Security, Surplus, and the Commons
Brendan McQuade (University of Southern Maine)
Today, we stand amid the dizzying spectacle of a seemingly successful fascist coup—just five years after the largest protest wave in U.S. history, when calls to defund the police echoed nationwide and mutual aid networks briefly flourished. In the wake of this rebellion, the Democratic Party pandered to the left, only to abandon its progressive promises, double down on law and order politics, and reveal its true character through its unapologetic support for the Gaza genocide and repression of pro-Palestine protestors—betrayals that cleared the way for Trump’s return. This moment makes painfully clear that appeals to identity, absent a materialist and solidaristic analysis, will only take us so far—and, in the case of the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism or the normalization of white supremacy, take us nowhere we want to go. In this regard, Cedric Johnson’s After Black Lives Matter: Policing and Anti-Capitalist Struggle offers a necessary left critique of BLM. His central contention—that a serious politics of liberation must reject identitarian moralism in favor of grounded analysis of class power—resonates all the more powerfully in our current conjuncture. Johnson grasped something essential that many overlooked in the heat of rebellion: protest is not politics, spectacle is not strategy, and the broad banner of “Black Lives Matter”—with all the disparate and often contradictory claims attached to it—is not enough to hold us together for the long fight for collective liberation.
After Black Lives Matter targets what Johnson sees as the liberal core of the Black Lives Matter movement. The politics of recognition implicit in BLM is easily co-opted by nonprofit networks and corporate media circuits, which channeled popular outrage into support for technocratic reforms and symbolic appeasement. For Johnson, BLM was not a radical rupture but a continuation of racial liberalism, which individualizes injustice and obscures the need for structural transformation. He rejects “black organicism”—the tendency to treat black people as a unified political subject, flattening internal class, gender, and national differences in favor of an abstract, essentialized identity. This framework not only erases material conflict within black communities, but reifies race as an ontological category rather than a historically produced and politically contested relation (Johnson 2023: 205-207). This politics can lead to claims not rooted in solidarity or strategic alignment, but in appeals to moral authority based on a shared experience suffering.
Unfortunately, Johnson seems to get lost in his own critique and misses opportunities for recuperation. While racial liberalism may be the most visible tendency within BLM (perhaps because it is so easily co-opted by elites?), the movement also draws on other, radical traditions: black feminism, abolitionism, social democracy, communism, and anarchism. At various points, Johnson acknowledges the militant wing of BLM associated with formations like Assata’s Daughters, BYP100, Dream Defenders, and We Charge Genocide, but his critique of racial liberalism overshadows analysis of these radical tendencies. This is not merely a matter of tone or presentation—it’s a problem of analytic clarity. His conceptualization of class is rigid and reductionist and one can be cleanly separated from race, which is reduced to an purely ideological concept (Johson 2023: 36). In doing so, he neglects the foundational insight of Black feminist thought that has had major influence on BLM: that systems of oppression are interlocking. While there many make this point in a shallow additive sense, as in the liberal reduction and academic institutionalization of an impoverished concept of “intersectionality,” the intervention was always about how various forms of structural inequalities are articulated within and through capitalist social relations, which is clear in the original Combahee River Collective Statement (Taylor 2017; Haider 2022). In other words, there are radical currents in BLM, some of which overlap considerably with Johnson’s own analysis and stand out, to me, as missed opportunities to go past critique and recuperate radical BLM tendencies into expanded and constructive analysis.
One of the strengths of After Black Lives Matter is the conjunctural analysis of post-Civil Rights period. Johnson (2023) details how deindustrialization, capital flight, and austerity rendered vast swaths of black urban populations economically redundant, surplus to capital’s needs, while simultaneously creating a black middle class. The incorporation of this latter group helped make the pacification of most of the black population (and especially surplus populations connected the survival crimes of informal economies)—i.e. “mass incarceration”—politically viable.
This is a powerful analysis and one often missing from contemporary discussions racial justice, especially when political, media, and intellectual elites enter those discussions. But Johnson’s treatment of racial formation is bounded by the neoliberal present and recent Fordist past. He describes how surplus populations emerge from economic shifts from one regime of accumulation to the next but he does not theorize racial formation as process of pacification that precedes and conditions the current conjuncture. The result is a flattening of history. Hence, Johnson notes (2023) that black people are “more likely to be surveilled assaulted and killed by police” but he also reminding readers that “whites still account for half of those shot by police annually” (21). Why does the violence of police (and incarceration) fall disproportionately on black people? Johnson never asks or answers directly. His implicit explanation, in my reading, is that the position black people in US political economy: “The urban black working class has borne the brunt of carceral power because of its particular structural position, which was produced out of the postwar transformation of American cities and the inadequate liberal antipoverty measures of the Second Reconstruction” (20).
