Joshua Clover, 1962–2025
Before we started Rosa Press, we asked Joshua for guidance. We are animated by his spirit and we are shaped, as a publishing collective, by his commitment to ideas, friends, and fights.
Joshua was a poet and theorist, music writer and pop culture critic, teacher and mentor. Above all else, Joshua was a militant committed to the struggle for a world beyond the misery of the value form. As a theorist of the circulation struggles of racialised surplus populations, Joshua taught us to attend to unfolding of history as a process of antagonism. Our task remains how to make sense of where struggle will move next, and to join it.
Joshua’s comrades are everywhere, and to read and write with them is to remember him.
So, we have asked some comrades to write a short piece for Joshua. In publishing them together, we want to share in grief as well as share the pleasure of his friendship – boundless, endless, tireless.
To Joshua: who always had time for us, for music, for animals, for children, and for struggle. We love you and we thank you.
— Rosa Press
The first time I met Joshua was at a university occupation in Santa Cruz in September 2009. The night before, he was part of an attempt to take Wheeler Hall. It didn’t work that time, but it would soon after. It was the beginning of what we would know as the west coast occupation movement. I was 24 and nervous. He was kind and didn’t care, and that surprised me. I gave him some glow sticks and then he made me laugh.
There are some moments you look back at which clearly delineate a “before” from an “after.” One of those moments for me was that first building occupation in Santa Cruz. Another was when I first read Joshua.
1989 was published that fall as well, and I remember one of my professors called the book “silly.” I knew what that meant—as Joshua quips, pop “is for women and children”—but it didn’t matter. What mattered far more to me was the insistence on pop’s possibilities for liberatory excess, as he found in George Michael’s “Freedom ’90,” and the distinction between “freedom from” and “freedom through”: “If it is transcendent—and it certainly feels that way—it does not seek to transcend pop but simply to explode bounded pop from the unbounded, without prohibition or border.” It’s more than that pop matters; it’s that the determination to ignore mass culture—and all things “silly”—is not just anti-feminist but how we get fascism. As Joshua explained in an interview last year: “I don’t mind looking like a fool… I hold open the possibility of communism.”
It’s striking that we lost two of our most brilliant political thinkers in such a short period of time. Each in their own way illuminated the stakes of the “cultural.” Fredric Jameson taught many of us about utopia, while Joshua taught the lucky of us about revolution.
rift to rift until it becomes general
you have not understood
what a revolution is it’s just this
But he’ll keep reminding us that the most important quote about poetry came from Guy Debord, about how the goal isn’t to put poetry in the service of revolution but to put revolution in the service of poetry. He’ll keep reminding us that the point wasn’t “poetry will lead us to revolution” but it also wasn’t “art is autonomous and must be protected from politics”; it was “what poetry could be, we as yet have no idea.”
I’m grateful that I stopped being so nervous around him. That was another moment I’ll be forever on the other side of. It felt like being rescued. He found me from across a room—a loft, that is—where he knew I didn’t want to be and he said “let’s get out of here.” We went to dinner. We ate Thai food and started talking about things that we kept talking about for years, from the problem of left authoritarianism to our love for Roberta Flack. I will miss him. We shared a favorite Joni Mitchell song, which he was listening to a lot lately—he told me to be sure to listen sometimes to the Don Juan medley, his favorite version, “really getting me through some hard times.”
When Jameson died last fall, Joshua eulogized him with a passage from Valences of the Dialectic: “the objective time of the universe, the great wheel of the stars, the perfect circular movement, whose very existence tends to reduce individual temporal experience to mere projection.” It is hard to think this way, facing such a tremendous sense of absence, about what history is. But here you go, friend: “No regrets, Coyote.”
— Madeline Lane-McKinley is the author of Comedy Against Work (Common Notions, 2022), Dear Z (Commune Editions, 2019), and with Max Fox, fag/hag (Rosa Press, 2024). She is also a co-editor of Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry
It’s May and then June somehow and I find myself listening again to a recording of a poetry reading from 2012 that Jclo and I did together, recorded and recently shared by Andrew Kenower. I haven’t remembered much of the reading, as memory erodes over 13 years, and mine isn’t especially good anyway. The fragments I’ve kept: one of us brought candy and being nervous, I ate a lot of Twizzlers my mouth felt waxy with it, and then later, my nerves seemed to dissolve completely from my body and land around the room.
