
Adolph Reed Jr.
(Photo by Dan Creighton)
Recently three blips popped up on my radar screen that reminded me it was time once again to look at the tortured race/class debate that dominates, if not haunts, the American left.
On June 5th, Philly DSA issued a statement on George Floyd’s killing that epitomized the class-reductionism that has festered in the group for some time now. So much static was generated over the statement, especially on social media, that they issued a Maoist-style self-criticism3 days later:
On Friday, Philly DSA posted a statement on our website titled “Against Police Violence and Austerity, For Worker Power”. In doing so, we made a mistake that we deeply regret. Our statement did not sufficiently address the disproportionate impact of police violence on people of color, specifically Black Americans, and the significant anti-racist character of the protests. George Floyd’s life mattered, and all Black lives matter.
Along the same lines, Cedric Johnson, a black professor and class reductionist par excellence, wrote an article for Nonsite titled “The Triumph of Black Lives Matter and Neoliberal Redemption”. It asserted, “This moment has been a triumph for Black Lives Matter activists, but once the plumes of tear gas dissipate and compassion fatigue sets in, the real beneficiaries will likely be the neoliberal Democrats and the capitalist blocs they serve.” Johnson also reminded his readers that the silent majority in the black community is pro-cop:
While a slim majority of Americans now believe police are more likely to use excessive force against blacks than other groups, millions more do not share the most militant calls to defund or dismantle police departments voiced by some activists. Most Americans are upset by police killings, but they also want more effective policing. Over the last five years, satisfaction with police has strengthened among all ethnic and racial groups, including African Americans (from 50% “at least somewhat satisfied” in 2015 to 72% now).
To bolster his arguments, Johnson cited an article by Adolph Reed Jr. titled “How Racial Disparity Does Not Help Make Sense of Patterns of Police Violence” that also appeared on Nonsite, where Reed serves on the editorial board alongside fellow class-reductionist Walter Benn Michaels. Like Reed and Johnson, Michaels (who is white) sees any pro-black movements as a particularism that ultimately supports the goals of the capitalist liberal elite.
Reed’s article crows triumphantly over his revelation that white people constitute the majority of victims of police shootings, even if blacks are disproportionately affected. He cites a Washington Post article that reveals that the states with the highest rates of police homicide per million of population are among the whitest in the country. The only problem with his data-driven analysis is that it doesn’t account for how and why these homicides take place. Would Derek Chauvin have kept his knee on George Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes if he was white? Or would Timothy Loehmann, a white cop, have shot Tamir Rice, a 12-year old black boy playing with a toy pistol in a Cleveland park? To even pose the question renders you brain-dead, no matter your academic credentials. For the class-reductionist left, suggesting that cops single out blacks for shooting first and asking questions later puts you in the same category as the kente-wearing Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer.
Not only does Reed turn a cold shoulder to the protests against George Floyd’s murder, he probably is grumbling at all the statues now being overturned. Writing for the Lens, a New Orleans ‘zine, in 2017, he urged readers not to be duped: “The clamor to take down the monuments falls short of a truly radical movement.” Among the statues he would defend against the unruly mob was Andrew Jackson, the slave-owner and Cherokee mass murderer whose portrait adorns Donald Trump’s Oval Office:
Already the group has over-reached in its tone-deaf demand that the statue of Andrew Jackson be removed from Jackson Square because Jackson was a slaveholder and architect of genocidal suppression of Native Americans. The Jackson statue against the backdrop of St. Louis Cathedral is one of the city’s most iconic, internationally known images, and Jackson, never really my cup of tea, fought to save the young republic and extend its reach, not secede from it in an act of treason. Indeed, when the city was under Union occupation, Gen. Benjamin F. Butler emblazoned the Jackson statue with the legend, “The Union Must and Shall Be Preserved,” thus rendering it an emblem of Confederate defeat.
Never his cup of tea? WTF? Sure, he fought to defend the young republic, whatever that means. As for his being on the side of preserving the Union, it should never be forgotten that Jackson was the first DP president. And what does Reed mean by extending the reach of the U.S.A.? Does this refer to Jackson’s ability to wrest control of land owned by American Indians? After the War of 1812 ended, General Jackson was directed to secure the southern borders of the United States. He used his military muscle to get the Creeks, Chickasaws, Cherokees and Choctaws to sign treaties ceding huge tracts of land to the U.S., thus leaving them confined in much smaller territories. The only other academic I’ve run into who has this unaccountable devotion to Jackson is Sean Wilentz, the only opponent of the 1619 Project that not even WSWS would touch with a ten-foot pole.
To avoid being co-opted by the liberal elite, it is supposedly necessary to abandon “anti-racism” and advance economic demands that can unite black and white workers. In putting this position forward, Reed and Johnson are continuing with a very long ideological tradition going back to Eugene V. Debs. In his 1905 “The Negro and the Class Struggle”, he wrote, “We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races.” In distinction to the SP, the CPUSA did see race and class as interlinked, even if in practice it fell short such as in opposing A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington during WWII.
However, by the early 60s, it too began to sound a lot like Debs. When Malcolm X began to develop a following, James E. Jackson, a black CP leader, ripped into him in Political Affairs in 1963:
The Muslim organization, in general, and Malcolm X, in particular, are ultra-reactionary forces operating in the orbit of the Negro people’s movement, with the strategic assignment to sow ideological confusion, to dissipate the organization energies of the Negro masses, to promote divisionism within the Negro movement, and to alienate the Negro movement from fraternal ties with and support of comparably deprived or democratically inclined white masses.
The Muslim movement objectively serves the interests of the main enemies of the cause of Negro freedom and equality.