I agree with this argument but also contend that it is insufficient. People of color and black people, especially, are more exploited, excluded, and oppressed, basic social fact that is manifests across basic demographic realities, because of the interconnected histories of racial formation, class formation, pacification, and state formation. In my book, Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision (McQuade 2019), I argue that the codification of race was a process of pacification, political strategy of divide and rule. In the United States, racialization is rooted in the codification of racial hierarchy in law following Bacon’s Rebellion, when race was legally codified to drive a wedge between two types of bonded laborers, “white” indentures and “black” slaves. Furthermore and drawing on the strategic relational theory of the state, a Marxist tradition that Johnson (2023: 74-75) appears to cite favorably, I trace how such deeply rooted and intertwined processes of labor formation and racial formation developed through time, shaping successive regimes of accumulation and state forms, what I term the herrenvolk-welfare state and the workfare-carceral state.
Here, there are two key points where my analysis departs from Johnson: the role of racism in New Deal and racialization as a factor of production. Johnson (2023) argues against “the Jim-Crowing-of-national-social-policy thesis,” pointing out that white workers dominated agricultural and domestic labor at the time of the National Labor Relations Act passed and concluding that sector capitalist interests, not white supremacy, provide the reason for exempting those segments of the working class form this foundational labor law (90). He also notes that New Deal public works projects, the integration of the defense plants, black unionism (and growing labor movement generally) were major advances for racial justice that undermine the interpretation of the New Deal as “another episode of American politics being hemmed in by the ‘original sin’ of race” (93).
On this point, I agree with Johnson that New Deal was a time that racial domination was challenge and changing but I add that a longue durée perspective that theorizes racial formation is continually developing process of pacification. In my book and a related article (McQuade 2018; 2019), I discuss the herrenvolk-welfare state not just in terms of the New Deal but also Reconstruction, another time of where the state, under crisis, assumed the cost of social reproduction in ways that saved capitalism and advanced racial justice. Racialization as pacification draws a thread that connects these two moments of state formation. In both moments, the state expanded in response to the need to stabilize a structural crisis, pacify and subsume revolting working classes, and balance competing capital sectors. While the elites abandoned Reconstruction because “abolition-democracy was pushed towards a conception of a dictatorship of labor” (Dubois 1999: 185), a dangerous example in relation to growing labor militancy in the North, such abandonment was politically viable because what of Du Bois famously called the “psychological wage” (700-701). White workers traded a monopoly of public honor for the potentially greater rewards won through inter-racial proletarian solidarity.
Johnson’s (2023) own analysis—the contraction of the New Deal into a consumerist and suburbanizing “spatial fix” that “created landscape of uneven development with an undeniable racial character” (101) and the related retreat of black elites “from social democracy, the fight for the expansion of the social wage… to the defense of racial democracy, the guarantee of black access to the fruits of the consumer society in a manner comparable to all of equal class standing” (105)—stands in relation to the earlier defeat of Reconstruction. These successive retreats from broad working class solidarity into the psychological wages of whiteness and a consumerist racial democracy are similar patterns of racialized pacification, moments in the ongoing development of state provisioning of social goods in ways that benefit capital—and in ways we, in the anti-security collective, label as social policy as social policing (McQuade 2020: 65-67; Anti-Security Collective 2024:; 43-54). These were the velvet glove of corporatist and consumerist racial identities to cover the iron hand of top-down police repression and bottom-up communal violence. History does not repeat but it rhymes and racialization (and its connection to class formation) is one of the most powerful rhythms in US history (and the wider capitalist world-system).
Racialization is pacification is not only in the sense that is a weapon to divide the working class and create hyper-exploitable and/or surplus of pools labor, racialization is also pacification because it is a material factor embedded in the relations of production themselves. Here, the work of Oliver Cox, which Johnson curiously does not cite, and James Boggs, which Johnson (2023: 131-135) cites extensively for its prescient analysis of “the outsiders” (surplus populations) that would soon become captured by mass incarceration—is essential. For Cox (1948), arguing against the same tendency to view African Americans as caste Johnson (2023) critiques in relation to the New Jim Crow thesis (40-45), defines racism as the wholesale proletarianization of people. In other words, the incorporation of black labor into the capitalist world-system first through slavery and triangle trade and later through colonialism, are deep structures, rooted in the temporality of the longue durée, that give anti-black racism a deeply entrenched material force and enduring. Here we connect Cox’s analysis on the long durée incorporation and racialization of black labor to Moishe Postone’ (1980) s critical theory of commodity fetishism as way to explain the specific nature different forms of racial oppression. Here, Hylton White (2020) extends this analysis to anti-black racism: “the Black of antiblack racism is the human representative of brute biological bodiliness… above all the identification of blackness with the untamed biological, is precisely the form that abstract labour assumes within its fetishised representation” (White 2020: 32). Taken together, I contend that the specific character of anti-black racism described by White is deep structure rooted in a long durée dynamics of labor and racial formation famously outlined by Cox.
