‘People Struggle Where They Are’: Joshua Clover on Riots, Strikes and Communes That Are Already Here

Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings was the book that made Joshua Clover one of the leading contemporary thinkers on riots as methods of political struggle. Staying true to the questions he theorizes, Clover believes theory and practice should not be as far away from each other as academia would often make them seem. For instance, Clover offers “Know your rights” trainings for people who are new to the experience and legal risks of protests—he is not unfamiliar with the methods of struggle that he analyzes.

In the following conversation, Ronja Mälström asks Clover all the overly simple questions she would have wanted to know before reading his book. As you will see, Clover makes a good case as to why strikes are not often the main category of struggle anymore and the importance of exploring political methods that some may find uncomfortable or dangerous. His voice provides a framework to understand the ways people struggle for justice, and for peace, today as well as historically. Starting with why people struggle in the first place.

JOSHUA CLOVER: My absolute first rule is that people struggle where they are. I don’t offer prescriptions, or say, “No, go over there and do that.” People fight where they are. If you hate your job and it is making you miserable, you fight in that space to change that. My sense was that people are now in a different place than they were in the 1950s. The era of industrialism, factory work, has declined, especially in the overdeveloped West. For more and more people, the place where they encounter their own misery is often outside of work and the place where they might have some leverage to change the world is often outside of work. So we see more struggles outside of the place of work. This is the social backdrop where I think riots happen. For me, what we categorize as a riot, is linked to a very broad social and historical context. 

RONJA MÄLSTRÖM: How can we make sense of this category then? Why is a riot, how is a riot, when is a riot?

My goal was to end up with a category that contained a lot of different kinds of events, rather than one very narrow specific thing. I think there are people who would look at a given riot and say, “that’s not a riot, that’s an uprising, that’s an insurrection,” in order to grant it more political legitimacy. But my sense is, they’re all politically important, right? I don’t want to select some forms and push others to the side—to say “that one doesn’t count, it’s not part of political life.” I wanted to include everything in political life. What I didn’t want to do was argue about words. I just accepted the common word “riot” and decided to try to rescue it as a political category.

The fancy term I developed is “circulation struggles.” I don’t really need to go into the political economy of that term except to say that “circulation” means the marketplace more or less. Not just the literal supermarket, but the world where we exchange goods, buy and consume things to try to stay alive. Especially for people who don’t have a regular job, or who work from home, or in general have no opportunity for struggle in the workplace. They might still be having trouble staying alive, getting food for their family, feeling safe from the police. All the things that happen out there in the public square and the marketplace, so that’s where they’re going to fight. And that’s what a riot is for me. Any kind of struggle that unfolds in that space. The market, the public square, the space of exchange, of transport, of consumption. 

The people who struggle there may be workers, but they’re not showing up as workers. That’s a key thing. I may have a job, but if I go blockade a freeway because I want to bring this world to a crashing halt because it’s intolerable, I’m not doing that as a worker, but I’m doing that as a body that can block a freeway. These are the parameters of the category I define riots through—it’s quite broad as you can see. I hope that starts to answer your question.

Absolutely, I see how it contains methods like occupations, blockades, and numerous other methods of struggle.

That’s important. If you reduce riot to “people breaking windows,” that can’t at all explain what’s happening or how history has changed. But if you start to look at all those struggles—the blockade, the occupation, the barricade, the riot and looting—all of those things together, and how they have changed and risen and fallen, you can begin to understand a history of struggle.

So we have the circulation struggles—what you call the forms of resistance that we take part in outside our workplaces and as workers. What, then, would you call struggles in the workplace? 

To stay with our pseudo-technical vocabulary, if we’re calling riots “circulation struggles,” we should call struggles at work “production struggles.” Struggles in the place where you’re producing goods, services, or profits for your boss. The strike is the most famous of them but not the only one. You might also think of workplace sabotage and embezzlement, slowdowns, and even taking part in meetings for organizing at work. 

Going back to the silly questions, why does striking have a good reputation and rioting a bad one?

