“Abolishing the Conditions…through Fractures in the State”
Reflections on Two Big Ideas from Cedric Johnson’s After Black Lives Matter
Joseph Ramsey (University of Massachusetts-Boston)
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
-Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”
O Blacksmith's Hammer,
How hot and hard must you pound
To change this cold wind?
-Richard Wright, Haiku #195
Cedric Johnson’s dogma-busting intervention and sweeping conjunctural analysis After Black Lives Matter (ABLM) concludes with a broad call to “Abolish the Conditions,” outlining what he calls an “abolition of a different sort” (341). Different, that is, from the abolitionism prominent in recent years that aims to straightaway abolish the police, abolish prisons, and abolish the carceral state. As much as he appreciates the revolutionary aspirations of this tendency (340), and though he supports many of the harm-reduction reforms achieved by the broader BLM movement, Johnson calls us, going forward, to work to abolish not police and prisons (let alone the state) per se, but rather the underlying economic conditions that render oppressive forms of policing and incarceration possible and systemically ‘necessary’ in the first place. In short, he argues, to make genuine progress towards anything like abolishing oppressive policing will require a broader movement challenging the parameters of contemporary capitalism.[1] How to conceive of a viable strategy for accomplishing such a monumental task?
Crucially, in this effort, Johnson underscores the need to establish universal economic security for all as the necessary basis for establishing a less unjust form of public safety. And so, he calls us to Abolish unemployment. Abolish poverty. Abolish starvation wages. Abolish exclusion from quality education and healthcare. Abolish the social relations that make human beings disposable—radically shifting the terrain on which policing takes place. Tall tasks, to be sure, even in the best of times…let alone in the Spring of 2026, when even meager existing federal and state social programs are under frontal attack.
Nonetheless, as a main path towards this transformation, Johnson proposes large-scale state intervention: a Universal Jobs program, anchored in expanded government-funded public works,reminiscent of the 1930s New Deal.[2] Over and above large-scale FDR-style infrastructure construction, Johnson imagines projects aimed especially at serving people’s neglected basic needs and reconstructing a sense of civic care and solidarity, outside of market relations, and against the privatizing tides of neoliberalism.[3] Anchored in local democratic and participatory planning processes, such projects could help transform our contemporary cities—where Johnson reasonably sees better prospects for progressive change than elsewhere in U.S. politics at present[4]— possibly setting a new course for the country as a whole. Johnson further calls for a massive redistribution of social resources, one that extends far beyond cutting police or prison budgets, to other more costly but less visible ways that wealth from public coffers gets siphoned into the private hands of the rich—from subsidies for private stadiums, to massive tax breaks and land grants provided to finance, real estate, and insurance (FIRE) and other commercial interests.[5]
Johnson’s state-centered approach would shift the social terrain of policing in at least two ways: First, it promises to abolish the immediate material precarity that characterizes life for those confined to the ‘surplus population’ of a capitalist system that increasingly treats them as disposable and that compels many un- or under-employed people to rely on ‘underground economies’ and ‘survival crimes’ to subsist—where they are most likely to become the targets of aggressive policing.[6] And second, it may help mitigate the psychological and social insecurity and anti-urban attitudes that make wide sectors of the U.S. population —including sectors of the working and ‘middle’ classes, across race and ethnicity—susceptible to genuine (as well as demagogue-inflated) fears of crime, and thus to support the ‘stabilizing’ force of existing or expanded police power, despite its abuses.
