Joshua Clover, Rest in Power
Members of the Marxist Institute for Research pay tribute to the poet, communist and political theorist.
Our comrade and friend Joshua Clover (1962-2025) passed away in late April after a brief and mysterious illness. We write as his comrades in the Marxist Institute for Research (MIR) to celebrate his life as a communist, professor, teacher, mentor, writer, poet, and lifelong student of Marx. Joshua lived multiple lives in diverse measures, as a music writer and pop culture critic, as literary critic and insurrectionist, as poet and social theorist, and as a hurricane that whipped collectives and movements together by organizing summer camps and counter-institutional spaces that brought comrades into new relation. It is as impossible to describe the entirety of his work and his contributions as it is to imagine MIR without him; here, then, we will try simply to describe the way his work and who he was shaped us, taught us, changed us.
We can find no better description of Joshua’s contributions to Marxist scholarship than the one provided by his oldest friend Louis-Georges Schwartz, who noted recently that Joshua was “one of the first scholars in the over-developed world to show that social analysis can combine a value theory approach with a capital accumulation approach.” Joshua convinced a significant chunk of cultural critics that if they wanted to make sense of the world after the financial crisis of 2008 that they better get up to speed on value theory. In articles such as “Gender Abolition and the Ecotone War,” “Can Dialectics Break BRICS?,” “Literary and Economic Value,” Joshua helped demonstrate what value could do for thinking about topics as varied as gender difference, the party form and aesthetic theory. Joshua enjoyed thinking with others and writing, and all three of these pieces were the result of collaborations (with Juliana Spahr, Aaron Benanav, and Chris Nealon respectively). Joshua was also a bravura literary and cultural critic. His major theory of the relationship between capitalism and literary form can be read across a kind of unofficial triptych of essays–“Autumn and the World System: Poetry and Financial Capital,” “Retcon: Value and Temporality in Poetics,” and “The Irreconcilable: Marx After Literature.” In these pieces and others, he maps the diachronic unfolding of literary form onto the synchronic development of the world system, often relying on Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth-Century to track the shifting periodizations of the long centuries up to and including our own.
Yet it is perhaps as a theorist of pop culture–whether in his years writing music journalism for Spin under the pseudonym “Jane Dark” or, later, writing about music as a Marxist scholar, including an award-winning book about Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ song “Roadrunner” and an influential essay about Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” for Commune magazine–that Joshua’s humor, humanity, and brilliance as a critic is clearest. His 2007 book on The Matrix is a much beloved classic that achieves that special Joshua combination of learned philosophical reference and hilarious wordplay. From 2007-2012, his “Marx and Coca-Cola” column for Film Quarterly took up texts from Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There (which he interprets, in a characteristically hilarious parenthesis, as a film about the 2007 Democratic primary), to Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse (presciently allegorized to the rise of a service economy), to The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (a film apparently so brilliant in its depiction of financialization’s fictitious value that it possesses “an intimate knowledge of volume 3 of Capital without reading”). In a column from 2010 titled “Remarks on Method,” he lays out what feels like a mission statement for his work: to describe “the dialectical relation between pop culture and the real political–economic conditions that are at once artificer and outcome of that culture.” Across his work, this discernment is not just a means of selection but also a way of seeing and interpreting, one driven and grounded by the Jamesonian proposition that Marxism is the “untranscendable horizon” of interpretation–or, as Joshua puts it, “the idea that our economic relations shape the kinds of thoughts the culture thinks, and that ideas are in turn about those situations (and endeavor to serve them).” Yet whereas many Marxist practitioners of ideology critique inevitably fall prey to a certain kind of kill-joy tendency to dismiss pop culture, Joshua was always, to recall the column title, “Marx and Coca-Cola”--he was as in love with pop culture and pop music as with gummy candy. In a beautiful short essay titled “Commune Pop,” about Rihanna’s “We Found Love” and Occupy Oakland, he writes of precisely this contradiction: “pop songs contrive to preserve us in the interval where they pass through us to make more money and it can be true that they can be joyous fight songs and it is surely true that the measure of this will be disclosed by what we do while the songs are spiralling in our shared social ear.”
