THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#22, JUNE-AUGUST/2025
Cedric Johnson, The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now (London: Verso, 2023).
Black Power Nostalgia Can't Save Us Now would have been a much more befitting title for a relatively recent work which actually takes its name from Cedric Johnson’s 2017 Daniel Singer Millennium Prize Foundation winning essay – “The Panther’s Can't Save Us Now” – that was originally published in the journal Catalyst. For in spite of refreshing contributions from Mia White and Kim Moody that are featured as critical responses to Johnson’s essay, the book gets mired in what can only be described as yet another imperial mainstream Leftist attempt to offhandedly diminish the historical memory of an international Black revolutionary organization that, for all its often misappropriated cultural notoriety, has not functionally existed as a radical force since its infamous split[1] in 1971. Thus, as is quite clear to any discerning reader, and in spite of its disappointing, yet extremely catchy title, Cedric Johnson’s The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now is certainly not about the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.
Instead, after deliberately scapegoating the Black Panther Party as being somehow emblematic of conservative Black Power era cultural nationalist orientations of social activism towards courting corporate patronage and civic assimilation, Johnson superficially engages Black liberation discourse by targeting “Black Lives Matter protests”, “Black Lives Matter activists” and “Black Lives Matter sentiment” with an orthodox Marxist fundamentalism that attempts to veil the racist dehumanization and coloniality[2] that inscribes modernity as imposed by western imperialist power.
As such, although definitively under the commendable flag of class struggle, Johnson’s thought functions as an effective pretext from which to police the Black radical imagination and thus prevent the question of Black liberation from disrupting the epistemic stability, academic prestige and western imperialist utility of cultural nationalist ‘white’ identity politics of class collaboration that help to sustain the labor aristocracy[3] in the Global North.
And yet, what is it about “Black Lives Matter sentiment” that provokes a fully decorated academic like Johnson, the 2008 Jon Garlock Labor Educator of the Year no less, into contributing towards an epistemic policing operation from the respectable confines of a discursive orientation that is often associated with partisan political thought from a paleontologist Left that mockingly disavows “a long and unbroken history of American racism” towards ignoring its own socio-historical overdetermination by settler colonial praxis?[4]
For rather than sociologically grapple with the Raw coloniality of lived Black experience under a western imperialist continuum, Johnson pragmatically appeases the normative gaze of modernity by cleverly dismissing the structural-inert violence against human ‘being’ imposed upon Black community by established power as a mere civic nuisance to the imperial mainstream electorate. “Despite the frequency and power of mass demonstrations, we are no closer to achieving concrete, substantive reform that might curtail police violence and ensure greater democratic accountability.” It’s hard to imagine the sheer historical naivete involved in actually thinking that western imperialist power allows for “substantive reform” that would in any way “curtail police violence” against the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’.
Indeed, an unambiguous genocide is currently being carried out against a racialized population of ascendant humanity in Palestine, by the armed forces of a Zionist settler colony that has literally been directly involved in ongoing training exercises and uncontroversial exchanges in the counterinsurgent tactics and totalitarian expertise of colonial occupation with localized neocolonial police departments in the heart of Empire for decades.[5] For as the Black liberation discourse enunciated by one of those Panthers who can’t save us now discloses, “The police do on the domestic level what the armed forces do on the international level: protect the way of life for those in power. The police patrol the city, cordon off communities, blockade neighborhoods, invade homes, search for that which is hidden. The armed forces patrol the world, invade countries and continents, cordon off nations, blockade islands and whole peoples; they will also overrun villages, neighborhoods, enter homes, huts, caves, searching for that which is hidden. ... They have unlimited firepower. They will use all that is necessary to bring you to your knees. They won't take no for an answer. ... They will not rest until you surrender or are killed. The policeman and soldier will have the last word.”[6]
And this is precisely why “Black Lives Matter sentiment” is so relevant to contemporary socio-historical struggles of human liberation, for the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ introduces an exceptional antagonism against Empire that calls into question the sovereign legitimacy of established power which is based upon “the policeman and the soldier” having “the last word” on the human condition. This is what is at stake when “Black lives matter sentiment” resonates in the streets of western imperialist metropoles across the globe. It is an enunciation of Revolt against the normative gaze of modernity, as imposed by western imperialist power, as ultimately having “the last word” on what it means to be human.
Johnson thus sociologically reimagines neocolonial police violence against the underground of modernity – those whose ‘race’, class and/or nationality places them outside the scope of ethical regard, legal redress and human consideration – not as a structural necessity of Empire, but as the result of a “policing crisis”. Johnson further explains that “if we are going to end this crisis and achieve genuine public safety and peace, the current struggles must grow beyond street demonstrations to build popular consensus and effective power. The road to reaching those ends is currently blocked.” Thus the normative gaze not only eludes the logical scope of his positivism, but steers Johnson away from any capacity to understand that “The road to reaching those ends is” not only just “currently”, but always already “blocked” by design, and thus continuously going nowhere but on a path of subservience to western imperialist power. Is it therefore a “policing crisis” which must be confronted or the very structure of established power itself?
For from the days of the slave patrols to the present, there has never existed a “policing crisis”. Neocolonial police are functioning as precisely and efficiently as they always have, and always will, doing whatever is required of them to structurally sustain and violently maintain the sovereign legitimacy of established power. It is indeed quite fascinating to note that, those same Panthers who obviously can’t save us now, certainly understood that “In their rage against the police, against police brutality, the blacks lose sight to the fundamental reality: that the police are only an instrument for the implementation of the policies of those who make decisions. Police brutality is only one facet of the crystal of terror and oppression. Behind police brutality there is social brutality. ... He is not there on his own. They have all been assigned. They have been told what to do and what not to do. They have also been told what they better not do. So when they continually do something, in every filthy ghetto in this shitty land, it means that they are following orders.”[7]
Rather than patiently sift through the epistemic wreckage from the disaster of history that engulfed the Black Panther Party, and from there, rebuild an insurgent trajectory of radical thought in authentic dialogue with Black liberation discourse to prepare for a steep exacting vertical climb towards the summit of emancipatory praxis in confrontation with Empire. Johnson decides instead to focus on the “Part of the problem” that “resides in the prevailing nostalgia for Black Power militancy and the continued pursuit of modes of black ethnic politics. Such nostalgia is underwritten by the vindicationist posture of recent scholarly writing on the subject and is abetted by the digital afterlife of movement imagery, which preserves the most emotionally impactful elements of the movement but is consumed in ways that forget Black Power’s historical origins and intrinsic limitations.” No doubt, and much to his credit, Johnson just can’t leave well enough alone as he then helpfully discloses the real problem that class fundamentalists have with the question of Black liberation. “At the heart of contemporary organizing is the notion of black exceptionalism. Contemporary Black Lives Matter activists and supporters insist on the uniqueness of the black predicament and on the need for race specific remedies.”
However, is Johnson’s skepticism of “race specific remedies” merited, when such skepticism originates from a Leftist perspective that exists in harmony with the democratic electoral pretense of an advanced neoliberal capitalist society? Especially when the blatant historical materialist record of “race specific remedies” that arise against the structural-inert violence of established power have always been indicative of a universality of democratic progress that is much wider in scope and certainly at times experienced more by social beneficiaries other than the “race specific” community such “remedies” were intended for?
Indeed, what is it about Johnson’s pragmatic political realism that somehow prevents him from advocating for a class consciousness that enhances, rather than competes with, the impact of such “race specific remedies”? And what is it about Johnson’s progressive reformist thought that compels him to proselytize against “race specific remedies” which have ultimately generated more impetus towards “substantive reform that might curtail police violence and ensure greater democratic accountability” than even the class fundamentalism he so dogmatically espouses?
The very scope of Johnson’s thought alludes to a socio-historical phenomenon about which Karl Marx himself harbored no ambiguity. “Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few products to the Old World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world.”[8] It thus appears that Black Panther insurgents, Black power cultural nationalists and “Black Lives Matter activists” are not alone in recognizing “the uniqueness of the black predicament” that arises out of the disaster of history.