The Trotskyist movement saw Malcolm much more positively, even if he was still under the sway of his sect’s obscurantism. This should not come as a great surprise since Leon Trotsky spoke favorably of Marcus Garvey in his discussions with American co-thinkers, including CLR James.
Some SWP members felt the same way as James E. Jackson. Tim Wolforth and James Robertson regarded black nationalism as divisive, so much so that this would convince the two to start their own groups based on the mechanical black-white unity defended by Debs and Jackson.
Wolforth’s group folded long ago but much of his thinking is preserved in the World Socialist Web Site, the online newspaper of the Socialist Equality Party that has been on a campaign against the 1619 Project launched by the NY Times last August. In addition to providing a space for civil war historians appalled by the idea that slavery was a major factor in black oppression today, the WSWS allowed Adolph Reed Jr. to recite some of his talking points. He disparaged those who are dwell on killer-cops and racial profiling. Despite his willingness to trash the 1619 Project, he failed to understand that its basic premise is correct, namely that this was the year that slavery first appeared in this country. He says, “Those first 20 people weren’t slaves. There wasn’t chattel slavery yet in British North America.” Implicit in these words is the notion that they were indentured servants, when in fact they were nothing of the sort. Whites who became indentured servants signed a contract under duress, usually to pay off a debt. But the Africans were simply kidnapped by Portuguese, who then ended up on a privateer’s ship alongside such genuine indentured servants.
I’ll give Jacobin credit for publishing a critique of Reed in 2016 written by Paul Heideman and Jonah Birch. In defending BLM against the charge that it is a tool of Nancy Pelosi, et al, they point to its success in changing young peoples’ minds: “At this point, BLM has majority support among young white Americans.” Only 4 years later, it now has the support of a majority of American voters by a 28-point margin, up from a 17-point margin before the most recent wave of protests began. One can imagine Reed and Johnson sitting in the chairs at home watching all these protests and gnashing their teeth over such a wasted effort. They’d be better off, I guess, ringing doorbells for the latest round of “democratic socialists” as the next election approaches.
Reed and Johnson get more articles published in Jacobin than any other black people, as far as I can tell. It is clear that Bhaskar Sunkara endorses their analysis, which coincides with his own social democratic gradualism. That affinity also exists between the Philly DSA and Reed, who developed ties with the chapter’s leadership when he was still teaching at the U. of Pennsylvania. One might hope that the self-criticism alluded to at the beginning of the article shows that the material reality of people in the streets in numbers might have changed their minds.
Over the past year or so, Jacobin has become more and more stuck in the rut of electoral politics. With the collapse of the ISO, there are fewer more openly revolutionary articles in its pages or on the website. And for those ex-ISOers who still have an in with Sunkara, there must have been an understanding that spouting the old-school opposition to the Democratic Party was a no-no. Ex-ISOer Paul Heideman, who once skewered illusions in the DP in Jacobin, is now just as vehemently a Sandernista ideologue.
It will be interesting to see whether Sanders’s swan dive into the Biden election campaign, as well as his opposition to police defunding, will have an impact on rank-and-file DSA’ers and/or Jacobin subscribers. As of now, Reed is on record as opposed to Biden, having co-authored a Guardian op-ed with Cornel West titled “Joe Biden wants us to forget his past. We won’t”.
Yet, he was not above urging a vote for someone cut from the same cloth as Biden, once upon a time. In an April 28, 2008 Progressive article that starts off with the ostensibly insurrectionary-minded title of “Obama No”, we learn that it could have just as easily been titled “Hillary Yes”:
I’m hardly a Clinton fan. I’m on record in last November’s issue as saying that I’d rather sit out the election entirely than vote for either her or Obama. At this point, though, I’ve decided that she’s the lesser evil in the Democratic race, for the following reasons: 1) Obama’s empty claims to being a candidate of progressive change and to embodying a “movement” that exists only as a brand will dissolve into disillusionment in either a failed campaign against McCain or an Obama Presidency that continues the politics he’s practiced his entire career; 2) his horribly opportunistic approach to the issues bearing on inequality—in which he tosses behaviorist rhetoric to the right and little more than calls to celebrate his success to blacks—stands to pollute debate about racial injustice whether he wins or loses the Presidency; 3) he can’t beat McCain in November.
Eight years later, Reed made another pitch for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in a July 7th radio interview on Doug Henwood’s “Behind the News”:
DH: The movement that has catalyzed with the Sanders campaign, how can we keep it from dissipating as November approaches. “Trump is so horrible, you know, hold your nose and vote for Hillary. etc.” There’s a great possibility for induced amnesia to set in. How do we fight that?
AR: What one does in November lies in a different dimension from the movement building concerns. From a pragmatic point of view there really is nothing else to do except to vote for Hillary. But that only becomes a big to-do if you have an exaggerated sense of the significance of your own vote anyway.
DH: People get so obsessed with something that takes five minutes to do in early November. It’s really remarkable.
AR: Absolutely. On some level it only comes down to a matter of taste and existential choice. I could vote for Gore in 2000. I lived in Connecticut and it was easy not to vote for Gore in 2000 and to vote for Ralph. I’d argue that this is a different moment and especially with Republican control of Congress-even if they lose the Senate which is a long shot . . . we’re going to be in the same position on the Wednesday after the election than we were on the Monday before the election. The real challenge is to try to disconnect the organizing from it being driven by the election cycle.
What was it that Molotov said to reporters after signing a non-aggression pact with the Nazis? Oh, I remember: “fascism is a matter of taste”. As far as existential choices are concerned, I would say that celibacy is an existential choice. Or assisted suicide. Or masturbating with a vacuum cleaner. That sort of thing, if you gather my drift.