Both Clover’s book-length study 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This To Sing About and his 2002 Criterion collection notes on Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part (1964) explore how cultural forms mediate moments of historical rupture. In 1989, Clover offers intricate Jamesonian readings of the era’s popular music, caught in a holding pattern between critique and commodification that ignited, among other things, Kurt Cobain’s “rage against the self” at a moment of triumphal neoliberal consolidation. Clover’s quip about Band, a film animated by “a bunch of singing and dancing on the border of two eras,” could describe the preoccupations of 1989 as a meditation on the soundtrack of TINA  (There Is No Alternative) and those “winds of change” filling the vacuum left at the end of history by Soviet collapse
 Although Joshua spent more than 3 decades writing as a poet and cultural and literary critic, he was also staunchly committed to showing how Marxist thought could both learn from and intervene in political practice. One of the greatest gifts that Joshua left us to that end is his best known work of social and political theory, Riot.Strike.Riot. A profound meditation on political form and crisis theory, Riot.Strike.Riot charts the course of the dominant modalities of radical expression across three eras of struggle. It moves from the bread and grain riots of seventeenth- and eighteenth- century upsurges against feudal domination and the market; through the factory floor and the union strikes that characterized the nineteenth- through mid-twentieth centuries; to our present moment, in which the riot has been recentered in the repertoire of popular collective action.
Riot.Strike.Riot. emerged almost shaman-like in the heady years of global uprising to offer a systematic explanation for the explosion of rebellions from Tahrir Square to Occupy Oakland and the Movement for Black lives. Against a dominant tendency in academic scholarship to dismiss the riot through either the orthodox privileging of workplace struggles or racialized denunciations of spontaneous eruptions of violence, Riot.Strike.Riot. provides a historical, value-theoretic account of shifting forms of struggle, ending with the riot as an expression and outcome of the rise in unemployment and surplus populations. As the book powerfully demonstrates, the unfolding of capitalist crisis and industrial relocation in the late twentieth century produced a corresponding shift in the early industrialized countries from the sphere of production to the sphere of circulation. The shift to circulation prompted a corresponding shift in the locus of popular struggle: from the strike to the riot; from wage-setting to price-setting; from working-class resistance at the point of production to the “circulation struggles” of racialized surplus populations who, excluded from the workplace, articulate themselves in a genre of antagonism made inevitable by historical transformations shaping both accumulation and uprising in dialectical relation. Brilliantly charting this sine wave of political form by meeting these movements where they are—learning from direct expressions of mass action in all their unruly power and energy—Joshua displays his characteristic antipathy for condescension and prescriptive moralisms, including those of the “radical theorist” who would seek to discipline, tame, and lead the people. Riot.Strike.Riot. is a modern classic by a thinker who eschewed canon formation, and an unsentimental love letter to the people fighting on the front lines of struggles for justice.
