After Black Lives Matter: Policing and Anti-Capitalist Struggle - Cedric Johnson
Published in 2023 by Verso, London, UK, and New York, NY
416 pages
ISBN: 978-1-80429-167-2
LCCN: 2022048814 (print)
LCC: E185.615 .J5889 2023
In 2013, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was first used in the aftermath of the George Zimmerman case as he was acquitted of the death of Trayvon Martin the previous year. In 2014, the hashtag began circulating as a way to garner support on social media during the street protests that arose after the killings of Michael Brown in Furguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City. In the following years, the phrase grew from an online hashtag to a tangible organization committed to combating police brutality and the injustices of the carceral system, which systemically and disproportionately affects Black Americans.
Most recently, Black Lives Matter (BLM) saw a renewed resurgence in the wake of the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in the spring and summer of 2020. With increasing clashes with militarized police forces in the streets and exposure to police brutality, police forces are viewed with increasing suspicion and negativity. While police often view themselves to be a “thin blue line” that protects the world of peace from the chaos that threatens it, organizations such as BLM sought to uncover this illusion and reveal the injustices of policing and mass incarceration. Soon enough, BLM found support from a wide array of corporations, including Apple, Google, and the NFL, who wrote public statements supporting the organization and sending funds to outwardly progressive initiatives.
While BLM found widespread support in its early days, such momentum proved not to be lasting. In the summer of 2020, 67% of Americans supported BLM, but this has quickly dropped to only 51% percent today. There are several reasons for this drop-off in support. Much to the chagrin of black-led activism, white liberals once again became the face of the protests in recent years. Additionally, BLM became associated with the “Defund the Police” movement, which was widely unpopular with moderate voters. Furthermore, Republicans utilized this momentum to further exacerbate a backlash to the movement, often labeling the group as “radical Marxists” who were promoting rioting and looting in the streets. Finally, BLM leaders faced scrutiny from both the Left and Right for using donations to buy luxury properties and other lavish expenses.
Those of us on the Left find ourselves in a peculiar position. Initially supportive of BLM, many of us became suspicious of the posturing of the organization toward real racial problems while obscuring the underlying unequal socio-economic conditions that feed racial injustice. While BLM mobilized millions of people to protest against racial injustice and police violence, the fact that so many multi-billion dollar companies also mobilized in support of the organization raised a red flag. Giving voice to these conflicting perspectives of BLM in his 2023 book, After Black Lives Matter: Policing and Anti-Capitalist Struggle, political scientist Cedric Johnson (Professor of Black Studies and Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago) offers an incisive and provocative Leftist critique of BLM and its assessment of modern policing. Johnson argues that by only focusing on the racialized components of police power and incarceration, we often miss the dynamics of class struggle and the role of policing in managing “surplus populations.”
Overview:
In the course of six chapters, Johnson illustrates how class conflict impacted the development of urban centers and the surrounding suburbs during the postwar era, leading to the rise of police violence to protect the interests of capital and control “surplus populations.” Engaging with the history and philosophy of policing and anti-policing movements in modern political and social discourses, Johnson attempts to strike a balance between supporting the obvious sentiment behind Black Lives Matter (the critique of unchecked police power against Black Americans) while critiquing the totalizing account of race and police power by those who have financially profited from the sloganeering and popularization of the movement for their own ends. Following along the thoughts and works of Adolf Reed Jr. and the Fields sisters, Johnson dismantles the idea that race alone accounts for the issues with contemporary policing and mass incarceration as he aims to critique both a naïve branch of the police abolition struggle and the corporatized and sanitized iteration of Black Lives Matter.
While deeply-seeded racism has undoubtedly had a deleterious effect on the lives of Black Americans, Johnson believes that race cannot be the sole focus of anti-policing struggles. Rather, police violence is not directed only against the black population, but rather against the most vulnerable and dispossessed members of the working class across urban, suburban, and rural geographic locations. Since the primary function of policing is to protect property and reproduce the market economy through the management of “surplus populations,” Johnson argues that economic status, rather than race, has a much more salient impact on how a population is policed. Thus, poor rural whites, inner-city Black populations, Native Americans, and undocumented and exploited Latin American workers have much more shared material interests than they do with their wealthier racial counterparts.
