“World-Systems Riot”

Joshua Clover, Professor, University of California Davis

30 November 2012
jclover@ucdavis.edu
World-System Riot

ABSTRACT: The riot has taken on a new force and popular momentum in the midst of global economic
crisis: a motion turned increasingly toward the core of the contemporary world-system. This calls for a
reconsideration of riot’s significance. Recent studies have tended toward data-determined correlations (food
price riots) and political periodization (riots as expressions of political disorder). Beginning with the historical
shift from riot to strike as primary form of political agitation in the 19th century, this article argues that the
recent shift back toward the riot form is entangled with the secular decline in the current cycle of accumulation,
and is best understood as a development proper to an age of declining industrial profitability and the
concomitant shift away from the industrial wage form and real production. The three phases of a hegemonic
cycle described by Braudel and Arrighi (merchant, industrial, financial) are understood as led by competition
in circulation, production, and circulation successively. Struggles for profits in the sphere of circulation are
more vulnerable to the blockade or interruption than to the downing of tools; the marketplace supplants the
factory or mine as the place of social antagonism. All of this implies a preference for riot over strike. The
data-driven and political accounts can be coordinated by this fact; they are both secondary expressions of the
underlying collapse of a hegemonic cycle of accumulation. KEYWORDS: capitalism, crisis, strike, riot,
production, circulation, accumulation, E.P. Thompson, Alain Badiou, Giovanni Arrighi.

We have entered into an age of riots; we are early on yet. This essay proposes a structural
reinterpretation of the riot: its place, its occasion, its determinations and purpose. The riot is
often taken to be both a pre- and extra-capitalist form, lacking in political content specific to
capital beyond its ideologically determined reenactment of imperatives to acquire and
consume. I mean to argue otherwise.

That said, the claims of this essay must be partial. We do not yet have adequate data on
contemporary riots from the standpoint of the political — despite the efforts of the
Bibliotheque des emeutes (a group of independent scholars who for several years assembled a
database of political perturbations around the globe, accompanied by analysis), Aufheben
(the name both for a British collective of political historians and their journal, which has
given over considerable space to the matter of riots in the Anglophone west), and a few
others. Further, the significance of the category “riot” clearly bears regional variations; Ching
Kwan Lee’s persuasive work on riots in contemporary China, for example, reveals an event
distinct in character from the riots of Tottenham or Tunisia—Chinese riots being,
effectively, collusions between crowd and local administrators to solicit specific
dispensations from provincial or national governments, in a way formalized enough to
suggest an armed plebiscite.

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This example bears in some degree on the logic of riot set forth herein. For present
purposes, however, “age of riots” designates on the one hand the riots moving steadily
toward the core of the US-centered world-system, such as those in Greece, France, Spain,
and the UK, and now beginning in United States (most notably in Oakland, California, from
the Oscar Grant rebellion to the Oakland Commune); and on the other, riots that approach
the status of revolution, as those still passing through the Maghreb and Mashreq. These two
categories might be distinguished as “anti-austerity” and “anti-state” riots; we may yet see a
greater unity between the two.

That we are in an age of riots is an assessment shared by, e.g., the New England Complex
Systems Institute and the political philosopher Alain Badiou. Their influential new studies
represent two methodological poles of Riot Studies. The former prefers a positivistic,
quantitative science, a single-bullet correlation wherein the authors “identify a specific food
price threshold above which protests become likely.”

source: “The Food Crises and Political Instability in North Africa and the Middle East”

