Riot. Strike. Riot - Joshua Clover

RIOT. STRIKE. RIOT – JOSHUA CLOVER

A riot is not an end unto itself but a means to an end, and what that end might be is the question that needs to be considered. Whether this has always been the case is something for historians to answer but certainly it is how things are today. According to Joshua Clover in his book Riot. Strike. Riot in the past the strike was the method by which workers would have their demands met, and this is very true. The world, however, has changed and nowadays what a strike can achieve has been reduced due to the way economics has been re-arranged. That's not to say the strike is absolutely ineffective or redundant as a tool of action, it's just that the demands a strike can call for have been contained and bracketed.

Clover's book is a complicated dissertation using the language of academia to posit ideas on how we might move toward what is essentially a revolutionary horizon. On reading it, if you don't have the will or that compulsion to move toward that horizon then you're probably going to fall after the first chapter because it's pretty hard going. At times it seems even a little strange to apply such intellectualism to a subject such as riots but then – why not? Are we meant to be intimidated by intellectualism? Are we meant to be intimidated by a riot and see it only as something to be condemned?

Whilst cutting a picaresque swathe through the jungle of words there are some really good points to be found, not only all of Clover's alone but many he has drawn from other sources to embolden his own. Regarding the police, for example, he quotes Guy Debord: 'What is a policeman? He is the commodity's active servant, the man fully subsumed by the commodity, by whose efforts a given product of human labour remains a commodity with the magical property of being paid for. Looting instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes its ultimate logic: the army, the police and the other specialised forces possessed of the State's monopoly on armed violence.'

The conclusion being that the police now stand in the place of the economy, the violence of the commodity made flesh.

Expounding upon this, the strike is applicable to the production phase of capital and the riot is applicable to the consuming and purchasing phase. Looting is still a form of purchasing except the payment is zero. During any so-called 'food riot' of old, the seizing of food by the mob was market regulation, much as exporting food in the midst of dearth is market regulation. Rather than the price being set by those who would profit and rather the market holding sovereignty, it is instead the mob who set the price and who command sovereignty, this same reversal being exemplified during the Gordon Riots of 1780 where the breached wall of Newgate Prison was signed 'His Majesty, King Mob'.

Given that the market was meant to provide full employment and a kind of equality for all, it should by now be abundantly clear that it does no such thing. The ranks of the excluded are swelling and the State can no longer purchase the social peace. It is all stick and no carrots, as Clover puts it. For the lumpenproletariat to strike is not an option and nor has it ever been which is why it is from them that any insurrection will find its urban spearhead.

Being surplus to requirement all that can be done is to hold the lumpenproletariat in check as effectively and as cheaply as possible so as not to impede upon the functioning of the market, the tool for this being the constant threat and constant use of State violence. It's no accident that the prison population is dominated by the workless poor.

'The riot,' writes Clover 'is the other of incarceration. That is to say, it is a consequence of and response to inexorable and intensifying regimes of exclusion, superfluidity, lack of access to goods and State surveillance and violence, along with the State's inability to apportion resources toward the social peace.'

Whilst public services are withered away under the guise of austerity measures or those that might generate a profit sold off and privatised, the services and institutions that money is always found for is the police and prisons. Again, it's no accident.

Of examples of the revolutionary horizon to be moved toward, Clover cites the Paris Commune of 1871 as an example along with the more recent Occupy movement though he's actually very critical of Occupy and pulls it up on some of its (many) failings. Ultimately, there is no blueprint of how to get to where we need to go and even no blueprint of where exactly that is. One thing for sure, however, is that the way things are now and the way things are going is not sustainable and simply cannot continue. Unless, that is, we want to turn the world (or even just the UK?) into a vast sub-North Korean super-state in which self interest is the guiding star, where laissez faire capitalism has free reign and profit is the be all and end all. Where nature and the environment is incidental and just something else to be exploited, where we are ruled over for the benefit of an elite 1% and the other 99% can go hang, or go beg, or go starve, or as writer Whittaker Chambers once put it: 'To a gas chamber – go!'.

The self-serving elite along with all those who benefit from the crumbs from their table must be brought to heel, and this task must fall to those who have no or very little investment in the way things are. The dispossessed. The lumpenproletariat. The excluded. The mob. Call them what you like but the important thing is not to fear them and not to fear a riot unless of course you are part of that 1% or a lickspittle of theirs. Then yes, be afraid because the end game is here. We are in it. Riots are inevitable and the mob is coming. His Majesty, King Mob is coming.

John Serpico