Nostalgia

 “The Panthers Can't Save Us Now,” by Cedric Johnson, 2023

This book is structured as a debate. The lead essay is directly aimed at 'race' reductionist analyses of black-skin oppression. Other essays in this collection agree or disagree in different ways. Johnson undermines the nostalgia about the Black Panther Party and black power, the idea of the “new Jim Crow” and the flawed black nationalism of Black Lives Matter. Instead he promotes a class analysis of the prison and police state's treatment of 'surplus populations' and the working class, advocating class unity across skin colors, national origins and languages as an actual winning strategy. His take is based on a class analysis of the African-American population. This involves the rise of 'black' business and political elites and a professional-managerial strata to leadership. They steered emancipatory politics towards non-profits, government contracts, small business and alliance with the Democratic Party. Black Agenda Report has called them the “black misleadership class.”

While the Panthers were inspired by a mixture of African socialism, black nationalism and Maoism, their legend now resides mostly in black nationalism given the passage of time. Few pay attention to the ultra-left or lumpen-proletarian tack some took. Romanticizing them comes in a long line of that behavior on the Left. Johnson looks at the historical context prior to the rise of the Panthers – a years-long reformist civil rights movement that embraced cross-color unity and proletarian, economic demands coming out of the New Deal. This slowly changed during the 1960s as 'Black Power” developed, which said dark-skinned people could save themselves alone. Johnson's 'War on Poverty' created a layer of poverty programs that ingested various activists into non-profits, government sinecures and ethnic-based urban politics. With the advent of capitalist neo-liberalism in the 1980s, class politics were further downgraded in the dark-skinned community.

Johnson is nuanced about each of these developments. His main point is that without unity across identities, based on class, not skin color (or gender or sexual orientation, etc.) no real progress can be made against the police state, prisons, poverty, homelessness, poor education and the rest. To do this he maintains that a concrete material analysis of the social-structure is necessary, not memes, vague slogans or theories that cover petit-bourgeois aims. He mentions but avoids the topic of 'decolonization' theory, which elides over the modern existence of capital and classes too.

Specific Polemics

Johnson targets Alexander's concept of 'the new Jim Crow' as ignoring the capitalist economic logic and class-based nature of the prison system. He makes fun of some academics' obsession with the tiny Combahee River Collective, (CRC) like Assad Haider. He attacks the idea of 'black essentialism' – that all black people have the same politics, class base and oppression, as posited by BLM. Some BLM leaders have endorsed black capitalism, charter schools and the substandard, scab Teach For America. Some were ingested into the non-profit sector, searching for grants and friendly foundations. The non-profit sector is how the state and ruling class avoids basic social change as a form of soft power. The BLM analysis is absent any real investigation of the present class structure among African-Americans according to Johnson. He notes how middle-class African Americans live better lives than the majority of dark-skinned people. During 2005's Hurricane Katrina for instance, black middle-class people and workers with cars got out of town and were not stuck in the horrors of the Astrodome or trying to trek across the bridges. While the black middle class can suffer car stops, micro-aggressions and the like, their lives are significantly better than the black working class.

Johnson's main target is the kente-cloth wearing elites promoting liberal anti-racism – a steady diet of which you can hear on National Public Radio / National Government Radio - and which has been mimicked by various radicals. The principal aim is to prevent any unity against capitalism, so they go into panegyrics about the 'deplorables' and the terrible 'white working class.' Johnson himself seems to be close to DSA, advocates limited work within the Democratic Party and supported Bernie Sanders. His analysis is based on class but his solutions are social-democratic unity around economic reform demands.  This accounts for his dissing of the BPP. Johnson is a professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and this is reflected in these solutions.

Haider

Johnson has an essay critiquing the book “Mistaken Identity” by Assad Haider (reviewed below). He alleges its focus on the CRC and various 1960s radical black nationalists is an attempt to center anti-racism as a winning solution, a method that will fail. I'm not so sure that was Haider's point in the book however. Johnson alleges the SWP, the ISO and even the DSA /DSOC did this. In the 1960s the first two groups were mostly focused on anti-war student work; in the 1970s they advocated going into the unions, so I don't think he's right there either. This smacks of the jealousy of organizational politics more than anything else and leaves out some Euro-American Left groups that did romanticize and 'center' racism.