Here Johnson builds on prophetic views from a black revolutionary thinker generally neglected within the BLM-era black radical renaissance: James Boggs. Writing in the early days of automation from de-industrializing Detroit, “Boggs foresaw how structural unemployment would precipitate a popular reactionary backlash and the rise of the New Right. ‘As automation spreads, it will intensify the crises of capitalism and sharpen the conflicts among various sectors of the population,’ Boggs wrote, ‘particularly between those working and those not working, those paying taxes and those not paying taxes’” (135). Anticipating our contemporary politics of right-wing resentment, Boggs also provides Johnson with a powerful idea of what may be needed to break out of this trap: “A new Declaration of Independence to fit the new Age of Abundance” (134), one that would move us beyond the “dogma of work,” the trap of seeing capitalist “productivity” as indicative of human worth, and the belief that “job training” will be enough to stave off the structural tendency of capital to render labor superfluous. Viewing racialized urban unemployed populations of the 1950s and 60s as “mine canaries” for a growing system-wide crisis that would soon afflict the working-class as a whole, Boggs calls us to “struggle for a society where there are no displaced persons” (135).[7]
Ironically—or rather, dialectically—Johnson’s central strategic proposal for overcoming the ‘dogma of work’ is not to abandon the virtue of labor as key means to human fulfillment, (an anti-work view Johnson sharply criticizes[8]) but rather to call for a radically rejuvenated public sector to step in where capitalist firms cannot, providing socially useful jobs outside the dictates of the market, to all people—as a universal right. In this way, state action focused on connecting people with the wide array of socially useful, but not necessarily immediately profit-generating, work—work that needsdoing—might help overcome the divisive politics that pits the “productive” against the “unproductive,” the “makers” vs. the “takers,” a structural intra-working-class divide that ever-fuels the noxious racialized divisions (“white” vs. “black” and “native” vs. “foreigner’” shaping US politics—including around policing—to this very day.[9]
Johnson proposes a robust range of jobs that could enhance urban social use-values, increasing public safety, reducing inequalities, and improving quality of life: from extending rail transit systems to underserved areas, to clearing ice from subway platforms, to employing groups of community members as roving transit safety teams during off peak hours, to mobile healthcare units that could check in on the vulnerable and the isolated or elderly, especially during heat waves, to literacy programs, DIY Saturday schools, green energy home upgrades and much more. The very title of his chapter “Whose Streets?” takes a common anti-police protest chant (“Whose Streets?” “Our Streets!”) and puts it to work with concrete proposals to materially transform public life on those streets (256-266).
In a way, then, Johnson’s stance could be seen as an abolitionism through state intervention, rather than abolition aimed against the state itself.
*
Can this call for “Abolishing the conditions” be simply added to the existing #BLM-era call to “Abolish the Police” as a kind of socio-economic supplement? Johnson suggests it’s not such an easy fit, despite the apparent overlap. He criticizes the more common “Defund the Police”demand as often narrow and misleading, counterproductive, socially naïve, and even symptomatically neoliberal. It’s often misleading because it tends to suggest that the funds to economically secure precarious communities are there for the taking in the form of the police or prison budgets themselves, when in reality, even the complete appropriation of these police budgets would amount to just a drop in the bucket of the social investment needed to provide true socio-economic stability for at-risk populations. To be sure: this bigger bucket is an investment that can and must be made. But the political and the budgetary approach to realizing such investment is only barely advanced by even the most robust ‘defund the police’ proposal, never mind the half measures that have actually been achieved. As Johnson puts it, provocative as it is, “Defund the Police” generally represents “a weak call for redistribution” (344).[10]
Perhaps more controversially, Johnson argues that the demand to defund the police can be immediately counterproductive insofar as depriving existing, sometimes already strapped police departments of operating funds in impoverished communities can make those police forces more, not less, violent in their interactions with the people, as well as less able to respond to legitimate public safety needs. Overworked and underpaid officers, working solo shifts with insufficient training, do not therefore become gentler or kinder cops on the street—quite the contrary.[11] Johnson also points out the social naïveté in thinking that the vacuum created by a retreat of publicly funded policing from struggling urban areas will not, under prevailing neoliberal social conditions, draw in other forms of organized violence, whether criminal predation—which then sews the seeds of ‘law and order’ political backlash—or even less-accountable unofficial forms of “policing,” such as fully privatized armed security and vigilantism: guns—and perhaps now armed AI drones—for hire. Johnson provocatively goes so far as to suggest that some “defund-ers” and police abolitionists may reproduce the logic of neoliberal privatization, attacking police unions, endorsing public sector job cuts, and undermining rather than engaging the (admittedly insufficient) means of public accountability and influence over policing that do still exist.[12] From Johnson’s analysis: calling for more public accountability or community control of police, along with the demilitarization of policing makes a lot more sense than flat calls to Defund or Abolish.
Fundamentally, Johnson takes issue with root assumptions informing the Abolish the Police approach, including the basically anarchist idea that the very notion of a state enforcing law and order using coercive force is always necessarily oppressive or unjust, and the related idea that contemporary policing is inherently a white supremacist enterprise, akin to and descended from “slave patrols” of the 19th century. On the first point, Johnson reminds us that some degree of organized state coercion is essential to the functioning of any society, period. The more relevant question, then, is not whether or not we will have police, but what type of policing and what sorts of laws are to be enacted and enforced? To what authority and political processes will these state forces be accountable, and whose interests will they serve? Even under the most democratic of socialisms, he reminds us, the need to enforce the law, protect individual rights, adjudicate conflicts, and hold violators accountable will persist…that is, if such socialist efforts are not to be undermined completely.
