This wonderful little brochure was left inside a Dutch pamphlet we had purchased sometime back and we couldn’t quite locate its exact history.
The brochure is a photocopied, tri-fold flier calling potential participants to come to a collective act of proletarian shopping in Groningen, Netherlands. The term used here for proletarian shopping – put simply, collective acts of taking commodities without paying – is “jat bewust,” or, roughly, a call to “steal consciously.”
The context in the brochure what is described as yet another round of austerity cuts, which cause lower wages and an increased cost of living. The historical reference points are really interesting. Philosophically, the author(s) note Paul Lafargue’s work The Right to be Lazy as well as P.A. Kooijman’s work. Kooijman is not very well known in the U.S., but was a Dutch militant anarchist who forwarded a concept of theft in context of capitalist surplus (for a very brief intro, see here). In terms of movements, the pamphlet references the Dutch group Alarm and initiatives in Italy in the 1970s among others.
The pamphlet includes an image that dates back to a poster from 1983, and was presumably a graphic used in other places. From the dates mentioned inside our best guess is that this dates to 1986.
We could not find any holdings of this little brochure and we reproduce images of it below.
New York Archives of Autonomist Marxism 