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Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (Verso)

Riots are coming, they are already here, more are on the way. They deserve an adequate theory.

Ferguson. Tottenham. Clichy-sous-Bois. Oakland. In recent decades we have returned to an “age of riots” as the prominent form of struggle against the abuses of capitalism. This theoretical and historical account by award-winning poet Joshua Clover explores how riots, the leading form of protest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, are supplanted by the strike in the early nineteenth century, and then re-emerged as the preeminent form in the early 1970s. 

From the early years of workers’ demands for increased wages through riots to recent social demands for economic equlity through occupations, Clover looks at historical moments like the economic crisis of 1968 and the decline of organized labor from the perspective of changes in protest tactics. As social unrest against government and corporate abuses continues to grow, this valuable history and theoretical framework will help guide future activists in their struggles for justice. 

Praise for Riot. Strike. Riot. 

“Riot, in this absolutely necessary book, is considered as differential procedure and rigorous improvisational method, as essential repertoire on the way from general malaise to general strike. But then this conception folds tightly yet disorderly into a new and open set of questions. It’s not that the raging, ragged entrance to the new golden age is the new golden age. It’s not that theory can’t bear a riot. It’s just that riot makes new ways of seeing what theory can and can’t do and imposes upon us a kind of knowledge of our own embarrassing and already given resources of enjoyment. Joshua Clover says riot deserves a proper theory but here—sly, stone cold—he gives us more than that. Now we have some guidelines for the new and ongoing impropriety that fleshes forth and fleshes out our optimal condition.”—Fred Moten, scholar, activist, poet and author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Hughson’s Tavern, B. Jenkins, The Feel Trio and co-author of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. 

“In its sweep, rigor, and elegance, Riot Strike Riot is pleasurable and provocative, worthy of the urgent debates it should inspire.”—Jeff Chang author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation and Who We Be: The Colorization of America.

“Riot. Strike. Riot. is the crystalline analysis of this fraught moment - between communism and anarchism, between street protest and economic strike. Clover’s text is clear without being simple, contemporary yet historical, and affectionate without being mawkish - much like a riot, in fact, it opens up the future while remembering that the past is comprised of little other than exploitation, exclusion and the kinds of violence that deliberately are attributed to the very people who suffer most from it.”—Nina Power is a senior lecturer in philosophy at Roehampton University and the author of One-Dimensional Woman.

Joshua Clover is a professor of Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California Davis. A widely published essayist, poet, and cultural theorist, his most recent books are Red Epic and 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About.