Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings

Excellent copy

All the one star reviews are from MAGA types who celebrate riots only when kicked up by violent fascists in support of a dictator who’s really just a voodoo doll made up of the most toxic trash of American capitalism spray painted with a fake tan.MAGA world, your hypocrisy and infantile insanity have left an ashen taste in the mouths of regular downtrodden people across the world. Your putsch failed just like fascism always ultimately does.With the right’s humiliating failure to mount any kind of coherent alternative to the establishment, and with all of their beliefs based in fear and hate—the only real lasting and positive movement beyond our present societal ills is in social justice, social democracy—socialism. Everyone knows it, deep in their bones. Even the plutocrats. And they are very afraid. That’s why they’re willing to bring our society to the brink of dissolution in backing the mendaciously millionaire muttonhead we just LEGALLY booted out of office.There’s a direct path from community organizing and socially minded activism through electoral politics and into the levers of power.We just need to wake up and realize it. We don’t need. We don’t need the hatred and fear the right uses because those are the wrong tools and a sure path to defeat. Commitment to the long haul of building civilly disobedient communities held together by loving solidarity for one’s fellow sufferers—THAT IS THE WAY.Read this book. Start the journey. There are anyway numberless paths to such revelations.Just look inside yourself, past the cynicism: humanity needs self understanding now more than ever. Because in 15-20 years the earth itself, its raging climate, will start hammering the blackened heart, the cancer of corporate America. Capitalism will help only the superrich when the seas rise and the plains burn. We who suffer in this mindless system of profiteering will ultimately have only each other. That is solidarity. Forget the rest of the old 20th century verbiage. The super storms around the corner won’t care what you believe. And the one percent, the Owner class, the selfish Rentiers, they really don’t value anything about the rest of us except insofar as we can be milked for fees rents and labor. And compliance.Brothers and sisters, stop trashing those who want to help you and are asking for your help in bringing about a new age as the Anthropocene ends this one whether anyone wants it or not.When your ship is sinking all on its lonesome you might be wondering what you had against social democracy back when you THOUGHT you were fat and happy with the status quo. A decade or two and that illusion of the old equilibrium will be gone. The only safety net will be your brothers and sisters. The rest will be trash on the winds and waves of an angry earth.

“Riot Strike Riot” by Joshua Clover offers a political theory about today’s new era of struggles. Professor Clover is an intellectual thought leader who teaches critical theory and literature at the University of California. This exceptionally perspicacious and well-written book helps us understand how today’s struggles may succeed in liberating humanity from the constraints of capitalism.Professor Clover contends that riots can help us better understand capitalism including the contradictions of the present. We learn how food riots accompanied England’s rise as a market economy. Later, strikes emerged as industrialization relocated the locus of struggle to the workplace.Professor Clover refers to the Rodney King beating and rioting in 1990s Los Angeles as the return of ‘riot prime’. Importantly, Professor Clover positions riot prime within capitalism’s racist tradition and crisis of profitability. The author explains how ‘circulation’ - that is, the use of logistics to move goods from low- to high-wage nations - has merely enriched the few and dispossessed the poor; thus creating the conditions for riot to flourish.Professor Clover recognizes riot prime’s occupation of the square as a strategic challenge to capitalism’s false separation of the political and the economic. Professor Clover identifies an impulse in the struggle towards both idealism and pragmatism. Perhaps, the author muses, a commune will emerge as those excluded from the circuit of wage and market organize and assert their rights.I highly recommend Professor Clover’s excellent book to everyone.

This is a wonderful book on riot. The negative reviews below appear to be from a mentally ill person.Clover has a very elegant thesis: strikes are typical of periods of capitalist expansion and are primarily about labor wages. Riots (Boston Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street) are about price or availability of goods and occur when capitalism is more rent-seeking than productive. His argument is that we are now in an age of rent-seeking and riot. We have millions of people who can't support a family no matter how hard they try. They don't even have jobs at which to strike for better pay. Riot is their path.This is a healthy corrective to the Bernie Sanders/Jacobin socialist crowd who are looking to rebuild unions. The growth period of the strike model was also the growth period for capitalism itself. Again, the permanently unemployed don't strike, they riot. That's not to say that strikes and riots cannot co-exist but, when rioters are shutting down freeways -- it's a safe best that those are people who really do not have a path to employment and cannot afford much of anything. In this, modern rioters are more like their forefathers at the harbor during the Boston Tea Party -- people for whom the current system is completely broken.

This book is based on lies and stupidity. Two thumbs dumb.