It depends who you ask, haha. In general, I think that strikes have a greater claim to legitimacy even among non-participants. Participants usually think what they’re doing is justified, or at least I hope they do, whether that’s a strike or a riot. 

I think people actually have a quite sensible respect for labor and the miseries of labor. They understand it and also strikes in those terms. A lot of people have experience with work, of being underpaid, bored, exhausted, injured, harassed by the boss; forced to show up when they need to take care of their family. All those things that are awful about work. So they are sympathetic to strikes. 

Strikes have often been very violent, on the side of the police or strikers, or both. And this is a forgotten history. But their reputation for being more organized, more peaceful, more about withdrawal than attack, makes people feel better about them in many ways. The strike looks like something passive. “What am I doing? Not working!” And there’s nothing that’s going to feel immediately aggressive or threatening when my neighbor says, “I’m not working”.

Riots feel chaotic, unmanageable and volatile, and you know the good liberal is always going to be opposed to every kind of social struggle that in any way threatens to arrive on their doorstep. So the undisciplined character of a riot, which is part of its power, is also part of its threat and its risk. That makes the centrist, the liberal, unsympathetic to riots by nature.

One last thing regarding strikes. In countries such as Sweden and Finland, with a long history of strong worker movements and social democracy, there have been a lot of threats towards the right to strike over the last years, and clear attempts to limit the ability to strike. I’m curious what you would have to say about this. How does it fit into everything? If we follow your position that circulation struggles, or riots, are the primary places where people are fighting today, but at the same time note that the ones in power are targeting “production struggles,” limiting the ability to strike. 

Good question. I mean, one reason may be that riots are already completely illegal. They can’t exactly make them more illegal. Although in the US, there are great efforts to make it legal to run over people who are blocking the road for example. Several new laws have been passed, as well as intensification of penalties against protests of any kind. So I guess it’s possible to try and criminalize riots even more.

The space for narrowing the legal protections for a strike, seems very available. So I can understand why that might be an interest. Here we get to maybe a little bit of cynicism I have, not about the historical labor movement, but about trade unions and how they operate. I think that leaving legal space and legitimacy for strikes was actually a useful strategy for capitalists in the period of massive economic expansion after WWII. We call this “purchasing the social peace.” You can afford to increase wages so people keep showing up to work, because work is generating huge profits for capitalists and because of this there is more room for labor to move, to win some corresponding gains. It was clear that it was in capital’s interest to give in to some demands rather than to let the economy stop booming.

Would you say that even before capitalism we have seen riots all throughout history? And striking is actually the new category?

That’s absolutely correct. Strikes really didn’t exist before the seventeenth century. On the other hand, if we look at more or less riotous activities, violent confrontations with authorities, with the government, these are on the verge of being “transhistorical.” We are always told never to start an essay with ”Since the beginning of time.” So I’m trying to avoid that. But anti-authoritarian struggles are pretty consistent.

Peasant uprisings and slave uprisings are incredibly important human, political, historical categories. I’m trying to separate those things out from circulation struggles, which are more historically specific and narrower. They can look very similar to peasant and slave uprisings, but I think they have a different basis. They arise from something specific to capitalism, in how it sets up local and world markets, and how it organizes our lives for profit; how it makes us dependent on these markets to survive. In how it includes some people and excludes others, and the particular ways in which it sets people against each other. So I think it’s useful for me to make this distinction.

But I also want to pay attention to the similarities between peasant or slave uprisings and riots. Circulation struggles may be about how much it costs to stay alive, the price of survival in the place of the market, but they inevitably involve fighting the police, once the police come into being. It’s important to remember that the police are a modern invention. The police don’t come into being until the 17th or probably the 18th century in the United States. They originate in two ways. In the South as slave patrols and in the northeast as ways of disciplining labor. 

Yet it is also in this sense that you see the links with all these historical struggles, because confrontation with coercive force is also part of peasant and slave uprisings. Confrontation with the police connects the slave uprising to the strike to the riot. They’re all about getting free. They’re all about struggling where you are. They involve specifically trying to overcome the coercive force that is locking you into a certain mode of life. 

