The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now: Debating Left Politics and Black Lives Matter (Jacobin)

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Leaving room for scholars to respectfully disagree, Johnson makes his case with citations of key points in American history. Daring to push against the contemporary orthodoxy of anti-racist scholarship, Johnson also makes a cogent argument advocating the necessity of reviving the labor movement. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010). In the wake of the “race-class” debates that accompanied the 2016 Democratic Presidential primary challenge of democratic socialist and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, many within academe and activist circles have sought to defend the virtues of identity-based appeals and organizing strategies. The defenses often begin from an interpretation of US history that sees popular, cosmopolitan forms of left alliance as anomalous and too often doomed by the reactionary behaviors and interests of whites, sometimes with the most venom reserved for the “white working class,” often portrayed as though it constitutes a self-conscious and unified social category in utero. Moreover, the liberal anti-racist frame reduces what are in fact common class conditions felt more widely across racial and ethnic populations to matters of racism and racial disparity. To emphasize the need to centralize anti-racism, Lowndes closes out by praising the militant protests that erupted in the Bay Area following the killing of Oscar Grant by transit police, the battles against ICE deportations, and other struggles he sees as “opening out onto broader vistas with populist dimensions.” Those vistas could be broader still, especially when we take seriously the actual patterns of police abuse, which defy liberal anti-racist canards. Kent B. Germany, New Orleans after the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship and the Search for the Great Society (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 15–16.

Historian Cedric Johnson’s essay “The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now,” published in 2017 in the new socialist journal Catalyst , generated a lot of discussion and won the Daniel Singer Memorial Prize. Contrary to the popular view of the fifties as an era of mass quiescence, labor unrest continued through the decade, but the expansion of the consumer society and the growth of suburbia weakened progressive unionism. The hearts and minds of many American workers were won over to capitalist growth imperatives through the promise of rising wages, spacious tract housing, the personal mobility of automobile culture, and the enlarged leisure industries reflected in television, drive-in theaters, and shopping malls. The pastoral and technological comforts of suburbia reminded Americans of capitalism’s virtues, while active state repression prescribed clear social consequences to those who dared openly criticize the system’s contradictions and faults. See Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1962); Kenneth Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). Johnson, Cedric, “Epilogue: Baltimore, the Policing Crisis and the End of the Obama Era,” James DeFilippis, ed. Urban Policy in the Time of Obama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, A Freedom Budget for All Americans: A Summary (New York: A. Philip Randolph Institute, 1967).

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Despite all of the demands made by movements challenging racism, there’s very little tangible, long-lasting progress that resulted from it. Why is that? Samb’s performance is an homage that evokes Newton’s notion of revolutionary suicide — the true show of radical commitment is the willingness to dedicate one’s full energy and time, and potentially one’s life, to revolutionary struggle. The performance title and Newton’s radical pledge are both in keeping with the Panther quip, “The only good pig is a dead one.” If the police constituted an “occupying army,” then liberating the ghetto from their grip would require an equal magnitude of force and sacrifice. Johnson, Cedrc, ed. The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism and the Remaking of New Orleans. (University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

We asked Cedric if he would be willing to extend his argument for New Politics and he graciously agreed to do so. We then asked three scholars and activists (Jay Arena, Touré Reed, and Mia White) to comment on the significant political issues he has raised, though they do so without having seen Johnson’s new essay. Patrice Marie Cullors-Brignac, “ We Didn’t Start a Movement. We Started a Network,” Medium, February 22, 2016. Throughout the text, Haider offers pithy statements about the centrality of race and anti-racism to revitalizing the left. “As long as racial solidarity among whites is more powerful than class solidarity across races,” he writes, “both capitalism and whiteness will continue to exist.” “In the context of American history,” Haider continues, “the rhetoric of the ‘white working class’ and positivist arguments that class matters more than race reinforce one of the main obstacles to building socialism.”

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Following the weathered playbook of GOP strategists, Trump’s approach to campaigning and governing pits the deserving American middle class against the relative surplus population of welfare dependents, the unemployed and unemployables, undocumented migrant workers, and low-wage workers in China and other countries. Surplus population, or the industrial reserve army, is understood here as those persons not currently employed who might be pressed into service to the advantage of capital. Relative surplus population in any given historical context exerts downward pressure on wages. As a reservoir of low-wage, fragmented, and disempowered labor, they are employed as competitors to the relatively more secure segments of the workforce and as such can be used to foment division within the working class.