Chapter 5: Looted Bread, Stolen Labor is full of examples that illustrate how effective looting is as a political tactic. The Pittsburgh riot of 1877 stands out.

"The rioting in the industrial city in western Pennsylvania followed a couple of days of striking on the railroad. Sent in to repress the stoke, local national guardsmen instead fraternized with the strikers, and police were unable to break the strike, which left +

thousand of full boxcars sitting idle in the Pittsburgh yards. The railroads, panicked by the thought of all that property and profit languishing, brought in national guardsmen from Philadelphia, knowing they wouldn't hesitate to fire on the working men.+

These outside agitators promptly did their bosses' bidding, massacring twenty strikers. They even brought a Gatling gun to mow down rioters. But the massacre backfired. Though the company technically retook the yards, no one, not even those workers who hadn't +

originally gone on strike, would drive trains captured in such blood. The entire Pittsburgh guard switched allegiance to the side of the workers, giving over their weapons to the workers, and in response to the capture of the rail depot "the entire city mobilized. +

A massive crowd formed and attacked the yards, forcing the Philadelphia National Guard to flee. Having driven away the guard, the crowd broke into and looted all the freight cars left in the yard. Then they burned them, alongside all railroad property +

letting the fire devour huge swaths of railroad and capitalist property, but organizing fire breaks to prevent the conflagration from spreading to nearby residential areas. This tactic of controlled arson would return in the major urban riots of the sixties and in LA in 1992."