Assessing Adolph Reed: A Look at the Thinking of the American Left’s Foremost Anti-Identitarian
by Jim Creegan
 |
| Adolph Reed Jr. |
“Ground-breaking”,
and “momentous” were adjectives gushing forth from the liberal media to
describe Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential running
mate. But neither Harris’s record as a tough law-and-order district attorney in
California, where parents in poor black neighborhoods
were prosecuted for their children’s truancy from school, nor her determined resistance
to the reversal of wrongful convictions, broke any new ground; neither her
failure to investigate questionable police shootings, nor her refusal to
prosecute the shady estate speculator, Trump’s treasury secretary to be Steve Mnuchin, for
fraudulent foreclosures, were of any
great moment. In these respects, Harris is cut from the same cloth as Biden
himself, who as a Senator pioneered the present carceral state by promoting draconian
criminal penalties, and did the bidding of the credit-card industry that
dominates his home state of Delaware. The momentousness of Harris’s nomination
in the eyes of her liberal boosters rather consists in the fact that—as the daughter
of a Jamaican father and Indian mother-- she is the first woman of color to
occupy second place on a major presidential ticket.
This appraisal of
Harris’s significance exemplifies much of what is wrong with identity politics
in the eyes of the man who has emerged in recent decades as its leading left-wing critic, Adolph Reed Jr., a
black professor emeritus of political science at the University of
Pennsylvania. He argues that emphasis on
‘diversity’ in the upper reaches of power conceals an acceptance of prevailing
class hierarchies. To speak as liberals often do of racial and gender
disparities alone, he argues, implies that their goals would be achieved if the
composition of all hierarchical strata—from the prison to the boardroom—contained
the same racial, gender and sexual-orientation ratios as those of society at large.
Thus characterized, identitarian discourse, by occluding capitalist society’s
most fundamental cleavage of class, itself contains an implicit class politics:
those of self-appointed minority-group influence brokers who accept the class
order, either because they occupy a comfortable place within it, or aspire to
do so.
It is arguments like
these that have earned Reed—along with academic co-thinkers Touré Reed (his
son), Robert Ben Michaels and Cedric Johnson—the epithet of “class reductionist”
in some left-wing quarters. His opposition to reparations to black people for
the crimes of slavery and Jim Crow reinforces the accusation in his detractors’
eyes. His politics have become so controversial that a scheduled talk to a New
York chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) on the inadequacy of racial
disparity measures regarding Covid-19 was called off in May because Reed refused
to share a virtual platform with his ‘intersectionalist’ critics. This writer thinks
their strictures are unwarranted. But Reed’s thinking can perhaps be better
understood by examining its origins.
Against the Drift
Reed’s two most
prominent books—Stirrings in the Jug and Class Notes—are
compilations of essays and articles written mainly in the late 80s and 90s—the most
dismal period for radical politics in recent memory. Under the Reagan-Thatcher
onslaught, and the discrediting of Marxism with the collapse of the Soviet
bloc, there occurred a wholesale falling away from the revolutionary and even
liberal reformist politics of the previous decades, and from politics in
general. At the same time, many rebels of the 60s were scrambling to make the accommodations—practical
and intellectual-- necessary to the respectable careers they were carving out.
As a young man, Reed
entered politics through the black liberation movement, and went on to become
an organizer in the Socialist Workers Party (US) and the anti-war movement of
American troops. Although personally successful as a professor at three prestigious universities since entering academia
in 1972, Reed has remained politically active, and is among the minority that did
not join the rightward drift. His two volumes are essentially a series of
polemics against the retreats and conceits of the long night of neoliberalism.
Reed concentrates his
criticisms on the political regressions of the black struggle. Much of what he aims
at, however, are the reflections in black attitudes of larger trends. One
example is the substitution of cultural poses for political action:
The thrust of much of… “cultural politics”… is to [redefine]
people’s routine compensatory existential practices—the everyday undertakings that
enact versions of autonomy and dignity within the context of oppression—as
politically meaningful “resistance,” thus obliterating all distinction between
active, public opposition and the sighs accompanying acquiescence. The effect
is to avoid grappling with the troubling reality of demobilization by simply
christening it, Humpty Dumpty-like, as mobilization.[1]
This ‘cultural turn’ amongst
leftwing academics and others had many specifically black variants:
Participating in
youth fads (from zoot suits in the 1940s
to hip-hop today), maintaining fraternal organizations, vesting hope in prayer
or root doctors, and even quilt making thus become indistinguishable from slave
revolts, activism in Reconstruction governments, the Montgomery bus boycott,
grassroots campaigns for voter registration, and welfare rights agitation as
politically meaningful forms of resistance.[2]
Reed considers the
more recent black cultural turn to be one symptom of the decoupling of the
cause of black emancipation from the working class. To examine how this came to
pass is one major purpose of his writings.
