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Review Essay: Are Strikes Over?
Book Review
Moody, Kim http://solidarity-us.org/atc/194/review-moody/
Publisher: Against the Current
Date Written: 01/05/2018
Year Published: 2018
Resource Type: Article
Moody reviews and critiques Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings by Joshua Clover.
Abstract:
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Excerpts:
Clover uses the equally well-known quote from Marx on the increase in "surplus population" or reserve army of labor and pauperization as the "absolute general law of capitalist accumulation" to back up his own argument that this surplus population "is recentered by economic reorganization from the sphere of production into that of circulation."
This presumably means that the "surplus population" or reserve army of labor is reduced to a legion of consumers, though "not in the popular sense," as Clover notes, since they lack a wage to spend. Indeed, it is hard to image a population less suited to the realm of capitalist "circulation" which, after all, requires the spending of money on a significant scale.
Looting, which often occurs during riots, can hardly replace consumption in the system, nor does it do much damage to the system as it virtually never affects major concentrations of capital significantly. In any case, the reserve army of labor exists outside the circulation of capital until part of it is drawn into production of one sort or another.
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