At the end of his life, Joshua was working on a new book, provisionally titled Infrastructure and Revolution. Born of his experience in the kitchens of the Oakland Commune and Standing Rock, Infrastructure and Revolution was Joshua’s effort to take the theoretical-historical periodization of capital accumulation he set out in Riot.Strike.Riot. and apply it to the resurgence of land struggles, blockades, and infrastructural disruption. If Riot.Strike.Riot. ended with a meditation on the commune as “both a tactic and a form a life,” Infrastructure and Revolution picked up where he left off to ask how the work of sustaining the commune might find in the unalienated reproductive labor exemplified in the commune kitchen an emancipatory rupture from the value form. Joshua’s last manuscript was in part a response to his frustration that people seemed to misread Riot.Strike.Riot. as a book that purportedly equated circulation with the circulation of goods, capital’s vulnerability with the chokepoint, and revolutionary seizure with the riot. Joshua wanted to resist this flattening by offering, as he did in his magnum opus, a systematic account of why heavy, physical forms of infrastructure seem to have become a stand-in for value as a social relation, becoming targets of popular uprising and protest. Thinking with Standing Rock as both pipeline blockade and commune, Joshua was working to understand the cyclical resurgence of a specific late colonial relationship to landedness as an outcome of “infrastructure as value’s heavy nightmare.” In an unpublished draft chapter, he resisted the “conceptual aerosolization” of infrastructure into a metaphor, proposing instead that a value theory of infrastructure — as fixed capital enabling circulating capital — could help us understand how infrastructure becomes both an overstretched concept and a site of struggle because of its ever-larger role in preserving capital’s profitability. Because accumulation by dispossession provides an orienting mode for a state struggling to stabilize and reinvigorate a waning capital, land defense blockades reappear as renewed assertions of anti-colonial struggle, and the commune its accompanying site of value-abolishing social reproduction. Among the many things we mourn with the passing of our friend and comrade, one indescribable loss is that we will never get to read Infrastructure and Revolution in the form Joshua intended.
In addition to being a literary and cultural critic and a fierce proponent of a value theoretic approach to political economy, Joshua was also an immensely influential poet. He published three major poetry collections: Madonna anno domini (1997), which won the Walt Whitman Award; The Totality for Kids (2006); and Red Epic (2015). Across his oeuvre, Joshua insisted on poetry's alignment with lived social antagonism: “Revolutionary poetry arises from struggle,” he contended, “not the other way around. The poem is not a gift to the movement; it is a record of the movement's own unfolding” that draws “its relation to race class gender from contemporary rifts.” The founding of Commune Editions in 2015 represents the practical implementation of Clover's theoretical insights about poetry's relationship to political struggle. Conceived as a venue for an emergent body of poetry marked by “the entanglement of poetry and militant anticapitalist + antistate politics,” the press published books by writers like Sean Bonney, David Marriott, Christopher Nealon, Heriberto Yépez, Jasmine Gibson, and Wendy Trevino. Joshua was a “poet of the transitions between periods,” to borrow a description he used to describe John Ashbery’s career trajectory. The inaugural poem (“The Nevada Glassworks”) in Clover’s first collection opens kaleidoscopically with comic-book sound effects, sun-drenched Cold War nuclear paranoia, US military atrocities, and exploded shards of poetic history from Allen Ginsberg’s breathless interrogatives to W.H. Auden’s ranches of isolation rearranged by military explosives. Already in that first poem, the speaker announces themselves as a chronicler of transitions between eras. His poems navigated the historical passage between earlier controversies over the “politics of form” and experimental writing to a post-2009 era of global political mobilizations that produced unpredictable solidarities, specific movement debates, and a resurgence of Marxism and socialist politics largely banished from academic spaces. The stances and preferred terms of these early collections–“totality” and “spectacle”–took up a range of polemical stances that developed over time into intractable opposition not only to a pervasive academic anti-Marxism but also dominant forms of post-Marxism fixated on cultural representation, discourse, ideology critique, and “literary politics.”
In the second collection, The Totality for Kids, one poem’s speaker likens a small, unexpected gesture of political solidarity to “having a spike slipped from your forehead./Which has been there since you were born”--a striking image of politicization but also a powerful preamble for Clover’s final collection. Red Epic abandons the isolated urban flânerie characteristic of the earlier books in favor of the rhetoric of direct political address inspired by the work of poets like Amiri Baraka and Diane Di Prima.
Clover’s final published poem, “Poem (Sept 26, 2023),” written in a church above Santiago, Chile, meditates on unfinished revolutions and persistent struggles, from Palestine to Standing Rock to the George Floyd uprising. The poem’s refrain—“which is not over”—refuses forms of ideological containment and closure that might render such struggles disparate, doomed, or merely incommensurable. Clover held to a vision of Marxist “value theory for the end of the world” that could map material interconnections between struggles as a ground for solidarity and subject of poetry as much as popular songs. The poem’s final ambivalence—“everything ends, even this”—is haunted by past failures but also steeped in the possibilities of collective renewal beyond the boundaries of an individual life. Revolutionary memory is hopeful, the poem seems to insist, and mortal. Nothing is over.
