Delio Vasquez

is a PhD candidate in the History of Consciousness at the University of California-Santa Cruz where he studies criminality, political theory, and philosophy. He is an educator and was born in the Bronx.

Consumption, Crime, and Communes: Making Political Meaning Out of Riots

Consumption, Crime, and Communes: Making Political Meaning Out of Riots

While Clover’s effort to historically situate and draw our attention to the riot as a form of anti-capitalist struggle outside of the workplace is certainly valuable, his insistence on interpreting its political value primarily through its relationship to the utopian keeps his analysis from accounting for the function and meaning that riots have for most of the people who participate in them, to say nothing of whether or not riot is really best understood through its relationship to consumption and circulation.