Archive of Riot. Strike. Riot

Key titles on activism and global resistance, from movements for Black liberation and climate justice to labor organizing and anti-colonial struggles.

The year 2020 has provided a practically laboratorial clarity. For political theory, or really political practice, it has been something like a natural experiment measuring two politics against the world and against each other. How to name these two politics, if not the election and the riot? 

Riots, rebellions and uprisings that have changed the world.

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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.

The place of this riot is the street, the street where Michael Brown was murdered, the street  where people gathered to await the news that his killer would not be indicted, the street where people met up afterward. The matching scenes from around the nation convey an uncanny sense of coordination, of organization without an organization.

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. 

A reading list of key titles on the history of labor organizing and class struggle in the US.

Our top books from the year - all in one place.

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.