TRICK AND TREAT
SMELL OUR FEET
GIVE US SOMETHING GOOD TO EAT
Bismillah, c’est les ténèbres.
Happy Halloween!!! It seems a small band of troublemakers celebrated spooky season in Portland by playfully expropriating a LOT of food, medicine, and menstrual supplies from Whole Foods, distributing all the looted bounty to various free pantries and fridges across the city.
Blending in with the other revelers out on the streets dressing head-to-toe in fun costumes, our mob brought smiles and laughter to passers-by and party-goers. After all, as some so-called Italians noted, if you don’t dress up then you don’t get any candy. Planned out with the precision of a heist, while the cops were busy with the chaos of the night, we moved into the store with joyous intention; some handing out agitational fliers to shoppers and workers; some keeping watch and handling signals; some loudly and distractingly decrying Amazon, techno-dystopia, and capitalism; others yoinking goodies off of the shelves, and thus out of the flows of commodity; timed out so everything lasted no more than a couple minutes. Once our bags were filled we quickly disappeared back into the foggy night. Our looted treats and necessities were dispersed and shared freely.
Why Whole Foods? Come on, everyone knows how much Whole Foods sucks. Do we need to enumerate all the reasons? Whole Foods is certainly a particularly egregious capitalist enterprise; from their shockingly overpriced goods that somehow both push bogus snake oil “wellness” commodities AND homogenize our desires through a highly controlled limited range of options; to their exploitation of their retail employees; to their connection to Amazon, and the surveillance, military, and policing infrastructure it maintains; to their role as harbinger of gentrification and displacement in poor and/or POC communities. And guess what?! Food should be free! It doesn’t matter if the business gatekeeping us from our means of surviving and thriving is a giant multinational conglomerate or a “mom n pop” local business. Commodification is a shit deal for the proletariat. The profit motive means social murder, the destruction of the ecosystem we all depend on, and a life spent toiling so the rich get richer while our dreams get put on the back burner.
This festive lick was a playful way to remind ourselves that with a few friends and a little planning we can take what we need to better our lives, and these small gestures can help us build the skills and trust to carry out larger actions against domination. We don’t need to relegate ourselves to exhausting charity work dressed up in punk clothes, our mutual aid can be fun, conflictual, and even as juicy as biting into a garden fresh tomato. Our wages will never give us back what has been taken by work. As long as there are both stocked shelves and hungry people, why not take and distribute goods in a way that also shows that revolt and glimmering freedom are still possible? We can’t fix everything social domination ruins, we need a revolution for that, but we can do more than scroll away our lives and only arrive to something in a timely manner when we’re clocking in.
They gave us a hellworld so let’s be devils. 😈
everything for everyone,
some anarchists 🖤
TRICK AND TREAT
SMELL OUR FEET
GIVE US SOMETHING GOOD TO EAT
Bismillah, c’est les ténèbres.
Happy Halloween!!! It seems a small band of troublemakers celebrated spooky season in Portland by playfully expropriating a LOT of food, medicine, and menstrual supplies from Whole Foods, distributing all the looted bounty to various free pantries and fridges across the city.
Blending in with the other revelers out on the streets dressing head-to-toe in fun costumes, our mob brought smiles and laughter to passers-by and party-goers. After all, as some so-called Italians noted, if you don’t dress up then you don’t get any candy. Planned out with the precision of a heist, while the cops were busy with the chaos of the night, we moved into the store with joyous intention; some handing out agitational fliers to shoppers and workers; some keeping watch and handling signals; some loudly and distractingly decrying Amazon, techno-dystopia, and capitalism; others yoinking goodies off of the shelves, and thus out of the flows of commodity; timed out so everything lasted no more than a couple minutes. Once our bags were filled we quickly disappeared back into the foggy night. Our looted treats and necessities were dispersed and shared freely.
Why Whole Foods? Come on, everyone knows how much Whole Foods sucks. Do we need to enumerate all the reasons? Whole Foods is certainly a particularly egregious capitalist enterprise; from their shockingly overpriced goods that somehow both push bogus snake oil “wellness” commodities AND homogenize our desires through a highly controlled limited range of options; to their exploitation of their retail employees; to their connection to Amazon, and the surveillance, military, and policing infrastructure it maintains; to their role as harbinger of gentrification and displacement in poor and/or POC communities. And guess what?! Food should be free! It doesn’t matter if the business gatekeeping us from our means of surviving and thriving is a giant multinational conglomerate or a “mom n pop” local business. Commodification is a shit deal for the proletariat. The profit motive means social murder, the destruction of the ecosystem we all depend on, and a life spent toiling so the rich get richer while our dreams get put on the back burner.
This festive lick was a playful way to remind ourselves that with a few friends and a little planning we can take what we need to better our lives, and these small gestures can help us build the skills and trust to carry out larger actions against domination. We don’t need to relegate ourselves to exhausting charity work dressed up in punk clothes, our mutual aid can be fun, conflictual, and even as juicy as biting into a garden fresh tomato. Our wages will never give us back what has been taken by work. As long as there are both stocked shelves and hungry people, why not take and distribute goods in a way that also shows that revolt and glimmering freedom are still possible? We can’t fix everything social domination ruins, we need a revolution for that, but we can do more than scroll away our lives and only arrive to something in a timely manner when we’re clocking in.
They gave us a hellworld so let’s be devils. 😈
everything for everyone,
some anarchists 🖤