I remember laughing hard, almost to tears. In the recording, I hear other people laughing hard enough that I can recognize some of their laughs. Laura’s laugh. I remember that he read a poem that in my mind is called “the cat poem” but is titled “My Life in the New Millennium.” And it felt like the poem was for us. I listen to his intro, which he did himself thank god, who could do it better. Intermingled with jokes, he refers to how we met and the context in which we know each other, and that “we” did not just refer to me and him but the room, which was full of comrades and in an anarchist space.
Joshua calls this a nice fact: we were in the same school but met not so much as professor and student, but in shared political commitments, shared activities. We met at the occupation, we continued to meet at the occupation, in the street. It’s how he says “nice fact” that makes me cry. I can hear him being careful, precisely weighing it with meaning but not too much, and there’s a warmth skimming the surface of nice fact too, a kindness. It is nice, duh. Like sunlight on your face is both a pleasure and sometimes paperless proof you exist. He also says he doesn’t want to be too sentimental but that several of the poems are dedicated to people, including people in the room.
Assuring out loud to an audience or just yourself that you limit your sentimentality is pinkie swearing that I’m telling the truth, that I am loyal to the source feeling and the nice fact of our connection, while sentimentality refers to the excessive counterfeit feelings, moving further away from its reference. The task is precision, in saying I love you, I loved you, I didn’t tell you enough, I didn’t know how. As I think about writing this, my cat plops down directly on my neck, pressing his back into my throat and the purring vibrates there. A coerced duet. And there is always excess, possibly always counterfeit; to feel anything fully we feel in connection, blowing past the edges of ourselves. I listen to you. I have to.
My mind feels waxy and dumb these days, filling with points of dancing information from my phone, from every corner more shocks of grief, and pieces of things I try to remember. Picnic blankets blow off the picnics, cones flip into the street, and on Kelly Drive and all around the city, branches pelted with hail make a break from their trees. Everything rolls into the noisy fog and blares out “don’t be too sentimental.” Runners already drenched keep going.
I take the train from Philadelphia to New York for Jclo’s memorial reading at The Word is Change bookstore; it’s May and drizzling in Brooklyn, thudding heavily from the awnings and trees to umbrellas. I hug the friends who organized this together, some I haven’t seen in many years, and old acquaintances are made new again. It’s all last minute but the room is full, standing room only. I say something like “I will be brave because Joshua taught me how to be brave.” And by Joshua, I also mean the all of us he talks about in the cat poem, or in that room. A we that is dense with what troubles me, the less than good times, while also making me brave. If we are punching up chorally, it is possible to join. I read a poem that Wendy wrote, which quotes a response from Joshua, and we laugh with everyone.
Every time someone gets up and reads a poem or shares their connection, I think: we are still learning so much from you. Learning how to love pop music & music criticism, communism, riot, learning how to love comrades, do jail and bail support, thinking, having fun doing all of it, learning who we are to each other. More crying, more laughing. Towards the end of the reading, someone gets up and says they didn’t know Joshua Clover personally but remembers first hearing one of Joshua’s poems read out in the middle of a university building occupation in the U.K. A nice fact that reverberates around the room.
— Oki Sogumi was born in Seoul, South Korea as military dictatorship ended. She writes poetry and fiction, and her forthcoming speculative novella is about giant insects, migration, time travel, oceanic feelings, wellness, and both the limits and possibilities of relations like friendship. She currently resides in Philadelphia.
I have been dreaming about Joshua since we lost him. In one dream, he wears his Friday Night Lights t-shirt: clear eyes, full communism, can’t lose. We’re gathered in an old shed next to an oval and I’m expecting him to give a talk or lead a teach-in: the two limits and the revolution, riot or the poetics of surplus populations, why the salaried have a duty to communise their wages. Instead he takes out a playbook, coach is ready for us to train. We run drills, learn formations that bear the names of various prohibitions: coca-cola + rag + petrol, the fire form, pirates, lateral agents, bamboo banga. I’m not good: drop the ball, drop it again. But coach insists we keep running the patterns, only he tells us we have to improvise too. In another, we’re on a basketball court and he wears that shirt emblazoned with the word: DISCIPLINE. The one he was wearing in that picture he sent that time our book was published by some friends that ran a press called Discipline. We play the game D-O-N-K-E-Y, you know, the one where you take it in turns to take the same shot from increasingly impossible locations on the court, receiving a letter of the word donkey each time the ball fails to grace the net. I miss a lot of shots and Joshua talks about how great donkeys are, and about all the animals over his back fence: sheep, rams, goats, stags, birds. As we shoot hoops he says: you can’t just tell your students they can’t use chatGPT, you have to show them why the fantasy that AI will develop free will (the supposed domain of the human) rather than being governed by the logic of the assembly line is a perfect inversion of our world, where humans and our social relations are already bound by the iterative and machinic compulsions of capital. The meaning is on the surface. The anxiety is how to continue without our mentor, teacher, friend, comrade. The wish fulfilled is that Joshua is still here, refusing to die as Juliana Spahr put it in her obituary to him. The team’s gotta dig deep for coach: clear eyes, full communism, can’t lose.