As such, the exceptional antagonism of Black liberation speaks to “the heart of contemporary organizing” due to the structural continuity of western imperialist power through the hegemony of advanced neoliberal capitalist globalization. Thus, “the uniqueness of the black predicament” and “the need for race specific remedies” that informs grassroots movements of protest-as-resistance against racist dehumanization and coloniality in the Raw, disclose a lived horizon of universality upon which the very question of human ‘being’ emerges through emancipatory praxis against Empire and thus onto the streets of history.
Almost begrudgingly, Johnson shapes his thought in contention with the fact that grassroots organizing around Black lives matter “forced the undeserved deaths of black civilians into the public conscience and created a crisis of legitimacy for the dominant approaches to urban policing”. Hence Johnson’s declaration that “Black Lives Matter is essentially a militant expression of racial liberalism” constitutes an attempt to overcome a genuine epistemic crisis over the fact that Black liberation inspired movements of ascendant humanity engaged in protest-as-resistance have always been able to exhibit a lived universality on the geohistorical stage by functioning as a galvanizing force, a united front of anti-racist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist orientations towards the possibility of emancipatory praxis in the very heart of Empire informing a worldwide phenomenon of social unrest and historical upheaval.
Therefore, Johnson’s often accurate sociological analysis of ways that advanced neoliberal capitalist globalization proceeds in the face of insurrection-in-itself, whenever such an uprising presents effective challenges to the sovereign legitimacy of established power, is tainted by either his inability or lack of desire to distinguish between attempts by the normative gaze to successfully co-opt, corrupt and disrupt “Black Lives Matter activists”, and the socio-historical integrity of original emancipatory imperatives driving organized grassroots movements of protest-as-resistance against the structural-inert violence of racist dehumanization that is inherent to modernity. Although even Johnson ultimately concedes that “struggles against policing have a much longer lineage” than “the current renewal of anti-racist organizing.”
Indeed, it just so happens that Johnson’s case against “Black Lives Matter sentiment” also comes from a “much longer lineage” of settler colonial orthodoxy as cultural nationalist ‘white’ identity politics laundered through class collaboration as a panacea towards preventing advanced neoliberal capitalist globalization from further undermining the political economy of labor aristocracy in the Global North.[9] Unfortunately for Johnson, the same well-rehearsed analytical grasp of empirical data that informs the academic disciplinary relevance of his sociological work, functions as a constraint upon the discursive freedom needed to engage in radical intellectual endeavor. This has the effect of exposing the reader to a rather vulgar strain of Marxist orthodoxy coupled with an uninspiring oppositional framework of electoral reform as a serviceable theoretical lens that also happens to be in certain, although understated, concordance with the normative gaze of established power.
Oddly enough, Johnson’s thought, unlike most relevant contemporary socialist orientations,[10] adheres to a generic class fundamentalism that still adamantly disputes the Real of racist dehumanization that inscribes modernity as imposed by a western imperialist continuum. “Blacks are disproportionately represented among the victims of arrest-related incidents in most years since the start of this century, but blacks are not the majority of victims.” Johnson thus seeks to epistemologically offset the structural-inert dynamic of objective violence against the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ by appealing to a vast array of sociological data that reveals, unsurprisingly, that in an advanced neoliberal capitalist society where an empirical majority of the population that commits violent crimes also claims ‘white’ identity, the empirical majority of people being killed and incarcerated by neocolonial police also happen to be from that same ‘white’ population. In this instance, Johnson rightfully makes the argument that the question of class cannot be overlooked.
However, once the statistical emphasis moves from raw empirical data to account for the explicit disparity in percentages of innocent people murdered, maimed and incarcerated by an occupying force of neocolonial police, the question of ‘race’ undermines any attempts at suggesting the need for an epistemic monotony of class fundamentalist analysis by disclosing counterinsurgent strategies of biopolitical pacification against a racialized population of ascendant humanity that speak to emancipatory imperatives of anti-racism and anti-imperialism that come to the forefront through Black liberation praxis. Johnson’s thought at times strains to sociologically mystify the Real of neocolonial policing of Black community, only to succumb to disclosing a sobering truth – “If the police constituted an occupying army, then liberating the ghetto from their grip would require an equal magnitude of force and sacrifice.” More importantly, the question Johnson necessarily avoids is that if neocolonial police do not in fact constitute an occupying army, why are they being trained so extensively by an occupying army that has been engaged in unrelenting campaigns of apartheid and genocide against a racialized population of ascendant humanity in Palestine?[11]
To be clear, this is where Johnson’s unfamiliarity with, and/or outright rejection of, Black liberation discourse begins to reveal itself. For as Reginald C. Major reveals, “In reality, the fact of Blackness only serves to concentrate disproportionately within a physical minority the effects of a generalized disregard for human worth. … Similarly, Blacks can be considered that group which can best display to whites the kinds of injustices endemic to the society as a whole. For racism, does not create new brands of injustice; it only blunts the sensitivities of the majority group to the inequities it tolerates as normal.”[12]
Indeed, what Johnson’s impressively quantitative data amassing analytics misses altogether, is that although the empirical majority of people being killed and imprisoned by neocolonial police can be identified by their claim to ‘white’ identity, not a single one of them was actually killed for being identifiably guilty of ‘whiteness’. In other words, the claim to ‘white’ identity does not register as a biopolitical danger within the normative gaze of established power, but rather as a socio-ontological exercise of biopolitical solidarity with a western imperialist continuum. The same cannot be said about a lived experience of coloniality in the Raw, as the neocolonial police murders of Tyron Lewis, Timothy Thomas, Amadou Diallo, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Oscar Grant, Mark Duggan, Sandra Bland, Zyed Benna, Bouna Traore, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Nahel Merzouk testify to the racist dehumanization against which Black liberation praxis introduces an exceptional antagonism against the Real of a western imperialist continuum. This phenomenon allows for a better understanding as to why “the political mobilization in the wake of Floyd’s death was so extensive. It grew on more fertile soil, had more media coverage, and drew on a deeper reservoir of popular support. Even while it jogged memories of the 1992 riots, this uprising was orders of magnitude greater in scope and size. It is widely regarded as the biggest social mobilization since the civil rights movement . . .” And yet, for Johnson, insurrection-in-itself still has no value if it does not contribute towards moving the needle of democratic electoral pretense within the imperial mainstream-as-civil society.
No doubt, the exceptional antagonism of Black liberation can readily translate into an inexhaustible source of insurrection-in-itself at any point in time, as a geohistorical phenomenon of spontaneous rebellion and protest-as-resistance becomes even more explicitly notable, and grows with a more violent social frequency within western imperialist metropoles as extremes of wealth and poverty continue to exacerbate the structural consistency of international underdevelopment and global economic stratification meant to distinguish the imperial mainstream-as-civil society from the underground of modernity.
By de facto ignoring a consistent historical record of settler colonial based cultural nationalist class collaborationist ‘white’ identity politics, The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now finds Johnson at his oppositional best when incredulously implying that a democratic pretense of conscious class struggle within the imperial mainstream-as-civil society can alone overcome the structural-inert violence of racist dehumanization through good faith appeals towards reimagining the social nihilism of contemporary parliamentary politics.
Throughout the book, we are consistently reminded that inherent class divides within Black populations negate the efficacy of grassroots Black community organizing. However, Johnson’s thought borders on the utopian by instead privileging the need for keeping hope alive in a promised future electoral triumph of a progressive majority of imperial mainstream politicians who decide to go against their own material interests and deliberately undermine the economic foundations of advanced neoliberal capitalist globalization by supporting radical legislation to drastically, and without regard to ‘race’, eliminate extremes of wealth and poverty in the settler colonial heart of Empire itself.
