“People who oppose violence often defend strikes, forgetting that strikes are historically every bit as violent as riots. They recast history so that strikes were always this ascetic refusal rather than open warfare with private or national military forces, where many, many people died so as to have some possibility of a decent work life, affordable housing, protections - the most practical goals we can imagine.” PeopleGoalForgetImagineViolenceMilitaryPossibilityProtectionViolentDecentRiotAffordable Author:Joshua Clover
“People often say, "Riots aren't revolutions." That's true. The vast majority of riots never become revolutionary. On the other hand, show me the revolution that started without a riot.” PeopleRevolutionRevolutionaryShow MeRiot Author:Joshua Clover
“People do make considered choices about whether they want to fight, and how, and they do so from disparate circumstances. But I think there are two important frameworks in which those choices get made. One, their degree of immiseration. The greatest predictor of who will engage in criminal activity is poverty, which tells us that the decisions people make about how unlawful they're willing to be are decisively based in their own experience of immiseration. The second framework is that when people choose to act, they inevitably act where they are.” PeopleThinkingImportantChoicesFightingDecisionPovertyCircumstances Author:Joshua Clover
“When people are in a workplace where it's possible to organize and engage in labor actions, that's how they fight, and it can be very effective. When people are not in that situation, they fight in other ways. They fight in the marketplace. One need only notice that there's been a meaningful shift in where people are over the last thirty, or fifty years from traditional productive industries toward a kind of work that involves circulation of capital and products, and toward unemployment. People who are in that situation are unlikely to fight somewhere else.” PeopleKindActionFightingSituationLaborMeaningfulProductiveOrganizeWorkplace Author:Joshua Clover
“I'm trying to mediate between individual agency and structural determination. I accept that people make individual choices, quite thoughtful, quite careful, quite difficult choices, but they don't make them without constraints that shape what choices are possible and provide the intensity of the push toward choosing.” PeopleTryingChoicesIndividualDifficultAcceptingDeterminationCarefulThoughtful Author:Joshua Clover
“I don't want to be hubristic about art's possibilities. I don't think that art has a causal relationship to revolution. I do think it's a way people coordinate or orient their own often-inchoate experiences, sometimes willfully. With "The Masque of Anarchy," one of the things I note is that many political movements over time have made use of it as a way to orient themselves and to narrate what they were doing.” PeopleThinkingArtSometimesPoliticalPossibilityRevolutionAnarchy Author:Joshua Clover
“The university is one of various funding structures by which people who want to do theoretical work stay alive, the same way that people go to grad school, not because they think it's going to change the world but because there's no patron system anymore, and they need some scaffolding of support while they're trying to figure out how they can proceed in their lives. I think that's utterly legit. A lot of our better theorists and thinkers, that's what the university is for them.” PeopleThinkingWorldTryingSchoolSupportVariousChanging The WorldThinkerTheoreticalStaying AlivePatronScaffolding Author:Joshua Clover