— Andrew Brooks is a writer and teacher. He is a co-editor at Rosa Press.
I remember when Joshua hosted the MLG conference in Davis, California. Joshua, Tim, and I went one weekend morning to pick up group coffee and bagels because nothing would be open on campus. It was early. We were just hanging out in an empty parking lot waiting for the order to be ready, and then driving to campus and finding that the door was locked and trying to figure that out … and all the while talking and laughing about things we’d read and gossiping about people we know and it was just fucking fun doing the most mundane tasks with them, because I was with people I truly loved and trusted with everything. It’s tiny stuff like this that has made such a massive difference to my life—not just to my life in academia, which can be frustrating and alien of course, but to my life in general as a thinking and feeling person. Hanging out with these people and feeling understood and protected by them, and always strangely excited about our time together as it unfolds, whatever it involves, because it won’t be boring, and it won’t be impossible to communicate anything, and because I can say what I really think. It all depends on a kind of agreement—call it “intellectual,” but that’s not it. Never without disagreements and differences, but undeniably there, some shared apprehension of a basic trajectory of what’s going on in the world, and where literature, culture, and the university fit into it—how to think about it all, how this thought itself moves alongside history, how we are changed as the world is changed. Some of the best bits of life have their origins in that simple camaraderie of thought, that feeling of being in genuine friendship and solidarity and community. Joshua knew this. He cherished it. He made it happen. It is not gone. We are all still finding each other. Nothing is over.
— Sarah Brouillette is Professor of English at Carleton University and the author of Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford, 2014).
Grief deranges things. I’ve thought about how much Joshua himself would balk at mine; it’s made me think things like what did I do to deserve his friendship? Such ideas, of friendship and me, have nothing to do with the reality of Joshua and what it felt like to be loved by him. But they do reveal something about the depth of gratitude I have, the enormity of my admiration, and the lasting sensation of his radiant kindness. I was, I am, lucky, is the nicer way to say it.
I first met him when I was very young. He needn’t have remembered it by the time we met again, almost a decade later. But he did. By then I had a small child and he showed her a tender and total respect. He was here in Sydney for only a few days, but he turned up, joined students in struggle, taught with incandescent energy, and listened to everyone with the same kind of ferocious attention. He wanted ocean swims, spicy food, cold white wine, gossip, and he wanted to love and be loved.
His time here is our family lore, our family lexicon. For the years that followed, we spoke across time and place, from one side of the Pacific to the other. He was ours, as we were his, and he was so many other people’s, and they were his. The closest I’ve felt to knowing what it might be like on the other side, as he would say, is the dizzying realisation that the comradely love of a friend in struggle can be actually endless.
It shouldn’t be possible, but it is. As in, his death, of course, but also, the size of his friendship, the size of the gift he has left us.
He was here, he was ours, and we remember him.
— Astrid Lorange is a teacher, writer, and editor at Rosa Press.
“The subjunctive is a lovely mood, but it is not the mood of historical materialism,” wrote Joshua in his book of political theory. But the conditional, only slightly less lovely in its insistence upon the open skies of the possible as glimpsed from the earthly realm of causation, might be just that: the mood of materialism, with eyes set on the future. Joshua occupied that mood with a funny little bit at the end of one of his poems, where it authorizes the unlikely mashup of Karl Marx and Frank O’Hara:
If Lunch Poems / were the poetry of the future / it would be all like / I communize this I communize that
Someone once said, incorrectly I think, that poems like this discharge the kind of joy we would expect from a poet like O’Hara, because that more playful aesthetic simply doesn’t align itself with a politics of revolution. And so, instead of play, we get militancy, instead of joy we get revolution, because these two modalities of being are mutually exclusive. But that is the exact opposite of how I read these lines, how I think Joshua intended them, and how I wish to remember him. There’s a politics of revolution in this poem, a clearly enunciated militancy, but the overwhelming impression is one of joy.