Careerism and Resignation
The aim of civil
rights movement of the 50s and early 60s was full equality under the law; black
people of all classes, being equally deprived of democratic rights, were more
or less united in the struggle. With the victories of the movement marked by
the passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act ( 1965),
however, the movement faced a choice of two possible paths. The first was marked
out by the Washington March for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. Best remembered for
Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, the march was mainly organized by
black social democrats A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin; it was a racially
integrated event, which, as its title indicates, linked the cause of civil
rights to that of economic equality. The second path—the one that more militant
elements of the black struggle ultimately chose for reasons examined below—was
that of separation from the ‘white movement’ and adopting a nationalist
perspective. This is the turn that Reed and his co-thinkers lament.
 |
| Civil rights leaders meet with President John F. Kennedy in the oval office of the White House after the March on Washington in 1963. Photograph shows (left to right): Willard Wirtz (Secretary of Labor); Floyd McKissick (CORE); Mathew Ahmann (National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice); Whitney Young (National Urban Leage); Martin Luther King Jr.(SCLC); John Lewis (SNCC); Rabbi Joachim Prinz (American Jewish Congress); A. Philip Randolph, with Reverend Eugene Carson Blake partially visible behind him; President John F. Kennedy; Walter Reuther (labor leader), with Vice President Lyndon Johnson partially visible behind him; and Roy Wilkins (NAACP). |
The ‘black power’
slogan under which leaders like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown assumed
leadership of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was amorphous.
In the hyper-charged atmosphere of the 60s, it was widely assumed to indicate a
revolutionary content of some kind. But,
as that decade morphed into the somnolent 70s, the militant’s pose became more
and more a camouflage for the social climber’s appetite. Appointing themselves
spokespersons for an internally undifferentiated entity called the ‘black
community’, newly arisen layers of professionals, elected officials and civil
servants were inclined to measure the progress of their people by their own
career success, and that of strivers like themselves. They, in turn, could only
advance by making their agendas broadly compatible with ruling-class interests.
In the meantime the large segments of the black population still mired in a
ghetto existence—now expected to participate through a kind of vicarious racial
pride in the good fortunes of those who had escaped-- were otherwise left to
their own devices.
 |
| Stokely Carmichael |
Accompanying this turn was the rise of a school of thought that
attributed the plight of the ghetto to something called the ‘culture of
poverty’: the absence of black fathers, families headed by single mothers with too
many children, street crime, drug addiction and dependency on government
welfare. These phenomena were viewed not mainly as responses to economic
deprivation, but as ingrained habits that prevented poor blacks from making the
efforts needed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and which resisted
amelioration through redistributive government
programs or job creation.
These notions
originated in a 1965 report, The Negro family: a call for action by
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the future New York senator who was then assistant
secretary of labor in the administration of Lyndon Johnson. It was actually a
call for inaction: Moynihan famously advocated a policy of “benign neglect” in
relation to black poverty. But elements of the ‘underclass pathology’ trope
were, according to Reed, echoed in the writings of the prominent black sociologist
William Julius Wilson, and often found a
friendly reception among black influence brokers. Although the proponents of
this ideology did not harbor notions of black racial inferiority, Reed argues that
their thinking often produced the same end result: the idea of static patterns
of behavior, impervious to political or social action.
Reed also claims that
the few remaining currents of black radicalism—Afro-centrism and self-styled
Marxism-Leninism—responded to the decline of 60s-type militancy by retreating into
an ideological purism that serves more as a refuge from the problems of daily
black existence than an action program.
