On Joshua Clover's 'Riot Strike Riot', and the question of what is a riot - a thread.

Theory Time!

How do we define a riot? Is it just signaled by the use of violence and if so, how does that limit the understanding of what a riot is?

Clover begins with a historical account from Paul Gilje's "Rioting In America" which conceptualises the riot as as corollary of the strike - the armed wing of the labor movement.

Whilst we shouldn't elide the links between violence and labor (how can we when capitalist exchange is a freedom founded on violence) but it's a mistake to reduce the riot down to simply being the presence of violence.

(As Clover puts it, "it is the character of bourgeois thought to preserve moral rather than practical understanding of social antagonism.")

Safe to say, Clover doesn't find Gilje's definition of a riot convincing:

This equivocation of the riot and violence is a kind of political reductionism, cordoning off the riot from the realm of "politics proper" - see the way media discourses shift from ""political protests"" to what they argue is senseless rioting

Then there are quantitative and positivistic models like the 2011 study from the New England Complex Systems Institute which argued for a "single bullet correlation" where if food prices rise past a certain point, riots become more likely.

On the other side of this position is the line taken by thinkers like Alain Badiou:

Badiou seems to have more of an accurate handle on (specifically) the London riots, seeing them not as a movement in need of vanguard leadership but rather, they function as a "periodizing fact in the midst of its own realization"

To quote Badiou directly: "several peoples and situations are telling us in a still indistinct language that this period is over; that there is a rebirth of History. We must then remember the revolutionary Idea, inventing its new form by learning from what is happening..."

Clover finds both definitions unsatisfying for similar reasons - "the quants give us too much causality; Badiou too little..."

How then do we steer between vulgar economism and 'the whirlpool of political abstraction..'

A more promising root into understanding the riot is EP Thompson's work, who argues that the situation of the riot is not simply hunger or political emotion but is rather the domination of the marketplace.