My great intellectual model Fredric Jameson [who passed away between when we did this interview and when it was published] wrote that you always have to hold continuity and rupture in mind at the same time. That is the best intellectual advice I’ve ever received. I got it from a book—people should read books. 

I try to do this with what you’re asking, whether riots always existed. There is a rupture, which is the integration of the world market, the fact that you have to sell yourself to purchase goods in that market even as they are shipping the local grain somewhere else where it can make more profit. That transforms lives. I think that deserves its own history and it’s different from peasant uprisings and slave uprisings. But because both of them inevitably involve having to confront coercive forces of violence that impose your misery upon you, there’s a continuity as well.

You said in the beginning that you wanted to rescue riots as a political category. At least for me, that was what happened. At the time when your book came out, I was surrounded by friends who were either really skeptical about the idea of riots, saying “riots don’t lead anywhere anyway.” And on the other hand, friends thought that we don’t need some theory for riots, but “people just do them.” 

I was unsatisfied with both of these positions, I thought we could find a way not to make such a big gap between thinking and practice, to blend them. Through your book I found a way to talk about riots with all of my friends from a more methodological and less moralizing perspective. By thinking of struggle as different tools, and riots as one of them, and basing our analysis on when it has made sense for people to use one or the other of them. So that was amazing, thank you. 

Now, the connection between theory and practice leads me to the idea of the commune which we haven’t talked about yet, but perhaps we can start with the basics of what the commune is for you?

I started thinking about this near the end of the book. For the upcoming book I’m working on, I introduce a third category that goes alongside riots and strikes, and yes, that is the commune.

Reproduction is the name for everything we do so that our friends, our household, and our community can exist from one day to the next, one month to the next, one generation to the next. It includes everything from cooking and caring for each other to bearing and raising children, and everything in between. Capitalism needs that because it needs workers, and it needs consumers. This is not for you and me, it’s not to make a good life for our friends and our kin in our communities, it is to make consumers and workers for capitalism. But this doesn’t have to be the case—the commune points to this possibility of another life. 

Industrial production in a factory might go away after capitalism does. Shopping in the supermarket or IKEA, that’s circulation. That’s also capitalism, and when capitalism goes away, that might also go away. But us caring for each other and cooking for each other and bearing and raising children with each other won’t go away. That can be external from capital. So all that effort that we’re going to call reproductive labor to remake our communities day by day, generation by generation, that’s the basis of the commune. That activity is what the commune does. That’s communal life. The commune is just a name for reproductive activity separated from capitalism and we think that, well, that’s in the future. 

We have famous examples in the past: the Paris Commune, but also the Shanghai Commune and the Morelos Commune during the Mexican Revolution, and various others. But mostly we think, well, the commune is only something in the future. We’re going to overcome capitalism some day but the commune doesn’t exist in the present. 

It does exist in the present. And I don’t mean those little groups of 12 rich people with beards and whatnot who go off to live in the countryside and say it’s a country. That’s not what I mean. Here’s what I mean when I think about the commune and particularly the commune as a tactic: 

I’m reading a lot for my book about pipeline blockades—classic circulation struggle, right? It’s the circulation of this resource. You don’t show up there as a worker saying “I’m on strike from the pipeline.” You show up saying, “I’m not going to let this pipeline pass through my land, my territory, my friend’s territory, our communal shared land. I’m not going to let it ruin the rivers and ruin the soil. I’m not going to let it happen. I’m going to blockade it with 1000 of my friends.” What happens? 

If you’re going to stay there and keep the blockade going not just on Monday but Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and then for the rest of the year, you need certain things to happen. You need to start cooking food, so you set up a communal kitchen. People need to rest. You set up places for people to sleep and shelter. People need to get care. You set up a medical tent and various other things. That’s the encampment. 

