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.