Riot, Strike, Commune: Gendering a Civil War – Joshua Clover (2020)

History, History/Theory, Theory

This piece extends the framework of the author’s Riot.Strike.Riot, adding the “reproduction struggle” to the pairing of circulation and production struggles. A paradigm of the reproduction struggle can be found in the practical encampments that accompany, constitute, and help propagate land occupations and blockades, providing the persistently gendered features of social reproduction: food, shelter, care, community. The essay identifies these encampments as nascent communes, and in turn offers the commune as a feature within the repertoire of social contest: not a utopian withdrawal, not an alternative to the militancy of direct antagonism, but a necessary aspect of that antagonism that both enables other forms and, in its character as “counter-reproduction,” carries within it the kernel of a social existence beyond colonial capitalism. 

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