Central to Johnson’s approach here is a refusal of what he calls the “head in the sand” mentality of some anti-police activists, who act as though the violence on American streets starts and ends with the cops themselves, or that police never function as a force to prevent or reduce harm in our communities. Any politics concerned with truly reducing violence in American society, he insists, needs to recognize not only the horrifying phenomenon of police brutality, but also the broader social violence of crime (violent crime, property crime, as well as “white-collar” crime) that harms especially poor and working-class people daily, and which, politically speaking, provides the alibi for opportunistic authoritarian politicians and increasingly punitive policing regimes that exert more and more control over the general population in the name of public “safety” and “security.” [13] It is in this sense that Johnson characterizes some of these “radical” tendencies around BLM, notwithstanding their “revolutionary” self-image, as “left in form, right in substance.”
On the second point, policing in the United States, as Johnson reviews in sweeping detail, fundamentally needs to be understood as a historically contingent and politically contested project, tasked above all, to be sure, with protecting propertied interests and with managing a capital-labor class relationship as it shifts and changes over time, but not simply or primarily a racist institution, and not outside of the shifts of democratic politics or beyond the reach of popular legislative reform. Policing is not, in his view, defined by a transhistorical expression of white supremacy, and the popular BLM and left-academic shorthand that characterizes contemporary policing as the continuation and the descendants of “slave catchers” or a “New Jim Crow” can be deeply misleading. [14] A narrow framing of over-policing as primarily a matter of systemic racism tends to leave activists with a limited sense of the problem, as well as a limited sense of the potential cross-racial, and cross-regional alliances necessary to address it.[15]
To refute this prevalent misunderstanding, Johnson reviews basic US history, including 19th century Abolitionism, post-Civil War Reconstruction, and the twentieth century Civil Rights Movement. The history here challenges common assumptions of the “Abolish the Police” movement, namely the idea that in the U.S. state power and police or military force has been an uninterrupted and unequivocal enforcer of white supremacy and social inequality, immune to progressive popular influences. The original Abolitionists, after all, ultimately called on the federal government to use its massive military policing power to abolish chattel slavery, through war, enforcing executive orders, legislation, and constitutional amendment. Similarly, the remarkable, if short-lived, egalitarian progress that was made possible under post-Civil War Reconstruction occurred largely when the former Confederacy was under federal military-police occupation. [16] Less directly, Johnson reviews how the non-violent direct action of the mid-twentieth century Civil Rights Movement, though aimed at dramatizing injustice and provoking the moral conscience of the nation, ultimately drew much of its historical force by calling on the federal government to deploy its military police power to defend black people’s constitutional rights, from the school to the voting booth.[17]
Again, this wasn’t abolitionism aimed at the state—at least not all of it—but abolition assisted by the state. It involved leveraging one part of the state apparatus against another.
*
Moving back to the present, Johnson also raises the thorny question of the widespread popular legitimacy of the police in the United States, a sobering recognition that raises real challenges for any anti-policing politics that aspires to make lasting social change through democratic means. How to win progressive legislative majorities to rein in police power in a country that is still—notwithstanding widespread horror at brutal police actions like the recorded killing of George Floyd—largely very “pro-police”? Here, Johnson forges a needle that needs to be threaded through creative and strategic organizing: We need to maintain a political and ethical critique of the oppressive actions and capital-defending systemic function of the police, without dismissing or abandoning the need and the possibility of forming coalitions with and helping to eventually win over crucial sectors of the “pro-policing” camp, and also without reducing the actually existing people working in policing (over 1.3 million plus as many more in '“private security”) to the worst of the system that employs them.