Johnson’s thought thus lends itself to a reading that suggests that the only thing standing in the way of the labor aristocracy’s long overdue triumph over advanced neoliberal capitalist globalization, is the purported ascendancy of “Black Lives Matter sentiment” that never loses sight of confronting the western imperialist foundations of racist dehumanization and coloniality in the Raw throughout the Global South which underwrites the very possibility of class struggle itself within the Global North. Again, Marx himself does not share Johnson’s prejudice against the exceptional antagonism of Black liberation, for “in fact the veiled slavery of the wage labourers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal.”[13]
Not surprisingly, the settler colonial legacy[14] of working class collaboration with the ruling power elite towards betraying the socialist emancipatory mission of the proletariat whenever confronted with the systematically violent socially constituted historical realities of ‘race’ and/or ‘nation’, reveals that some of the descendants of those “wage labourers” who often had no serious intention of working towards ending “the unqualified slavery of the New World”, currently share that same attitude towards any contemporary reconfigurations of “unqualified slavery” that constitute the necessary conditions of possibility or “pedestal”, that structurally positions the working class firmly within the imperial mainstream-as-civil society.
No doubt, ‘white’ identity politics of class collaboration speak to a refusal to risk experiencing human subjectivity-as-lived universal amongst the underground of modernity through emancipatory praxis against Empire, for it would require abandoning the comfort of a labor aristocracy that is wedded to a western imperialist continuum, in favor of an unprecedented socio-historical fate as committed to an anti-slavery dialectic of revolt, resistance, struggle and progress[15] in solidarity with racialized populations of the Global South towards constituting an ascendant humanity together through emancipatory praxis.
As such, Black liberation struggles, even those aspects of which the ruling power elite seeks to assimilate in order to pacify the exceptional antagonism against the normative gaze of modernity introduced by the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’, exist in lived tension with working class collaborationist movements that always already enjoy “full recognition within the established terms of liberal democratic capitalism” by virtue of their very existence as guaranteed through ‘white’ identity politics that are so intrinsic to settler colonialism[16] and therefore unreflectively familiar to modernity as imposed by western imperialist power, that the very structure of their cultural nationalist orientation is conveniently obscured through a veneer of universality that tellingly dissipates under the socio-ontological pressures of history.
However, Johnson’s critique is still both urgent and sobering, as he necessarily grapples with obvious and well documented claims that the liberal wing of the ruling power elite has indeed “embraced the language and tone” of anti-racist rhetoric for partisan political gain within the democratic electoral pretense of an advanced neoliberal capitalist society. The question remains as to why Johnson blindly conflates the ruling power elite with grassroots organizers, even when those same elites can never seem to bring themselves to embrace the emancipatory praxis associated with a grassroots movement of protest-as-resistance against the accumulative slaughter of Black people by neocolonial police violence?
Is it a closely guarded secret that ruling power elites have never been above making strategically concerted attempts, often under the very democratic pretense Johnson’s thought frequently valorizes, to assimilate organized efforts of protest-as-resistance with the specific aim of watering down and guiding such social movements towards engaging in protest-as-ritual event to assist in securing structurally unrealizable assurances from established power that the lives of Black people merit human consideration within the normative gaze of a western imperialist continuum?
With this in mind, Johnson’s attempt to reframe the political logic of Bayard Rustin’s[17] colorblind liberal assimilationist strategies as somehow the truly radical way forward comes off as, well, exactly as what it is, strategies towards colorblind liberal assimilation into the imperial mainstream of an advanced neoliberal capitalist society. Indeed, is it odd that Johnson’s Marxist class fundamentalism coalesces with Rustin’s capitalist liberal assimilation in their shared socio-historical desire to dismiss the anti-racist and anti-imperialist prerequisites of Black liberation against Empire?
Indeed, the overwhelming continuity of western imperialist power forms the material basis for the avant-garde conditions of possibility and emancipatory geohistorical significance of Black liberation struggles in our contemporary world. And yet, Black liberation praxis is often regarded by the orthodox Left as an unwelcome guest at the table of neatly prefigured scientific social change, and certainly viewed with contempt for its unruly discursive contributions towards insurgent philosophy that upends conventional paradigms for what passes as radical thought, this, by revealing as it does the racist dehumanization and coloniality in the Raw that structurally positions lived Black experience inside the underground of modernity amongst other racialized populations of the Global South, and therefore outside the imperial mainstream-as-civil society, and as such unworthy of human consideration, ethical regard or legal redress under the normative gaze of a western imperialist continuum.
Thus, to engage in the struggle for Black liberation speaks to disclosing a lived universality of the human condition through the staunch refusal to support an anthropological wager of social reform endorsed by settler colonial leftist orientations that prioritize a labor aristocracy of ‘white’ identifying working class constituents who have historically shown no indication of seriously challenging racist dehumanization domestically or western imperialist power internationally.
No doubt, these same orthodox leftist orientations of the imperial mainstream-as-civil society at times feel compelled to self-righteously police the Black radical imagination when it does not adhere to conventional trajectories of oppositional thought that exist in complete epistemic harmony within the normative gaze of modernity as imposed by a western imperialist continuum. Such orthodox oppositional discourse has no qualms indulging in revolutionary posturing and radical gesturing while trafficking in the democratic pretense of essentially moderate electoral recommendations that ultimately fail to confront Empire and/or disrupt the structural-inert violence and global saturation of its sovereign legitimacy.
From 1967 to 1971 the Black Panther Party for Self Defense was grappling with an emancipatory tension arising from the dire need to engage in oppositional tactics within the imperial mainstream-as-civil society to free imprisoned comrades and attempt to prevent any further politically motivated incarceration of the brothers and sisters who made up the rank and file of the Panthers. However, these same oppositional tactics, though necessary, were severely mediated by the threat that such engagement might disarm their insurgent trajectory of emancipatory praxis against Empire. “For instance, many people confuse the Black Panther Party with the Free Huey Movement or the many other mass activities that we have been forced to indulge in in order to build mass support for our comrades who have gotten captured by the pigs. We are absolutely correct indulging in such mass activity. But we are wrong when we confuse our mass line with our party line.”[18] In other words, as the Black Panther’s Minister of Information, and therefore the main theorist before the COINTELPRO instigated ideological split that shattered the working unity-in-diversity between lumpenproletariat elements of street fighting rebels, community organizers, radical intellectuals, disaffected military veterans, student insurgents, social activists and reformed ex-convicts within the Black Panther Party itself, Eldridge Cleaver thought it imperative that any advocacy of pragmatic reforms within the system must be understood as contributing towards an enunciation of Revolt against established power, rather than comprehending the Panther’s enunciation of Revolt against established power as contributing towards an advocacy of pragmatic reforms within the system of advanced neoliberal capitalist globalization. Unlike the Panthers, however, the political logic of Johnson’s brand of Marxist thought is premised upon the intrinsic value of the latter option.
For the Black Panthers however, it was certainly vital to sustain a radical demarcation against “a lot of confusion over whether we are members of the Working Class” positioned through economic exploitation as an internecine conflict within the imperial mainstream-as-civil society “or whether we are Lumpenproletariat”[19] socio-ontologically displaced and positioned through structural-inert violence and miseducation of soul amongst the underground of modernity. As lumpenproletariat, the wretched of the earth or “the forgotten people at the bottom of society”,[20] and therefore definitively outside of a labor aristocracy constituted through racist dehumanization, settler colonialism and Empire, the Panthers were able to build emancipatory international alliances with, among others, Vietnamese, Cuban, Congolese, Palestinian, Chinese and Algerian brothers and sisters who shared a lived experience of coloniality amongst the underground of modernity in varying historical degrees and socio-ontological positionality to the imperial mainstream. “It is necessary to confront this confusion, because it has a great deal to do with the strategy and tactics that we follow and with our strained relations with the White radicals from the oppressor section of Babylon.”[21]
In light of these “strained relations with the White radicals” from the labor aristocracy, is it fair to ask whether conventional oppositional thought has ever truly forgiven the Black Panther Party’s insurgent orientation of Black liberation discourse for outflanking them from the left in the eyes of history? For as Harold Cruse prophetically discloses, “The revolutionary initiative has passed to the colonial world, and in the United States is passing to the Negro, while Western Marxists theorize, temporize and debate. The success of the colonial and semicolonial revolutions is not now, if it ever was, dependent upon the prior success of the Western proletariat. Indeed, the reverse may now be true; namely, that the success of the latter is aided by the weakening of the imperial outposts of Western capitalism. What is true of the colonial world is also true of the Negro in the United States. Here, the Negro is the leading revolutionary force, independent and ahead of the Marxists in the development of movement towards social change.”[22]
No doubt, by grounding their emancipatory praxis in an unprecedented dynamic theoretical unity of Black liberation discourse as unambiguously anti-racist, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist, the Black Panthers explicitly exposed the longstanding ideological dominance of settler colonial ‘white’ cultural nationalist identity politics within the labor aristocracy as a lived class collaborationist positionality in affirmation of the sovereign legitimacy of western imperialist power.[23]
However, no matter how novel we may consider the Black Panthers’ contributions to Black liberation discourse, what they revealed was by no means the first and/or only time in history that the reactionary phenomenon of a pervasive class collaborationist labor aristocracy of ‘white’ cultural nationalist identity politics that originates in settler colonial praxis was confronted with the introduction of epistemic ruptures against a western imperialist continuum by Revolt enunciated through emancipatory imperatives initiated from the underground of modernity.
