A New Paradigm?

“Riot, Strike, Riot – the New Era of Uprisings,” by Joshua Clover, 2016.

This is an attempt at understanding the changing configurations of the proletariat.  It references events worldwide (and thus attempts to get credence from that), but it really extrapolates the model of Oakland Occupy as a model for the U.S.  In the process it fails as an international analysis.  In Oakland a combination of youth and what Clover  calls ‘surplus populations’ under capital – presumably the unemployed and the destitute - occupied a geographic square, engaged in property damage, blockaded the port twice, then set up a mass democratic social structure – the Oakland ‘commune’ - for a short period of time.
  

His theory - which is elegant and well-written as Clover is a professor, poet and music writer - is that the proletariat under capital has gone through 3 periods of resistance.  They are a period of geographic riots based on the high prices of basic items like food, which centered around the marketplace and ports.  This corresponds to the early period of rising mercantile capital.  The second is the period of strikes, as more and more the locus of rebellion centered on oppressive waged work in factories.  This corresponds to the period of industrial capital and the industrial 'revolution.'  The third period is a return to what he calls ‘riot prime.’  This period returns to riots that focus on the issue of consumer prices and the circulation of capital through transport.  But now tending towards a new social configuration in the context of declining world-wide financial capital - the present.  He calls the dominance of financial capital part of ‘exhaustion capitalism.’

Clover seems to be a anarchist of some kind, hostile to traditional party politics of the reformist or revolutionary type and also against stagnant forms of Marxist ‘analysis.’  His challenge to what he calls ‘workerist’ Marxists is that he thinks they still focus on the strike as the main path to social revolution.  Not the Marxists I know...  He insists this ignores the lived existence of the racialized ‘lumpen’ who now live outside the confines of waged work and instead live on the dole, in the non-productive economy, as peddlers or even criminals - or whose pay and labor is so precarious as to be almost non-existent. Anarchism has always relied heavily on this strata.

A great quote from Marx about the immiseration of the proletariat backs him up:  “the working population therefore produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it itself is made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent which is always increasing.”

I think he’s got something here, with a large caveat.  The caveat is this, briefly:  Clover’s idea of a deindustrializing ‘center’ society is a thesis that borrows from bourgeois sociology, which wishes to hide the working-class that exists in ‘center’ countries like the U.S.  Clover conceded Kim Moody’s thesis that U.S. transport and warehouse workers are a new mass force, but this fits in with Clover’s slant that consumption and the transport of goods are now key in center countries.  For this he might be called a ‘consumerist’ or "Keynesian" for his focus on a consumerist U.S.  Because the book is ostensibly about the U.S., Clover does not discuss the re-centering of production to the capitalist periphery or social revolutions, political revolutions and attempts at revolution in other countries that rise above strike and riot.  Nor does he conjecture about a future ‘strike prime' such as massive general strikes in a city or region or country, as has happened in countries like India and other countries recently.

Occupy Oakland Port Shutdown

What is powerful, though not new, about Clover’s thesis is that he captures the degeneration of stable waged work as the hallmark of capital flows and the confrontations that are now occurring.  They are not yet in production facilities but around geographic consumption and transport issues – especially the price of gas, food and housing worldwide (and in the U.S. health care and post-secondary education, which have taken on an electoral form…)  ‘Real estate’ rentier capital is now the main repository for wealth in the world.  This is why housing and city square occupations and blockades of roads, freeways, airports, ports, pipelines, dams and terrible infrastructure projects are so prominent as forms of resistance.  Occupy and the ‘yellow vests’ rebellion in France are cases in point, as is the NoDAPL protest at Standing Rock and the U.S. city and town rebellions against police brutality.  The politics are contained in the acts themselves – basically calling on capital’s machinations and ‘business as usual’ to stop. This is not being carried out by the solidly waged workers alone, but by every strata of the proletariat.  However as yet they have not really succeeded except in small ways.

The issue of ‘non-violence’ obviously comes up, as looting, arson and broken glass are inevitably part of any riot – a pejorative word when used by the corporate media but for ultra-leftists a holy grail.  As Clover points out, liberals (and conservatives) get involved on the basis of pacifism, calling for the state to have a monopoly on violence while calling the ‘zero-price’ setting of looting or property damage the same as violence against people. 

In the broader context, Clover does not think riot and strike are counter-posed, nor aspects of anarchism and socialism.  This is not news, of course. He thinks the confrontation of ‘riot prime’ is directly against the capitalist state, not against the capitalist workplace.  Anarchists see the 'state' as the main enemy at all times.  As such, he ignores sites of capitalist production, which ultimately have more power than any average riot.  He ignores the fact that riots also affect small businesses and public buildings, as well as innocent workers and civilians.  We saw this in Minneapolis. This is a book which captures some present conflicts between capital and the proletariat in the U.S. – but perhaps not in a more organized future.  

(Clover is a contributor to a new academic left journal out of the Bay Area - "Commune" - sold at May Day Books.)

Other reviews on this topic or mentioned in the book below, use blog search box upper left:  “The Precariat,” “On New Terrain,” “Rebel Cities,” “This Changes Everything,” “How Non-Violence Protects the State,” “Tropic of Chaos,” “Detroit,” “Black Panther,” “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” “The Coming Insurrection.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

August 6, 2019