Turning to more recent events, Johnson revisits the lead-up and aftermath of the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, reminding readers (back in 2023) of how desirable it would have been to have a more robust policing and carceral response to the wannabe coup-maestro Trump and the deluded, treasonous mob he helped congeal and catalyze. The immediate problem in this case was not too aggressive law enforcement, but the lack of it. [18] The return of Trump 2.0 and this dangerous new escalation of MAGA authoritarian nationalism has understandably prompted new rounds of despair and denunciation of the U.S. government “as such,” amplifying the view of American policing as fundamentally racist, white supremacist, and oppressive to the core—as if Trump, Stephen Miller, and the masked agents of ICE merely reveal the “deeper truth” of US state and society. [19] Certainly, the open bigotry, xenophobia, and blatant unchecked ignorance of Trump himself in his first term made Black Lives Matter (and Afropessimist) views about the irredeemably racist nature of the country ring plausible to many at the time.[20]
Now, in this second Trump regime, with its more focused and escalating violations of long-standing constitutional rights to free speech and basic due process, as well as the blatant attacks on international students, pro-Palestine and anti-genocide protesters, and immigrant working-class communities, not to mention scientific research, public education, academic freedom, labor unions, investigative journalism, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive rights, and more…It’s all too easy for the shock and awe of this moment to lead us into earnest but mistaken conclusions: namely, that the state apparatus in America is nothing more than a solid and expanding wall of white supremacy and systemic oppression. But falling back into such sweeping generalization at this admittedly dangerous historical juncture would be a grave mistake. As Johnson frequently reminds us: What captures our emotions does not always capture the realities of what we are up against: what galvanizes may mystify. [21]
One danger here is that, by imagining policing as an essentially static—oppressive and white supremacist—project, effectively removed from the tectonic plates and shifting sands of capitalist history and ideological struggle, we lose sight of potential openings and fractures that may be of absolutely crucial political and ethical importance. Based in such a broad essentializing of the state as racist, it becomes too easy to mistakenly declare not only that “All Cops Are Bastards” (ACAB), but that anyone who appears supportive of police, or even skeptical of anti-police efforts, is themselves a racist, or more charitably, a deluded victim of white supremacist ideology.[22] At the same time—and this is crucial—seeing the entire system of courts, laws, police, and punishment as one uninterrupted transhistorical and omnipotent Wall of White Supremacy, makes it difficult or impossible to discern the internal contradictions, cracks, and contingencies that may be opening up in and around the state itself, including within the ranks of the people who work to enforce its laws.
Which brings us to arguably Johnson’s most dogma-defying Big Idea of all: his proposal that the Left should begin a serious discussion about Organizing the Police.
To frame this provocation, Johnson offers a historical account of the rapidly degrading working conditions faced by many police officers under neoliberalism, and he sharpens the point with a dystopic futurist interlude, imagining what the not-so-distant AI-powered future of robotic policing may look like. He then broaches a question that violates a long-standing American radical taboo: How might the left organize with cops? Johnson provides no blueprint for how this can be done, and no doubt many readers will remain skeptical. [23] Nonetheless, he usefully suggests that, despite the oppressive system-sustaining function that policing plays under capitalism, the deeply alienating and psychologically harmful conditions faced by many who work as police officers—in combination with the working-class origins and public service motives of many who enter the profession—could and sometimes does make them more open to broad class-based appeals and progressive politics than prevailing ACAB-type dogma allows us to consider. [24] Johnson thus problematizes the widespread left belief that all police are definitional “enemies of the working-class,” particularly in this historical period where police are increasingly tasked with serving as an (inadequate) replacement for an austerity-starved social state, and where more cops are being driven to take their own lives by suicide than ever before. [25] Johnson suggests, at a minimum, that the contemporary left has not adequately thought through the shifting conjuncture with respect to this high-stakes question. More, to be sure, needs to be discussed and debated, not just in terms of whether or not left organizing of police is conceivable—Johnson makes a compelling case that it is—but in terms of the practical and strategic question of what that might actually look like, and what strategic barriers stand in its way.
To suggest what might be lost by refusing to (re)consider such a question, Johnson draws us back to the unlikely leading edge of left organizing 50 years ago: the GI Coffeehouse Movement of the Vietnam War era, a project that brought civilian as well as military veteran anti-war activists to meet and mingle with active-duty enlisted troops near stationed US bases. Though too often forgotten today, the GI anti-war movement, which those coffeehouses helped to incubate (alongside a massive underground network of anti-war newspapers), played a strategically crucial, even heroic, role in opposing the genocidal American onslaught against the people of Southeast Asia. This occurred both through public truth-telling that helped shift civilian hearts and minds even in ‘middle America,’ and by fomenting outright resistance and refusal within the ranks of the U.S. military itself, to the point that the top military brass feared losing control of its war machine altogether.[26] Could something similar be accomplished with police today?