In this way, these populations also have a greater chance to build solidarity along class lines than through racial ones. Johnson argues that the current focus on race can have the effect of serving bourgeois interests by separating the working class into racial divides. While there is a high correlation between skin color and economic status that has a basis in historical inequalities, Johnson writes “We should be leery of any discussion of twentieth-century black life that treats white and black as synonyms for rich and poor, wealthy and dispossessed” (101). He believes that focusing solely on the racism of individuals often obscures the central role that poverty and class play in modern policing. If there is to be any hope of change, it will require a diverse popular anti-policing movement composed of all of those whose communities have suffered at the hands of police, regardless of race.
The popularization of the Black Lives Matter Movement, while initially drawing attention to these class inequalities through the utilization of social media and mass protest, eventually capitulated to the interests of capitalism as revolutionary sentiments were sanitized and neutralized by the implementation of corporate DEIA training and anti-racist workshops. These efforts, Johnson argues, only serve to sever solidarity across racial lines and reduce other communities who have also suffered at the hands of police as “merely allies, junior partners rather than political equals and comrades” (162). BLM may have mobilized millions of people to organize and protest against injustice, but it also had mass appeal because it did not radically challenge the neoliberal status quo.
Johnson is not quite a police abolitionist though, as he writes, “it seems rather naive to think that a complex, populous urban society can exist without any law enforcement at all, especially in those moments when forces threaten social justice and even the basic democratic rights of citizens” (32). Rather, to combat the contemporary carceral regime, Johnson argues that we need to recognize the fundamental economic and social contradictions of capitalism and “abolish the class conditions that modern policing has come to manage” (32). According to Johnson, we must not simply attempt to remove racism from society but rather broaden our critique to find common antagonisms around which the working class can organize. Through a shared vision of a society centered on redistributing public goods and promoting human dignity, we can build powerful coalitions that undermine the contemporary carceral system and render it redundant.
Deeper Dive:
Johnson utilizes the Introduction to give a brief history of the Black Lives Matter movement -- focusing primarily on its most recent iteration in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020 -- as well as provide a framework for the rest of the book. In the first two chapters, he offers an alternative historical interpretation of the emergence of contemporary policing. Instead of finding its roots in Antebellum slave patrols or Progressive Era (1901-1929) policies targeting black migrants, the modern carceral system, Johnson argues, is most tied to the postwar transformation of American cities and the expansion of consumer society (33). Chapters Three and Four shift from a historical analysis to a trenchant critique of the Black Lives Matter movement as Johnson argues that its underlying liberal antiracist politics emerge from an anxious black PMC (professional-managerial class) that seeks integration into the dominant capitalist system rather than the abolition of the conditions that facilitate black dispossession and incarceration. Chapters Five and Six then tackle the debates regarding police abolition and defunding and carve out a pro-worker and pro-pubic goods vision of a Leftist alternative that secures public safety by guaranteeing economic security (34).
In the First Chapter, Johnson offers a historical materialist analysis of the history of mass incarceration and policing. opens by dismantling common liberal approaches to mass incarceration and policing, most notably Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book, The New Jim Crow. For Johnson, Alexander’s primary error is in her portrayal of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and contemporary police as an unbroken narrative chain of racial oppression. According to Johnson, this narrative falsely depicts race and racism as transhistorical, immutable, and omnipotent forces that are endemic features of American society, which is simply not supported by history (40). He also critiques Alexander’s focus on drug offenses over violent crime as a driver of mass incarceration from the 80s onward, as well as her data focusing narrowly on federal prisons, rather than state penitentiaries and local jails, which make up the majority of those behind bars (42). For Johnson, The New Jim Crow also treats mass incarceration as a primarily black issue when it is not, thus retreating to “caste” as an ontological category, which is an idealist and bourgeois move that relies on the liberal idea of black exceptionalism, which forecloses class solidarity along lines of racial difference (43-44).