It’s not a protest camp trying to bring attention to something and saying: “We’re outraged”. It’s a very practical thing. And what’s that practical encampment doing? It’s doing exactly what we were calling reproductive labor a little while ago. It’s supplying food, shelter, care and community for people who are blockading the oil pipeline. It’s a commune that starts to happen as part of a tactic of struggle. It’s doing that communal work that we identify with the commune or reproductive labor, not to produce labor for capitalism, not to produce consumers for capitalism, but to produce a pipeline blockade. And, in fact, the pipeline blockade doesn’t exist without that little commune, and the commune doesn’t exist without the blockade. They’re utterly linked. They are one. It’s not one or the other. You don’t have to choose militancy versus care work. They’re one thing. 

That’s where the commune fits in, not as a vision of the future, which is great, but as a practical tactic in the present that we’re all already engaged in. And as always, my job is not to tell people what to do, it’s just to try and name things correctly, to try and describe what’s already happening. The great theorists are the people who are blockading the pipelines and taking care of the camps. They’re the theorists and they’re figuring out how you do it and what you do to get free and I’m just lucky to have the opportunity to try and think about it and put sentences around it. 

This view of the commune feels very promising to me, it brings hope. I’ve been missing struggle related thoughts on continuity and reproduction, in this sense.

If you don’t have a wage, or are in a work relation, then you can’t strike, or you can try but what will happen? If you don’t have a very able body, which is the case for all of us at some point in life, it’s difficult for you to riot. But how is it with the commune? What do you need to be part of that, or to struggle that way? 

That’s a really great question that I’m not sure I’ve thought about as much as I should, but I think you already offer a useful way to think about it. Which is, if we were to reductively divide up all the kinds of struggle in the world into three categories: riot, strike, commune; or circulation struggles, production struggles, and reproduction struggles, this makes a lot of space for a lot of different kinds of activity. And hopefully, if we think about them as all part of a unity, instead of thinking of them as opposed choices, that means there’s a lot of different places for people to locate themselves in terms of how they want to participate. 

Someone often says no, the only right tactic is this. But as you point out, there’s going to be lots of people who say that’s not available to me. Even if I believed in this tactic, even if that was my desire, it is for various reasons not available to me: because of where I live, my citizenship status, my labor status, my bodily capacities, various other things. And, being attentive to the fact that not all forms of struggle are available to all people is fundamental. If we can think of all of us together with our different capacities as forming a kind of unity, it gives lots of various places for people to go. 

And that’s why it’s important not to invent oppositions. One of the most destructive is the debate between militancy and care. Where someone says, “Let’s do a very militant thing”—something coded as militant, something violent or risky or just physically ambitious. And then someone says, “Well, we should in fact be more attentive to care work and focus on that and not fall into the trap of trying to be ultra-radical and so on.” This debate is often gendered, with militancy coded as masculine and care work as feminine. But it also invokes other differences including who is able and in what ways. So you get a real opposition of militancy versus care, presented as an ethical debate. Which is the right thing to do? And as long as you choose either one of those, you’re going to end up with an incomplete set of tactics and with people who are excluded. 

We can think of these things as a unity, as I have been trying to suggest. The commune and the blockade are a great example. It’s not one versus the other, they form a whole. In the end I want all three—riot, strike, commune—to form a whole in which people can participate in various ways. The poet Diane di Prima has a poem that ends “It will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down.” That’s one way to put it. 

Another way to put it is, that’s what a general strike means. For a general strike is actually not a strike in the technical sense of labor withdrawal, it involves a lot more stuff. The general strike is the name for when the riot, the strike, and the commune all happen at once. That’s what the general strike really is. And that’s the day, the week, or the year where there will be a role for everyone. 

Thank you, Joshua Clover, arriving at the general strike is the right way to end this interview and I can’t wait for that year to arrive. You have given essential clues on how to comprehend the various forms of struggle that are available—or not available—for people and why it makes sense to use them in specific contexts and times. As you say, people struggle where they are, and ideally, all the various tactics together create a unity. 

I’m looking forward to your book on the commune, to understand this tactic in the present-day even better. Already the conceptualization of something that will stay when capitalism goes away is a powerful one. 

The coming riots, strikes and communes by who you call the “great theorists” will look a bit differently to me in the future now, in having a framework to connect all the dots.