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 The latter offers an abstracted, qualitative sense of the political moment; Badiou identifies
“intervallic periods” between political sequences which, lacking an organizing Idea, host the
disordered proto-political mode of riot.
I believe that we can describe these riotous tendencies as characteristic actions of what I shall call
intervallic periods.
What is an intervallic period? It is what comes after a period in which the revolutionary
conception of political action has been sufficiently clarified...and on this basis has secured massive,
disciplined support. In an intervallic period, by contrast, the revolutionary idea of the preceding
period...is dormant. [Badiou 38-39]
Both methods are portable. Each extends itself, for example, to the European situation in
the earlier nineteenth century. For the Complex Systems team, it is a matter of “widespread
droughts” preceding the volatility of 1848. Badiou sees an “uncanny resemblance” between
our age and the French Restoration following the final defeat of the Republican spirit:
…from the start of the 1830s it was a major period of riots, which were often momentarily or
seemingly victorious (the ‘Trois Glorieuses’ of 1830, the workers’ riots pretty much everywhere, the
1848 ‘revolution’, and so on). These were precisely the riots, sometimes immediate, sometimes more
historical, characteristic of an intervallic period. [Badiou 41]
E.P Thomson, in his remarkable “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the
Eighteenth Century,” locates this previous riot-charged age somewhat earlier, tracing the
sequence that begins in 1709 and becomes a regular feature after mid-century with a
periodicity strikingly similar to the modern business cycle.
Those years which brought English agriculture to a new pitch of excellence were punctuated by the
riots — or, as contemporaries often described them, the “insurrections” or “risings of the poor” —
of 1709, 1740, 1756-7, 1766-7, 1773, 1782, and, above all, 1795 and 1800-1. This buoyant
capitalist industry floated upon an irascible market which might at any time dissolve into marauding
bands, who scoured the countryside with bludgeons, or rose in the market-place to “set the price” of
provisions at the popular level. (Thompson 79)
Thompson’s national focus provides a somewhat different periodization of riot than the
French examples above, and for us a more useful one, as it unfolds within not just the
horizons but the heart of a world-system hegemon; as the task before us is to resituate the
riot in relation to hegemonic cycles of accumulation set forth most lucidly by Giovanni
Arrighi and Beverly Silver, this will prove quite useful.

3
Those who know Thompson’s essay will recall the deliberative empiricism regarding grain
harvests and flour types. Nonetheless, it offers no sympathy for the “growth historians,”
who from a price-driven determinism derive a “spasmodic” account of riot wherein the
participants are in no regard historical actors. Beloff, Wearmouth, Ashton, Wilson, and
Rostow, figurations of the present positivism, are found “guilty of a crass economic
reductionism, obliterating the complexities of motive, behaviour, and function, which, if they
noted it in the work of their marxist analogues, would make them protest” (Thompson 78).

Against this admonition, Thompson does not then decede to the explanatory power of the
political a la Badiou. He offers instead a periodization according to systemic transition, to
wit, the achieved industrial revolution. If in advance of this shift the market has generalized
itself as social fact (hence the “social synthesis” in the terms of Alfred Sohn-Rethel), the
modern wage-relation has not yet done so; this will require the ascent of the factory and the
mine against agricultural labor. Consequently, per Thomson, social struggle in the earlier
period takes the form of interventions in the marketplace. “The central action in this pattern
is not the sack of granaries and the pilfering of grain or flour but the action of "setting the
price" via riots “or, as contemporaries often described them, the “insurrections” or “risings
of the poor,” wherein merchants and hoarders are persuaded to reconsider their policies at
peril of destruction.

Two features of these events are particularly worth remarking, for their bearing on later
developments. One is the subspecies of irruption called by Thompson the “export riot,”
seemingly geographical: “1795 and 1800 saw the efflorescence of a regional consciousness
once more, as vivid as that of one hundred years before. Roads were blockaded to prevent
export from the parish. Waggons were intercepted and unloaded in the towns through which
they passed” (Thompson 100). The other feature is the extensive participation of manual
workers.
If we are looking for the characteristic form of direct action, we should take, not squabbles outside
London bakeries, nor even the great affrays provoked by discontent with the large millers, but the
“risings of the people” (most notably in 1740, 1756, 1766, 1795 and 1800) in which colliers,
tinners, weavers and hosiery workers were prominent. What is remarkable about these

4
 “insurrections” is, first, their discipline, and, second, the fact that they exhibit a pattern of behaviour
for whose origin we must look back several hundreds of years. (Thompson 107)
If such laborers “were prominent,” one cannot help but note, it was not as laborers.

This is precisely the situation that will turn with the century: “Economic class-conflict in
nineteenth-century England found its characteristic expression in the matter of wages”
(Thompson 79) Once the wage-relation is generalized, such struggle no longer seeks to “set
the price” of provisions but of labor-power. Action moves from market to factory and mine.
“The economy of the mediaeval borough," wrote R. H. Tawney, "was one in which
consumption held somewhat the same primacy in the public mind, as the undisputed arbiter
of economic effort, as the nineteenth century attached to profits” (quoted in Thomson
132)].