Furthermore, Boggs (1975), in a work Johnson does not engage, elaborates how racialization shaped the structure of the U.S. working class in ways that deflected its revolutionary potential. For Boggs, the color line functioned as “a horizontal platform, resting on the backs of blacks and holding them down, while on top white workers have been free to move up the social economic ladder of advancing capitalism.” These dynamics, Boggs realized, counteracted “the fundamental contradiction between constantly advancing technology and the need to maintain the value of existing plants… by collectively and often forcibly restricting blacks to technologically less advanced industries or to what is known as ‘common labor.’” Race channeled both the productive violence of pacification and the institutional power of organized labor, producing uniquely American political subjectivities. Rather than forging a strong welfare state and a self-conscious, politicized working class, the United States became “a unique land of opportunity in which whites climb up the social economic ladder on the backs of blacks,” while Americans became “the most materialistic, the most opportunistic, the most individualistic—in sum, the most politically and socially irresponsible people in the world” (6-8). In this regard, I see Johnson’s (2023) analysis of the post-Civil Rights creation of “consumers and criminals,” where the communal ghetto of Jim Crow gave way to the segregated suburb and hyperghetto of the present, as an evolution of the relations that Boggs described in the context of declining demand for black “common labor” in a post-industrial economy.
Altogether, Johnson rightly critiques how BLM was open for co-optation by nonprofits, corporations and neoliberal politicians but, absent any analysis of a race as material force in labor-formation and pacification, he treats this as a political failure rather than a structural tendency. Without a deeper theory of race and its relation to security as pacification, he cannot explain why race so often functions as a cipher for managing disorder, why the figure of the Black criminal remains central to the state's vision of threat, why racial liberalism always re-emerges as a strategy to mollify black power and working-class militancy.
Here, my work—while aligned with Johnson in several key areas—breaks sharply from his analysis (McQuade 2018; 2019; 2020; Anti-Security Collective 2024). In reducing race to the realm of discourse or ideology, Johnson inadvertently reinscribes the very liberal separation of race and class that a materialist critique should transcend. Anti-racism not as a distraction from class struggle, but as one of its primary vectors. Racialization is pacification. Race segments labor markets and, along with other systems structural violence and oppression, organizes a continuum of exploitation: from the privileged high-status workers incorporated into the wage system on relatively favorable terms, to the most systematically obscured, hyper-exploited, and/or criminalized forms of labor. In this context, racialization is not merely ideological: it is material relation grounded in histories of labor formation, renewed and sustained through practices of pacification, including, importantly, social policy (or, better, social police).
The particular of braiding of oppression that shapes territorially bounded and historically specific working classes is why police and other security apparatuses are so politically central—and so explosively contested. Security is pacification: the ongoing fabrication of social order around wage labor, the commodity form, and private property. Because capital is constantly in motion—destroying its own foundations and building new ones—security becomes a primary means of organizing social reproduction and labor formation (Neocleous 2008; 2011; 2021; Anti-Security Collective 2024). Indeed, modern policing is rooted in the old police science of late medieval and early modern Europe, a comprehensive administrative science focused on the promotion commerce and expansion of state power. Here, “police” means not the modern police institution but police power, the discretionary power sovereign to manage people and things in the name good order (Rigakos et al 2009; Neocleous 2011; Anti-Security Collective 2024). Police power not only animates law enforcement but operates through all forms of social policy (McQuade 2020; Kaba and Ritchie 2022: 140-148; Anti-Security Collective 2024: 43-54).
Recuperating this original expanded concept of police as critical concept, the anti-security critique highlights the common convergence of multiple institutions of state power in the fabrication of capitalist order. It provides conceptual language to better understand connections between the different sites of abolitionist organizing from the prison to police to child protective services to education and on and on. Most importantly, it locates emergence of police power in the destruction of the commons and its existence is the ongoing maintenance of private property and commodified life. As Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie (2022), prominent abolitionist drawing on anti-security, put it “Police are the anti-thesis of the commons,” which means the fullest conception of defunding the police is rebuilding the commons: “Universal accessible, quality womb-to-ancestor health care, education, child and elder care; housing; safe, sustainable, accessible and meaningful ways to contribute to the collective; universal basic income regardless of whether people to choose to work; and everything needed for life and safety” (216). Anti-security restores abolitionism to the heart of communist thinking and centers the communist horizon in abolitionist thought (Anti-Security Collective, 2024:).