Indeed, the exceptional antagonism of Black liberation as disclosed in the discursive movement of insurgent thought in the works of Frederick Douglass[24], Ida B. Wells[25], W.E.B. DuBois[26], Cyril Briggs[27], Aime Cesaire[28], Jean-Paul Sartre[29], Frantz Fanon[30], Malcolm X[31], Harold Cruse[32], Eldridge Cleaver[33], Walter Rodney[34], Herbert Marcuse[35], Huey P. Newton[36], George L. Jackson[37], Angela Y. Davis[38], J. Sakai[39], Jalil A. Muntaqim[40], Russell Maroon Shoatz[41], Safiya Bukhari[42] and Dhoruba Bin Wahad[43], speaks to epistemic ruptures against the normative gaze of modernity that have long shared a critical awareness that so long as the working class engages in ‘white’ identity politics of labor aristocracy, be it either overdetermined in coded racist sentiment or veiled in American exceptionalist cultural nationalism, it can never fulfill the messianic emancipatory expectations that Marx bestowed upon the proletariat as a socio-historical revolutionary force. “The fact that white labor in America today is clearly unsympathetic to the ‘emancipation’ of either Negro workers or the ‘petit bourgeois’ Negroes — or the ‘intellectuals,’ as the Marxists are fond of citing — poses, as was said, a serious dilemma for the revolutionary Marxists. On the other hand, the Negro movement’s rise to the ascendancy as a radical force in America completely upsets Marxian theory and forces the Marxists to adopt momentary tactics which they do not essentially believe in. In short, they become opportunistic.”[44]
As such, Johnson’s highly trumpeted cash prize winning essay in orthodox Marxist analytic historicism speaks to exactly such a discursive opportunism that, in spite of being a direct polemic against “Black Lives Matter activists” and “resurgent Black Lives Matter sentiment”, is strangely, and some would argue, egregiously entitled The Panthers Can't Save Us Now. This notwithstanding the fact that the Black Panther Party was functionally neutralized and violently decimated many decades ago by counterinsurgent incarceration, domestic political assassinations and international isolation brought on by the normalization of diplomatic relations between previously non-aligned ‘Third World’ nation-states and western imperialist power that proved fatal for an emerging insurgent geonational horizon of Black liberation praxis.
To be certain, Johnson’s resentiment against “Black Lives Matter activists” is quite understandable given his class fundamentalist predilections when confronted with the unprecedented capacity of “Black Lives Matter sentiment” to effectively bear a socio-historical burden of lived universality that, according to the political science of his own theoretical devotion to orthodox oppositional frameworks of meaning, should have been the exclusive property of a settler colonial working class that still has tremendous difficulty materializing the universality of its emancipatory prerogatives in history – even and especially amidst all the democratic pretense of electoral possibility and cultural nationalist ‘white’ identity politics within the western imperialist metropoles of advanced neoliberal capitalist globalization.
However, to what do we owe Johnson’s sleight of hand against the Black Panther Party for Self Defense? For Johnson assuredly knows that no organization since, Black or working class, has seriously attempted to disrupt the sovereign legitimacy of established power and thus risk attracting the focus of counterinsurgent persecution by building upon the emancipatory example of the Black Panther Party towards new grassroots formations of Black liberation praxis. Too suggest that “Black Lives Matter activists” are carrying the torch of the Black Panthers, rather than the obvious fact that they are directly taking their cues from the ‘civil rights movement’ is either a disingenuous analytical approach to, or ignorant empirical accounting of, the lived diversity of emancipatory praxis generated by the exceptional antagonism of Black liberation against Empire.
Vivek Chibber does his best in the introduction to explain why the Panthers are even mentioned at all, to say nothing of why they are disrespectfully referenced in the title of the book itself. However, when we read him state without sarcasm that “Johnson's project was, in part, to interrogate the viability of the Panthers as an organizational model and strategic actor”, it raises serious concerns that maybe Chibber accidentally got ahead of himself and is potentially referencing an upcoming future work of Johnson’s, as there is no sign of any interrogation whatsoever of “the viability of the Panthers as an organizational model” within the pages of this book.
Indeed, aside from the discursive ‘sucker punch’ implied in the title, The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now lacks any substantive critique of the Panthers and their singular contributions to Black liberation discourse. Even Chibber begrudgingly cedes the point and admits that “more directly, it was to question the political vision of Black Power writ large, and by extension, to critique the present-day tendency to resurrect it as a model.” In other words, Chibber cleverly attempts to justify the way Johnson brazenly conflates the Black Panther Party’s insurgent orientation with competing conservative visions of Black Power espoused by actual historical rivals, if not downright enemies, of the Panthers, even though Johnson himself comes clean in a previous work, about how “the Black Panther Party acknowledged the importance of building a multiracial, revolutionary popular front” in opposition to “many Black Power advocates” who “viewed race as the paramount basis of political organizing and mobilization.”[45]
To be sure, what “Black Lives Matter activists”, Black Power cultural nationalists and Black Panther insurgents each have in common, is that they all begin from the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ in the face of the global hegemony of a western imperialist continuum. This exceptional antagonism of Black liberation against Empire speaks to “the very fact that the world revolutionary initiative” has “passed from white nations of the capitalist world to non-white nations of the colonial and semi-colonial world” and thus “introduced another factor in revolutionary politics, the racial factor, which the Western Marxists”, in full class fundamentalist splendor like Johnson’s ideological precursor Adolf Reed Jr., “never admitted should be a factor of any importance at all.”[46] However, regardless of whatever “Black Lives Matter activists”, Black Power cultural nationalists and Black Panther insurgents have in common, there are very few similarities in the way their subsequent social movements engaged with the disaster of history.
And yet, although Johnson summons Rustin’s thought often enough, there seems to be a definite ideological hesitance throughout the pages of this work, to even come close to suggesting that “Black Lives Matter activists” actually resemble more in strategies and function the assimilationist ‘civil rights’ movement that Johnson radically approves of, rather than the cultural nationalist Black Power orientations that he liberally does not. Is it because orthodox oppositional working class thought, now seeks to position itself as the true inheritor of past ‘civil rights’ victories, and therefore has to portray ‘civil rights’ struggle in a more radical light, even while simultaneously exposing these victories as historically transient and thus giving itself enough space from which to critique “Black Lives Matter activists” who take on all the risks towards actually manifesting both the power, limitations and methodological continuity of nonviolent civil disobedience in the streets?
All while ‘white’ cultural nationalist working class identity politics prevents established labor from uniting under “Black Lives Matter sentiment” because it would undermine the settler colonial logic of its existence as a labor aristocracy. As Nik Pal Singh discloses, “Racial integration, which emerged to prominence in the era of reform that began under the New Deal, envisioned the disappearance of race as a meaningful political category. Social struggles born of Black communal existence gave the lie to such an easy dichotomy. In doing so, they not only mounted a definitive challenge to white supremacy at home, but also established race as a framework from which to enlarge upon the public meanings of words like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ within the wider world.”[47]
Johnson at times seems embarrassed to admit that “Black Lives Matter activists” certainly have more in common with his own brand of pedestrian working class oppositional thought than either of them have in common with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense’s confrontations with established power? Indeed, even the proposed methodological objectives of Johnson’s orthodox Marxist orientation – “to compel city councils, state legislatures, or Congress to pass … its demands” – are strikingly similar, if not the same as those of the “Black Lives Matter activists” he mercilessly berates for capitulating to the normative gaze of established power.