He highlights the common liberal response to the injustices of contemporary policing, as well as how it has fallen short of its goals. BLM’s narrow focus on racial justice, according to Johnson, fails to provide language that can unify and encompass the experiences of all who suffer from the carceral regime, regardless of race (55). Countering the common “few bad apples” argument, Johnson writes, “The problem before us is not one of racist excesses that might be remedied through better training against implicit bias, hiring some more minority officers or firing bad cops. The problem, rather, is that the policing of surplus population is necessary for capital’s system preservation, which depends on massive dispossession and exploitation” (78).
In the Second Chapter, Johnson provides an alternative to contemporary left-liberal race-centered accounts of social class by tracing the rise of the consumer society and the formation of the middle class during the postwar and Cold War eras to tease out how they influenced our current system of mass incarceration. Massive investments in urban renewal, housing, and the interstate highway system radically changed the face of American cities. These postwar shifts in the demographics and infrastructure of US cities produced higher standards of living, as well as emerging conservative notions of class, the passive acceptance of capitalism, and new social antagonisms among the working classes (84).
These developments also produced an industrial reserve of unemployed laborers, who were mostly black and brown Americans in urban centers. Following political scientist Paul Passavant, Johnson contends that the US state was governed by the “criminal-consumer double” (82). Those who could not abide by these new rules of consumerism were met by increasingly punitive measures of state discipline. As Johnson notes, “While race provides a convenient shorthand for summarizing the broad inequalities produced by the postwar urban transformation, race-centric approaches forget African Americans’ different class experiences of the consumer society” (102). These contradictions were forged in the immediate postwar era, but would not reveal themselves until the mass demonstrations in the 1960s.
At this point, the concept of “inner city” urban centers became perceived as crime-ridden and filled with social despair while the suburbs became associated with middle-class aspirations and safety. The mass incarceration regime of the Reagan-Bush era was not done by conservatives alone but was perpetuated by actors across racial, political, and geographic lines. Some did so for purely ideological reasons, while others saw punishment as the only solution for worsening crime. According to Johnson, “The roots of this dilemma lie in the Cold War liberal turn away from public works and redistributive public policy, and towards civil society and cultural solutions to urban property” (85).
Johnson then ends the chapter by analyzing the work of two liberal urbanists, Jane Jacobs and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. For Johnson, both of these thinkers were deeply concerned by poverty and crime in urban centers, but each proposed solutions that failed to alter the power of the capitalist class, instead proposing market-based solutions. While Jacobs proposes community surveillance and self-policing as a means to maintain public security, Moynihan turns toward behavioral modification and overcoming cultural deficiencies as a solution to overcome black poverty (85, 117). For Johnson, both theorists abandoned social democratic strategies in favor of privatized solutions, and their thoughts signaled a larger turn toward neoliberal policies as an attempt to alleviate black poverty and crime.
In the Third Chapter, Johnson shifts from his historical analysis to a pointed critique of the Black Lives Matter movement. He argues that BLM has its roots in the limits of the Second Reconstruction, which restored black citizenship rights, began the process of dismantling Jim Crow laws, and paved the way for immense black social progress, leading to the formation of the black middle class. While it did much to alleviate black poverty, the Second Reconstruction failed to address and resolve structural unemployment, especially in urban areas. These issues were compounded by the increasing expansion of globalization and the erosion of New Deal social welfare programs.
Utilizing the work of James Boggs and the Black Panther Party, Johnson recovers the voices of black activists and thinkers who saw the struggles of the black community as “a vanguard in catalyzing a broader struggle that might unite Americans across social layers towards socialist transformation” (128). During the neoliberal turn of the 1980s and 90s, however, these critiques were subsumed by the black political class, who sought market-based solutions to black poverty. This is inadequate to address the roots of black poverty, as Johnson writes, “The condemnation of America’s history yields more services, increasingly through the private sector and nonprofits in the time of neoliberalism, and more symbolic representation, but not necessarily more responsiveness from government for the most dispossessed and most policed” (174).