Admittedly, the late 1960s was a time when millions were entering the US military as conscripted draftees, not volunteers, a not insignificant qualification that demands further consideration. Contemporary police officers, though they may be “conscripted by class” (324) to some extent, remain “voluntary” recruits—as, for better and for worse, do contemporary US military personnel. Nonetheless, at a minimum, by taking policing serious as degraded labor under neoliberal conditions, Johnson helps us detect, beneath the officially trumpeted harmony, a hidden dissonance between the oppressive system-function of contemporary police work under capitalism and the lived human experiences, as well as the professed values these uniformed professionals have sworn to “protect and serve.” Such a recognition of contingency and contradiction opens the possibility and raises the challenge—without, to be sure, any rosy guarantees—of left- and labor-organizing breakthroughs in what might seem the least likely, but most consequential, of places: across the “thin blue line” itself. [27]
Framing the left’s mission broadly as “abolishing the conditions” of capitalist domination rather than “abolishing the police” straightaway, matters, for more reasons than this short essay can review. But surely one such reason is that the abolitionist frame we use affects whether or not such a vital mission as winning people employed by the repressive state apparatus away from their oligarchic overlords appears as possible or desirable at all, not to mention how successful such organizing will be at reaching its potential audience. [28] Among this audience, as of this writing, we must include reluctant U.S. military personnel and state National Guard members—many of them drawn from immigrant working-class families—now being federalized, often over the objections of local and state government officials, and sent to American cities as anti-protest police or as back-up for seemingly lawless masked ICE kidnappers. [29]
At a minimum, Johnson cautions us against approaches that would tend to shut down even the possibility of such left- and labor-openings across the civilian-police line. One need not view left police organizing as a top priority to agree that remaining open and alert to such possibilities is more important than performing militancy through sloganeering denunciation. Following Carl Rosen, Johnson suggests “that if the conversation is less about police personnel and more about a system that has been structured to condone bad behavior and cover-ups” then the possibility for finding allies is considerably improved (314).
Cedric Johnson in After Black Lives Matter calls us to move beyond the blinders of influential left and BLM dogma to imagine—and to investigate concretely and locally—the possibilities for emergent fractures within the existing the state, including both its legislative and its repressive wings. He pushes us to take seriously the sort of broad majoritarian multi-racial coalition-building that will be needed if we are to win lasting progressive change, and yet never loses sight of the transformative goal of overcoming the exploitative class relations of capitalism. In this pragmatic-yet-radical spirit, Johnson prompts us to ask important and often-tabooed questions: What might a GI Coffeehouse movement aimed at connecting with alienated and disaffected police officers (or military personnel federalized for police work) look like today? Where are the political openings—and what are the methods—that could make such organizing work viable? And how might a robust universalist vision of a world beyond human disposability, anchored in a commitment to a massive public jobs program, help broaden our progressive coalition to include many now written off as hopeless bystanders or irredeemable enemies?
Notes
[1] As Johnson writes: “There can be no real solution to the policing crisis without addressing [the] underlying and fundamental problem of surplus population. And there can be no real resolution of the surplus population problem within the parameters of capitalist political economy” (179).
[2] Johnson builds on the work of the late Marxist scholar Frederic Jameson, with his unabashedly utopian call for universal conscription as a means of radically outflanking the political economy of capital. See Jameson’s book An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army (Verso, 2016). My own early discussion of Jameson’s shocking proposal, which Fred offered early on as a talk at the Marxist Literary Group conference at Ohio State University, was published in 2013 in Socialism & Democracy here “Re-imagining the Place and Time of Communism Today”: https://sdonline.org/issue/63/re-imagining-place-and-time-communism-today-between-hardt%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Cnew-love%E2%80%9D-and-jameson%E2%80%99s-
[3] How so such a universal public works program could build upon and help nourish existing and expanding decentralized mutual aid networks in communities is worth further discussion.
[4] The recent victory of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral race dramatically embodies such a progressive political opening.
[5] Expanded progressive taxation would also need to be part of the mix. See for instance recent successful efforts to pass the “Millionaire’s Tax” in Massachusetts: https://massbudget.org/fairshare/
[6] Such a move would also improve the bargaining power of those workers already employed, by reducing the ‘reserve army’ of unemployed labor available for capital to replace them.
[7] It hardly needs to be stated in 2025 how the rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence intensifies this dynamic. For a brief but incisive recent analysis of global capitalism’s increasingly brutal surplus population management strategies see William I. Robinson, “The Third Worldization of the Global Working Class” in ZNet, July 2025: https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-thirdworldization-of-the-global-working-class/ .
[8] See Johnson’s discussions on pages 257-8.
[9] Not to mention immigration politics. Such a universal jobs program would also need to fundamentally abolish the criminalization of millions of existing workers in the U.S. as “illegals,” including a large-scale amnesty or path to citizenship that would raise up from the criminalized ‘underground’ all the human labor upon which this society depends—though this takes us beyond Johnson’s argument in ABLM.
[10] Nonetheless, one might see some of the gains made by “Defund the Police” as beachheads for a future redistribution efforts. Johnson reviews a number of the more promising Defund/Invest proposals, including the collectively authored report Freedom the Thrive: Reimagining Public Safety and Security in Our Communities, and “The Counter-CAPs Report: The Community Engagement Arm of the Police State” produced by the Chicago-based group We Charge Genocide. (See pages 251-254.) It should be noted that prominent abolitionist thinkers, from Angela Davis to Ruth Wilson Gilmore have been clear that ‘defunding’ of existing institutions must be paired with a radical (re)building of counter-institutions to address social problems in a non-carceral manner.
[11] It should be noted that, Johnson’s argument is not for continuing to fully fund all existing police operations, but merely an argument to make distinctions between the different police departments and different programs within police departments. Surely some police programs do deserve a radical funding rollback if not complete elimination, whereas others—contrary to the logic of ‘defund’—may need and deserve more, not less, funding in pursuit of the goals of equality and social justice.
[12] For a discussion of some of the contradictions around prevalent criticisms of police unions, see Benjamin Levin’s essay in The Columbia Law Review. “What’s Wrong with Police Unions?”: https://columbialawreview.org/content/whats-wrong-with-police-unions/. For a critique of police unions, see https://theflaw.org/articles/police-unions-and-the-labor-movement/.
[13] According to the Center for Disease Control, for example, in 2023, the U.S. experienced over 22,830 homicides per year, with 17,927 from firearms: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm. As Johnson also discusses, black community organizations and black political leaders have often been part of the push to support increased policing as a way of combatting rising crime. Johnson cites quite shocking homicide statistics from his city of Chicago to underscore the point that fear of crime can be based in genuine threats to public safety.
[14] To start with the most basic fact: by far the largest racial demographic of those killed by police in the United States each year remains white people. According to the Washington Post ten-year study of police killings in the U.S. between 2015 and 2024, of the 10,429 people known to be killed by police over that period: 4659 were (non-Hispanic) White, 2486 Black, 1717 Hispanic, and 380 “Other or Multi.” The disproportionate rate at which Black people are killed (6.0 per million per year) vs. White people (2.3 per million per year), though important, does not alter this under-appreciated statistical reality. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/. I review some of these neglected but essential statistical realities in my essay “Don’t Judge an Issue By its Cover: 12 Important Points from Jacobin’s Latest Issue ‘Reduce the Crime Rate’” https://multiracialunity.org/2021/11/27/dont-judge-an-issue-just-by-its-cover-12-important-points-from-jacobins-latest-issue-reduce-the-crime-rate/ . See Jacobin’s “Reduce the Crime Rate” issue here: https://jacobin.com/issue/lower-the-crime-rate .
[15] A less visible but important portion of killings by police occur in rural communities. As explored by a 2025 Marshall Project report: “Officers in rural areas fatally shot about 1,200 people from 2015 through 2020, while in cities there were at least 2,100 such deaths, according to the news organizations’ analysis of data compiled by The Washington Post; no comprehensive government database exists.” “White people make up the rural majority in nearly every state, and two-thirds of the people fatally shot by law enforcement in rural areas across the country were White, the data analysis shows; about 10% were Black. (In cities, 37% were Black and 31% White.)” https://www.themarshallproject.org/2021/08/13/shooting-first-and-asking-questions-later
[16] As a relevant historiographical side note, the recent surge of interest in W.E.B. DuBois’ 1935 tour de force Black Reconstruction in America tends to amplify DuBois’ argument about the role played by the self-activity of enslaved black people of the South, whose collective withdrawal of labor from the Confederacy DuBois provocatively casts as America’s first “General Strike,” but neglect DuBois’ extensive detailing of the crucial and complex political struggles going on inside the U.S. Congress as well as within the Executive Administrations of both Abraham Lincoln and his successor Andrew Johnson, developments which, by DuBois’ own account, were often decisive and characterized by extensive contingencies, contending political lines, and competing leadership. The methodological as well as political ‘inside-outside strategy’ that DuBois exemplifies in Black Reconstruction risks getting flattened in the contemporary passion for unadulterated black radical agency from below.
[17] A key qualifying question: To what degree was the Civil Rights Movement leverage over the Democratic-led Federal Government in the 1960s made possible by the international geopolitical situation of that time, namely the existence of actually existing socialist and Communist movements within the context of global decolonization? Would the Civil Rights protests have been able to compel federal action against Southern white supremacist state and local officials to the degree they did without the pressure of the Non-Aligned Movement and the threat of developing nations “going communist”? What are the implications of no longer having such international left pressure today?
[18] Johnson also looks at the dangers of lawlessness at the other end of the political spectrum, following the George Floyd rebellions of 2020, detailing the way CHOP, the cop-free zones established by BLM/Defund/Abolish the Police activists in Seattle, Washington led to very serious problems.
[19] For a compelling analysis of the breakdown of MAGA’s neo-fascist elements, see the recent work of John Bellamy Foster in Monthly Review: https://monthlyreview.org/2025/05/01/the-maga-ideology-and-the-trump-regime/ and https://monthlyreview.org/2025/06/01/the-trump-doctrine-and-the-new-maga-imperialism/ .
[20] On the limits of Afro-pessimism, see Loic Wacquant, “Afropessimism’s Radical Abdication” in the Nov/Dec. 2023 New Left Review: https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii144/articles/loic-wacquant-afropessimism-s-radical-abdication.
[21] I hasten to also add, however: The process of mobilization itself also can educate and clarify. Once mobilized, people may be able to expand their knowledge and understanding well beyond the initial slogans, banners, and hashtags that shook them into motion. What may have allowed or limited such mass clarification through mobilization in the case of #BlackLivesMatter is beyond the scope of this short essay, but is something Johnson’s ABLM speaks to as well.
[22] Particularly grating for Johnson is the way that the New Deal itself is often dismissed as little more than an expression of white supremacy, a tendentious generalization that then functions to fuel suspicion against large-scale universal state economic intervention.
[23] The documented voting patterns of police officers and recent political endorsements of leading police unions both create basis for skepticism, with studies of police voting showing strong Republican leanings and widespread support for Donald J. Trump. That said, Johnson does survey a range of promising, if limited, attempts to organize police around progressive or anti-racist goals, and he reviews the thoughts of labor leader Carl Rosen on the potential for leveraging the common interests that police unions share with other public sector workers as a means of opening space for discussions about reducing police brutality. (See pages 311-322)
[24] In Johnson’s own words, he aims not to suggest any ready-made model for left organizing of police, but “rather to illustrate that policing has been a site of struggle, albeit episodic, that the most progressive segments of police have spoken against oppressive practices and openly clashed with conservative unions and entrenched top brass, and that policing as an institution is fraught with all the class contradictions and ideological contestation that course through society writ large. Rather than some monolith as imagined of the type imagine in ACAB sloganeering, the institution of policing is constituted by flesh-and-blood labor, often drawn from the most dispossessed sectors of the working class, who carry myriad motivations for becoming officers, and have a vast array of experiences of the carceral apparatus. While it is common for many on the left to cling to ‘enemies of the workers’ condemnations as a way of signaling the depth of their political commitments, there have been other moments when left activists sought to engage those laborers who constitute the state’s repressive arm.” (322). Johnson also reminds us that reactionary views and political complicity can be found predominating other sectors of the U.S. working-class (“Teamsters vs. Turtles” etc.), which is decidedly not a reason to give up on organizing those workers, who remain exploited and oppressed within the existing system.
[25] As Johnson notes: More US police officers take their own lives by suicide each year than die by violence or by car accidents while on duty, combined. Johnson also turns to neglected writings of well-known figures, including James Baldwin, who reflected on the alienating conditions of Harlem’s police in some of his less-famous essays and also Frantz Fanon, who, in the generally neglected final chapter Wretched of the Earth, ruminates on the extensive traumas inflicted on not only the colonized Algerian natives but on members of the repressive French occupier army as well. The occupiers here emerge as both perpetrators and victims of occupation.
[26] For a revealing institutional self-assessment of the threat to U.S. military operations posed by the GI antiwar movement, see Col. Robert D. Heinl, “The Collapse of the Armed Forces,” in Armed Forces Journal, June, 1971: https://archive.org/details/1971-robert-heinl-the-collapse-of-the-armed-forces. For a compelling participant history of this GI resistance movement, I recommend David Zeiger’s excellent 2005 documentary film Sir! No, Sir!, featuring testimonials from movement activists. It can be found open access on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6ch3Jo8oUo&t=1193s.
[27] It warrants mentioning here that many US soldiers and veterans who would eventually play key roles in the GI anti-war movement entered the military first as enthusiastic volunteers, even “gung-ho” true believers, some from multi-generational military families. Such radical transformations did occur; it was not only forced draftees who turned against the war. See Sir! No, Sir! for a number of such cases. See also Ron Kovics’ memoir, Born on the Fourth of July (McGraw-Hill, 1976).
[28] It is worth noting that the title of the traveling anti-war performance troupe, “F.T.A.”, so popular with US troops on bases around the globe, (it featured such Hollywood stars as Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland), ironically repeated the Army’s slogan of “Fun, Travel, and Adventure,” as a dissident call to arms: “Fuck the Army.” Clearly, by this point, many active-duty GIs were not afraid of confrontational anti-Military rhetoric. That said, the popular and rebellious title was not “Fuck the Soldiers,” though there were certainly radical anti-war activists at the time pursuing such a line. The artistic approach of the F.T.A. shows themselves, (like the coffeehouses) was not to condemn the soldiers but to relate to them sympathetically as human beings caught up in brutal social and historical forces not of their own choosing.