And yet, how is it that Johnson misses the point of insurrection-in-itself against Empire by somehow imagining that the ascendant humanity that took to the streets of the world in the name of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor actually sought “a viable political approach capable of leveraging mass demonstrations into actual policy outcomes”? It can become unnerving to readers, just how often Johnson effectively obfuscates the distinction between activists engaged in protest-as-ritual event and activists committed to protest-as-resistance. Those who took to the streets through protest-as-resistance were calling into question the sovereign legitimacy of western imperialist power that sanctions the murder of human ‘being’ with impunity, not seeking reforms within the imperial mainstream-as-civil society to make room for the wretched of the earth.
No doubt, only an academic as tremendously gifted as Johnson, whose work betrays a puzzling, though certainly partisan unfamiliarity with the Black liberation discourse of the Panthers, would dare utilize the epistemic contours of scientific socialism as rhetorical theatrics meant to muddy the waters towards associating an inherently nonviolent anti-racist non-profit organization that ultimately co-opted a grassroots movement to make Black lives matter to the imperial mainstream-as-civil society, with the emancipatory praxis of the Black Panther Party who in the face of the consistently sanctioned counterinsurgent repressive gunfire of established power, never hesitated to enunciate Revolt, socio-historically resist and struggle by any means necessary in principled defense of the ascendant humanity of Black community, and thus ultimately attract the unhinged violence and undisguised might of Empire upon them.
Even Johnson doesn’t pretend to want that smoke, which is quite understandable given his stature as a respected academic within the imperial mainstream-as-civil society. What isn’t tolerable, however, is for such blatant disrespect and cavalier disregard for the historical memory of those brothers and sisters of Black Panther Party for Self-Defense who sacrificed their lives and their freedom through Black liberation praxis in the service of ascendant humanity. Perhaps, this analytical and empirical style of casting aspersions helps contribute to the ways by which orthodox class fundamentalists veil the fact “that the white labor movement in the advanced capitalist countries, has, indeed, abandoned the Marxian historical role assigned to it”?[48]
Otherwise, it’s difficult to understand why Johnson thinks the reader is supposed to fall for this false equivalence between Panther insurgents and “Black Lives Matter activists”, just because they are both supposedly examples of a very generously ambiguous characterization of Black Power at its most conservative. For if we are to take Johnson’s political logic seriously, we somehow arrive at a very loose and unbefitting correlation between the insurgent trajectory of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense against Empire and the always already failing assimilationist oriented faction of a movement within the imperial mainstream-as-civil society aiming to hold established power accountable for the lack of human consideration, absence of ethical regard and problematic legal redress with which it consistently violates the ascendant humanity of Black community at home in the Global North and subjugates racialized populations of ascendant humanity abroad in the Global South.
If indeed it is true that, following the lived trajectory of Rustin’s thought, “‘Black Lives Matter is a cry for full recognition within the established terms of liberal democratic capitalism”, Johnson spectacularly fails to convince anyone not already converted to the cultural nationalist ‘white’ identity politics of labor aristocracy, that the socio-historical legacy of the Black Panther Party has anything to do with such a movement? In other words, what is the point of holding the historical memory of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense accountable for the misdeeds of the corporate faction existing amongst “Black Lives Matter activists”? It’s almost as if Johnson is intent on doing a favor to the neoliberal wing of “Black Lives Matter activists” – for by flippantly associating them with the Black Panther Party, they come off as more radical than they actually are.
Indeed, it’s a common socio-historical mistake to uphold the Black Panther Party as emblematic of the Black Power era. The Black Panthers were the insurgent exception amongst a plethora of cultural nationalist orientations with very distinct methods and aims. And some of these same cultural nationalists were always already predisposed to make their peace with Empire so long as the crumbs from the table they shook up through protest-as-ritual event fell into the coffers of their organization.
As such, the relevance and need for Johnson's thoroughgoing class fundamentalist critique of certain incorporations of “Black Lives Matter activists” cannot be ignored. However, right from the outset, Johnson would have been better served by making a clear distinction between the Black Panther Party and the variety of cultural nationalist organizations that populated the Black Power era; and then follow up by making another crucial distinction between the grassroots movement that organized protest-as-resistance against the accumulative slaughter of Black community by neocolonial police violence and the effective corporate takeover of such a powerful movement that reduced it to protest-as-ritual event.
To equate one with the other is self-defeating, even for the express purpose of promulgating an orthodox class fundamentalist approach as the most effective means towards influencing established structures of power to pass progressive legislation in an advanced neoliberal capitalist society. And make no mistake about it, for all his socialist hootin’ and Marxist analytical hollerin’, the implications of Johnson’s thought are electorally reformist and unapologetically dismissive of grassroots socio-historical upheaval that doesn’t care to play the game of partisan politics. “As we should know too well by now, white guilt and black outrage have limited political currency, and neither has ever been a sustainable basis for building the kind of popular and legislative majorities needed to actually contest entrenched power in any meaningful way.”
And yet, is Johnson’s orthodox class fundamentalist logic of cultural nationalist ‘white’ identity politics as settler colonial appeasement through democratic pretense, any more effective at generating “a sustainable basis for building . . . popular and legislative majorities . . . to contest entrenched power” than the neoliberal capitalist laundering of the exceptional antagonism of Black liberation against Empire that he rightfully assails “Black Lives Matter activists” for?
The disconcerting truth is that since the counterinsurgent demise of the Black Panthers and the neutralization of the Black Liberation Army, coupled with the normalization of diplomatic relations between Empire and non-aligned nations, all radical intellectuals, not only those Cruse once chided as “Western Marxists”, are responsible for the way by which to “theorize, temporize and debate”[49] as a means of working towards, or working against, the epistemic conditions of possibility for a Return of emancipatory praxis to history through engagements of egalitarian geonational insurrection-for-itself against a western imperialist continuum.
Clearly, both Chibber and Johnson have undialectically responded to the disaster of history in all its contingency by refusing to embrace Black liberation, even when it materializes as a “leading revolutionary force, independent and ahead of the Marxists in the development of movement towards social change”, which thus creates the conditions of possibility for a neoliberal capitalist faction of “Black Lives Matter activists” to take advantage as they effectively attempt to reroute the exceptional antagonism of Black liberation from fueling protest-as-resistance against the structural-inert violence of neo-colonial police, and into legitimizing protest-as-ritual event as catharsis for the imperial mainstream-as-civil society. What would class struggle mediated by the exceptional antagonism of Black liberation against Empire look like in our contemporary socio-historical situation? Tellingly, why are neoliberal “Black Lives Matter activists” and orthodox class fundamentalists like Johnson both blind to the emancipatory potentialities of such a question?
And yet, you will be hard pressed to find any sober radical intellectual who disagrees with Johnson’s prognosis that “Despite the frequency and power of mass demonstrations, we are no closer to achieving concrete, substantive reform that might curtail police violence and ensure greater democratic accountability.” However, Johnson’s thought exhibits somewhat of an epistemic paucity that doesn’t lend itself towards exploring more of an engagement with “Black Lives Matter activists” towards potentially building upon “Black Lives Matter sentiment” with more of an appropriate class conscious edge in anticipation of further social crises and historical upheavals erupting around the racist dehumanization that inscribes modernity with structural-inert violence against the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’. “We should certainly condemn and fight racism in all its manifestations. However, in political life, we should also proceed from a careful investigation of the felt needs, shifting political positions, and expressed interests of blacks and all other Americans, rather than assuming black exceptionalism — that African Americans constitute a discrete political constituency who can never find common cause with nonblacks.” Here we find Johnson swinging at shadows, for the truth of “black exceptionalism” is “that African Americans certainly constitute a discrete political constituency who can” always already “find common cause with nonblacks” through grassroots emancipatory praxis.
