, asking him to create a “participatory and anticonsumerist happening” for April Fools’ Day. “In Troy, there were about three Walmarts in a radius of seven to ten miles, and they put a lot of small stores out of business,” Lynn said.
The first Whirl-Mart, on April Fools’ Day 2001, happened during daylight saving time. Lynn forgot to set his clock. When he arrived at the Walmart, almost in tears at the thought of having missed the event that he had worked so hard to set up, a line of fifteen people snaked into the parking lot outside. They whirled “of their own accord” for two hours.
For a few years, Whirl-Marts sprang up all over the world: in Stockholm, Sweden; Finland; England; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Germany; and Austin, Texas. According to an Internet rumor, a Whirl-Mart took place at the foot of the Mayan pyramids, where Walmart was improbably planning to build a store. Asked how shoplifting was connected with Whirl-Mart, Lynn said they were both on a continuum of “risky anticonsumer rituals,” repeating the point of view, common in his circle, that shoplifting doesn’t hurt stores financially since they are insured for less.
Store personnel missed the postmodern inflection. In 2001, Kmart chased some “Whirl-Marters” out of the Astor Place store, as did a Walmart in Latham, New York, the following year. Zoë Sheehan Saldaña approached Sam Walton’s daughter to see if she was willing to buy some of the shirts to exh
ibit in Crystal Fields, the company art gallery at store headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. She never heard back. “It’s not worth anything to them to touch it,” she said, explaining that her shoplifting artwork was too radical for a Walmart gallery in a Southern town.
SHOPLIFTING IS YOU
If part of ethical shoplifting comes from Abbie Hoffman, part is imported. In 2004, a group of Barcelonese artists interested in social justice introduced Americans to their version of the crime: Shoplifting in Barcelona is a belated response to Franco’s regime, as well as a reflection of the city’s history of anarchism, an unemployment rate of 18 percent, the lack of a solid middle class, and Spain’s lack of interest in what the law considers in most cases an irrelevant crime. In Spain, if you shoplift an item worth less than 400 euros ($600), you are unlikely to go to jail.
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