As this final poem suggests, any capacity Joshua had to write brilliant poetry and theory arose from the fact that he was first and foremost a communist in and of the streets. Much of his writing in the last fifteen years came out of his participation in the revolutionary experiments of Occupy Oakland, from sustaining the commune at Oscar Grant plaza to his role in port blockades, freeway actions, and militant occupations during Occupy and well beyond. Charging into the fray, bike helmet and goggles on and mask up, Joshua fought until his last breath to be a comrade wherever people wanted to get free. Some of this he did by refusing the separation between theory and practice, engaging in collaborative writing across forms as diverse as zines, cowritten interventions, anonymous writing, poetry, op-eds in student newspapers, and public reflections on shifting expressions and sites of struggle. But Joshua also was a tireless and unwavering comrade in action: we have lost count of the number of organizing meetings, court hearings, coffee-not-cops sessions, know your rights trainings, picket lines, and occupations on which we met Joshua, unapologetically militant and insurrectionist in every space. Over the last two decades, Joshua was especially found in the thick of struggle within and against the university, from student occupations to Cops Off Campus protests, student dining hall liberations, and Palestine solidarity encampments. In many spaces, he was both on the frontlines and in the kitchens: simultaneously risking life and limb while doing hundreds of hours of invisible background work. He broke the law frequently, but also connected students to legal support; raised bail funds (often contributing thousands of dollars of his own money); supported students facing disciplinary challenges; ran know your rights trainings; and showed up with breakfast on the picket line. And despite the reservations he expressed in his writing about the “affirmation trap” of business unionism, in life and practice he saw the riot and the strike less as opposed forms than as forms of struggle open at every juncture to insurrectionary possibility. Over the course of three UC-UAW strikes in 2019, 2022, and 2024, Joshua was a committed faculty comrade who found joy in spreading the strike, composing non-retaliation pledges, drumming up faculty commitments to withhold final grades, and showing up every day on the picket line.
Joshua was absolutely committed to solidarity above all else, and he demonstrated this commitment constantly. At a recent memorial for him in Davis, a student noted how Joshua never wanted to be in a Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapter; he only wanted to be in Students for Justice in Palestine—not out of a denial of his structural position but from a fundamental commitment to solidarity with students, there to use his experience and fearlessness, experience and privilege to advise and support them. He found the revolutionary imagination of students not yet dulled by “reality” to be beautiful and utopian. Indeed, the student’s anecdote epitomizes Joshua’s vexed relationship to the university. While many leftist academics center their politics within the university knowing little else beyond its walls, Joshua nurtured a love-hate relationship to it, and especially to his employer, the University of California. He took the position that he had to fight within it because people struggle where they are, but he eschewed institutional reformism and had little faith in public institutions whose underlying commitments were to buttress the status quo. He loved teaching working-class students but hated the apathy and conservatism that permeated sections of the professoriate. He refused to abandon the university because he saw it as a site of contradictions that could be seized and made ripe for struggle. He found the revolutionary imagination of students not yet dulled by “reality” to be beautiful and utopian. He saw it his responsibility to test the university’s institutional form as a vehicle of transition, exposing its violence as an investor in housing deprivation, defense contracts and police militarization while testing its simultaneous promise as a site of emancipation, in which one could uniquely make and test maximalist demands.Â
This steadfast commitment to maximalist horizons brought him many critics, with whom he often engaged in vigorous debate. Few can deny that his obduracy could be frustrating. But few can also deny that Joshua lived his commitments. He held maximalist positions and was constantly willing to put himself at risk in their defense; for this he was frequently the recipient of attacks from both the university and the public. In one famous instance for which he received multiple death threats, he defended a controversial position on cop killings by stating that he would only be ready to make a comment to the press “on the day that police have as much to fear from literature professors as Black kids do from police.” While many might have thought of these statements as reckless, they were for Joshua a way to enact a concretely materialized utopianism rather than make abstract performative gestures. He thought the privileges and security granted by tenure were meaningless if we did not test their capacity. Joshua was constantly testing how elastic tenure was and how far it could be stretched — as part of his conviction that the university could, in spite of all his frustrations, still be a place where revolutionary ideas could live not only in the classroom but be tested in the public sphere. To struggle alongside Joshua, witnessing his fearlessness and indefatigable refusal to cower in the midst of the most vicious attacks, was to feel more brave and more emboldened, inspired by the resoluteness by which he remained at every moment alive to the possibility that revolution could happen in his lifetime.
