The Return of Riots
Hegel famously wrote that the Owl of Minerva only flies at dusk — meaning we can comprehend an age only when it is over. We know that there’s something unique about this moment, that we’re truly unable to understand. There’s a deep mistrust and suspicion about our world, a malaise that gnaws from deep within us, yet we cannot put it in words. There are many explanations for the growing unrest all around the world. But, something is not quite captured in these accounts.
Joshua Clover’s 2016 book Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings is, as he calls it, a theory of the present. In it he attempts to use structural analysis of historical patterns within capitalism to show why riots are emerging all over the world. He also wants to show that riots are a form of class struggle, a form of class struggle that has laid mostly dormant for over a century and a half. It is both a fascinating and compelling account, that I believe every leftist serious about the study of our moment, should read.
Clover finds contemporary accounts of riots to be lacking in their explanatory power, and he wants, in his words, “a properly materialist theorization of the riot.” To do this he borrows from the school of world-systems analysis to categorise periods within capitalism to which he maps his own categories of class struggle. In the longue durée of capitalist modernity he finds three periods:
- The first period from the emergence of capitalism to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, somewhere between 1790 and 1840. This period he associates with financial expansion led by merchant capital, or simply as a period in which circulation dominates.
- The second period from the beginning of industrialisation to the stagflation crises of 1970, when deindustrialisation as a project began in the western core countries. This period he associates with material expansion led by industrial capital, or simply as a period in which production dominates.
- The third period, which we are living in now, starting from the 1970s to the present, which is associated with deindustrialisation, financialisation and globalisation. The pendulum has swung back and this period, like the first period, is one where circulation dominates.
Clover’s argument is that during periods where circulation is dominant, the dominant form of class struggle is the riot, and where production is dominant, the form that class struggle takes shape in is the strike. Clover explains that the riot is a form of price setting (recall here bread riots), whereas the strike sets wages.
Whether one agrees with this periodisation or not, the book is peppered with insights that I believe is relevant and vital reading for this moment. For ages some leftists have distanced themselves from riots as a form of adventurism or simply portrayed them as acts of desperation, not to be considered strategic actions. Here now is a convincing account of why riots are a form of class struggle. This is all the more relevant now because we are living through a world historical crisis, with worsening economic conditions that have not been seen in a century.