Johnson then discusses how BLM is limited by its militant racial liberalism, which turns racism into an immutable ontological condition (America’s “original sin” of racism), rather than a historically constructed force utilized to justify capitalist exploitation. “Black people are disproportionately targeted by the police,” Johnson argues, “because blacks are overrepresented among the most vulnerable layers of the working class residing in cities, where the heaviest fiscal and technological investments in stress policing have been made” (179). As such, for Johnson, BLM is essentially a liberal movement that depends on the concept of black exceptionalism which, far from opposing the logic of private property and the creation of surplus value, has only served as a boon to the capitalist order (162).
In Chapter Four, Johnson presents a case study of urban planning and neoliberal policy in Baltimore. Highlighting Freddie Gray’s death after his arrest by the police and the protests that ensued, Johnson sets these events in the context of the historical and economic development of the city of Baltimore. A once industrial city ravaged by the forces of globalization and offshoring of jobs, Baltimore became increasingly segregated and violent in the late twentieth century. The Obama administration's neoliberal policies, characterized by Johnson as “soft overtures to left social criticism and a heavy dose of underclass moralizing combined with pro-market solutions” (198), have made the immersion of black Baltimore residents even worse, as it blamed Baltimore’s violence, poverty, and inequality on cultural deficiencies.
Likewise, in Chapter Five, Johnson turns his attention to the Midwest as he highlights the protests against Rahm Emmanuel’s administration and their neoliberal policies in Chicago in the wake of the death of Lacquan McDonald in 2015. This is one of the longest chapters of the book, which makes sense as Johnson has spent much of his life in the Windy City. He highlights how the protests took place on Black Friday amidst the city’s main tourist district, disrupting commerce on what is typically the most commercially important and profitable day of the year. This brought the contradictions inherent within modern policing and the consumerist neoliberal city to the forefront of public consciousness.
Johnson proposes a socialist alternative to the neoliberal status quo in the city, suggesting a bold restructuring and mass funding of public works. Following the work of David Harvey, Johnson discusses the “right to the city,” in which the public utilizes collective power to reshape the urban landscape. For Johnson, this is a key component of a viable socialist alternative to our current neoliberal crisis, as he writes, “The creation of universal public works, inspired by the highly successful CCC and WPA programs of the New Deal but tailored to contemporary conditions, could undermine the very basis of modern policing by addressing the problem of surplus population and reorganizing labor around use values, thereby ending basic need and the alienation of the broader urban laboring classes” (250).
In Chapter Six, Johnson examines the institution of policing, remaining critical of its function in reproducing the capitalist social order while also analyzing its constitutive labor relations. Taking aim at common progressive rallying cries against the police, Johnson writes, “Too much contemporary left criticism of policing remains at the level of protest, a condemnation of the institution, stopping short of a critical-dialectical analysis of the institution, of the internal contradictions of those who carry out its work and the diverse American publics who support them” (282). While police primarily protect the interests of capital and private property, we must not forget that there are internal social, political, and psychological divides within the institution of policing.
As such, Johnson highlights the prevalence of police suicides and the burdens that are inherent to the occupation. Johnson playfully twists the meaning of ACAB (“All Cops Are Bastards”), writing, “Cops are bastards, illegitimate offspring, in the deeper sense that they are born out of an unholy union between the capitalist class and the workers they exploit” (279). Johnson argues that police are members of the working class who are turned against other members of their own class to serve the interests of the capitalist class and their private property.
To a certain degree, he sympathizes with the plight of police as members of the working class who are likewise threatened with precarity through the automation of policing and surveillance through the employment of AI and robotics. Pushing back against the monolithic depiction of police that can be common in Leftist circles, Johnson calls the reader to remember that police often come from the most economically dispossessed parts of the laboring class and usually have different motivations for becoming an officer (322). He believes that an emancipatory, revolutionary movement must be rooted in the broad interest of the working class against capital. For Johnson, this includes engaging, persuading, and recruiting “some reactionary elements, including military, police, and would-be police” (289) to struggle against capital in the interests of the working class.
