Steal This Book

"Democracy is not something you believe in or a place to hang your hat, but it's something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles."

- Abbie Hoffman 

Shouldn't books on anti-consumerism or anti-capitalism be free? 

Interested readers should be strongly encouraged to borrow them from the library rather than buy them from money and power grasping capitalist corporations. 

Or even better, steal them from those capitalists and their brother and sister-run independent small book store-killing big box stores.

"Steal This Book" is a book written by author Abbie Hoffman. In his day he was labelled as an activist and radical. 

If he were alive today, he would most certainly be identified as a domestic terrorist. Even in his day the FBI had a dossier on him that exceeded 10,000 pages. That is how much the establishment fears people like him.

Hoffman's book asked readers to reject the status quo, and was meant as a practical guide to the aspiring hippie hungry for much-needed change in the power structure.

Published in 1971, the book exemplified the counterculture of the sixties. 

It sold more than a quarter of a million copies between April and November 1971. 

The number of copies that were stolen is unknown, but it would be fitting if it were more than the number purchased.

After recent years of the complete trashing of democracies around the world, I feel like going out and stealing a copy today.

Or at least borrow a copy from that most democratic of places, the public library.

"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." - Abbie Hoffman