In all likelihood lashing out at fancy retailers will be effective. Additional police powers and crackdowns will be paired with throwing the rioters a few bones (e.g. greater checks on police powers and throwing the book at George Floyd's murderers).
Of course, the elites will pretend that they meant to throw that bone all along and will vehemently deny it has anything to do with a smashed up Gucci store in Beverly Hills and a lot of Americans (perhaps most) will believe this denial.
Wait, so if there were some elites in charge of everything, and if they felt personally threatened, you are suggesting that their response would be to decrease the power of their security forces? Wouldn't they want to make the police even more powerful?
> Wouldn't they want to make the police even more powerful
Civilians outnumber police 500-1. The people who were lead to the guillotines also wanted more police power but you have to throw a bone to the civilians to make them think 'you care'.
Here's $2 extra to come to work and risk coronavirus and we totally won't cancel your insurance when you get sick.
Yes of course they'd want that, but compromise is often a necessity to prevent things from spiraling totally out of control.
The French and Russian revolutions are a testament to what happens when the ruler tries to effect the appearance of compromise without actually doing it (e.g. Constitution of 1906). It ended very badly for the rulers in both of those cases.
They fucked up a lot more than just that, but that was a key contributing factor to their deaths.
The difference is in the times of the French revolution, the elite lived only mere miles away from the angry poor, within striking reach of their wrath whereas now the elites can move to super safe heavens, isolated from the mess they created and suffer no consequences from the angry masses.
Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett can move with their families to some private island in the Caribbean and wait while things cool down while running their gigs remotely.
I could see Louis 16th's failed flight to varennes being repeated in a different form. It wasnt a lack of technology that stopped him, it was a man recognizing him and arresting him.
Part of the problem was that he left it too long to attempt fleeing.
Indeed, peaceful protests are good for the status quo because they're easy to ignore. They want you to sit down and be quiet so they can ignore you. Once you start to inconvenience rich people, or god forbid cause the stock market to go down, real change will begin to happen.
Gucci doesn't control the police, no. People who shop at Gucci do.
Do you think that they are not going to see the smashing of their favorite shop as an implicit threat against them personally?
Gucci is a powerful symbol of unchecked gaudy wealth as much as it is a retail establishment. The handbags themselves aren't really the point, which they'd be the first to admit to.
I'm not sure anyone controls the police. They look a lot like self ruling autonomous entities to me. The mayor of New York, supposedly their boss, is in a conflict with NYPD, and is mostly losing, from what I hear.
The current "looting" is in no way confided to Gucci type stores. All retail with anything of value is being plundered.
But even in a world where the gaudy rich control the police, and only their favorite stores were destroyed, I can't imagine that leads to police reform.
If people attack something you hold dear and makes demands on you, few people just give in. The normal reaction is to fight back as hard as you can, ignoring costs, until your enemy is defeated. I offer the US reaction to 9/11 as an example.
In your model, the Gucci customers are extremely powerful, so they can mount very strong counter attacks.
I was reading this this morning, on the subject of "who controls the police," seems legit (the answer is, the economic elites, absolutely represented by Gucci patrons):
> More than crime, modern police forces in the United States emerged as a response to “disorder.” What constitutes social and public order depends largely on who is defining those terms, and in the cities of 19th century America they were defined by the mercantile interests, who through taxes and political influence supported the development of bureaucratic policing institutions. More than crime, modern police forces in the United States emerged as a response to “disorder.”
> These economic interests had a greater interest in social control than crime control. Private and for profit policing was too disorganized and too crime specific in form to fulfill these needs. The emerging commercial elites needed a mechanism to insure a stable and orderly work force, a stable and orderly environment for the conduct of business, and the maintenance of what they referred to as the “collective good” (Spitzer and Scull 1977). These mercantile interests also wanted to divest themselves of the cost of protecting their own
enterprises, transferring those costs from the private sector to the state.