Finally, in the Conclusion, Johnson turns toward the riots that occurred on the steps of Congress on January 6th, and the failure of police to stop the protestors. While most leftist commentators used this event to illustrate the double standard in the police’s show of force in this instance when compared to the BLM protests, Johnson argues that January 6th showed the limits of police abolition, as most Americans believe that police and the carceral system should still exist and lock up the participants. He argues that calls for police abolition/defunding in favor of restorative justice are “leftist in form but rightist in substance” (342), relying on the same privatized solutions and working to accelerate capital-intensive policing.
As such, Johnson notes, “BLM is essentially the latest permutation of racial liberalism, proposing a set of bourgeois strategies and solutions for addressing the structurally determined conflict between police and the surplus population” (333). Instead, Johnson believes we need to abolish the conditions of modern policing -- the defense of capitalist interests -- through public works programs that mobilize the unemployed to improve infrastructure such as public transportation and green energy, raise working conditions and wages in traditionally undervalued work, and deepen investment in urban planning, improving the daily lives of broad sectors of the public (344-345).
Commendations:
After Black Lives Matter contains several dimensions that are well worth commending. First and foremost, the book serves as a necessary and timely critique of Black Lives Matter and its often faux-progressive discourse from a Leftist perspective. All too often, progressives can get caught up in the trappings of identity politics, eliding how we are primarily shaped through the material conditions of our existence. A pernicious form of Afro-Pessimism can all too easily permeate activist circles, alienating potential allies in the universal struggle for economic justice. Similarly to Asad Haider, Johnson critiques how unproductive forms of identity politics have made us overly focused on particularity and difference, rather than furthering a universal message to the working class.
Johnson confronts us with the fact that state violence is not merely racialized, but is rather rooted in class warfare, as punishment is meted out to the poorest and most vulnerable segments of our society, regardless of race or ethnicity. As such, if we are to have any hope of changing our current state of police brutality and mass incarceration, we cannot simply address one aspect of the problem by struggling for gradual reforms. Rather, we must abolish the conditions that facilitate police violence by providing housing, employment, and education for the most economically disadvantaged.
I also found Johnson’s inclusion of the police into the working class struggle to be thought-provoking, even though it will undoubtedly be contentious among Leftist circles. Johnson lambasts the Leftist impulse to frame policing through an ACAB lens, and he playfully turns the acronym on its head. Yes, all cops are bastards, but in the sense that they are the bastard children of capitalism who serve its interests even though they betray their own class in the process. By flipping this phrase, Johnson corrects the often diachronic antagonism between police and the working class, casting them as part of the working class turned against itself for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. While I remain skeptical regarding the efficacy or wisdom of persuading cops to the socialist cause, Johnson still rightly highlights the importance of solidarity across lines of difference to build a truly emancipatory movement for all peoples.
Critique:
On the other hand, After Black Lives Matter suffers from some notable weaknesses. First, while it is a cogent and necessary critique, it is written in an overly complex manner, with compound sentences stretching to almost paragraph length. It is quite a dense read at times, and I often had to reread sentences multiple times to tease out their meaning. This work should be read by a wide audience, yet its inaccessible prose will limit its reach, which is deeply unfortunate.
Additionally, while I am sympathetic to Johnson’s scathing critique of identity politics, it can often be overly-reductionistic and reactionary. While there are segments of the Left that can be annoying “wokescolds” who constantly police their allies and alienate them further from the cause, this, in my experience, is a narrow minority of activists. Johnson can often be too simplistic in castigating Black Lives Matter as merely a corporate grift. While there are undoubtedly bad actors within the movement who have used it for their own social clout and monetary gain, this does not spoil the integrity of the movement as a whole. Just as he criticizes segments of the Left for treating the police as a monolithic force, he also paints supporters of BLM with an incredibly wide brush, often setting up their positions as a strawman to easily take down.
