Archive of Joshua Clover

In the second part of their series on the global conjuncture, Nikhil Pal Singh and Joshua Clover survey our present economic and ecological impasse, and search through the ruins for the green shoots of solidarity and for the "openings that are necessarily present when things fall apart."

Contemporary circulation struggles – the occupations, riots and critical infrastructure blockades that dominate the reportoire of resistance – have in recent years been popularly associated with movements of the left. But what happens they migrate across the political spectrum? Here, Joshua Clover writes on the contemporary terrain of struggle.

It took just 66 days to get from the first shelter-in-place order to the first riot. Joshua Clover writes on the current protests and riots that have sprung up across the United States in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and their context at a time of economic and social crisis.

2019 has been a year of planetary unrest, with mass struggles springing up in places as diverse as Haiti, France, Ecuador, and Iran. Yet, it is the struggles in Chile, sparked by a 4 per cent rise in the price of a metro ride, that have been most emblematic of this new cycle of mass mobilisation. In this article, Joshua Clover reads the striking image of a train on fire in the Elisa Correa station of the Santiago metro, and asks what it can tell us about our new era of riot and protest. 

Are we in the early history of climate riots? What is already apparent is the state’s willingness to seize this situation on behalf of capital and of its own consolidation of power, a Green Nationalism which leverages climate management regimes toward hard borders, xenophobic violence, differential citizenship, protectionist labor pacts, further intensifications of militarization and surveillance.

Much has been written about the gilets jaunes and their relation to both politics, of the left and the right, and historical waves of labour unrest. In this article, Joshua Clover argues that the gilets jaunes are in fact a texbook example of a contemporary riot, and may be best seen as an early example of an approaching wave of climate riots.

May 1968 stands at the precipice into which the historical labor movement will descend. 

Absurd at it will seem, this episode of prosecutorial overreach should not be laughed off, even with a first set of acquittals in hand. Its obscene falsity has within it a moment of truth.