Review: Riot. Strike. Riot. by Joshua Clover

The introduction of this book was promising — and is worth reading on its own — but the rest of the book failed to deliver. Clover sets out to investigate why social resistance movements to oppressor classes shifted from riots (pre-17th century), to strikes (until the 1960s or so), and then to riots once again.

His most important contribution is to clearly show that mainstream definitions of strikes and riots are woefully inadequate. Rather than strikes representing organized and peaceful protest while riots use violence to channel inchoate anger, Clover demonstrates that strikes also often turned to violence to make their demands met. Rather, Clover delineates them based on who participates and where. In Clover’s telling, riots are made up of citizens acting at the site of consumption (originally typically the market or port, now usually the public square) while strikes are made up of workers acting in their capacity as producers at the site of production.

Unfortunately, his framing of history as "Riot-Strike-Riot-prime" (an allusion to Marx’s M-C-M’) is overly cute, and restricts analysis rather than aiding it. Facts are thrown together when convenient, rather than building a convincing, scientific argument. Evidence for his thesis is sometimes drawn from history, sometimes from literature, and there is very little in the way of social survey of economic trends and social unrest, which I would want to see as proof of his thesis. Clover neatly sidesteps questions of generalizability to real social relationships between economic mode of development and social mode of conflict by stating he restricts his focus to the west. If riots are the mode of social conflict of pre-industrial production, strikes are the mode of conflict of industrial production, and strike-prime is the mode of conflict of off-shored post-industrial production, we should see these modes shift both across geography and across time. Clover resists testing his thesis, preferring to enjoy the vibes. (The vibes are indeed enjoyable. His writing is a pleasure to read; there are many fun turns of phrases, reminding me of Christian Thorne.)

The final section of my copy had an Afterword, in which the author reflected on how well his work stood up to criticism and time. It is easy to get nothing wrong if you don’t say all that much in the end.