Of course, the pleasure we take from O’Hara’s poetry has always been the pleasure of the commodity fetish – as Joshua suggested, “of circulating, the temporary autonomy of the weekend, the links of friendship, language fit to the more or less spontaneous and shifting course through the magnificent city stocked to its rafters,” all of which is subtended by the manifest unease of economic and colonial violence brought home to the metropole. In these lines, where poetry insists upon its own status as commodity – a book titled in italics, not only personified but also given to speak – our pleasure is in reading that same playful language now from the standpoint of its redemption. So much depends on that least referential phrase, “it would be all like,” embodying as it does a kind of cheerful imprecision. It’s also the one line I cannot subvocalize in any voice other than Joshua’s, the one in which I can most clearly hear his accent, momentarily pitched between excitement and sarcasm, even though I never heard him read this poem. And that’s ultimately what I love about this bit of this poem: it conveys perfectly what Joshua said characterized the writing he enjoyed most, the articulation of “intense knowledge worn lightly,” here in words that are militant and literate but also wholly personable, like an overcaffeinated conversation with a good friend.
But if the poetry of the future communizes this, communizes that, it will be Joshua’s own explanation of communism that clarifies the affective polarity from which this poem draws energy. “I think there is a struggle to preserve the possibility of communal life and emancipation and flourishing,” he wrote in a handful of sentences I keep pinned next to my desk, “and this struggle has two faces. Care and militancy. It must be capable of its own reproduction, be a site of mutual care, and it must be capable of breaking the procedures of capital. These are not opposed, they are the same struggle, and that unity is the real movement.” I have kind of known Joshua for around a decade. We exchanged notes on this and that, we shared a platform or a microphone at a few events, and we had bits and pieces of writing compiled in the same collections. I say “kind of” because I don’t want to pretend we were especially close, that I have any right to claim the type of familiarity shared with his closest comrades. But for over a decade he has been, for me and almost certainly for a whole generation of comrades, something like a Marxist super-ego: an authority to be internalised and against which to test one’s own thinking, a partisan of the riot, a fact-checker for militancy – a living field manual for the breaking of capital.
It was only later, having kind of known him this way for a few years, when I began to see more from that other side of the struggle, its hidden abode, which Joshua embodied with brilliant exceptionality: he really cared, about things and about people, and he put as much labor into that care as he did the militancy, because the two are inseparable. I had learned this from my limited interactions with him, in person and online, but then to read the outpouring of tributes in April 2025, was to have that lesson reconfirmed, exponentiated, amplified. And that’s what his poem wants, for these are its conditions: care and militancy, revolution and joy, together and at once, the real movement. Because if we build the commune, for Joshua and for ourselves, for everyone everywhere, then we will have already written the poetry of the future and it would be all like we communized this we communized that.
— Mark Steven is Associate Professor of Literature and Film at the University of Exeter. His most recent book is Class War: A Literary History (Verso, 2023)
I was reading Joshua Clover on value form theory and crisis and marvelling at the beauty and economy of his sentences on a weekday in my garage when Colleen called to tell me he had died. Everything I’ve written in the last decade bears an imprint of the effect his thinking had on mine. I talked to him everyday in my head, and every other day in real life. In argument and in agreement, he was a true comrade, a dear friend, a constant intellectual companion, an irreplaceable mentor, one of my favorite people in the world, and one of my greatest teachers.
What I loved most about Joshua was that he was first and foremost a communist in and of the streets. He lived his communism as militantly and precisely as he theorized it. He stood on so many front lines; occupied so many buildings; made demands unrepentant and filled with a love for a world that belonged to the people and a rage against those who would take it away from them. Charging into the fray, bike helmet and goggles on and mask up, Joshua fought until his last breath to be a comrade wherever people wanted to get free. Indeed, much of his writing in the last fifteen years came out of his participation in the revolutionary experiments of Occupy Oakland, from sustaining the commune at Oscar Grant plaza to his role in port blockades, freeway actions, and militant occupations during Occupy and well beyond. For Joshua, practice and theory could be one and the same; one could throw a brick at a cop car in one moment and sit down and reconstruct a materialist history from its lessons in the next. “Theory is immanent to struggle;” he wrote, “often enough it must hurry to catch up to a reality that lurches ahead.
