Reading Group Week 22 - Riot. Strike. Riot
Hello, and welcome to the reading group if you're just joining. This week we're starting a new book: Riot. Strike. Riot by Joshua Clover. 
If you buy the book somewhere other than the Workshops 4 Gaza bookstore, please consider donating to The Sameer Project - proceeds from the Workshops 4 Gaza bookshop partner, Open Books Emporium, go to The Sameer Project to try to keep Palestinians in Gaza fed and alive during Israel's ongoing imposed starvation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
Format
Every time we start a new book I want to try to remind people of how this works in case you haven't dug into the archives for the format and roadmap post. The gist is that there are a few ways to follow along:
- follow these emails (which I send on Mondays)
- video chats (Saturdays at 12pm ET)
- signal group chat
- discuss with me on social media (you can find me on bluesky, mastodon, and twitter/x)
Schedule
Here's my tentative plan for Riot. Strike. Riot. I'm trying to keep the reading load around 20 pages per week, but please contact me if you have feedback on that.
| Week | Date | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | June 16 | Introduction |
| Week 2 | June 23 | Chapters 1+2 |
| Week 3 | June 30 | Chapters 3+4 |
| Week 4 | July 7 | Chapters 5+6 |
| Week 5 | July 14 | Chapter 7 |
| Week 6 | July 21 | Chapter 8 |
| Week 7 | July 28 | Chapter 9(+afterword) |
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Reflections
Introduction
Labor struggles have in the main been diminished to ragged defensive actions, while the riot features increasingly as the central figure of political antagonism, a specter leaping from insurrectionary debates to anxious governmental studies to glossy magazine covers. (pg 3)
No doubt many riots involve violence—perhaps the great majority, if one includes property damage in the category, as well as threats explicit or sub voce. It is not altogether clear that such inclusion is natural or reasonable. That property damage equals violence is not a truth but the adoption of a particular set of ideas about property, one of relatively recent vintage, involving specific identifications of humans with abstract wealth of the sort that culminate in, for example, the legal holdings that corporations are people. (pg 11)
In 1700 [...] the state was far and the economy near. In 2015, the state is near and the economy far. Production is aerosolized; commodities are assembled and delivered across global logistics chains. Even basic foodstuffs are likely to originate a continent away. Meanwhile the standing domestic army of the state is always at hand—progressively militarized, on the pretext of making war on drugs and terror. Riot prime cannot help but heave itself against the state; there is no way not to. (pg 29)
Something has ended, or should have ended; everyone can feel it. It is a sort of interregnum. A miserable lull, backlit everywhere by the sense of declension and fires flaring across the planetary terrain of struggle.
[...]
And yet this anxious persistence, this uneasy suspension. Will there be a restoration? Greater catastrophe? Which should we prefer? This is the tonality of the time of riots. (pg 31)
I'm kind of fascinated by the narrative journey Clover takes to pin down and explain the structure that the book takes. More than that, I think it's fascinating that he takes like... multiple pages to explain the distinction between what is a riot and what is a strike (and what is this new thing "riot prime").
(I know I dwell on this stuff, but bear with me.)
I really appreciate when an essay or a book names an idea - even an idea that you think you understand intuitively - and makes a point to explicitly draw a line around it for the sake of everyone (including themselves). Whenever I write about something, I find myself dragged in a thousand different directions, and the most effective remedy for that is to scope what I'm going to write about more intentionally. I can acknowledge the importance of other work beyond the scope that I can handle, and I can preserve my ability to focus on a subject by keeping close to that little square of land.
Clover does this a lot - facing and disambiguating something that has been creeping around in the periphery for a while. The question of whether a riot involves "violence" or is intrinsically "violent" is this perpetual that creeps around a lot in conversations about protests, uprisings, demonstrations, and riots. Is a riot intrinsically "violent"? Is it "violence" when someone breaks a car window or a storefront? What kinds of accommodations do we have to make in our heads to privilege a panel of glass and elevate it to the point that we use the same word - "violence" - as when an occupying settler state dismembers a child?
(For that matter - how much weight do we constantly pull on behalf of a violent carceral state that commits heinous, gratuitous violence against people every day; that casually initiates violence in public protests and demonstrations - what word do we have for when police riot, when police use "less-than-lethal" munitions and aim for people's eyes and vital organs? What do we call that? How do we call property damage "violence" but what police do to us every day not that? How do we call the former a "riot" and the latter anything less than hell on earth? Anyway, I'll digress.)
I also appreciate the rhetorical style he intertwines with the theory: "Riot prime cannot help but heave itself against the state; there is no way not to" is powerfully evocative. And I'm reminded of so many activists and organizers who have pointed out in fleeting posts that the police today are nothing like the police during the civil rights movement in the 60s. In the 60s you could overwhelm a police force administratively if several dozen people all got arrested. Today the police have the administrative capacity to arrest virtually anyone. Getting arrested will not slow down the police state now; all it does is put you in a carceral system.
In advance of the "No Kings" protest there had been some advice going around telling people to sit down on the ground if you see violence. I hope this doesn't need to be said to my readers, but that is bad advice. Police train with the IOF and regard all of us as armed, militant opposition, as "terrorists". They'll drive cars over people if they need to; their officers on horseback will trample people without much thought.
The advice from experienced, knowledgeable organizers is to avoid getting arrested or even lingering under the scrutiny of police. The value of being photographed defiantly resisting police as they arrest you, with all your humanity and dignity, has been watered away by decades of police militarization, as Clover points out. Things are different now. Help one another get away from the police, and stay out of their reach.
The end of the introduction stood out to me, perhaps more so with recent events. As I write, Israel is bombing Iranian apartment buildings and television news studios and the US is shipping dozens of planes' worth of cargo and materiel to resupply their colonial partner. The "fires flaring across the terrain" are literal now, just like a number of evocative metaphorical turns of phrase Clover used that have aged in remarkable fashion.
We're no longer in a period of "uneasy suspension", are we? It seems like every day there is more and greater catastrophe. Still, all the more reason that this feels like "the tonality of the time of riots". I hope we are indeed at the end of something, and the beginning of another. The end of a colonial empire; the beginning of a free Palestine; the beginning of a world free from violent oppression.
Share your thoughts
I want to hear what you're thinking about after reading the introduction, what brought you to Riot. Strike. Riot and to the reading group.
If you'd like to chat with the Signal group chat, I'd love to see you there.
Otherwise, let's chat on Saturday at 12pm ET, during the weekly video call.
Next Book
Our next book will be... I'm not sure yet. If you have strong feelings, please let me know in the signal chat, on bluesky, or on twitter.
Okay, that's everything. If you're new, thank you for joining. If you're returning, thanks for being here. Regardless, looking forward to hearing from you (and seeing you on Saturday, if you can make it.)