Volume 14, Issue 2 - Special Issue: The Global Riot. Theories – Concepts – Actions; Guest Editors: Maura Brighenti, Lucía Cavallero, Niccolò Cuppini, and Alejo Stark

The past few years have seen a number of “riots” – in Mexico City, Hong Kong, Chile, Ecuador, the United States, Argentina, France, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. What do they have in common with one another and with other popular upheavals in history? How do they differ? What do they represent as sites of protest, resistance and rebellion? This forum explores the meaning of such riots through the meaning of the term itself, focusing mainly but not exclusively on the Global South, in theory and in the words and actions of rioters and the authorities who act to suppress them. If it is true the world has entered a “new age of riots,” citizens and scholars must begin to reach some conceptual clarity of what a global riot is, and seeks to become.

This is the transcript of a conversation between Verónica Gago and Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar. The two authors speak of the “constellation” as a methodology for approaching the process of the “feminist strike.” They discuss a kind of mourning-struggle, a feminist embodying, that by placing itself singularly in all places, becomes irreducible to attempts to limit it via localization/dispersion. The authors ask: what happens with struggles that are able to project themselves on a massive scale without losing their minoritarian vector? It is precisely here that the feminist strike emerges as a threshold, which is to say, as an instance of actuality in the direction of a new political technology of social struggle that also generates a change in the “riot” as a political concept.

This article departs from Joshua Clover’s historical and theoretical schema that locates riots and strikes within the categories of circulation and production struggles, moving from the categories of capital’s reproduction to the reproduction of the proletariat. Here it offers the commune as the exemplary form of the category of reproduction struggle. The commune is understood not as an intentional community of withdrawal but as something like counter-reproduction, able not just to reproduce itself but to strike at capital as an antagonistic force — striking at the vital exposure of an increasingly circulation-centered capitalism. Crucial examples are encampments against extractive capital such as Standing Rock or the ZAD. The article shows how political sovereignty and economic circulation are entirely entangled, pointing to the ways that social movements have looked upon them as separate domains. Therefore, the commune is a process at the crux of the political and the economic, overcoming the tendency to prefer one or the other. Finally, the article discusses the gendered aspect of the sphere of reproduction that makes possible the double confrontation of counter-reproduction.

The international feminist strikes of 2017, 2018, and 2019 challenged the categories and imaginaries relating to what it means to disobey contemporary modes of exploitation. In this text, the author debates some of Joshua Clover’s theses from Riot. Strike. Riot. in light of feminist theories of the strike. She underscores the role that the reproductive sphere plays in the feminist strike while, at the same time, analyzing that sphere as a space for the expansion of contemporary forms of finance.

In Ecuador, there were rebellions of enslaved men and women who organized to free themselves and improve their living conditions from the beginning of slavery. In the memory of past Afro-descendant workers of cane-producing haciendas in the northern Ecuadorian highlands, the Agrarian Reform of 1964 is associated with “the end of slavery” even though slavery was abolished in 1851. Until the 1960s, working conditions on the hacienda were still regarded by the population as akin to slavery. This article discusses a revolt in the ’60s in the Santa Ana hacienda, now an Afro-Ecuadorian community of the same name. Here, the master’s sexual abuse led to a rebellion by a working adolescent. The rebellion led to an insurrection by the workers who, in addition to fighting for the end of the landlord system and the distribution of land, fought for the dismissal and disappearance of the master. Together, these events redefined ideas of development, of private property, and domestic labor especially by women.

This essay reviews a set of contemporary experiences of sex-political organization in the history of the Argentinian antagonistic imagination. It sketches an experimental, theoretical diagram of the power of queer negativity as it has been mobilized by several strategies of public space occupation. Addressing the interference and discontinuity of political time in the wake of new experiences of strike allows one to identify other forms of critical approaches to the streets’ heteronormative control systems. It also allows one to trace how new agencies of common organization can be activated for destabilizing the projective direction of emancipatory Left utopias, creating space for new vital protests.

The transition and consolidation of the democratic regime in Argentina banished violence as a means of gaining access to state power. However, the frequent appearance of violent protests (“outbursts,” riots, looting or “puebladas,” among others) interrogates the persistence of violent collective actions and their relations with the dynamics of institutional policy in the current democratic framework. To what extent do these facts form part of the new repertoires of action, as several authors maintain? Are they actions that are an instrument of politics, or are they the expression of a radical opposition to the system? On the other hand, the emergence of a multiple and a fragmented form of violence go hand in hand with the emergence of illegalities of various kinds: the expansion of informal and illegal economies (the trade in drugs, weapons and people, among the main ones). The proven complicity of the state institutions in these processes also questions the relationship between politics and violence, although in a different register. Is it an institutional “flaw” or a new form of government? To what extent does such violence represent strategies of political accumulation?

In the last 30 years, Chile has crowned itself as one of the most singular, sophisticated, and cruel reference points of the global neoliberal laboratory. This article delves into the conceptual thinking of that laboratory by investigating the formation of an emotive-financial consensus based on the operation of institutionalizing sadism and a masochism of merit that profits from the affective destruction of collective intelligence. It situates this dystopic Chilean reality within the broader Latin American context, where the delicate administration of crisis and fear exposes the affective inclinations of persistence and resistance.

A lathi has a flesh of its own. Gandhi carried one, the police carries its own. Fashioned of wood thinned out and stemmed long, lathis being sold in shops are as unnerving as when clutched in hands, building authority. In one, it refuses to be simply ornamental, in the other, it marks bodies with legality. Authority emanates from this marking, the blood that spills and the deaths of which accountability is in its invisibility of documentation. Lathis are charged on the suspecting/unsuspecting who force an appearance in spaces distanced from actual belonging. In this article, there is a narrative of such a breakdown of the conflict itself, the space and the appearances. Reading through affect is a lot about undoing; grand concepts, strict functioning, identities addressed. Affect also has a lot to do with attachments. And attachments flow in and out of a network wherever bodies gather, in assemblies, demonstrations, in strikes and in riots. In these attachments, decisions are felt which later empiricist read as fixity of ideas and ideologies, only later, but affect is in the now.

In the years 1967 and 1968 the city of Detroit was the site of two waves of rebellion. The riot of 1967 was one of the largest and most costly urban rebellions in U.S. history. And in the ashes of the ‘67 insurrection a wave of strikes began shutting down the sprawling factories of the auto industry. These strikes were organized by militant Black workers who later founded the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, an organization that characterized itself as the “ideological inheritor” of the riot. This article situates the League within the global moment of 1968, discusses the relationship of work stoppages to circulation struggles, and examines how the participants’ experience in riots, both on the streets of Detroit and in the prisons around the state, informed the praxis and politics of the League.

The 2016 and 2018 wave of prison strikes in the United States presents itself as an extraordinary flashpoint of the prisoner resistance movement. But how might these events be understood in relation to what has been broadly characterized as an “age of riots”? Following Joshua Clover’s characterization of the contemporary riot in Riot. Strike. Riot. as a “surplus rebellion” of racialized “surplus populations” and given the characterization of the contemporary carceral state as a warehouse to contain such racialized populations, this essay characterizes the contemporary wave of prison riots accordingly as a “surplus rebellion.” More specifically, it focuses on the Kinross prison strike-riot that broke out in September 2016 in Michigan’s Kinross prison in order to derive some general parallels between the surplus rebellion and the singularity of recent prison strikes.