Last month, under pressure from Black Lives Matter, Block the Bunker and other community groups, Seattle City Council tabled plans for a new North Precinct for the Seattle Police Department. It was a surprising concession, and a significant victory for the activists who worked hard to rally public opposition.
Still, the Council hasn’t abandoned the plans. It hasn’t apologized for spending months insisting on a $149 million police precinct when thousands of people in Seattle are homeless. It’s still speaking the language of a class whose interests are served by a militarized police force and the oppression of poor people and people of color. So the struggle continues.
And the struggle is escalating. Anti-racism and anticapitalism now command an unprecedented place in mainstream U.S. discourse, and the promises of compromise and reform touted by the government and its corporate allies are less credible than ever. The crisis of the current social order is getting harder and harder to ignore.
“Riot. Strike. Riot.” a new book by poet and scholar Joshua Clover, broaches a timely discussion for this moment of widespread unrest. Drawing on the work of Karl Marx as well as more recent Marxist scholarship, Clover presents both a theory and a brief history of riots and strikes. From this rather specific angle, he accomplishes a second, broader aim: a history of capitalism traced through the kinds of resistance it has provoked.
Clover starts with the notion that capitalism has historically wavered between two main sources of profit: circulation and production. From the earliest days of European exploration to the Industrial Revolution, trade — a kind of circulation — was the greatest source of wealth in western economies. Throughout this period, poor people and other exploited groups agitated for power by taking control of spaces essential to circulation like public squares and ports. Sometimes unruly, though often quite organized, these actions were forebearers of the contemporary riot.
During the Industrial Revolution, production outpaced circulation as the most profitable economic activity in the West. In this era, people found that holding up a factory floor afforded greater political leverage than seizing a port or square. Before long, strikes eclipsed riots as the most effective form of anticapitalist struggle.
But by the mid-20th century, production was beginning to exhaust the economies it was supposed to serve, and western countries commenced a long process of deindustrialization that has continued to the present day. Labor has been outsourced, workers have been shunted from manufacturing into service work or unemployment, and the main source of profits has shifted back from production to circulation. With production devalued, strikes no longer wield the political purchase they once did. Today’s biggest collective actions seek to occupy the spaces where capital circulates — public squares, ports, freeways — because this is the most effective way to create a disruption. Thus, Clover concludes, we have seen the return of the riot.
Or rather, we have seen the return of the riot with a twist, since today’s riots have a racial character that earlier, pre-industrial riots lacked. Citing Marx’s theory of “surplus populations,” Clover demonstrates how capitalism has depended on racial inequality for cheap or free labor and, more recently, to absorb the costs of deindustrialization. Communities of color, especially Black communities, have been relegated to un- or underemployment; been exploited by low-paying work; and been targeted, incarcerated and murdered by the police and prison systems.
It is not surprising, then, that riots have racial overtones, for the people most negatively affected by capitalism are necessarily the ones most compelled to act out. Riots, in short, are the inevitable answer to the systemic oppression. Or as Clover puts it in one of the most memorable passages in the book, “The riot, we might note, is the other of incarceration … If the state’s solution to the problem of crisis and surplus is prison — carceral management — the riot is a contest entered directly against this solution — a counterproposal of unmanageability.”
One of the best things about “Riot. Strike. Riot” is Clover’s ability to identify broad trends without abandoning nuance: linking the food riots of 18th century England with the 2014 race riots in Ferguson, for instance, without ignoring the obvious differences. Another strength is the persuasiveness and tenacity with which he disputes common misconceptions. He goes to great lengths to prove that riots, though incomprehensible to the ruling class, are not without cause or purpose. Whether participants understand their actions in the same way or not, riots are unifiable as attempts to reject an untenable situation and to seize some means of survival. They express a lived truth: that the current social order is unsustainable — will not be sustainable, cannot be sustainable — for the rioters most immediately, but ultimately for everyone.
If the book has one shortcoming, it lies in failing to answer a question that dogs political and cultural theory as whole: namely, who is this for? Clover writes in a way and about concepts that most people without advanced backgrounds in the humanities would find taxing to navigate. There is nothing wrong with academics theorizing about riots — it’s important work. And neither are academics mutually exclusive with rioters. But if riots, as Clover starts the book out by saying, “deserve an adequate theory,” this is only the first step toward making that theory accessible to those who most need it, and therein truly revolutionary and democratic.