Archive of Riots

The year 2020 has provided a practically laboratorial clarity. For political theory, or really political practice, it has been something like a natural experiment measuring two politics against the world and against each other. How to name these two politics, if not the election and the riot? 

In this excerpt from Tear Gas, Anna Feigenbaum describes the history of the Himsworth Report, used by governments around the world to justify the use of tear gas.

It took just 66 days to get from the first shelter-in-place order to the first riot. Joshua Clover writes on the current protests and riots that have sprung up across the United States in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and their context at a time of economic and social crisis.

Are we in the early history of climate riots? What is already apparent is the state’s willingness to seize this situation on behalf of capital and of its own consolidation of power, a Green Nationalism which leverages climate management regimes toward hard borders, xenophobic violence, differential citizenship, protectionist labor pacts, further intensifications of militarization and surveillance.

May 1968 stands at the precipice into which the historical labor movement will descend. 

Absurd at it will seem, this episode of prosecutorial overreach should not be laughed off, even with a first set of acquittals in hand. Its obscene falsity has within it a moment of truth.