(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Joshua Clover:
Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprising
Verso, 2016
On August 4, 2011, 29-year-old Mark Duggan was shot and killed by police in Tottenham in north London. Immediately after the police killing, peaceful demonstrations against the police's lack of response in the case led to increased protests in the coming days, and riots spread to other parts of the country. Between 6 and 11 August, arson, looting and smashing of windows followed in London's poorest towns such as Lewisham, Tottenham Hale, Tower Hamlets, and outside London to cities such as Liverpool, Nottingham, Manchester, Leeds, Leicester and Coventry.
As the riots spread, the police launched a counter-offensive that resulted in, among other things, mass arrests and stricter punitive measurements. An analysis by The Guardian (18. August 2011) revealed that around 1000 convictions related to riots gave prison sentences of 25 percent longer than normal for similar offenses. The severe punishments showed a gang's perception of riots in themselves – not only among the conservative right wing, but also among the majority of an organized left-wing riots, which is considered tantamount to looting, vandalism and violence.
Strike versus riot. One of the problems as Joshua Clover sees it in the book Riot.Strike.Riot – The New Era of Uprisings, is that the riot as a collective form of action lacks an adequate crisis theory. It is set up only as the strike's straight opposite. Where the labor movement's actions traditionally show a clear political organization with demands for pay conditions and labor rights, the rioters' demands for social and political change appear to be devoid of this. Clover claims that when the riots are in opposition to the strike's mode of action, the riots are reduced to a depoliticized disorder where nobody seems to know what they want anymore.
Equally, the riots on the march and the labor movement's strikes are in retreat. The riots that started at Tottenham in London in 2011 are just one collective action in the series of a series of riots that can be said to have their roots back to Watts, Newark, Detroit in recent times. Here is a line from Tiananmen Square in 1989 and Los Angeles in 1992 to our own time with Säo Paolo, Gezi Park and San Lazaro. The list is long: Clover, for example, mentions the protor-revolutionary riots at Tahrir Square and further Clichy-sous-Bois, Oakland, Ferguson and Baltimore. He also describes student occupations as the one of the Tories headquarters at Millbank in London in 2010. On the whole, Clover writes, the list of recent riots just goes on and on.
Given historical context. Clover develops an adequate crisis theory for riots based on a historical-materialist method integrated with the understanding of the practice of fighting. He is critical of socialist theories with scriptures and specific instructions on how to fight the state and capital – they are based on vague premises that this once worked. For the same reason, the recruitment problems of trade unions and left-wing radical organizations are not explained on the basis of a general lack of will or liberated worker consciousness. According to Clover, one must consider the relationship between riots and strikes in a given historical-material context for the forms of action themselves. With the periodisations of history, both practices are in relation to the market and capital: the pre-modern riots were a precursor to the industrial revolution of capitalism where the strike and the labor movement were established.
The riot as a practice relates to market, price and distribution, while the strike is directly linked to wage struggles and capitalist production.
It is futile to operate with an overly narrow understanding of the term proletariat.
In the 1700 century with food shortages and price inflation, shipping was blocked to prevent the export of necessary food from the local markets. In the transition from feudal to capitalist society, all collective values become subordinate to the imperative of profit. The afflictions of the feudal society were displaced to a landless proletariat dependent on wage labor to survive. Without work, only the Poverty Law applied. But as Clover mentions, zero pay is also a paycheck as it serves as an important supplement to keep the arm of reserve workers alive.
The superfluous. The movement from riots to strikes corresponds to the industrial revolution and wage labor at the beginning of Britain's long 1800 figures. The next transition from strike to major riots is the way Clover describes it to the US hegemonic dissolution at the end of the 1900 century and to the crisis of "prime circulation".
We are now in the midst of the catastrophic fall of capitalism where growth and profits have reached a saturation point. Capitalism has deceived into financial expansion and money circulation. In this phase, human labor is becoming increasingly redundant and relegated to an informal economy with temporary contracts, straw jobs and blood-sucking credit systems in a downward spiral of poverty.
According to Clover, today's population surplus is helping to expand the global riots. Unlike the workers' struggle, today's riots do not require one to be a worker, such as with the strikes. It is rather the lack or theft of resources and own property that unites everyone in the riot – out in the streets, on the barricades and with the looting.
The overpopulation also leads to racial discrimination throughout the Western world. Capitalism has always produced and reproduced social differences in the labor market with wage differentials. For example, with double unemployment rates among black Americans compared to the average for the rest of the population. In the United States, a systematic redundancy of the black American population is taking place in parallel with the expansion of the prison industry. Simply a racial discrimination of unpaid life.
The proletariat as a negation. In summary, Clover's problem is that it is futile to operate with an overly static and narrow understanding of the term proletariat. The struggle of the proletariat cannot only be seen as a form of action in relation to the strike. Also, one cannot mourn the gradual weakening of the labor movement. Rather, one must take the extensive riots seriously and repoliticize our understanding of them.
The question of race is a subordinate part of a larger antagonistic whole when it comes to the proletariat in the broadest sense. Clover uses Gilles Dauvés' description of the proletariat rather as the negation of society, a population without resources – which in Marx's sense has nothing to lose but its own links. But what does this mean? The consequence is that the proletariat would not be able to liberate itself "without at the same time destroying the existing social order" in its entirety.
