Shoplifting & Class Struggle
By Hazel Barker. Illustration by Rory Robertson-Shaw.
On the evening of 15 December 2025, just before 9:40 PM, a large group of people dressed as Santa Claus and his elves went into a supermarket in Montreal. They moved calmly through the supermarket aisles, filling their sacks with food. Within minutes they left taking thousands of dollars' worth of groceries, none of which was paid for.
Santa and his masked elves then went to the Christmas tree in the central square. Underneath the twinkling lights, they laid out the stolen food and attached signs that read ‘Christmas is expensive, free food’. The remaining groceries were distributed to community fridges across Montreal.
In a statement released afterwards, the group said they were responding to rising food prices and supermarket profiteering. ‘We work more and more just to be able to buy food from supermarket chains that are using inflation as a pretext to make record profits’, the statement read. ‘A handful of companies are holding our basic needs hostage…. For us, that is theft.’
The Santa Claus stunt in Montreal comes at a moment when shoplifting is once again a central political talking point in the UK. In recent years, shoplifting has skyrocketed. Office for National Statistics figures show that shoplifting offences rose by 13 per cent in the year to June 2025, with 529,994 incidents recorded. Meanwhile, the British Retail Consortium, a trade body representing retailers, claims there are as many as 20 million incidents a year.
Much of the mainstream media coverage has focused on individual morality and criminality. The right-wing press shouts ‘Broken Britain’, while many reports fixate on drug users stealing to fund addictions. But what is almost always missing is the wider context of poverty and hunger, and the reality that if people had enough food or money, they wouldn't be stealing.
In 2024, the Trussell Trust estimated that 14 million people in the UK faced the prospect of going hungry because of a lack of money. At the same time, drug treatment, homelessness services, and rehabilitation programmes have been cut back for years, so it's hardly surprising that people are also stealing to fund drug habits. It's an obvious point, but if people are living with poverty and trauma, they are more likely to take drugs. When people cannot meet their basic needs, most normal people will break the law to survive. If everyone had enough to eat, stable housing, and access to support, crime would plummet overnight.
As Santa and his Elves pointed out in their statement, supermarkets aren't struggling. UK chains have reported record profits since the pandemic. Sainsbury's posted around £1 billion in profit in April 2025, in line with similar figures right across the sector. Rising prices have hit shoppers hard, but haven’t hurt the bottom lines of major supermarkets.
This gap was what the Montreal Santas were trying to expose playfully. Food and money are in abundance, but access to them is the problem.
Actions like that carried out last December are not new. In Italy during the 1970s, working-class communities organised the self-reduction of prices- more commonly known as autoreduction. Neighbours would collectively refuse price rises, either paying the old rate, or not paying at all. These campaigns spread from shops to rent, utilities to transport, rooted in powerful workplace and neighbourhood struggles. The basic attitude of the working class at the time, borne out of heightened class consciousness, was that these activities were not theft. Instead, they were viewed as a collective taking back of some of what had been stolen from them by the capitalist class. Capitalism, after all, is based on mass looting of our labour and of common land. If we are to talk about stealing, we should start there.
The Montreal action is obviously not on the same scale as during the 1970s in Italy, which was a genuinely revolutionary situation and could have led to a working-class revolution in the heart of the capitalist world system. But it gestures in the same direction—away from individualised survival and towards collective response to our situation. It suggests that rising theft cannot be understood only as crime, and certainly not as moral failure.
At the moment shoplifting is widespread, but this expression of class struggle is not organised and has not developed an outward-facing political form. Maybe we should start taking inspiration from the 1970s and organise around the class struggle that is going on every day, all around us, into something that is capable of transforming society. By focusing on organisation, we can create shared action beyond individual shoplifting.
Hazel Barker is a London-based writer interested in class struggle.
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