"When we try to define a riot people often want to define it in distinction to a strike because it accords to a sense of violence and a certain amount of chaos. I think that's difficult to maintain this distinction because strikes are historically extremely violent and people tend to forget that in the modern era strikes are more associated with a kind of aesthetic downing of tools. Historically, strikes have been quite violent. So I don’t think that distinction works very well. For me, and I draw this distinction largely from E.P. Thomson the historian: a riot is a struggle over the price of market goods. So if you think of the bread riots in 16th, 17th, 18th centuries in the UK, France... all over the world...people are unable to afford to make their way in the world to meet basic subsistence, and so they struggle to make things cheaper. That is what we define as a riot. And when you have the rise of people working for a wage, struggles over how much work is worth, the struggle over the price of labor, that's what a strike is. I think that's an incredibly useful set of distinctions that works very well for a lot of places and for a long period of history but it gets complicated in the recent past, most notably, and I think most obviously because of the category that we've come to call, somewhat uncomfortably, "race riots." Race riots are deeply identified with the United States. The earliest ones in the U.S. were in the late 19th century and they had to do with Chinese laborers who were no longer needed to do labor, and were still hanging around. White populations would often descend on them quite violently. Sometime in the middle of the 20th century, the valence or the direction shifts so that now when people say race riot, they tend to mean a riot started by usually African-Americans or seemingly started by Latino, Latina Americans. But the initiating event, and I think this is by now common knowledge is almost always the police killing of a kid, and the death of that kid and the fact that no one seems to care very much is an expression of a broader immiseration." Joshua Clover Unpublished interview, 2014