While the divisive and overly-zealous identitarians within the broader movement should be rightly criticized, Black Lives Matter reflected a wide swath of mass mobilization and protest that cannot be so easily dismissed as a “liberal solution.” Did it succeed in abolishing the conditions of policing? Of course not. But should the actions of so many protesters who took to the streets in 2020 be cast aside, especially when we only have the benefit of a few years of hindsight? I would argue that they should not. To do so, in my opinion, only works to alienate would-be allies and push them further into reactionary and divisive politics.
Instead of nitpicking a broadly popular mass movement, we need to recognize the importance of small, grassroots movements that did (and continue to) emphasize the role of class in policing. Black Lives Matter helped to facilitate a wider awareness of cross-sectional forms of solidarity, as generally well-intentioned liberals rubbed shoulders with more class-oriented socialists, anarchists, and unionists. Instead of endless Leftist infighting, we should be working to build coalitions that can challenge the power of capital.
Likewise, while Johnson correctly draws our attention to the centrality of class in understanding the dynamics of policing and mass incarceration, we must also not simply disregard the racial component in the exercise of contemporary policing. While I agree with Johnson’s larger argument regarding the policing of the poor in a consumer society, as someone who grew up in the rural South, there is also certainly a racial component to police violence and incarceration as well. While we certainly need to recenter class as a primary mode of analysis, we must also not forget the ideological ballast that racism serves in justifying violence.
There are also two of Johnson’s main arguments that remain unconvincing. First, while I appreciate Johnson’s reminder that officers are a part of the working class, I am not convinced that it is either prudent, wise, or quite frankly possible to recruit them to a socialist project. While this sounds like a nice idea in principle, my personal encounters with police -- even as a white male -- make this seem naive at best and downright dangerous at worst. It is incredibly difficult for me to believe that these defenders of private property and capitalist interests would be persuaded to support an anticapitalist cause, even if it did serve their material interests.
Secondly, while I likewise agree that we need to invest more in housing, education, food security, infrastructure, and green energy, I remain skeptical that a New Deal public works program would solve the problem of contemporary policing. While such a program could go a long way toward shifting the American economy more toward social democracy, it will not suddenly abolish the conditions that make policing necessary. Johnson seems to occupy a strange position in these pages: he chides liberals for paying closer attention to race than class on one hand and lambasts far-leftists as naive for calling for the abolition of the carceral state and policing on the other. Yet, when it comes to solutions, it amounts to little more than a call to social democracy and resource allocation, neither of which inherently challenge the power of capitalism. As such, Johnson can be too reactionary in some small squabbles about reforming the carceral state before suggesting little more than reforms to the economic sphere. While social democracy is certainly a step in the right direction, it is ultimately insufficient to address the immensity of the crises we face.
Finally, the scope of Johnson’s critique can often be overly narrow, applying specifically to American discourses. While his critique of equating race and class is salient within an American context, these segments of the population are still much more aligned in the Global South and former colonies. For example, I’ve spent a decent amount of time doing research and leading college students within the former Dutch colony of Curaçao. On the island, there is a much stronger correlation between race and class, which can often be separated between the wealthy white Dutch who live near Caracas Baii and Punda versus the local islanders living in dispossessed neighborhoods such as Seru Fortuna or the rural countryside of Bandabou. This is slowly changing, however, as more wealthy black islanders are coming to positions of power within the Curaçaoan society. There is a growing nationalist movement on the island, and time will tell whether Johnson’s analysis will prove instructive as the demographics slowly shift.
Conclusion:
Overall, After Black Lives Matter is an informative, contentious, and thought-provoking critique of Black Lives Matter and its most neoliberal tendencies. While I remain skeptical of several of his more reactionary arguments (ie. painting BLM with an ungenerously wide brush, persuading active officers to join the anticapitalist cause, etc), Johnson’s materialist analysis calls on us to recenter the role of class in the contemporary practice of policing and incarceration. Johnson’s utilization of “surplus populations” serves as a useful and important category to understand the development of policing in America and how it targets the poor, regardless of skin color. While Johnson’s prescriptions need to go further than merely implementing public works programs to build social democracy, this work still serves as a much-needed counterpoint to the popular liberal accounts of racism, policing, and mass incarceration in American society.