Looting as a symptom of an ill system

Topic: Looting in protests are often seeing as an offensive treatment to the

protests but this may be just a consequence of the massive consumption
system and as a valid form of protest.
Every political protest has its moral presumptions and one of them is that looting is bad.
First of all, let’s go beyond than that. The moralized discourse of looting as theft has its
roots in property and property rights. However, the assignation of property is nothing more
than a social assumption of authority and this is seeing in looting. Looting shows that
property just exists when authority is there to protect it, property is theft, looting is a
consequence of how massive consumption affect societies and how it prioritize
consumption over precariousness.
Property rights are the rights that allows people to have property, this means that this rights
are necessary to know which property belongs to who. Property (understood as private and
personal) have just existed because of authority on possessions, and the main example of
this is when police need to defend property in any protest, they are enforcing property
rights. This is where looting enters. In a world full of a commodified-life, property is seeing
as a right to tread and to convert life into a schizophrenic paradise of pleasure, to this
looting can be seen as a symptom of an ill system that avoid us to enjoy non-commodifies
pleasures. “Did you wanted to produce commodities? Then give them to us as far as we
can’t control the system that grows within us” this is what protests may look.
However, some people refer to looting as a problem of consumerism and individual
responsibility that tread against property rights and because of that every protest that uses
force against property must be punished. This kind of thought concentrates the protests on
the state and thinks that as far as the protests is against the state force and not property, it is
valid and legitimated, referring to looters as vandals and thieves that wants to use the
protests as an opportunity of vandalism and theft.
Both perspectives has its form of legitimate their way of thinking, nevertheless, some
thinkers says that the second perspective enters in a circular reasoning about the state and
what legitimize property. From the experience of protests we cannot say that all of them are
there for the protests but the loot is only explained here for in the social illness kind of
view, while the property rights doesn’t allow us to go beyond what is behind that behavior.
In conclusion, the legitimism of looting cannot be announced as an individual problem,
however if this allows them to loot or not is a different question whether if their condition
requires it or not, a good answer would be if they needed some basics goods, but this
explanation can’t be applied as a justification for looting of retail stores and furthermore it
is not the purpose of this essay.