The same shift occurs in western Europe. It is deferred — but not by much. Shorter and
Tilly, in their study of the French strike, begin with a document from 1830 that captures in
flight and in havoc the same change detailed by Thompson.
“The riot, according to my deputy’s report, does not appear to have any political overtones.” So wrote
a prosecutor in Douai, France, two weeks after the July Revolution. He was referring to a riot of
textile workers who wanted a raise in pay and by his own accounting, “broke the windows of the
main shops, where they went in force to ask for written agreements about the raise.” (Shorter and
Tilly 1)
Symptomatically, our Douai deputy is able to register neither the change nor the political
valence of the event. These two misrecognitions are one: it is exactly because an intervention
with the paymaster takes the form of market-place melée that its content cannot be
recognized. We might suggest that he has a mind of the 18th century, trailing the great
change. But the presumption that crowd violence must not be properly political is itself a
constant feature of riot studies, persisting to this day; in Thompson’s words, “we have been
able to accept for so long an abbreviated and “economistic” picture of the food riot, as a
direct, spasmodic, irrational response to hunger — a picture which is itself a product of a
political economy which diminished human reciprocities to the wages-nexus.”

5
This is one of the limits against which Thompson’s account presses. It is not the birth of a
certain political antagonism of which Thompson seeks to take the measure, but its qualitative
transformation. Riot yields pride of place to strike, and to new forms of organization; the essay
moves to capture the grain and texture of periodization itself:
We are coming to the end of one tradition, and the new tradition has scarcely emerged. In these years
the alternative form of economic pressure — pressure upon wages — is becoming more vigorous;
there is also something more than rhetoric behind the language of sedition — underground union
organization, oaths, the shadowy “United Englishmen”. In 1812 traditional food riots overlap with
Luddism. In 1816 the East Anglian labourers do not only set the prices, they also demand a
minimum wage and an end to Speenhamland relief. They look forward to the very different revolt of
labourers in 1830. The older form of action lingers on into the 1840s and even later: it was
especially deeply rooted in the South-West. But in the new territories of the industrial revolution it
passed by stages into other forms of action. (Thompson 128-129)

***

For all the clarion quality of Thompson’s account, its eloquent synthesis of local facts and
systemic transformations, it confronts us with an evident problem. If offers what is
essentially a single point across which periods break: goods to wage, agriculture to industry,
market to factory, riot to strike. It stands mute in the face of later changes. The attuning of
our own age of riots to this seemingly singular event now long past is the first of two puzzles
before us. The second is how, in addressing the first, we will navigate between the Scylla of
positivism and the Charybdis of political idealism.

It is here that the framework of world-systems theory, of “long centuries” and systemic
cycles of accumulation, might let that earlier moment speak to our own, and begin to
coordinate political intuitions like “intervallic period” with a materialist analysis not lacking
in empirical data.

6
Britain’s long nineteenth century follows the tripartite schema common to all centers of
accumulation: two periods of financial expansion bracketing a central period of material
expansion.
(1) a first period of financial expansion (stretching from Sn-1 to Tn-1), in the course of which the
new regime of accumulation develops within the old, its development being an integral aspect of the
full expansion and contradictions of the latter; (2) a period of consolidation and further development
of the new regime of accumulation (stretching from Tn-1 to Sn), in the course of which its leading
agencies promote, monitor, and profit from the material expansion of the entire world-economy; (3) a
second period of financial expansion (from Sn to Tn), in the course of which the contradictions of the
fully developed regime of accumulation create the space for, and are deepened by, the emergence of
competing and alternative regimes, one of which will eventually (that is, at time Tn) become the new
dominant regime. (Arrighi 220)
These can also be understood as periods dominated in series by merchant (albeit debt-
funded), industrial, and financial capital in series; in either description, only the middle and

7
longest phase which is value-productive, leading to actual accumulation on a world scale.*
The transition from riot-form to strike-form that Thompson draws forth at the dawn of the
nineteenth century is the same fact as the generalization of direct wage-labor, which is in
turn the same fact as the rising cry of the industrial revolution and of Britain’s phase of
material expansion, which is to say, finally, its phase of value accumulation.