We would be remiss not to mention Joshua’s role as a teacher. From large undergrad courses to mentoring grad students, he cared about teaching deeply and enduringly. Here too his critique of the university never devolved into cynicism about his obligation to his students. He would often share strategies for teaching Marx and Marxism, and he clearly thought about it seriously and with profound commitment. Despite the bigness of his own personality and the strength of his opinions, he was always generous in the grad student reading group and the dissertation workshop. He loved his students, and he was at his kindest and most big-hearted (and also funniest, most vibrant) when he was thinking through problems with them. He was a professor in the truest sense—he was professing his own abiding commitments, his own sense of the world, and much as he always wanted his writing to be legible and vibrant (and funny), he also wanted to make those commitments and that sense of the world as available to others as possible.
Joshua was also, of course, the founder of the Marxist Institute for Research (MIR). In 2021 he assembled a handful of comrades across the UC system and proposed that we apply for grant funding from the UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) for a multi-campus faculty working group. The basic aim of the project was simply to provide a space for Marxist faculty across the UC to work together and to provide infrastructure for collaborations that were already ongoing, from co-writing to serving on dissertation committees. But the other, larger motivation was to collectively limn the contours of a new and newly germane Marxist political economy that had been germinating in both praxis and in theory over the previous decade, especially in the combined wakes of the 2007-8 financial crisis and the cycle of protests from Occupy Oakland to the George Floyd Rebellion. This form of Marxism would deploy the analytic resources provided by Marxist method and the critique of political economy while also integrating transformative interventions regarding racialization, colonization, gender, and ongoing dispossession. It would, as Joshua wrote in the initial proposal, “proceed under the name of Marx but also Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, and Claudia Jones; Cedric Robinson and W.E.B Du Bois; Silvia Federici, Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa; Glen Sean Coulthard and Howard Adams — to cite just a few orienting thinkers.” And it would focus on the premise that Marxism offered unique and powerful methodological tools for researching the relation between short- and long-term upheaval, cyclical and secular crisis, conjuncture and historical unfolding.
MIR’s insistence on a departure from orthodoxy oriented–and still orients–not just our intellectual work together but also, and more concretely, the major pedagogical project of MIR, namely the MIR Summer Seminar. Affectionately known as “Marx camp,” the Summer Seminar brings 20 or so UC affiliates (graduate students, undergraduate students, and UC staff) together for a 5-day series of seminars, reading groups, and lectures at a nature reserve in Northern California. Marx camp was Joshua’s brainchild, and he insisted that it be run as communally as possible with collective cooking and cleaning. Who Joshua was in MIR reflected who he was in real life: a generous, galvanizing, and inspiring teacher who worked endlessly to proliferate the commune form.Â
Some months ago, one of us was texting with Joshua on a night when he was eating candy in bed and feeling sad. He asked if we had read any of the notes left on Marx's grave in London. We hadn't. You should read them sometime, he said; "They are the most unbearably moving sad documents in the world." They all basically read "Dear Karl, I'm sorry that we have not yet lived up to what you wanted for us, we'll keep trying, I promise." As we say goodbye to our friend and contemplate a vastly more impoverished world without him in it, this is a phrase we will keep repeating. We are sorry that we have not yet lived up to what you wanted for us. We’ll keep trying. We promise.
