Baltimore. Ferguson. Tottenham. Clichy-sous-Bois. Oakland. Our era has become an “age of riots.” In this book, Joshua Clover addresses the problem of riots by challenging Marxism’s conventional characterization of them as apolitical or spontaneous. Throughout the text, Clover presents a theoretical reflection on riots as a concrete form of class struggle throughout history and uses the dialectic of riot and strike to rewrite the history of capital accumulation. The hypothesis put forward in this analysis is that riots constituted the main form of struggle in the 17th and 18th centuries, but were supplanted by the celebrated strikes and workers’ protests of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Since the 1970s, we have witnessed a resurgence of riots, which have since been transformed by the coordinates of race and class. From the earliest wage demands to the recent social justice ca...read more