On this syllogism rests our current moment. Let us now leave the hidden abode of history
for the noisy sphere of the present. Obviously we will not find to hand a sea change
equivalent to that from nascent to realized capitalism. Our moment does, nonetheless, admit
of a lesser but nonetheless vast transformation, also a sea change of a sort: the decline of the
United State-centered cycle of accumulation, opening onto a next movement of a sort yet to
clarify itself.

In what I will call the Arrighian scheme, the third or financial phase of one hegemon
overlaps with first phase of another: the period of imperial transfer. Historically, the
declining empire serves as creditor to the ascendant; that our present phase has deviated
from that schema, the U.S. being a debtor nation of prodigious appetites, is one good reason
to have doubts about the seven-century spiral’s capacity for continued expansion. The U.S.-
centered cycle is not only larger than the British cycle, as each is necessarily larger than the
last; it is in at least this regard substantively distinct.

That said, the logic through which the third phase is dominated by finance as revenue source
and economic logic has not changed. The second, industrial phase inevitably faces decreasing
profitability; this feature persists regardless of whether one’s causal assessment of declining
rates of profit derives from a Smithian, Ricardian, or Marxian analytic. In the lattermost,
which we take to have the greatest explanatory force, productivity is defined as the
increasing ratio of machines to living labor; the ineluctable competition for productivity thus
expels living labor from the production process; as that labor is the source of surplus value,

*
The oft-misunderstood distinction here is between on the one hand profit-taking, wherein one business gains
at the expense of another either through buying cheap and selling dear (the central character of revenue in
merchant enterprises) or through sharing in the real or prospective revenue of a different capital’s profits
(finance), and on the other hand the production of surplus value in production. The former modes reapportion
value; the lattermost also increases the systemic sum of value. For more on this distinction, see for example
Capital 1 258-269 and Capital 3 459-479.

8
the capacity to valorize commodities in production tends to diminish over time. In Marx’s
most compact formulation,
Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum,
while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it
diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits
the superfluous in growing measure as a condition – question of life or death – for the necessary.
(Grundrisse 706)
As such valorization in production is the sole source of real accumulation, its decline heralds
the end of a cycle of accumulation in the world-system. Once below some threshold of real
growth (David Harvey and others have suggested it is around three percent growth of
GDP), the flood-tide of investment ebbs from the manufacturing sector and rises elsewhere,
most spectacularly in the financial sector; this hydraulic operation appears as a “signal crisis.”

Certain neo- or post-Marxian positions, most notably the political economists associated
with operaismo/autonomia in Italy, have contended that this shift away from manufacture
might still be value-productive via a newfound capacity to exploit other, immaterial aspects
of human activity. Derived from a reading of the “Fragment on Machines” passage from the
Grundrisse, specifically the potentially emancipatory character of the “general intellect”
necessarily developed by the social totalization of capitalist productivity, the group (including
figures such as Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, and Christian Marazzi) theorized
the “social factory” of post-Fordism which extends beyond the factory floor to the recesses
of daily life. All social existence having been subsumed to the logic of capital, all may now be
productive of value. This contentious claim can be and has been debated elsewhere (see for
example Clover 107-114). Such a position has certainly offered less persuasion since the
beginning of the Long Recession in 2007. This systemic crisis is not only a catastrophe unto
itself, but a sort of clarification that the post-1973 era, while hosting ample profits in given
sectors, has from the standpoint of all capital seen not a new capacity for post-industrial
production but rather a secular stagnation of systemic accumulation — a fact largely
concealed by a series of bubbles.

I should here aver that this misapprehension about the existence of “new production” and
allegedly restored accumulation does not belong to the autonomists alone; their account is

9
germane in that they identify the specific problematic as a question of capitalism’s survival,
and as the terrain of anti-capitalist struggle. Moreover, they have grasped in flight an actual
change in the kinds of work we do, here in what we used to call the industrial core: the
limited but decisive shifts into kinds of service provision, affect and process management,
finance, informatics and communication, and so on.