This “black exceptionalism”, as Johnson caustically frames it in a discursive attempt to subordinate the exceptional antagonism of Black liberation against Empire to a mere epiphenomenon of class conflict within the imperial mainstream-as-civil society, originates not in some kind of nostalgic Black Power chauvinism of “Black Lives Matter activists”, but in the social dynamics of western imperialist power, colonization and severe materialist geohistorical consequences of direct human slavery. It is thus difficult to justify Johnson’s continued adherence to a dated political orientation grounded in the fundamentalist belief that only a return to a class based Marxist orthodoxy that allows for a more complete assimilation within the imperial mainstream-as-civil society can save the Left. And by promoting some kind of pure Idealist anti-capitalist orientation socio-historically divorced from anti-racism and anti-imperialism, what kind of a Left is Johnson really advocating?
The question that weighs heavily upon a work like this is as such – what happens when discursive priorities shift, from regulatory concerns over some mythical orthodox Leftist integrity, to emancipatory imperatives of socio-historical struggle in the service of ascendant humanity? For what seems to preoccupy Johnson’s critical attention is not the constantly encroaching reach of advanced neoliberal capitalist globalization upon our common humanity and how to resist it, but the further contamination of orthodox Leftist thought by Black liberation discourse and how to dismiss it. Does this not constitute a “terrible evasion, an attempt to cling to an ideological faith even when actual social conditions require a different approach”?
As such, Black liberation discourse does not in any way, shape or form claim “antiracism is . . . a different sort of egalitarian alternative to class politics”. Rather, Black liberation discourse looks askance at any suggestion of “class politics” that is not explicitly anti-racist, anti-colonialist or anti-imperialist, as indistinguishable from a class collaborationist cultural nationalist ‘white’ identity politics inherent to settler-colonial praxis. Working class ‘identity’ politics is thus not “a different sort of egalitarian alternative” to “antiracism” but is unambiguously about the settler colonial logic of de-emphasizing racist dehumanization precisely because it is socio-historically inscribed into modernity through structural-inert violence and miseducation of soul as imposed by western imperialist power and could thus possibly upset deeply ingrained feelings of universality that are mistakenly regarded as exclusive to ‘white’ identifying working class masses.
Unfortunately, for anyone who recognizes the sheer contingency of the disaster that is history, and hence doesn’t share Johnson’s doctrinal view that history submits to the same inexorable deterministic materialist laws that were once thought to govern the universe itself before the advent of quantum physics[50] transformed such a view into the modern equivalent of a de facto belief that the world is flat, there is no compelling reason why should we accept Johnson’s hyperbolic claims that “Black Lives Matter sentiment is essentially a militant expression of racial liberalism”, rather than obviously recognize that yes, “Black Lives Matter sentiment” can certainly be misdirected into a “militant expression of racial liberalism”, just like working class sentiment can indeed be easily misdirected into a fascist expression of ‘white’ cultural nationalism.[51]
The question that Johnson avoids is this – exactly what does it say about established geohistorical structures of western imperialist power when, even the mere progressively gradual and cautiously incremental fight for “racial liberalism” violently disrupts the normative gaze of modernity as a socio-ontologically “militant expression” of Black liberation praxis akin to the emancipatory geonational trajectory and genuine egalitarian socialist commitments of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense?
Which is why for Johnson to go so far as to claim that “Such expressions are not a threat but rather a bulwark to the neoliberal project that has obliterated the social wage, gutted public sector employment and worker pensions, undermined collective bargaining and union power, and rolled out an expansive carceral apparatus”, willfully ignores the vital importance of just who is making such claims that Black lives matter. And just how much do such claims distract from the Real of cultural nationalist ‘white’ identity politics that are still unimpeachably vital to the social workings of democratic pretense and historical dynamics of settler colonial class collaboration inherent to the imperial mainstream-as-civil society, thus sustaining both constituencies of conservative and liberal wings of the ruling power elite?
Johnson rightfully ridicules the liberal wing of the ruling power elite who were literally compelled to bend the knee and feign solidarity to “Black Lives Matter sentiment” in the face of global tides of insurrection-in-itself while “Draped in Ghanaian kente cloth, a fabric popularized by Afrocentric nationalists” as ideological cover for their complete lack of emancipatory will to confront the accumulative slaughter of Black people by neocolonial police violence in any meaningful way. And yet, the fact that Johnson states unequivocally that “that moment was a triumph for Black Lives Matter activists”, certainly begs the question – just which class of “Black Lives Matter activists” has he been in dialogue with?
What about the everyday people and insurgent lumpenproletariat who regard the neocolonial police precinct of an occupying force associated with the murder of George Floyd burning to the ground as a “triumph” indicative of a socio-historical phenomenon of insurrection-in-itself that engulfed western imperialist metropoles across the world as the response of an ascendant humanity to the call of the disaster of history? Johnson’s thought is just not relevant to those for whom the very assertion of their human agency in resistance to established power is translated consistently as irrational animalistic barbaric savagery by the normative gaze of modernity.
Thus, the sheer regulatory petulance of Johnson’s discursive attempt to police the Black radical imagination from the imperial mainstream Left reaches its zenith when he loudly proclaims, in concert with other labor aristocracy collaborating luminaries like Adolf Reed Jr., “that Black Lives Matter and cognate notions like New Jim Crow are empirically and analytically wrong and advance an equally wrongheaded set of solutions.”
And yet, how is it possible for Johnson and Reed Jr. to religiously know with such empirical authority and analytical certainty, that they indeed possess proper “solutions” that are not as “equally wrongheaded” as the “set of solutions” they claim to be holding “Black Lives Matter activists” accountable for? Rather, by withdrawing from the struggle for Black liberation on class fundamentalist grounds to appease the labor aristocracy, Johnson and Reed Jr. foreclose the possibility of actual social progress which can only arise through a geohistorical process of grassroots struggle together. For no amount of logical positivism can hide the fact that “Black Lives Matter protests” speak to something greater than even working class solidarity in the streets across racial lines while confronting the sovereign legitimacy of neocolonial police violence that mediates lived Black experience within the context of a western imperialist continuum.
As such, it is not so clear why Johnson, as he has been consistently prone to do in previous works, deliberately rejects an epistemic framework of Black liberation discourse that would allow him to fathom precisely how “Black Lives Matter sentiment” speaks to the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ that constitutes an exceptional antagonism against a western imperialist continuum, and therefore cannot be allowed to go unchecked by the normative gaze of established power because it threatens to engulf western imperialist metropoles across the globe in the flames of insurrection-in-itself.
Sure, Johnson can attempt to convince himself all he wants that “Such expressions are not a threat but rather a bulwark to the neoliberal project that has obliterated the social wage, gutted public sector employment and worker pensions, undermined collective bargaining and union power, and rolled out an expansive carceral apparatus.” For however much such rhetoric provides discursive cover for the inherent class collaborationism of settler colonial praxis amongst the labor aristocracy, slandering “Black Lives Matter sentiment” only serves to further alienate those brothers and sisters who comprise an insurgent lumpenproletariat that torched an imperial garrison of neocolonial police violence with no intent whatsoever to somehow influence the establishment culture of electoral democratic pretense.
Confronting the perpetual brutality and structural injustice of an occupying power by burning down a neocolonial police precinct, isn’t carried out to convince self-satisfied imperial mainstream policy makers of anything; the armed garrisons of Empire who brutally police the underground of modernity catch fire because they are responsible for the racist dehumanizing suppression of ascendant humanity through the totalitarian surveillance, mass incarceration and accumulative slaughter of Black community.
To this end, The Panthers Can't Save Us Now, can at times come off like a pedestrian sociological survey that attempts to roll a massive boulder of class fundamentalist leaning statistical data up against the mountain surface of a western imperialist continuum, just to convince readers that if geohistorical insurrection-in-itself does not lead to more political participation in the very system of oppression that it unambiguously calls into question, then it is pointless. Basically, Johnson’s thought implies that fighting against a system of oppression requires first accepting the parameters of engagement set forth by that same system of oppression itself.
