Riot Prime | Reading List

In Riot. Strike. Riot, Joshua Clover describes the modern form of upheaval as riot prime –where the economy is out of reach but the state is near, with its progressively militarized police forces deputized against us. "Riot prime cannot help but heave itself against the state; there is no way not to."

We've collected a selection of titles that work to contextualize these movements and provide perspectives on strategy that draw from similar struggles throughout history.

Key reading on the Verso Blog: The Imperial Boomerang: How colonial methods of repression migrate back to the metropolis by Connor Woodman

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Riot. Strike. Riot

by Joshua Clover

Baltimore. Ferguson. Tottenham. Clichy-sous-Bois. Oakland. Ours has become an “age of riots” as the struggle of people versus state and capital has taken to the streets. Award-winning poet and scho...

Riot. Strike. Riot

by Joshua Clover

Baltimore. Ferguson. Tottenham. Clichy-sous-Bois. Oakland. Ours has become an “age of riots” as the struggle of people versus state and capital has taken to the streets. Award-winning poet and scho...

Disaster Nationalism

by Richard Seymour

The rise of the new far right has left the world grappling with a profound misunderstanding. While the spotlight often shines on the actions of charismatic leaders such as Donald Trump and Jair Bol...

What Is Antiracism?

by Arun Kundnani

Liberals have been arguing for nearly a century that racism is fundamentally an individual problem of extremist beliefs. Responding to Nazism, thinkers like gay rights pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld and...

Late Fascism

by Alberto Toscano

The rich archive of twentieth-century debates on fascism can steer a path through an increasingly authoritarian present. Developing anti-fascist theory is an urgent and vital task. From the ‘Great ...

The New Faces of Fascism

by Enzo Traverso

What does Fascism mean at the beginning of the twenty-first century? When we pronounce this word, our memory goes back to the years between the two world wars and envisions a dark landscape of viol...

Underground America

by Voice of Witness

Foreword by Luis Alberto Urrea

Edited by Peter Orner

They arrive from around the world for countless reasons. Many come simply to make a living. Others are fleeing persecution in their native countries. Millions of immigrants risk deportation and imp...

Pacification

by Mark Neocleous

In his new book, critical theorist Mark Neocleous engages in a sustained critique of the theory and practice of pacification. Combining philosophical analysis with historical detail, Neocleous anal...

Set the Night on Fire

by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener

Histories of the US sixties invariably focus on New York City, but Los Angeles was an epicenter of that decade’s political and social earthquake. L.A. was a launchpad for Black Power—where Malcolm ...

Reactionary Democracy

by Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter

Democracy is not necessarily progressive, and will only be if we make it so. What Mondon and Winter call ‘reactionary democracy’ is the use of the concept of democracy and its associated understand...

The US Antifascism Reader

Edited by Bill Mullen and Christopher Vials

Since the birth of fascism in the 1920s, well before the global renaissance of “white nationalism,” the United States has been home to its own distinct fascist movements, some of which decisively i...

Against Borders

by Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke de Noronha

Borders harm all of us: they must be abolished.Borders divide workers and families, fuel racial division, and reinforce global disparities. They encourage the expansion of technologies of surveilla...

City of Quartz

by Mike Davis

No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, "Los Angeles brings it all together." To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where "you can rot without feeling it." To Mi...

Bodies Under Siege

by Sian Norris

Think today's anti-abortion ideas are rooted in religious prohibitions or arguments about where life begins? Wrong: today's anti-abortion movements is largely financed and planned by far-right extr...

The Palestine Laboratory

by Antony Loewenstein

Winner of the 2023 Walkley non fiction journalism prizeFinalist for the 2023 Moore Prize for Human Rights WritingIsrael's military industrial complex uses the occupied, Palestinian territories as ...

Empire of Borders

by Todd Miller

The twenty-first century has witnessed the rapid hardening of international borders. Security, surveillance, and militarization are widening the chasm between those who travel where they please and...

The Rebirth of History

by Alain Badiou

Translated by Gregory Elliott

In the uprisings of the Arab world, Alain Badiou discerns echoes of the European revolutions of 1848. In both cases, the object was to overthrow despotic regimes maintained by the great powers—regi...

Organize, Fight, Win

by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean

Black Communist women throughout the early to mid-twentieth century fought for and led mass campaigns in the service of building collective power in the fight for liberation. Through concrete mater...

All-American Nativism

by Daniel Denvir

It is often said that with the election of Donald Trump nativism was raised from the dead. After all, here was a president who organized his campaign around a rhetoric of unvarnished racism and xen...