is an assistant professor of History at the University of Michigan and a member of the Michigan Society of Fellows. She has published on struggles in the sphere of social reproduction for LIES, Reclamations, and the South Atlantic Quarterly, and is currently working on a book project about anti-colonial and class struggles on the British and colonial Indian railways between the 1840s and 1920s.
Clover argues against the continued viability of industrial strike organizing, suggesting that the time of the strike has passed, and that we now inhabit the time of the riot. But the conceptual and periodizing demarcations that Clover deploys in advancing these claims tend to obscure the actual forms of class struggle that broke forth during the supposed era of the strike – forms of struggle that may yet have something to offer us.
We’re passing through a low phase in Northern California – a lull that partially parallels those facing organizers from Madison to New York. The rebellious energies so evident recently seem scattered these days, dormant. The universities are quiet. And the forces that had gathered in city parks and squares, most massively at Oakland’s Oscar Grant Plaza, are largely absent. The encampments are broken up, the assemblies dissolved.
Viewpoint Magazine