It doesn’t take long for any reader to realize that Johnson himself suffers from a severe case of leftist nostalgia for a deterministic materialism that provides a simple causality of answers generated through a class fundamentalism that commits to preserving the epistemic hierarchy of this cardinal aspect of Marxist orthodoxy, even at the expense of a more pronounced emancipatory relevance of class consciousness when stretched, transformed and decolonized in dialogue with Black liberation discourse as intrinsically anti-racist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist.
In a very real sense, Johnson’s work can be read as an epistemic lament over the contemporary fate of orthodox Marxist fundamentalist approaches that remain trapped within an abusive marriage to contemporary working class orientations of thought that are allowed to proliferate within the labor aristocracy of the Global North because they are often hypocritically anti-racist, academically anti-capitalist and insignificantly anti-imperialist.
As such, Johnson’s writings suggest the need to smooth out the anti-racist and anti-imperialist edges of contemporary socio-historical struggle towards preserving a cultural nationalist purity of orthodox class fundamentalist reform, that in effect, provides some much needed discursive cover for a conservative American exceptionalist reality of labor aristocracy within the imperial mainstream-as-civil society, allowing ‘white’ working class identity politics to attempt and politically re-center itself, above and beyond the geonational horizon of social justice, as the end all be all of the Black radical imagination, even while constantly wavering and hesitating in the face of “an unprecedented wave of protests that had already swept more than 500 US towns and cities in all fifty states, along with scores of demonstrations of solidarity globally”. The source of this hesitance is located in the overwhelming contingency of history that is being engaged in, in the streets, and which rarely conforms to preordained sociologically approved criteria of emancipatory legitimacy by established power. Imagine what could have been accomplished had labor organized nationwide strikes in the spirit of “Black Lives Matter sentiment” and in correlation with “Black Lives Matter protests”? Now imagine what organized labor could achieve with nationwide strikes augmented by “Black Lives Matter activists” in the streets?
Indeed, much to Johnson’s chagrin, this “unprecedented wave of protests” stands associated, not with the response of organized labor to economic exploitation, but with a growing, intermittent and continuing socio-historical phenomenon of insurrection-in-itself as a lived response of ascendant humanity to an ongoing racist dehumanization that is inscribed into modernity itself through western imperialist power as it was once constituted through direct human slavery, and now reveals itself through more contemporary reconfigurations as counterinsurgent mass incarceration, totalitarian surveillance culture and the accumulative neocolonial police slaughter of Black community. And what Johnson seems to have forgotten, is that wherever and whenever Black community is threatened by the structural-inert violence of racist dehumanizing oppression, the universality of humanity itself is being called into question.
Building working class solidarity across racial lines isn’t accomplished by policing the Black radical imagination from the Left in deference to long entrenched settler colonial orientations of ‘white’ identity politics and cultural nationalist paradigms of American exceptionalism, but rather by embracing Black liberation praxis whenever and wherever it arises at the forefront of geohistorical struggles for social justice in our contemporary world. Otherwise, “The revolutionary is entombed, walled off from our own cultural and social world, no longer a part of our sense of living political possibilities.”
As such, does “Black Lives Matter sentiment” really conceal “substantive political differences among protestors and within broader US publics” or by drawing its sustenance from the exceptional antagonism of Black liberation, is it providing an emancipatory imperative from which to transcend those “substantive political differences” towards emancipatory praxis against Empire? Indeed, this question transcends the democratic electoral pretense of the imperial mainstream-as-civil society and must be addressed by everyday people in the streets. For a socialism bereft of anti-racism and anti-imperialism no longer speaks to the emancipatory needs of the proletariat of the world, but rather lobbies on behalf of the material interests of the labor aristocracy.
[1] After 1971, the Black Panther Party split into two main orientations over the future direction of Black liberation praxis. The conservative faction included brothers and sisters like Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Elaine Brown, David Hilliard and advocated authoritarian leadership, social democratic electoral reforms and Black capitalism. The radical faction included brothers and sisters like Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, Geronimo Ji-Jaga Pratt, Donald Cox, Connie Matthews, Sekou Odinga, Assata Shakur, Dhoruba Bin Wahad and advocated decentralized command, grassroots democratic socialism and armed struggle. Donald Cox, “The Split”, Liberation, Imagination & the Black Panther Party, edited by Kathleen Cleaver & George Katsiaficas, (New York: Routledge, 2001) pp.118-122. Joshua Bloom & Waldo E. Martin, Jr, Black Against Empire, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013) pp.341-371.
[2] Anibal Quijano, Foundational Essays On the Coloniality of Power, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024).
[3] “Before I turn to the agricultural labourers, I shall just show, by one example, how crises have an impact even on the best paid section of the working class, on its aristocracy.” Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I., (London: Penguin Classics,1867, 1990) p.822. “In addition to these national-war engendering jealousies there is a more subtle movement arising from the attempt to unite labor and capital in worldwide freebooting. Democracy in economic organization, while an acknowledged ideal, is today working itself out by admitting to a share in the spoils of capital only the aristocracy of labor . . . The resultant jealousies and bitter hatreds tend continually to fester along the color line. We must fight the Chinese, the laborer argues, or the Chinese will take our bread and butter. We must keep the Negroes in their places, or Negroes will take our jobs. All over the world there leaps to articulate speech and read action that singular assumption that if white men do not throttle colored men, then China, India and Africa will do to Europe what Europe has done and seeks to do to them. ”. W.E.B. DuBois, “The African Roots of the War” (1914), included in W.E.B. DuBois Speaks, (New York: Pathfinder, 1970) p.252-253. “On the other hand, the industrial workers cannot accomplish their epoch-making mission of emancipating mankind from the yoke of capital and from wars if they confine themselves to their narrow craft, or trade interests, and smugly restrict themselves to attaining an improvement in their own conditions, which may sometimes be tolerable in the petty-bourgeois sense. This is exactly what happens to the ‘labour aristocracy’ of many advanced countries, who constitute the core of the so-called socialist parties of the Second International; they are actually the bitter enemies and betrayers of socialism, petty-bourgeois chauvinists and agents of the bourgeoisie within the working-class movement.” V.I. Lenin, “Preliminary Draft Theses on the Agrarian Question for the Second Congress of the Communist International” (1920) included in Lenin Collected Works Vol.31, 4th English Edition (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965) pp. 152-164. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jun/x01.htm.
[4] J. Sakai, Settlers, (Montreal, Canada: Kersplebedeb Publishing, 1983, 2014). Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018).
[5] Mershiha Gadzo, “How the US and Israel exchange tactics in violence and control”, Al Jazeera, June 12, 2020 – https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/6/12/how-the-us-and-israel-exchange-tactics-in-violence-and-control,
Philissa Cramer, “ADL considered scrapping its US police training trips to Israel, decided not to”, The Times of Israel, March 18, 2022 – https://www.timesofisrael.com/adl-considered-scrapping-its-us-police-training-trips-to-israel-but-decided-not-to/,
[6] Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, “Domestic Law and International Order”, (New York: Delta Book, 1968, 1991) pp.156-157.
[7] Cleaver, Soul on Ice, pp.160-161.
[8] Marx continues on – “Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. Without slavery, North America, the most progressive nation, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Only wipe North America off the map and you will get anarchy, the complete decay of trade and modern civilization. But to do away with slavery would be to wipe America off the map. Being an economic category, slavery has existed in all nations since the beginning of the world. All that modern nations have achieved is to disguise slavery at home and import it openly into the New World.” Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1847, 1995) pp.121-2.