Demonology vs Political Economy
It is hardly
astonishing that those who speak of unchanging black behaviors should ascribe a
similar stasis to whites. The Reeds—Adolph and Touré (who, with his father, has
now become a leading proponent of their jointly held views) —do not deny that
centuries of racial oppression have had lasting effects, or that parts of the European-descended
population remain committed to white supremacy in varying degrees. Adolph Reed
grew up in New Orleans when segregation was in force. The Reeds are unfairly accused of class reductionism. What
they emphatically reject is the assumptions of many black intellectuals—Ta-Nehisi
Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones and Michelle Alexander come to mind—that white
racism is a supra-historical phenomenon. These thinkers argue that slavery, Jim
Crow segregation, mass black incarceration and police brutality are all
different instantiations of a single essence called white racism—the innate
hatred of whites toward blacks--that remains constant throughout American history
despite its many guises. The Reeds insist that the black question cannot be
understood apart from history and political economy.
 |
| Ta-Nehisi Coates and Cornel West. West called Coates "...the neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle". |
Take, for instance,
the present concentration of approximately one fifth of the black population in
deprived urban areas. In his “Case for reparations”, Ta-Nehisi Coates tends to
explain ghettoization by the refusal of the government and banks to extend
housing loans to black families, and the existence of restrictive covenants,
forbidding the sale of suburban homes to blacks. [3]
The Reeds would probably counter that, harmful though these things were, black
residential patterns cannot be explained by racial animus and deliberate
discrimination alone.
One factor in
ghettoization was the mass emigration of blacks from the South. In the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, European immigrants filled American
industry’s growing need for workers. Yet as that need diminished in the 1920s, concerns
for maintaining the ‘ethnic integrity’ of the US began to take priority, and a
strict quota system was enacted into law.
Yet there was one
immigration stream that legislation could not shut off: that of Southern blacks
who acted against poverty and lynch law in the only way left open to them—by
moving to Northern and Midwestern cities. Between 1916 and 1970, nearly 7 million
relocated, in the biggest migration in the country’s history, larger than the influx
from any European country. Many hoped to—and did—fill the industrial jobs
vacated by white workers during the two World Wars. But, having been deprived
in the South of education and opportunities to acquire skills, black workers
could only fill the lowest-paid, least skilled jobs, and there were many more migrants
than openings at the factory bench. There
thus came into existence a permanent black underclass, rendered even more
precarious by automation and outsourcing.
Hence the US found
itself with a population that the 20th century capitalist economy
could not fully absorb. And it is by no means mysterious that the poverty of
this population leads to street crime, substance abuse, family instability and
a number of other symptoms inimical to middle-class notions of respectability
and striving—all of which tend to reinforce existing racial prejudice. Racialized
poverty, moreover, presents endless opportunities for right-wing demagogues—one
of whom now occupies the White House—to portray this marginalized demographic
as composed of shiftless parasites, eating up the hard-earned tax dollars of solid
citizens in the form of social-welfare subventions.
With the progressive abandonment of 1960s government
anti-poverty programs, culminating in a full- fledged neoliberal attack on an
already inadequate welfare state, harsher police tactics and mass imprisonment were
expanded to keep this ‘surplus population’ in line. Neoliberal capitalism, not
eternal racial animus in contemporary form—not the “new Jim Crow” of Michelle
Alexander—is responsible for increased reliance on repressive methods. It is
these methods that inflame relations between the police and communities of color,
and make police forces attractive to many whites predisposed to racism in the
first place. One result are the episodes of police brutality—now electronically
recorded and disseminated-- that have given rise to the biggest wave of
demonstrations in American history. [4]
The Reeds help us
understand the fruitlessness of any
counterposition of the abstract and vacuous categories of ‘race’ and ‘class’; that
contemporary racial politics are the result of
complex interactions between economic forces and a history of black
oppression, itself rooted in economic exploitation. And just as they refuse to
see this history and politics as a morality play in which the only actors are white
racists and black victims, they also reject
the moralistic demand for reparations.
This writer has no
doubt that, under a regime of socialist planning, a major effort will be
required to redress the historic deficit in income and opportunities that the
African American population has incurred over the centuries. At the current
moment, however, the reparations demand is being presented as the payment of a moral—and
financial-- debt owed by the white population as a whole to the descendants of
slaves. It is of a piece with attempts to point an accusing finger at ordinary Caucasians
for enjoying ‘white skin privilege’ because they do not share the adversities
of the most oppressed.
White shaming may
tweak the guilt feelings of liberals (for whom it is largely intended), but
will fall on deaf ears among white workers, who consider their existence to be
far from one of privilege. Many will answer—not without some justification—that
they have never done anything to harm blacks, and are not collectively
responsible for the sins of their forbears, who, in many cases, took no part in
the oppression of black people either. Put in terms of practical politics, any
project aimed levelling down—the idea that one section of the population must
give up part of what they have to put themselves on a more equal footing with
those who have less—is a politics with no future, especially at a time when the
entire working class is facing hardships on a scale unknown in since the great
depression.