Johnson mentions how Haider ignores all the right-wing business forces within the black 'community' – which is typical of what he calls 'standpoint epistemology' – i.e. thinking everyone treated the same way thinks the same way, has the same politics, or has the same social outlook. After all James Brown, who wrote “I'm Black and I'm Proud” in the 1960s supported the Vietnam war, backed Nixon and celebrated wealth.  Kanye West is the current version. Back in the 1960s the Black Muslims were another group that promoted black business. Even now, even with black politicians in political control of some major cities (can you say Eric Adams?), crime, poverty, gentrification, homelessness, environmental damage and cruel police departments are still with us. Sections of mostly middle-class black voters endorse more police, more surveillance, more incarceration – giving the lie to the nationalist BLM perspective. The War on Drugs was not exclusively a 'white' thing either. Johnson mentions that most people killed by police are white and most in jail/prison are white, though these are not percentages, so that is a weak point. Nevertheless it shows a joint rationale for being against police violence other than guilt or skin politics.

Others Comment

This book includes an essay by Jay Arena, who focuses on Rosa Luxembourg's opposition to Lenin's slogan of 'right of self-determination of nations' - and all nationalisms - because they can be and are manipulated by capitalist ruling classes. Certainly in 1919 this was partly true, but as history has gone on, it is now harder for any nation or nationality to be actually independent from capital or imperialism. It used to be a transitional demand – now it has become, except in some obvious cases, an impossible one to actually achieve.

There is another essay by another academic, Mia White, who challenges Johnson. She criticizes his praise of the New Deal, seeing it still discriminated; and says that 'race' can't be ignored as a huge component of minority life. In this essay, like Johnson's own, she uses the term 'race' to describe black people. While admitting it is a political category, not biological, she still uses it – like the U.S. government, the liberal media and so many other academics. I submit that the terms 'multi-racial,'bi-racial,' 'races' and other forms of multiple usage are – racist. There is only one race, the human one. Stop it! Skin color is not a race, it is a geographic origin marker.  Nor is speaking another language, coming from Ireland, having differing eyes, noses or hair, wearing certain clothes, eating certain foods and all the rest of the bullshit promoted by race 'scientists'

Kim Moody writes another essay that debates Johnson. He contends that racism is a central capitalist project, given the large amount of workers who are non-white. 72% of prison inmates are not white according to him. Most people in prison and jails are employed – they are not a surplus population – according to one 2014 study. The avalanche of EEOC, lawsuit, grievance and other actions related to discrimination shows this is a central concern of workers. The black middle class play a contradictory role, given their traditional class position as petit-bourgeois - they are not merely betrayers. Moody himself, like many new-leftists, worked with or on BPP issues. Most of all Moody targets Johnson's 60's nostalgia around Bayard Rustin, A. Phillip Randolph and Michael Harrington - social democrats who formed an alliance with the trade union bureaucracy and the Democratic Party – and ended up supporting the Vietnam War! He thinks Johnson is harking back to those other 'great days' too – reflecting the irritation those activists had with the BPP and black power figures.  Based on this debate, both1960's routes were flawed but in different ways. History has proved that true.

Johnson responds to both essays. His key point against Moody is that Moody defends 'black self-organization' and questions some of his figures while promoting his own definition of 'surplus population.' Their views are actually closer than they claim. If you favor a multi-ethnic revolutionary party, labor party and mass organization, I'd say Johnson has a point here. Purely black organizations are preparatory organizations that will have a too limited impact but that doesn't mean you oppose them.

If you are interested in another book on this debate topic, especially the material weaknesses of black nationalism, or the real relation between class and 'identity,' or how to actually begin to defeat racism and police violence, this book can help.

Prior blog reviews on this matter, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “Mistaken Identity” (Haider); “The New Jim Crow” (Alexander); “The South – Jim Crow and Its Afterlives,” (A. Reed); “Towards Freedom – the Case Against Race Reductionism” (T. Reed); “Intersectional Class Struggle,” “Virtue Hoarders – the Case Against the Professional-Managerial Class,” “Caste” (Wilkerson); “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded – Beyond the Non-Profit-Industrial Complex.”

Red Frog

July 28, 2023