The age-old philosophical question “Would you steal bread for your starving family?” has a simple answer from French anarchist Marius Jacob. He lived his life in spite of the economic system that surrounded him, the system that prioritizes wealth and power and not the workers who assembled in factories to make a pittance of their worth. To my surprise, I agreed with a major amount of Jacob’s manifesto, but I believe it has a massive caveat in a modern society of corporations. Marius Jacob expresses my belief that the poor are justified in stealing from the elite class by virtue of taking back what the poor had produced in the factories while questioning the society that prioritizes wealth and penalizes labor.
Before dissecting Marius Jacob’s manifesto, I feel the importance of discussing my views on so-called ‘bandits’ and general thievery. I’ve only ever stolen something once in my life, and looking back, it’s a stretch to call it a ‘theft’. When I was no older than a lad, I was exploring the Kohl’s department store when I noticed a ring on the ground, with no label or price tag. I took it home with me and later confessed to my mother that I did wrong. Looking back on it now, I realize that it was most likely a lost item that rolled under the clothes rack. As a young adult, I have a much-refined view of stealing other than the black and white view of ‘stealing is bad’.
As I’ve come of age, I’ve seen late-stage capitalism disenfranchise millions of individuals by locking them out of essential elements that humans need to survive. Affordable housing is increasingly harder to find, and food stamp recipients are ineligible to buy non-food essentials like diapers and cleaning supplies (USDA.gov). Simply put, the current economic system breeds necessities that have no guarantee of being fulfilled and as such, my thoughts on thieves have changed drastically since my younger years. I believe that so-called ‘thieves’ have reasons to acquire their goods through less-than-legal means, and in doing so, have rebelled against global capitalism’s chokehold on hoarding necessities for human life and prosperity within the modern world.
My view on ‘thieves’ compares similarly to nineteenth-century French anarchist, Marius Jacob, who himself was a thief. Only, Jacob didn’t see the profession as anything to be ashamed about, rather he took pride in the fact he was ‘sticking it to the man’ or rather, the State that had oppressed him. As he was awaiting trial for killing a police officer, his 1905 manifesto “Why I was A Burglar” explains much of his reasoning behind his anarchist actions. To start out his manifesto, Jacob addresses his audience, presumably France’s upper echelon class and declares the need to clarify what a thief is. “In my opinion theft is a need that is felt by all men to take in order to satisfy their appetites. This need manifests itself in everything: from the stars that are born and die like beings. . . Life is nothing but theft and massacre. Plants and beasts devour each other in order to survive” (Jacob, 1905). Jacob is referring to the natural impulses of animals in the wild where laws don’t apply. Within the give and take dichotomy that exists between predator and prey in the wild, the concept of thievery is nowhere to be found within this ecosystem. Animals simply take what they need to survive, with no economic barriers insight. Jacob is questioning the narrative that human survival requires a certain amount of money to simply exist in a modern society. He ponders the question of why certain human necessities are hidden by a paywall, while others are given for free by nature. He claims that air and light have never been given a price tag, while food and shelter have been reserved for those who can pay the price. While he does include water on the list of free goods within society, clean drinking water has historically been difficult to come by, but for our purposes, we’ll include it on the list of free gifts of nature. He criticizes society for gatekeeping food and shelter behind the veil of ‘honest work’ and here Jacob gets to the rationalization of his so-called ‘crimes’.