> Maintaining a stable and disciplined work force for the developing system of factory production and ensuring a safe and tranquil community for the conduct of commerce required an organized system of social control. The
developing profit-based system of production antagonized social tensions in the community. Inequality was increasing rapidly; the exploitation of workers through long hours, dangerous working conditions, and low pay was endemic; and the dominance of local governments by economic elites was creating political unrest. The only effective political strategy available to exploited workers was what economic elites referred to as “rioting,” which was actually a primitive form of what would become union strikes against employers (Silver 1967). The modern police force not only provided an organized, centralized body of men (and they were all male) legally authorized to use force to maintain order, it also provided the illusion that this order was being maintained under the rule of law, not at the whim of those with economic power.
The pandemic demonstrated that luxury retail is non-essential (you can still buy your Gucci bags online). When luxury retail was closed the world did not fall apart. Nobody is protesting because they can't shop at the Apple store.
For someone in desperation all I hear is further reason to riot and loot. Nobody cares about these people, and politicians keep going on TV saying how they're going to put everyone in jail or shoot them.
Statements and actions are two very different things, and as far as I can tell the rioters have the support of both corporations and the state, as absolutely nothing has been done to deal with the unrest.
I'm not sure why people are eating up the media lie idea that the government is some fascist entity supporting corporations, because the government's actions show that the rioters, politicians, corporations, and government (state and federal) are all on the same side.
Revolutionaries that signal on the same lines as Sony, Target, Walmart, Google, the state governments, and the federal government... It's honestly laughable how well this is orchestrated and how incredibly naive or stupid the people are that are eating it up for social brownie points.
The only people not being represented by anyone are the small business owners who don't wan't their homes and businesses eviscerated, and normal citizens who keep their heads down.
Do you really think so? These stores all have insurance. The deductibles will hurt a little but I don't think it's going to be game changing, especially for any national or international chains.
Yes. I don't think it's a problem for them financially, it's just it's a a powerful symbol of the control that they have lost.
That's why they'll pull out all of the stops including heavy handed propaganda, agent provocateurs, sending in the army (if it gets much worse) and even (finally, with gritted teeth), appeasement.
Historically riots have often presaged regime change as it can uncover how dangerously exposed the elites are and how little support the elites have. Unlikely in this case, but it's still the same process that scares the bejesus out of most regimes.
We're already seeing agent provocateurs in the current protests. White nationalists are purposely trying to incite violent riots throughout the U.S. as part of their "accelerationist" plans. The regrettably widespread opinion that the original, peaceful protest against police brutality is per se violent and thus to be opposed is very much a false and racist claim.
> We're already seeing agent provocateurs in the current protests. White nationalists are purposely trying to incite violent riots throughout the U.S. as part of their "accelerationist" plans.
The amount that this is actually happening is vastly overstated. I've watched this narrative blow up within 48 hours, but the reality is that a lot of the "looting" is from frustrated, angry, low-income people.
In no way is that a racist claim - poverty and extreme inequality breeds desperation and anger and you can't pretend that away.
Angry and frustrated people will always be vulnerable to provocation. We can't pretend that away, but we can't wish that away either. So both claims could be true in some sense, but agent provocateurs (acting under fictitious monikers such as "Antifa", "Anonymous/4chan" or the like) are clearly playing a key role.
The big chains won't run risky or unprofitable stores. It's the communities that will be hurt by this. Despite interest-free loans and over $100 million in federal funding, Baltimore still hasn't recovered from the 2015 Freddie Gray riots.[1] Moreover: government funding is a rather blunt tool, and directing it at a city tends to cause most of the money to flow to the nicer parts of town. That's what happened in Ferguson.[2]
Riots tend to widen the disparities, not reduce them.
The big chains were suffering outside of a handful of affluent neighborhoods in all cities even in good times, I don’t see why this wouldn’t be a problem. Margins are low, and consumers’ ability to spend is low, so raising prices might not be possible leaving closing down as the only option.
If you don't run a viable business, should your business continue to exist? Which one do you want, socialism or capitalism? In a capitalist system, failed businesses are allowed to fail and don't get free money from the government.
Of course, the elites will pretend that they meant to throw that bone all along and will vehemently deny it has anything to do with a smashed up Gucci store in Beverly Hills and a lot of Americans (perhaps most) will believe this denial.