Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings by Joshua Clover (review)

Joshua Clover begins Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings with the provocation "Riots are coming, they are already here, more are on the way, no one doubts it. They deserve an adequate theory" (1). The important word in Clover's opening remark is theory. Despite the historical breadth of Clover's book, readers anticipating a chronicle of riots and strikes will be woefully disappointed. However, if the reader is looking for a paradigm to better understand the reemergence of riots in the industrialized West, Clover's latest contribution will live up to their expectations.

The argument is straightforward. During the golden age of riots in the eighteenth century, popular struggles took place within the spheres of circulation (the pier, the market, etc.) because capitalism's productive capacities had not yet transformed the masses into wage laborers. By the nineteenth century, industrialization had pushed people into the shops and factories that defined production during the period. Consequently, struggles over reproduction were waged within the sphere of production. As Clover argues, "phases led by material production will issue forth struggles within production, over the price of labor power; phases led by circulation will see struggles in the marketplace, over the price of goods" (21). Hence, capitalism's history bears witness to the bread riots of the eighteenth century, in contrast to the shop floor stoppages and general strikes during the nineteenth century.

Building on the work of Giovanni Arrighi, Robert Brenner, and others, Clover uses this theory of riot and strike to contextualize his analysis of the present. According to Clover, the United States, Europe, and other regions of the world are in the middle of a "Long Crisis." Since 1973, Clover's historical swivel, deindustrialization and financialization have engineered an economic conjuncture where capital is no longer interested in absorbing the masses into the labor market. In conjunction with the decline of union membership and union militancy, these conditions give rise to a working population that fights not to challenge capital, but to make deals with it to preserve its own existence. In this affirmation trap, "labor is locked into the position of affirming its own exploitation under the guise of survival" (147). For Clover, the corollary of labor power's twilight is the emergence of surplus populations who have no access to wage labor, much less labor politics. Instead, they have access to scarcity. In this historical context, the riot returns.

One of the strengths of Clover's interjection is that it complicates popularized narratives that frame past and present riots. From the idea that riots are disorganized madness to the conception that they lack political utility in the same vein as the strike, Clover does much work to broaden the contours that structure scholarship in this area. Unlike scholars who advocate a reductionist "New Jim Crow" narrative, Clover situates the state's racialized violence within the context of the Long Crisis. As deindustrialization and financialization push more people into poverty and the informal economy, the state continues to replace the social safety net with more prisons and militarized police. Since black Americans are overrepresented among the deindustrialized poor, it would make sense that this "management of surplus populations in general" through violence would most impact their communities (186). With state violence and imprisonment presented as the solutions to economic malaise, riots like those in Fergusson are not just a consequence of neoliberalism's regime of accumulation and social control, but also a response to it.

The biggest critique of Clover's book will no doubt come from those who still regard labor as a pillar of radical political power. Despite a treatment of the historical trajectory of labor's decline into the twenty-first century, Clover does not adequately address the possibility that its power may return. He also does not engage the range of scholars who posit an alternative path forward, such as Richard Wolff (Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism [Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012]) and...