What the Reeds
propose as an alternative is a politics of levelling up, consisting of demands
for the improvement of the entire working class, such as those advanced by
Bernie Sanders in his two presidential campaigns: Medicare for all; a hike in
the minimum wage; free public university tuition. As Touré Reed writes in his book,
Toward freedom:
The bottom line is
that is that because blacks have borne a disproportionate share of the damage
inflicted on working people by deindustrialization and the subsequent
neoliberal economic consensus, African Americans would benefit
disproportionately from Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 platforms despite the absence
of the reparations “brand”[5]
Most capitalist
countries contain a lumpenised underclass. That the bottom social rungs of
American society are disproportionately black is a result of the country’s
sordid racial history. To deny that black people of all classes face
special impediments by virtue of simply
being black would indeed be color blind. Democratic demands, including those
for affirmative action—special efforts to promote people of color to higher
education and better jobs—are intended to overcome specifically racial
barriers, and are not opposed by Adolph or Touré Reed. Arguably, Adolph Reed bends the stick too far
in his recent disparaging of attempts to measure racial disparities in the
effects of Covid-19 and other blights; it is undeniable that blacks and
minorities always get the worst of the sufferings of the working class. But greater
black distress does not automatically point to the necessity of black-specific
remedies.
The principal injustices
now commonly treated under the head of
racism—police brutality and mass incarceration—are not afflictions of the black
middle class, but of the black poor, both working and chronically unemployed. That
their condition can best be addressed by demands aimed at lifting the working poor
and unemployed as a whole, without putting the accent on race, with all its divisive
pitfalls, is not color blindness, but a corollary to the Marxist aim of uniting
the working class.
Caveats
In addition to
evaluating the kinds of demands the Reeds argue for, one may enquire as to the
process by which they envisage the demands as unfolding. The question posed
over a century ago by Rosa Luxemburg, reform or revolution, is considered
largely irrelevant in a contemporary American left dominated by a militant
social-democratic reformism. For Jacobin and most of DSA, the
possibility of revolution is seen as either non-existent, or a distant bridge,
to be crossed (or not) when the working class comes to it. This was not the political
sensibility that held sway in the long-lost 1960s, when to avow being a
reformist was to place oneself on the rightward side of the left political spectrum.
One decidedly
reformist figure that the Reeds, father and son, refer to approvingly is the
civil rights leader Bayard Rustin. They commend him for perceiving the
necessary linkages between black emancipation and economic equality. Rustin emphasized
the need for expansive federal efforts to overcome black poverty. In conjunction
with the trade unionist and civil-rights leader A. Philip Randolph, Rustin
promulgated the 1965 Freedom Budget, a series of proposals for legislative
action, including a big federal wage hike and job and income guarantees.
 |
| Bayard Rustin (left) in debate with Malcolm X (center) |
What the Reeds
neglect to mention is the political allies Rustin looked to for the budget’s
passage. He viewed the Democratic Party of Lyndon Johnson and the AFL-CIO trade
union federation, headed by the notoriously anti-Communist George Meany, as his
principal change agents. Making sure not
to offend these perceived allies, Rustin not only refused to join King in
denouncing the Vietnam War—which Johnson waged with Meany’s support--but
actively red-baited anti-war protestors, and ultimately refused to participate
in the Poor People’s March, led by King’s lieutenants after his assassination,
whose demands were adopted from the
Freedom Budget. Rustin was afraid of alienating the Democrats.
Rustin had earlier
fallen in with Max Shachtman, the former disciple of Trotsky who was then in swift
rightward motion. By the 60s, Shachtman fully supported US imperialism in its
global struggle with what he saw as the Soviet totalitarian menace. The
alliance with Shachtman launched Rustin on a political trajectory from which he
emerged a neoconservative. By the end of his career, he had become a fervent
supporter of Israel, an advocate of American aid to South African forces battling
anti-Portuguese guerillas in Angola and Mozambique, and a proponent of escalation of the nuclear arms race. More was
involved than an evolution of Rustin’s views. He headed the A. Philip Randolph
Institute, the civil-rights arm of the AFL-CIO. Rustin was only too aware that taking
any political position offensive to George Meany would result in the
discontinuance of his pay cheques. It is understandable that the Reeds find the
Freedom Budget commendable in and of itself. But it was half of a social democratic
devil’s bargain: support by certain
bourgeois parties for reform at home (which the Democrats eventually abandoned)
in exchange for complicity in the global defense of private property that was the Cold War. The Reeds’ favorable
mentions of Rustin would be less irksome if they would include some
acknowledgement of his larger reactionary arc.