Amidst the idiosyncrasies and analytic vexations of their account, this list of new modes of
labor is the moment of truth. The new forms of labor aggregated above are conjoined not
finally by their status as “immaterial labor” but by their operation within the sphere of
circulation rather than production. From the accelerations of turnover time provided by
financial liquidity, containerization, and automated ports; to the build-out of global
command-and-control systems toward the supply-chain Taylorism developed in Japan but
now exemplified by WalMart — these investments, innovations, and capital strategies focus
not on the valorization of commodities but on the realization of a higher percentage of
declining valorization, at a higher frequency. The domination of realization over valorization
is the very definition of Circulation-Side Capitalism.

The very distinction between valorization and realization should help clarify a common
debate localized here. There is no claim that circulation now achieves some primacy over
production, much less that it becomes itself productive of new value. From the perspective
of the capitalist system tout court, circulation must always rest on production; valorization may
happen without realization, but the reverse is not true.

We recall, however, that individual capitals do not concern themselves with the overall
health of the capitalist system, nor are they compelled to do so. They are compelled rather to
outcompete other capitals in their sector. So while the need to expand, to generate new value
leading to systemic accumulation, is an existential absolute from the standpoint of all capital,
individual capitalists do not think in terms of value and accumulation. They measure their
existence in profit and wealth, and are compelled to seek it wherever it may be found,
regardless of the consequences for the whole. Within capitalism, surplus value appears as
profit. Nonetheless, and this is a greatly under-remarked fact, there is as well a contradiction
between surplus value and profit, between all capital and individual capitals, as the struggles

10
defined by the latter serve to undermine the former. This is another way to grasp the
inevitability of crisis. The leap into circulation of both capital and labor is not a
restructuration of capital as such, but an indication of crisis within the present structure.

This leap is scarcely the only feature of contemporary capitalism, nor the only function of
the developments in the expanded circuit of capital described above. Finance and
globalization should as well be understood as temporal and spatial strategies respectively to
internalize new value inputs from elsewhere and elsewhen. But this can only affirm the
proposition that the current phase in our cycle of accumulation is defined by the collapse of
value production at the core of the world-system; it is for this reason that capital’s center of
gravity shifts toward circulation, borne by the troika of Toyotaization, information
technology, and finance.

By way of a happy ending, this description of the current crisis allows us to marry the
accounts of autonomia and Arrighi. Right or wrong, both, finally, signal the present phase of
the hegemonic cycle as one in which capital has departed a diminished sphere of material
production for profit-taking in circulation. This further allows us to see in our third, post-
industrial phase of finance a mirror image of the first, pre-industrial phase (whether one
understands it as organized by merchant or financial capital): both are zero-sum eras, lacking
in accumulation and characterized by relative weakness of production.

You will have seen the conclusion approaching — will have seen the circulatory motion back
toward the earlier age. We now have, rather than Thompson’s Before and After, a three-
phase movement wherein the exit from an industrial phase replays its entrance in reverse. In
turn we see a suggestive inversion. Value, originating in production, enters into circulation to
be converted into price so as to be reinvested in further production as capital, and thus
describes the motion Production-Circulation-Production. The hegemon’s accumulation
cycle, on the other hand, divides into phases of Circulation-Production-Circulation. To note
again that expanding production is capital’s sine qua non is simply to note that empires end.

Now we might return to our earlier syllogism, but now reversed for the third phase: failure
of value accumulation is the same fact as the end of the industrial phase of material

11
expansion which in turn indicates the end of productive wage labor as the pivot of capitalist
profitability. Just as the market yielded pride of place to the workplace as site of struggle at
the dawn of the second phase, this action now reverses itself, but at an expanded scale —
the world-market becomes again the place of struggle. This, to complete our reversal, implies
a transition away from the strike form, back to the riot form. Here we are now.

By way of disclosing the observational minimum behind technical accounts of productive

labor and world-system hegemons, we might restate the theme thusly: when capitalism is
working, strikes work; when not, not. When profit’s mainspring is exploitation of productive
labor, it is there that struggle will erupt. When real growth is high, labor has more to gain,
capital more to lose. Moreover, in these central periods of material expansion, there is the
sort of social surplus which on the one hand lets labor, stocked with war chests and stable
communities, organize strikes; and on the other, lets capital purchase social peace. A signal
crisis indicates the end of this period, and thus of the dominance of this form of struggle;
moreover, the new modes of labor disaggregate masses of workers both spatially and
temporally.