But though he was known for his militancy, most of all, Joshua loved being in common. In so many spaces in which I encountered him, he was both on the frontlines and in the kitchens: simultaneously risking life and limb while doing hundreds of hours of invisible background work. He broke the law frequently, but also connected students to legal support; raised bail funds (often contributing thousands of dollars of his own money); supported students facing disciplinary challenges; ran know your rights trainings; and showed up with breakfast on the picket line. He complained about the reformism he wanted us all to break out of, and frequently got into strategic disagreements with many who found his commitments difficult, but his faith that the revolution was within our grasp was unshakeable, and he showed up wherever there was struggle. And despite the reservations he expressed in his writing about the “affirmation trap” of business unionism, in life and practice he saw the riot and the strike less as opposed forms than as forms of struggle open at every juncture to both insurrectionary possibility and the need for quiet organizing. Over the course of three UC-UAW strikes in 2019, 2022, and 2024, Joshua was a committed faculty comrade who found joy in spreading the strike, composing non-retaliation pledges, drumming up faculty commitments to withhold final grades, and showing up every day on the picket line.
When we co-founded the Marxist Institute of Research, a body of faculty and graduate students within the UC system committed to historical material research, Joshua decided that the primary form it would take was a free summer camp for students to learn Marx. He did everything possible to make the camp a commune: he quietly did all the painfully boring financial management and accounting without asking that we share the load; he made epically large shopping trips to Costco with Annie, where mountains of food were loaded into his electric pickup truck; though he was frequently in pain by the evenings, he stayed up late to talk and argue and pick comradely fights on everything from pop music to politics. Every year, we held Commie Trivia, where Joshua would heckle from the sidelines while keeping score — his favorite was the year the winners were named “The Ultras.” As a presence for the students he was generous and skeptical and funny and incredibly supportive. He cooked epic meals of pasta and lentils; he stayed after dinner to clean; he sat with people as they figured out how to say the thing they wanted; he was so intransigent and stubborn one minute and then the sweetest, kindest, most affirming teacher the next; he was the kindest to children and cats; he was constantly thinking about pedagogy and how to mentor students with patience and generosity and humor; he always volunteered to cut the onions.
Our friendship first grew in 2020 when we organized together through Cops Off Campus, when a brief note of appreciation for his book in an email chain turned into a long conversation about abolitionist organizing, infrastructure, circulation struggles, and revolution that unfolded over the years from emails into text chains, coffees and walks. I wasn’t his friend for very long, but it felt like a lifetime. We talked constantly about the ideas we were chewing over in our book projects, which were unfolding along complementary lines. Whole threads about Department II and circulation. So many laugh emojis. We organized and schemed a lot — from strike solidarity to cops off campus to the George Floyd uprising to Palestine. He sent flowers when I was sad and bottles of whiskey to fuel the flames whenever we were in the thick of struggle. “Merry Strikemas,” he wrote on a wine bottle from him and his partner Seeta one Christmas; “FUCK ICE” on another occasion when I had trouble crossing the border. We argued constantly; it was probably his love language. We loved snarky side chats. We bonded a lot over feeling lonely in the academy where it often felt so impossible to organize faculty beyond letters and petitions. I was so surprised and delighted when he welcomed me into his circle. I was a nobody from Singapore with a PhD from the Midwest, and I felt like I’d been standing at a distance in awe of the California communists, their conviction and their clarity, never quite able to get there myself. His generosity made me feel special, until I realized that this was how he was with everyone: He gave so many young Marxists the permission to see themselves as smart, capable communists with something important to say and a stake in our collective struggle. Someone on twitter said he welcomed us all into the long tradition of people fighting for freedom and the abolition of colonialism, class society, and the cops: and it was true. He helped me to be brave. He was never a gatekeeper. He never made people feel dumb. He took everyone seriously, even and especially when he thought you were wrong. He was always, always, on the right side of struggle. He said “everything for everyone” often, and he lived it.
There was one night when we were texting where he was eating candy in bed and feeling sad. He asked if I had read any of the notes left on Marx’s grave in London. I hadn’t. “You should read them sometime,” he said, “they are the most unbearably moving sad documents in the world.” They all basically read “Dear Karl, I’m sorry that we have not yet lived up to what you wanted for us, we’ll keep trying, I promise.”
I keep saying that to him now, over and over. I’m sorry that we have not yet lived up to what you wanted for us. We’ll keep trying. I promise.
— Charmaine Chua is a Singaporean organizer, writer, and researcher living and working on the traditional lands and waters of the Chumash people, and is an Acting Associate Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley.