The Steal (10 page)

“People secretly applaud those who do not play by the rules. It’s a vital fantasy among the law-abiding bourgeois,” says Stephen Mihm, author of
A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States
, explaining Americans’ preoccupation with such figures. Mihm adds that Americans tolerate Robin Hoods and Butch Cassidys more in times of social tumult. “Whenever there is an economic dislocation, theft rises. We often fall in love with the little thief if there is a big one at work. The analogs of the robber barons and their rapacious greed are the small-time thieves in the underworld.”

In his popular 1969 book (revised in 2000)
Bandits
, Eric Hobsbawm, the distinguished nonagenarian British Marxist historian, presents the figure of the “social bandit” as an individualistic hero, a leader who appeals to poor people and champions them even as he distances himself from them. “They are little more than symptoms of their society,” and “the essence of the bandit myth is social redistribution and justice for the poor.” Hobsbawm also maintains that in times of economic stress, the line between criminal theft and theft as social act blurs. “Bank robbery might be theoretically punishable by law, like distilling moonshine or (for most citizens in the 1980s) smuggling goods through customs or illegal parking, but it was not a real crime. It might in fact be an approved kind of social justice.” But Hobsbawm sees shoplifting as a less communitarian theft. “I don’t think shoplifters are into social redistribution as distinct from individual redistribution,” he told me. “Most shoplifters I know don’t think they are causing their victims an obvious loss.”

Adam Weissman, my first Robin Hood 2.0, a sophisticated connoisseur of twenty-first-century media, does not think of stores as victims. The media-savvy Weissman was until 2009 a spokesman for Freegan .info, the website associated with the Freegans, a group most known for Dumpster-diving—scavenging in Dumpsters for food that supermarkets have recently tossed. He has appeared on
Life & Style,
the morning TV show, where he illustrated Dumpster-diving for horrified host Kimora Lee Simmons and a live audience. He has been the subject of a number of television documentaries, including several on PBS, and he is quoted about activism regularly. Victoria’s Secret prints its catalogs on unrecycled paper, he told CBS. “Those lacy panties that are advertised are coming at a cost to our planet’s environment.” The
New York Times
described him as having “the air of a Latin American revolutionary.”

Shoplifting first appeared on the men of Freeganism’s alternatives to buying in 1998, when Warren Oakes, the former drummer for the punk rock band Against Me!, wrote an informal manifesto, “Why Freegan,” and posted it on the Freegan website. Oakes defined Freeganism as “an anticonsumeristic ethic about eating,” which might comprise “Dumpster diving, foraging, bartering, and shoplifting.” When I tracked him down, Oakes said that he did not speak for the Freegans. But, he explained, “some Freegans consider shoplifting steaks to be a perfectly acceptable way to get free food while many (including myself) feel that the whole purpose is to use resources that would otherwise be wasted instead of just shoplifting from store shelves.” He added, “Shoplifting from a locally owned place was seen as a really shitty thing to do, but shoplifting a toothbrush from Walmart was harmless at worst. Some would say shoplifting from corporations you dislike was direct action sabotage against them. I wouldn’t go that far, but there was a time when I could morally defend the concept.”

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:

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 spree 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.

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.”