[9] “On the one hand, there is the tendency of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists to convert a handful of very rich and privileged nations into “eternal” parasites on the body of the rest of mankind, to “rest on the laurels” of the exploitation of Negroes, Indians, etc., keeping them in subjection with the aid of the excellent weapons of extermination provided by modern militarism. On the other hand, there is the tendency of the masses, who are more oppressed than before and who bear the whole brunt of imperialist wars, to cast off this yoke and to overthrow the bourgeoisie. It is in the struggle between these two tendencies that the history of the labour movement will now inevitably develop. For the first tendency is not accidental; it is “substantiated” economically. In all countries the bourgeoisie has already begotten, fostered and secured for itself “bourgeois labour parties” of social-chauvinists. The difference between a definitely formed party, like Bissolati’s in Italy, for example, which is fully social-imperialist, and, say, the semi-formed near-party of the Potresovs, Gvozdyovs, Bulkins, Chkheidzes, Skobelevs and Co., is an immaterial difference. The important thing is that, economically, the desertion of a stratum of the labour aristocracy to the bourgeoisie has matured and become an accomplished fact; and this economic fact, this shift in class relations, will find political form, in one shape or another, without any particular ‘difficulty’.” V.I. Lenin, “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism” (1916), Lenin Collected Works Vol.23 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964) pp.105-120. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/oct/x01.htm.
[10] Ahmed Shawki, Black Liberation and Socialism, (Chicago: Haymarket Books,2006). Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation, (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016).
[11] Edith Garwood, “With Whom are Many U.S. Police Departments Training? With a Chronic Human Rights Violator – Israel”, Amnesty International, Aug 25, 2016 – https://www.amnestyusa.org/with-whom-are-many-u-s-police-departments-training-with-a-chronic-human-rights-violator-israel/,
Ilise Behshushan Cohen, Azadeh Shahshahani, “U.S. Police are Being Trained by Israel—And Communities of Color Are Paying the Price”, The Progressive Magazine, October 7, 2019 – https://progressive.org/latest/us-police-trained-by-israel-communities-of-color-paying-price-shahshahani-cohen-191007/,
[12] Reginald C. Major, The Panther is a Black Cat, (Baltimore, MD: Black Classics Press, 1971) pp.1-2.
[13] Karl Marx, Capital Vol.1, (New York: Penguin Classics, 1867, 1990) p.925.
[14] Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018).
[15] Frederick Douglass, Anti-Slavery Dialectic: A Frederick Douglass Anthology, (New York: Cannae Press, 2025).
[16] J. Sakai, Settlers, (Montreal, Canada: Kersplebedeb Publishing, 1983, 2014).
[17] “The visionary tactician of the civil rights movement, Bayard Rustin, argued that the essentially revolutionary character of black struggle was manifested by the fact that it had done more to "democratize life for whites than for Negroes" in the United States. Rustin believed this assured its future success, since "economic interests were more fundamental than prejudice" and poor whites realized the "loss of social security" was not worth "a slap at the Negro." He chastised the "new militants" and advocates of black power for being hyperbolic moralists rather than political realists. Reflecting on Lyndon Johnson's landslide defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, Rustin argued that the political turning point was at hand, that time was ripe for complete victory. He went on to envision a future in which the majority of blacks and poor whites would reconstitute the Democratic Party (especially in the South), leaving the Republican Party as the "party of economic conservatives and refugee racists.” There is something to he said for Rustin's argument, particularly about the overall democratizing impact of the movement. It would be difficult, however, to imagine an analysis that was more breathtakingly wrong in its conclusions. By fantasizing that the U.S. political economy could simply be lifted out of its racial matrix, Rustin underestimated the cultural and economic investment in white supremacy, for example, among middle- and lower-middle-class homeowners, police, firefighters, and construction workers, as well as rural Southerners, gated-community dwellers, and others whose very market or social locations were quite precisely defined against black encroachment. He therefore did not foresee (or refused to see) the ease with which race (and its codes) could (and would) be used once again to drive a wedge between people at, or near, the bottom of society. Appeals to "law and order," promised crackdowns on criminals and welfare cheats, and moral panics about black teen pregnancy, wilding, gang violence, racial quotas, and falling standards have from the 1968 election onward been part of a concerted (and highly successful) strategy of making the Republican Party the majority party in the United States, refugee racists and all. Equally significant, Rustin underestimated how the imperial and neocolonial dimensions of U.S. capitalism, so powerfully on display in the war in Vietnam in the late 1960s (and in the war in Iraq today), both relied upon and began to reconstitute the very logic of an antagonistic, racialized world that was supposedly being dismantled. This was not simply an issue of "guns or butter." Rather, it was an issue, to paraphrase Lillian Mobely, of who was being prepared to live and who was being prepared to die (both at home and abroad). The racialization of the world in this sense needs to be understood as one of the supreme, constituent acts of modern power. It has helped to create and re-create "caesuras" in human populations at both national and global scales that have been crucial to the political management of populations by nation-states ever since. To understand this, we need to recognize the technology of race as something more than skin color or biophysical essence, but precisely as those historic repertoires and cultural, spatial, and signifying systems that stigmatize and depreciate one form of humanity for the purposes of another's health, development, safety, profit, and depreciate one for of humanity for the purposes of another’s health, development, safety, profit and pleasure.” Nikhil Pal Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) pp.222-223.
[18] Eldridge Cleaver, “On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party”, Target Zero, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1969, 2006) pp.172.
[19] Cleaver, “On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party”, Target Zero, p.173.
[20] Cleaver, p.173.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution?, (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1968) p.75.
[23] “The eclipse of Communist Party Marxism went hand in hand with the decline of labor union radicalism in America. White labor (as differentiated from black labor) went conservative, pro-capitalist and strongly anti-Negro. This created a serious and a practically insoluble dilemma for the Marxist movement because the theory and practice of revolutionary Marxism in America is based on the assumption that white labor, both organized and unorganized, must be a radical, anti-capitalist force in America and must form an alliance with Negroes for the liberation of both labor and the Negro from capitalist exploitation. No matter what the facts of life reveal to the contrary, no matter what the Marxists say or do in terms of momentary tactics, this is what the Marxists believe, and must believe or cease functioning as Marxists.” Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution?, p.140.
“Some so-called Marxist-Leninists will attack us for what we have to say, but that is a good thing and not a bad thing because some people call themselves Marxist-Leninists who are downright enemies of Black people. Later for them. We want them to step boldly forward, as they will do — blinded by their own stupidity and racist arrogance — that it will be easier for us to deal with them in the future.” Eldridge Cleaver, “On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party”, Target Zero, p.173.
[24] Frederick Douglass, Anti-Slavery Dialectic: A Frederick Douglass Anthology, (New York: Cannae Press, 2025).
[25] Ida B. Wells, The Light of Truth, (New York: Penguin Classics, 2014).
[26] W.E.B. DuBois, Writings, (New York: Library of America, 1986).
[27] Cyril Briggs, “The Negro Liberation Movement”, The Toiler, December 10, 1921. Published under his pen name C. Lorenzo.
[28] Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1955, 1972).
[29] Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol.1, (London: Verso, 1960, 1991).
[30] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Press, 1961, 1963).
[31] Malcolm X, The Final Speeches, (New York: Pathfinder, 1965, 1992).
[32] Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution? (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1968).
[33] Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, (New York: Delta Book, 1968, 1991).
[34] Walter Rodney, Groundings with My Brothers, (London: Verso, 1969, 2019).
[35] Herbert Marcuse, Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
[36] Huey P. Newton, To Die For the People, (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1972, 2009).
[37] George L. Jackson, Blood in My Eye, (Baltimore, MD: Black Classics Press, 1972, 1990).
[38] Angela Y. Davis, Angela Davis Reader, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998).
[39] J. Sakai, Settlers, (Montreal, Canada: Kersplebedeb Publishing, 1983, 2014).
[40] Jalil A. Muntaqim, We Are Our Own Liberators: Selected Prison Writings, (Portland, OR: Arissa Media Group, 2000, 2010).
[41] Russell Maroon Shoatz, Maroon the Implacable: Collected Writings, (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013).
[42] Safiya Bukhari, The War Before, (New York: Feminist Press, 2010).
[43] Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Revolution in These Times, (New York: Common Notions, 2025).
[44] Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution?, p.140.
[45] Cedric Johnson, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) p.86.
[46] Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution?, p.143.
[47] Nik Pal Singh, Black is a Country, p.215.
[48] Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution?, p.148.
[49] Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution?, p.75.
[50] David Bohm, Quantum Physics, (New York: Dover, 1951, 1989).
[51] Devin Z. Shaw, Genealogies of Antifascism, (Montreal, Canada: Kersplebedeb, 2024).
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