Read from this perspective, After Black Lives Matter is powerful critique of a mass movement and a missed opportunity go beyond critique. Johnson’s criticism of racial liberalism, while incisive, is undermined by his rigid conception of class and his relegation of racialization to the realm of “racecraft”—a political alchemy seemingly disconnected from material life. To move beyond the impasse that Johnson identifies—and at times reproduces—we must understand race not as a distraction from class struggle, but as one of its primary mechanisms: a material strategy of pacification, deployed and redeployed through successive crises and across historical epochs. This is precisely why Black Lives Matter struck such a powerful chord, and why its abolitionist wing continues to be force on the Left. Rather than posing racial justice and class struggle as competing paradigms, we must grasp their mutual imbrication—how racial and class formation are intertwined. A politics adequate to our moment must begin from this synthesis. And that is where critique plays its most important role: not simply as negation or rejection, but as a generative force that clarifies, recuperates, and advances the political composition of the working class.
Johnson (2023) concludes with a call to "abolish the conditions that make policing necessary." This is an apt formulation. But what does it mean to build a world beyond policing? Engaging with policy reports and demands from organizations associated with BLM, Johnson (2023) criticizes “calls to ‘Fund Black Futures’” as not “ambitious enough” and “limited by an older and defeated horizon and welfare statism” (254). In response, he calls for public works programs geared toward “the abolition of the class relation.” He hopes that “the basic premise of public works…that no one should be without a means of subsistence, that…other needs should be commodified…is a statement of values, if institutionalized, could diminish the power of the capitalist values of private property and exploitation” (259). However, he cautions that such a project could be recapitulation of “the New Deal vision of creating the consumer society….public works will only aid in the reproduction of the current order” (264).
These recommendations for public works programs are in line with recent abolitionist thinking, much of it centered around Interrupting Criminalization and drawing on the anti-security critique, that sees defunding police as point of entry into decommodification and rebuilding the commons (Akbar 2020; Kurti 2020; Kaba 2020; Kaba and Ritchie 2022: 214-217; Shanahan and Kurti 2022:156-183; Ritchie 2023; MP-Weeks and McQuade 2023). The language of commons, moreover, breaks with “welfare statism” that Johnson see as limiting demands from BLM and his own suggested public works program. Indeed, the commons contains within it a radical horizon of life outside the dominance of private property and commodity form. It is, I contend, a more fruitful and political promising articulation of the sentiments—and some of the strategy—that Johnson expresses in discussion of public works programs.
All told, Johnson’s main point is correct and hard for many to confront: BLM failed to build enduring institutions of power because it’s most dominant tendencies lacked class politics. But without an fulsome understanding of racial formation and a critique of security, class analysis remains economistic and blind to the forms of domination that operate outside of wage labor. The state does rules surplus populations through pacification, including promoting popular participation in this pacification (Schrader 2016). Security, as “the supreme concept of civil society,” permeates all social relations; it is not only violence imposed on us, but violence we enact against one another (Marx 1978: 43). It turns segments of the working class against each other. We are all encouraged to “secure” our own private fortresses, becoming wardens of our own possessive individualism, ever-vigilant against an endless array of “universal adversaries”: criminals, terrorists, gang members, drug dealers, sex offenders, human traffickers (Neocleous 2016; Anti-Security Collective 2024: 73-75). In this way, BLM is a truly radical project because it politicizes police power, the foundational violence that underpins bourgeois civilization, and, through an anti-security read of the divest-reinvest strategy of police abolition, contains the project of communization within it.
A serious anti-capitalist politics must grapple with these facts. It must understand security not as a neutral good distorted by racism, but as a fundamentally violent project deeply implicated in the work of racial control and class domination. It must recognize the centrality of police power to fabrication of capitalist order through the creation and administration of the working class. And it must recognize positive project of police abolition is the creation of the commons. Johnson has issued a challenge to the left: to move beyond moral performance and into material struggle. I offer this commentary as a companion challenge to him: to recognize that there is something irreducibly radical about BLM. It politicized police power and opened space for a vision of life beyond it. If abolition begins where security ends, then the vision for black lives—like communism itself—remains a call to reclaim the commons.
References
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Brendan McQuade is an associate professor and chair of the Sociology and Criminology Department at the University of Southern Maine. He is author of the Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision (UC Press, 2019).