Marius Jacob likes to work, that is, when that work can provide a livable wage without breaking his back in the process, which he argues is inherently wrong. Within his manifesto, Jacob admits that he enjoys work and that a person has a certain amount of energy that needs to be expended (Jacob, 1905). However, his complaint is that necessities are hidden behind the need to work for these goods and even in doing so, this is not guaranteed to produce enough income to properly sustain on. “Because [food and shelter] demand the expending of effort, a certain amount of labor. But labor is the very essence of society; that is, the association of all individuals to conquer with little effort much well-being.” (Jacob, 1905). Not only is he critiquing that living in a society requires one to work to eat, but he also questions if society is even organized in such a fashion. He also argues that the act of working in an industrialized society is skewed and how wealth is not distributed to those who produce the goods within the factories. “The more a man works the less he earns. The less he produces the more he benefits. Merit is not taken into consideration. Only the bold take hold of power and hasten to legalize their rapine” (Jacob, 1905). Here Jacob is arguing that the act of working no longer guarantees a prosperous life, rather this is acquired by accumulating resources to ensure the system continues to benefit wealthy elites while leaving the actual laborers to swelter in the factories. He elaborates on this by providing examples of the economic inequality within society. “A liquor seller and the boss of a brothel enrich themselves, while a man of genius dies of poverty in a hospital bed. The baker who bakes bread doesn’t get any; the shoemaker who makes thousands of shoes shows his toes. . . the bricklayer who builds castles and palaces wants for air in a filthy hovel. Those who produce everything have nothing, and those who produce nothing have everything” (Jacob, 1905). While laborers are painstakingly assembling the attire and homes of the wealthy, they are confined to cramped hovels, paid for with poverty wages. In this environment, tension, and hatred for those in power can start to synthesize.
Why can’t the powerful elites within any given society see it within themselves to help change the system that keeps the creators of wealth beaten down in the dirt? Simple, that system made them rich and powerful and continues to benefit them and their bloodline. Marius Jacob’s manifesto’s argument that the elite’s legalization of an unjust system, parallels another anarchist’s views on how power corrupts even the best of people. Michael Bakunin, a Russian collectivist anarchist, wrote in his 1867 article “Power Corrupts the Best” that “the best man, the most intelligent, disinterested, generous, pure, will infallibly and always be spoiled at [the habit of command] . . . inherent in power never fail to produce this demoralization; they are: contempt for the masses and the overestimation of one's own merits” (Bakunin, 1867). Essentially, Bakunin demonstrates that once someone is in a position of power, whether that’s a manager of a factory or a public official, your power becomes routine such that you can’t see any other way of operating without it. Your ego becomes inflated with the responsibilities of representing a great number of people and you start to despise your constituents. Bakunin was a student of ‘collectivist anarchism’ which argues for the elimination of positions of power, private ownership, and the means of production, for them to be turned over to be run by the collective. Relating back to Jacob, once the laboring class creates an elite’s wealth, he accumulates more power off the backs of the laboring class and is reluctant to share this with the ones that made it possible.
My arguments align with Jacob in the sense that, when wealth is prioritized overwork and the creators of wealth don’t get a slice of the metaphorical pie, stealing seems to be the only restitution to survive in an apathetic society. However, where Jacob and I differ is the difference between stealing from a locally owned grocery store and a mega-corporation. Walmart reports an estimated $3 billion dollars in stolen goods every year, about 1% of their $300 billion yearly revenue (Fortune, 2015). I am of the understanding that stealing from a mega-corporation, like Walmart is ethically justifiable when their full-time employees don’t make enough to be over the federal poverty line (Global Citizen, 2018). Walmart’s poverty wage reinforces Jacob’s argument that ‘those who produce everything have nothing’ directly by not paying its employees a living wage. Although Walmart employees are not the direct manufacturer of the goods they peddle, Walmart relies on them to receive, stock, and sell the product at the store, while dealing with difficult people and long shifts. While Jacob’s environment in post-industrial Paris is a separate world from modern consumerism, the struggle of working-class people being paid a fair wage continues over a century later.
Jacob promotes thievery as the only restitution in a society full of ill-gotten gains and that he has given up trying to appease the thieves of wealth and has taken to getting some of it back. While discussing Jacob and Bakunin, we have come full circle with the question: “Is stealing wrong?” The answer we’ve come to is, not only is stealing right, but it’s also justified when the elite class steals working-class wages, preventing them from rising above their station to achieve comfortable or elite status. While Jacob and I somewhat differ on stealing in relation to small vs. large businesses, we are in agreeance that stealing from powerful companies is justified. Summing up, Marius Jacob and I are together in the belief that stealing is justified in an apathetic society prioritizing wealth and not labor, with an emphasis on targeting mega-corporations in modern society.
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