In opposition to Rustin’s
brand of reformism stood sections of the black movement that considered
themselves in some sense revolutionary—the black nationalists the Reeds decry. A revolutionary working class
politics is what Marxists strive for, then and now. But history does not always
serve up political elements packaged
together in an ideal way. During those years, key unionized segments of the US
working class—still overwhelmingly white—were enjoying the unequalled prosperity
of the post-war boom, and were indifferent or hostile to radical politics. The
locus of revolutionary/emancipatory energy largely shifted to the anti-imperialist
revolts then convulsing what was called the third world. More than domestic labor
struggles, the Chinese, Cuban and
Vietnamese revolutions were the stuff of far-left consciousness.
In the context of the
time, it is understandable why the more militant elements of the black struggle—Malcolm
X, SNCC and, later, the Black Panthers-- were inclined to take as their model
third-world liberation movements and regimes, which at best professed nationalist-tinged versions of Marxism, as opposed to what was seen as a sclerotic labor
movement. Most nationalist groups also rejected the liberal-pacifist commitment
to non-violence under all circumstances, and asserted the right to black self-defense,
placing themselves further beyond the pale of mainstream respectability than
King. And, most importantly, they denounced the Vietnam War, in marked contrast
to the right wing of the union bureaucracy to which Rustin was captive. If the
alternative to black nationalism was the kind of labor-oriented strategy Rustin
represented, one could be forgiven for looking elsewhere for inspiration.
An activist during the
60s, Adolph Reed is no doubt aware of this history. But one wonders if his
sneaking admiration for Rustin is not unrelated to a subsequent political involvement.
In the 1990s, Reed was an important player in the attempt to found a
union-based US labor party. The project represented the collaboration of union
officials disgruntled that the neoliberal administration of Bill Clinton no
longer offered them a ‘seat at the table’, and left-wing activists inside and
outside the unions who hoped to nudge these officials into breaking with the
Democrats. The Labor Party was stillborn at its founding in 1996 because union leaders, in the
face of deindustrialization and shrinking union density, lost any taste they
may have had for political independence. The efforts of left-wingers involved
in this project were completely honorable. One wonders, however, if they did
not overestimate the potential of even the most left-inclined of labor
bureaucrats.
Identity Politics as Diversion
Reed, however, is not
being opposed by identitarians because of any soft spots for bureaucrats or
right-wing social democrats, but for his insistence on a class-centered
politics. Here it is important to appreciate the ruling-class ideological
disarray accompanying the economic and social crisis triggered by the pandemic.
One bourgeois aim on the ideological front is to preclude the development of a class
politics by means of mass diversion. Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign
represented the last gasp of neoliberal attempts to sell the masses on the
‘magic of the market’, now an impossible feat in the midst of a collapsing economy.
The Republicans have thus resorted to the only strategy left to them—the mobilization
of white resentment against immigrants and blacks. They will continue along
this course for the foreseeable future, with or without a less erratic and more
capable leader than Donald Trump.
On the other hand,
the Democratic Party, which counts among its voters more of the masses in need
of diversion, has recently been haunted by the spectre of a class-based
movement in the form of Bernie Sanders and successful insurgent campaigns for lesser
offices. The party leadership, along with more astute corporate representatives,
have latched onto identity politics as one response to this challenge. We
have been treated in recent months from everything
to the spectacle of the Democratic Congressional leadership taking a knee clad
in Kente cloth, to Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman of the leading investment
house of Goldman Sachs, talking about the need to combat “structural racism.” Relegating
the party’s left to a couple brief token appearances at the Democratic National
Convention, and saying next to nothing about measures needed to combat the economic
devastation caused by Covid-19, the party went out of its way to foreground
women and minority politicians willing to toe the centrist line. In this
climate, the need is greater than ever for a class politics like that promoted
by Adolph Reed and his co-thinkers, this time free—it is to be hoped—from the
fatal compromises of social democracy.
[1] Stirrings in the jug, Minneapolis
London 1999, p. 118, emphasis in original.
[2] Ibid.
p. 151
[4] M
Alexander, The new Jim Crow, New York 2010.
[5] Toward
freedom, London, 2020, p. 120
by Jim Creegan
New York,
26 August, 2020
