Most protests that took place in the States after the brutal killing of George Floyd by a police officer last week in Minneapolis were peaceful. In some cities, though, anger generated violence and looting.
Images from the States showed boarded up storefronts, damages to New York's Macy's and Bloomingdale's and to designer boutiques on Madison Avenue, including Michael Kors, Hermès, Givenchy and Chanel among the others.
Some branches of sportswear chains such as Adidas and Reebok remained closed and some retail companies also seemed concerned about the fact that the damages may not allow the targeted stores to join the scheduled reopening of non-essential businesses set for June 8 after the COVID-19 emergency.
On Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, the Gucci boutique was boarded with blue plywood that was tagged with "Eat the rich", while the nearby Alexander McQueen store was looted. 
Virgil Abloh, founder of Off-White and creative director of men's wear at Louis Vuitton, first condemned the looting in his stores and in stores that belonged to friends.
Commenting on the Instagram account of Sean Wotherspoon, whose vintage sneaker store Round Two in Los Angeles, he stated: "This is f–ked up. You see the passion, blood, sweat and tears Sean puts in for our culture. This disgusts me. To the kids that ransacked his store and RSVP DTLA, and all our stores in our scene just know, that product staring at you in your home/apartment right now is tainted and a reminder of a person I hope you aren't," the designer wrote. Soon after, though, Abloh issued an apology on his own Instagram account, explaining he himself has been the victim of prejudice and racism.
At the end of May, Marc Jacobs' shop on Melrose Ave in Los Angeles was also defaced, the name of the designer was deleted from the entrance placard and the names of George Floyd and Sandra Bland (found hanged in a jail cell in Texas in 2015 after being detained by police during a traffic stop) were added to it. The designer reposted the image, commenting "A life cannot be replaced. Black Lives Matter." 
But maybe the most accurate answer and explanation about such acts wasn't provided by designers, Instagram comments and news pieces, but by an essay entitled "The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy", written by Guy Debord, and distributed in the USA in December 1965.
The essay opens with the Watts riots, that took place in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles from August 11 to 16, 1965, following a roadside argument between an African-American motorist on parole for robbery and traffic police that escalated into a fight. Also in that case stores were looted and burned.
What happened then is similar to what is happening now: "a revolutionary event, by bringing existing problems into the open, provokes its opponents into an inhabitual lucidity," Debord commented.
The public opinion divided between supporting the cause and condemning the riots that followed, but Debord tried to look at the meanings behind the revolt from another perspective. "(…) the main point is that the civil rights movement only addressed legal problems by legal means. It is logical to make legal appeals regarding legal questions," he stated, continuing "What is irrational is to appeal legally against a blatant illegality (…) It is obvious that the crude and glaring illegality from which blacks still suffer in many American states has its roots in a socioeconomic contradiction that is not within the scope of existing laws, and that no future judicial law will be able to get rid of this contradiction in the face of the more fundamental laws of this society. What American blacks are really daring to demand is the right to really live, and in the final analysis this requires nothing less than the total subversion of this society." Debord therefore went on to quote Martin Luther King who commented about the events with the statement, "This was not a race riot. It was a class riot."
In his essay Debord highlighted that the riots in LA were a rebellion against the world of the commodity in which worker-consumers are hierarchically subordinated to commodity standards. "Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance (…) the blacks are at the same time rejecting the humiliation of being subject to commodities. The Watts youth, having no future in market terms, grasped another quality of the present, and that quality was so incontestable and irresistible that it drew in the whole population."
Debord explained that in Los Angeles black people were better paid than any others in the United States, but they were also "separated from the California superopulence flaunted all around them". According to the philosopher and writer, the hope to be part of America's prosperity, turned for them into an unreachable illusion, "the hierarchy that crushes them is not based on economic buying power alone: they are also treated as inherently inferior in every area of daily life by the customs and prejudices of a society in which all human power is based on buying power. Just as the human riches of the American blacks are despised and treated as criminal, monetary riches will never make them completely acceptable in America's alienated society: individual wealth will only make a rich nigger because blacks as a whole must represent poverty in a society of hierarchized wealth."
"In the United States today the whites are enslaved to the commodity while the blacks are negating it. The blacks are asking for more than the whites – this is the core of a problem that has no solution except the dissolution of the white social system. This is why those whites who want to escape their own slavery must first of all rally to the black revolt – not, obviously, in racial solidarity, but in a joint global rejection of the commodity and of the state."
In 1965 for Debord the first step of a vast, all-embracing struggle was "not to overcome scarcity, but to master material abundance (…) Mastering abundance is not just changing the way it is shared out, but totally reorienting it." So social justice and the fight against social inequalities (think about also how designer boutiques and stores can be conceived as tangible symbols of inequalities…) should be accompanied by this effort to "reorient abundance" that could help us analysing and overcoming the socioeconomic contradictions that divide us.