Rogueish

Groups of Black Bloc protesters, for example, smashed the windows of a locally owned coffee shop in November in Oakland and looted it.

You know who owns “locally owned businesses”? Capitalists. But the criticism of vandalism against small businesses actually prevents thinking about what “small businesses” are. I think the coffee shop Hedges is talking about here is a Tully’s, a branch of a multinational coffee company, but it’s a franchise operation, so “locally owned” is technically accurate. The question is, are nominal owners of a franchise operation really owners of the means of production in a meaningful sense? It seems to me that the answer  is no - the “owner” of a franchise is more like an employee who is given a bit more management responsibility so that the company can force them to take on significantly more risk. Smashing the windows of a Tully’s franchise, just like smashing the windows of a bank, may have some effect on the capitalist owners, but it will also have a significant effect on the employees, and that needs be taken into account. So it may well have been wrong to smash the windows of this coffee shop, but not because it is a “locally owned business”; in fact, quite the opposite.