Collective Bargaining by Riot
Thompson coined the phrase to describe the political practice of people excluded from formal negotiating mechanisms. The food rioters of eighteenth-century England did not riot merely because they were hungry; they rioted because the institutional channels through which their grievances might have been addressed — the magistrates' courts, the assize of bread, the paternalist regulation of the grain trade — had been dismantled or captured. The riot was not a breakdown of order but the assertion of an order by people denied every legitimate mechanism for its enforcement. The term travels directly to the AI transition, where displaced workers lacking formal negotiating structures are improvising mechanisms of voice — class-action lawsuits, strikes, open letters, viral campaigns — that serve the same structural function as the riot served two centuries ago.
In the AI Story
The concept's analytical power comes from its inversion of the standard framing. Conventional history treated crowd violence as a breakdown requiring suppression. Thompson treated it as a political practice requiring interpretation — and the interpretation revealed discipline, targeting, and principled motivation where earlier analysts had seen only chaos.
The structural function is the same across centuries: the improvised assertion of interests that formal governance mechanisms refuse to acknowledge. The eighteenth-century food rioter enforcing a just price, the Nottinghamshire framework knitter breaking the offending frame, the 2023 visual artist filing a class-action lawsuit against an AI company that scraped her portfolio — each is performing collective bargaining by riot, improvising a mechanism of voice from whatever materials are available when institutional mechanisms are absent.
Thompson was unsentimental about the limits of the practice. The food riot enforced a just price for a day. The framework knitters compelled attention for a season. Neither created durable institutional structures. The durable structures — trade unions, factory acts, franchise extensions — came later, built through decades of organizing, and came because the extra-institutional actions demonstrated, at significant human cost, that the institutional deficit was intolerable.
The contemporary collective bargaining by code — the lawsuits, strikes, and petitions of AI-affected workers — faces the same structural limitation. Each action signals the need for structures. None is the structure itself. The question is whether the signals will be heeded in time to produce institutional innovation, or whether they will be dismissed as Luddism until the accumulated injustice makes institutional response unavoidable.
Origin
Thompson developed the phrase in the 1960s essays that preceded his 1971 moral economy essay, drawing on earlier usage by historians including Eric Hobsbawm, who had used similar formulations to describe machine-breaking as a form of wage negotiation by pre-industrial workers.
Key Ideas
Structural function over formal classification. The political function of the action matters more than its legal classification — lawful petition and unlawful riot can serve the same structural purpose.
Institutional deficit as precondition. Direct action emerges when formal channels are closed or captured, not when they are functioning.
Signal without structure. The riot, like the modern lawsuit, compels momentary attention but does not create the durable representation that sustains interests over time.
Demonstrative necessity. Extra-institutional action makes the institutional deficit visible, creating political pressure for institutional innovation.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- E.P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century" (Past & Present, 1971)
- Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (Manchester University Press, 1959)
- George Rudé, The Crowd in History (John Wiley, 1964)