Here we might draw a suggestive comparison between the U.S.-centered world-system, in its
present (second) circulation phase, and China, where real growth — even if likely overstated
— rests above the three percent threshold. There, in addition to the labor riots previously
mentioned, we continue to see events such as the recent strike at a Foxconn fab supplying
parts to Apple. There has not been a like event in the United States. The notable strikes
since 2007 have involved public sector workers (the Chicago Teachers Union, the broad
Wisconsin protests of 2011), but far more exemplary are the ongoing strikes against
Walmart, currently the world’s largest publicly traded corporation. These actions, while
labor-led, strike not at production but at the circulation of goods produced elsewhere, now
entering into the marketplace for consumption. From a strategic perspective, the Walmart
strike resembles less a factory strike than a port blockade. It is an organized riot.

The riot, it is tempting to say, is a circulation strike, a form both new and illuminated by the
old light of Thompson’s “export riot.” But that does not quite get it right. There is no
downing of tools, no organized labor. As with the colliers and weavers of the eighteenth

12
century, labor takes part, but not necessarily as labor. It is, rather, a political antagonism that
erupts in the sphere of circulation and is proper to it — from episodes of looting to port
shutdowns, gathering in the public squares to the sabotage of transit lines. It is a struggle
against the domination of commodity exchange, against the commodity form itself in its
unremitting need to be exchanged before it is consumed.

Two notes remain: one methodological and one political, or perhaps theoretical and
practical, as you will. Via Thompson and Arrighi, we have plotted a course of research that
passes between positivism and intuition. But historical materialism should not be understood
simply to replace or reject such approaches. Rather it offers a mediation between seemingly
incommensurate methods. Badiou’s “intervallic periods” might now be understood as
periods of transition between phases of hegemonic cycle; if they are characterized by the
absence of a political idea that might magnetize masses, they are equally identified with
seismic shifts in the rate of real accumulation. Once we have attuned said intervals with
empirical data, said data may then become not a blind set of correlations but an opportunity
to ground accounts of the political moment beyond the airy confines of the Idea.

The raises the immediate question of whether there is a meaningful relation between global
manufacturing data and the Food Price Index, if we are indeed to grasp historically the
return of the riot via the former, when it tracks the latter so persuasively? Happily, these data
keep close company; they are close to being the same fact, but that one is far more capacious
in its comprehension of capital’s systemic situation and direction.

13
source: http://traderedge.net/2012/09/19/global-manufacturing-pmi-deteriorates-
further/jpmorgan-global-manufacturing-pmi-graph-august-2012/ [accessed 11/22/2012]

I would suggest that if we wished to move beyond pure correlation in grasping the sense and
incipience of riots, we would do better to look at things like the PMI or even at planned

14
capital expenditures, a forward-looking index usefully suggestive regarding the sector or
sphere toward which capital’s center of gravity is leaning.

***

It is one thing to locate the riot as a form of struggle proper to era of circulatory capital, but
quite another to recognize its political efficacy. We might return to Thompson once more:
‘If the market-place was as much an arena of class war as the factory and mine became in the
industrial revolution, then the threat of riot would affect the entire marketing situation….”
(Thompson 120) One could do worse in naming the present. The dismissals of Camden
Town looting as an apolitical expression of capital’s imperatives — shades of Thompson’s
“growth historians” — miss this point entirely: given the current condition of capital, the
market, the entire marketing situation, will be the place of struggle. History in these parts having
tilted back toward the marketplace as social synthesis, we might see events in Greece, in
Spain, and in London’s “short hot summer” of 2011 as threats to that synthesis, as localized
episodes in dialectical relation to the same action at the level of the world-system. It is here
that anti-austerity and anti-state riots meet: the U.S.-centered regime, reduced to a zero-sum
economic regime, can no longer magnetize its outer boroughs. The home counties are next.

15
Those for whom a stagnating or declining wage can no longer acquire the market basket —
much less the ever-vaster surplus population beyond the wage — have realized the truth of
the age: that a visit to the paymaster, even armed and in company, no longer affords a
remedy. For them the action will be elsewhere, more and more intensely. Which is by way of
saying: the riots are coming. They will be an ascendant feature of hegemony unraveling,
regarding which moral scolds, condescending strategists, and bourgeois opinion can have
little to say.

16
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