[29] Such cracks in the military are already becoming visible. See for instance: https://truthout.org/articles/calls-to-gi-hotlines-rise-as-service-members-consider-defying-trumps-orders/. And strikingly, as my article is completed, even ICE agents are now showing great signs of strain under the current regime of escalated mass detention and deportation: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/07/trump-ice-morale-immigration/683477/.
References
Boggs, James. The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968.
Cohen, Leonard. “Anthem.” On The Future. New York: Columbia Records, 1992.
Foster, John Bellamy. “The MAGA Ideology and the Trump Regime.” Monthly Review, May 1, 2025. https://monthlyreview.org/2025/05/01/the-maga-ideology-and-the-trump-regime/.
———. “The Trump Doctrine and the New MAGA Imperialism.” Monthly Review, June 1, 2025. https://monthlyreview.org/2025/06/01/the-trump-doctrine-and-the-new-maga-imperialism/.
Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Free Press, 1998.
Heinl, Robert D. “The Collapse of the Armed Forces.” Armed Forces Journal, June 1971. https://archive.org/details/1971-robert-heinl-the-collapse-of-the-armed-forces.
Jameson, Frederic. An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army. London: Verso, 2016.
Jacobin. “Reduce the Crime Rate.” Special issue. https://jacobin.com/issue/lower-the-crime-rate.
Johnson, Cedric. After Black Lives Matter: Policing and Anti-Capitalist Struggle. London: Verso, 2023.
Kovic, Ron. Born on the Fourth of July. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.
Levin, Benjamin. “What’s Wrong with Police Unions?” Columbia Law Review (2020). https://columbialawreview.org/content/whats-wrong-with-police-unions/.
The Marshall Project. “Shooting First and Asking Questions Later.” August 13, 2021. https://www.themarshallproject.org/2021/08/13/shooting-first-and-asking-questions-later.
Ramsey, Joseph G. “Don’t Judge an Issue by Its Cover: 12 Important Points from Jacobin’s Latest Issue ‘Reduce the Crime Rate.’” Multiracial Unity, November 27, 2021. https://multiracialunity.org/2021/11/27/dont-judge-an-issue-just-by-its-cover-12-important-points-from-jacobins-latest-issue-reduce-the-crime-rate/.
–––. “Re-imagining the Place and Time of Communism Today: Between Hardt’s ‘New Love’ and Jameson’s ‘American Utopia.’” Socialism & Democracy 27, no. 3 (2013). https://sdonline.org/issue/63/re-imagining-place-and-time-communism-today-between-hardt%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Cnew-love%E2%80%9D-and-jameson%E2%80%99s-.
Robinson, William I. “The Third Worldization of the Global Working Class.” ZNetwork, July 2025. https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-thirdworldization-of-the-global-working-class/.
The Atlantic. “ICE Morale and Immigration Enforcement.” July 2025. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/07/trump-ice-morale-immigration/683477/.
Truthout. “Calls to GI Hotlines Rise as Service Members Consider Defying Trump’s Orders.” Accessed April 5, 2026. https://truthout.org/articles/calls-to-gi-hotlines-rise-as-service-members-consider-defying-trumps-orders/.
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Homicide.” Last modified 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm.
The Washington Post. “Fatal Force: Police Shootings Database.” Accessed April 5, 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/.
Wacquant, Loïc. “Afropessimism’s Radical Abdication.” New Left Review, no. 144 (November–December 2023). https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii144/articles/loic-wacquant-afropessimism-s-radical-abdication.
Wright, Richard. Haiku: This Other World. Edited by Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1998.
Zeiger, David, dir. Sir! No, Sir! 2005. Documentary film. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6ch3Jo8oUo
Joseph G. Ramsey teaches English and American Studies and in the Honors College at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he is an active member of the Faculty Staff Union (FSU/MTA). His writing has appeared in The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Mediations, New Politics, Jacobin, Counterpunch, Monthly Review, Science & Society (forthcoming), Socialism & Democracy and Cultural Logic, and in numerous book volumes. His new book of poems, Rhymes Against Ruins (Fomite Press, 2025) is available here. Joe is presently completing a scholarly book on the lost critical communism of Richard Wright, and he welcomes inquiries at jgramsey@gmail.com.