Value Theory for the End of the World
Remembering Joshua Clover (1962-2025)
Poet, communist, cat-lover, teacher, music critic, roadrunner, critical theorist, Marxist: though not necessarily in this order, Joshua Clover was all those things--and more. To me, however, he was first and foremost my compadre, the nonbiological family member whom my wife and I would trust to take care of our youngest son and his godchild Manu, should anything happen to both of us. The void his passing leaves behind is unspeakably painful and the following words do not pretend to say otherwise. History—including personal history—is what hurts.
Joshua and I met fortuitously in the fall of 2010, when we were both Faculty Fellows in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. Right from the start of the weekly seminar that all fellows are expected to attend, we hit it off as we were both quickly targeted as old-school Marxists, something he would wear as a badge of honor for the remainder of the academic year, while never hiding his skepticism about my credentials for making the same claim. On this subject, as for everything else having to do with political action and the theory immanent in it, Joshua put the bar extremely high. Quite certain of falling short of his expectations, I always felt that he indulged me a bit and let me go on with my insufficient grasp of the true Karl Marx—the author of the Grundrisse and the three volumes of Capital. As recently as last summer, he told me he wanted to spend time in Berlin and learn German to read Marx in the original.
During that shared year at Cornell which now seems to belong to another era altogether, we would spend many late evenings in our home in Ithaca, talking and laughing and drinking. Simone and I always made sure to have a bottle of Sancerre especially set aside for him. The following year we would travel with the kidsto Sea Ranch in Northern California, which he made us discover, for his fiftieth birthday; soon thereafter, he would come and visit us in Mexico City; not even two years ago, we would all travel back to Sea Ranch for his sixtieth birthday. And, in between, every time he passed through New York City, he would try to stay the night at our place, and we would have dinner together. He was such a unique soul, if I may use this idealist concept, so genuinely caring to our two sons Lucas and Manu, even though he was a thorough abolitionist as far as the bourgeois family is concerned, and unforgivingly but also endearingly critical of my many according to him misguided judgements about critical theory and philosophy. After the loss of Fredric Jameson in September of 2024, with Joshua I now feel like I have lost one of my last remaining implied readers.
“Poetics of social forms,” Jameson’s chosen label for his lifelong work, likewise could serve as the overarching title for Joshua’s many books, whether his own collections of poetry (the award-winning Madonna anno domini, The Totality for Kids, and Red Epic), his analyses of the writing, film, and music of others (The Matrix, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About, and Roadrunner) or, finally, his theory of forms of collective action (Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings and the new book he was working on as a follow-up). This is because for Joshua there is no significant difference, whether ontological or epistemological, between poetic or artistic forms and social or political forms. Nor can theory be separated from activism. All forms are obviously social but inversely the more fundamental principle holds that society as such cannot be understood and acted upon outside a given set of forms, to be studied with the tools and methods of historical materialism.
As he wrote in the “Introduction” to Riot. Strike. Riot, with a sarcastic warning shot across the bow to those friends and comrades whom he considered overly moralizing and voluntaristic:
Theory is immanent in struggle; often enough it must hurry to catch up to a reality that lurches ahead. A theory of the present will arise from its lived confrontations, rather than arriving at the scene laden with backdated homilies and prescriptions regarding how the war against the state and capital ought to be waged, programs we are told once worked and might now be refurbished and imposed once again on our quite distinct moment. The subjunctive is a lovely mood, but it is not the mood of historical materialism. (3-4)
This stubborn refusal to sacrifice the periodisation of actual forms of struggle and their immanent theories on the altar of the subjunctive mood or mode may well be impossible to sustain all the way to the end. After all, Joshua himself concludes his bestselling book with an invocation of the coming forms of the commune, which would point beyond the limits of the historical and materialist analysis of the strike, as the wage-setting form of production struggles on the factory floor, and the riot, as the price-setting form of circulation struggles in the marketplace. “The coming commune will develop where both production and circulation struggles have exhausted themselves,” Joshua predicts (or prescribes), before ending with a détournement or diversionary allusion to both William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming” and Guy Debord’s sixth and last film, In Girum imus nocte et consumimur igni: “Things fall apart, core and periphery cannot hold. We turn round and round in the night and are consumed by fire.”
Over the past few years, Joshua had been working steadily on an expansion of his materialist theorization of forms of collective action to add the blockade and the encampment to the repertoire of riot and strike. Our mutual editor, Sebastian Budgen, tells me that Verso had wisely offered a contract for this new book, to be titled Two Problems, Two Limits, the Rev (based on a few lines from Aimé Césaire’s 1955 Discours sur le colonialisme, according to which the two problems in question concern colonialism and capitalism, or land and labor, the extreme limits of which we are currently confronting in the guise of the climate collapse and the end of capitalist growth).
Refusing once again to accept the misguided opposition between making a political intervention and the work of theory, Joshua continues to ask how forms of struggle change and, based on a historical and material grasp of their internal functioning in concrete practice, how they may contain nascent communes, where the urgent practical matters no longer hover only around production and circulation but furthermore expand into the realms of reproduction and care. As a contribution to Marxist thought, finally, he goes so far as to offer “value theory for the end of the world” as the name for his overall project that began with Riot. Strike. Riot: “To show, in short, that Marxist thought (and value theory in particular), far from being divorced from daily political practice, both learns from these practices and makes them newly thinkable. Theory helps think how to intervene or it is nothing.”
May you rest in peace, compadre. Yesterday, while turning round and round in the night trying to make sense of this senseless loss, I reread the last lines of your acknowledgements in the riot book, when you furtively quote Marx’s letter from May 1843 to his friend and fellow Young Hegelian Arnold Ruge, and I could not help but feel as if you were reaching out to all of us today: “And when everything is at an end give me your hand so that we may begin again from the beginning.”
