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After Black Lives Matter: Policing and Anti-Capitalist Struggle
Contemporary policing reflects the turn from welfare to domestic warfare as the chief means of regulating the excluded and oppressed
The historic uprising in the wake of the murder of George Floyd transformed the way Americans and the world think about race and policing. Why did it achieve so little in the way of substantive reforms? After Black Lives Matter argues that the failure to leave an institutional residue was not simply due to the mercurial and reactive character of the protests. Rather, the core of the movement itself failed to locate the central racial injustice that underpins the crisis of policing: socio-economic inequality.
For Johnson, the anti-capitalist and downwardly redistributive politics expressed by different Black Lives Matter elements has too often been drowned out in the flood of black wealth creation, fetishism of Jim Crow black entrepreneurship, corporate diversity initiatives, and a quixotic reparations demand. None of these political tendencies addresses the fundamental problem underlying mass incarceration. That is the turn from welfare to domestic warfare as the chief means of regulating the excluded and oppressed. Johnson sees the way forward in building popular democratic power to advance public works and public goods. Rather than abolishing police, After Black Lives Matter argues for abolishing the conditions of alienation and exploitation contemporary policing exists to manage.
The historic uprising in the wake of the murder of George Floyd transformed the way Americans and the world think about race and policing. Why did it achieve so little in the way of substantive reforms? After Black Lives Matter argues that the failure to leave an institutional residue was not simply due to the mercurial and reactive character of the protests. Rather, the core of the movement itself failed to locate the central racial injustice that underpins the crisis of policing: socio-economic inequality.
For Johnson, the anti-capitalist and downwardly redistributive politics expressed by different Black Lives Matter elements has too often been drowned out in the flood of black wealth creation, fetishism of Jim Crow black entrepreneurship, corporate diversity initiatives, and a quixotic reparations demand. None of these political tendencies addresses the fundamental problem underlying mass incarceration. That is the turn from welfare to domestic warfare as the chief means of regulating the excluded and oppressed. Johnson sees the way forward in building popular democratic power to advance public works and public goods. Rather than abolishing police, After Black Lives Matter argues for abolishing the conditions of alienation and exploitation contemporary policing exists to manage.
417 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 21, 2023
20 people are currently reading
354 people want to read
About the author
Cedric G. Johnson
7 books8 followersCedric G. Johnson is associate professor of African American Studies and Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His book, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics was named the 2008 W.E.B. DuBois Outstanding Book of the Year by the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. Johnson is the editor of The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism and the Remaking of New Orleans. His 2017 Catalyst essay, “The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now: Anti-policing Struggles and the Limits of Black Power,” was awarded the 2018 Daniel Singer Millenium Prize. Johnson’s writings have appeared in Nonsite, Jacobin, New Political Science, New Labor Forum, Perspectives on Politics, Historical Materialism, and Journal of Developing Societies. In 2008, Johnson was named the Jon Garlock Labor Educator of the Year by the Rochester Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO. He previously served on the representative assembly for UIC United Faculty Local 6456.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 9, 2025
This book is at times insightful and at times infuriating. Johnson's explanation of how working and middle class people came to support cops (rather than properly identifying them as the enemies of the working class) through mortgages and the diffusion of home ownership in the post-WWII era was so helpful. So, that's great.
Literally everything he had to say about the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) was hot garbage. He calls the movement neoliberal, conflating the movement itself with how corporations have coopted its messaging and imagery. He is flatly wrong when he describes the movement's politics as neoliberal or as not anti-capitalist. Several movement leaders have written books that explicitly discuss how opposition to racial capitalism is at the center of their politics. He resorts to ad hominem attacks on leaders in the movement who have fucked up in public, as if their fuck ups are grounds for dismissing an entire movement. Everything to do with the movement in his book is intellectually dishonest or misinformed. Readers who want understand the movement would be better off reading Deva Woodly's fantastic book, Reckoning.
In the conclusion, he has this paragraph where he talks about how unfair it was that in the unrest after the murder of George Floyd, he and his class-over-everything friends weren't getting interviews and weren't able to place their op-eds and articles. And honestly, it feels like the pettiness of that paragraph explains the whole approach to the book. It's hard not to conclude that he is unsupportive of the M4BL because it is led by Black women, Black queer folks of all genders, and doesn't identify as Marxist (though is still very much anti-capitalist).
Sadly, the two narratives exist in each chapter, so it's not like you can just pull out the parts that are actually useful and assign those to students. It's a real shame because part of the argument is great, and the other part is just wildly inaccurate and seems driven by pettiness.
Literally everything he had to say about the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) was hot garbage. He calls the movement neoliberal, conflating the movement itself with how corporations have coopted its messaging and imagery. He is flatly wrong when he describes the movement's politics as neoliberal or as not anti-capitalist. Several movement leaders have written books that explicitly discuss how opposition to racial capitalism is at the center of their politics. He resorts to ad hominem attacks on leaders in the movement who have fucked up in public, as if their fuck ups are grounds for dismissing an entire movement. Everything to do with the movement in his book is intellectually dishonest or misinformed. Readers who want understand the movement would be better off reading Deva Woodly's fantastic book, Reckoning.
In the conclusion, he has this paragraph where he talks about how unfair it was that in the unrest after the murder of George Floyd, he and his class-over-everything friends weren't getting interviews and weren't able to place their op-eds and articles. And honestly, it feels like the pettiness of that paragraph explains the whole approach to the book. It's hard not to conclude that he is unsupportive of the M4BL because it is led by Black women, Black queer folks of all genders, and doesn't identify as Marxist (though is still very much anti-capitalist).
Sadly, the two narratives exist in each chapter, so it's not like you can just pull out the parts that are actually useful and assign those to students. It's a real shame because part of the argument is great, and the other part is just wildly inaccurate and seems driven by pettiness.
April 4, 2023
No rest for the weary — have you tired of hearing about the transparently obvious insufficiencies of the politics haphazardly gathered under the broad BLM umbrella (that is, 'racial liberalism')? Have you tired of milquetoast writers playing the world's smallest violin as they bemoan everyone else's underappreciation of the self-evident path of reheated social democracy? Of course you have. But do not worry: another text is here, rehearsing the exact same arguments, which at this point just flow naturally off the assembly line of popular left discourse. The theoretical and strategic repertoire here is exhausted in the introduction and it is already familiar to you — you can reproduce it in your mind's eye right now, I assure you. The only slightly daring thing is a reformist redux of the Schlageter speech in which Johnson engages in a bit of special pleading for the bravery and tragic pathos of police officers. Even that is old hat. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
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December 24, 2025In reaction to Kathleen's review: Case in point: Published in 2023. On page 7, Eric Adams is quoted and identified as "Brooklyn Borough president". Adams was elected mayor of New York in 2021.
In the years since Cedric Johnson picked out that quote and commented on it later in the introduction during the time the book went through the publishing process, I think the author or Verso editors should have revised the identification, or picked a different quote from someone else so the issue addressed wouldn't be distracted by Adams' later controversies.
In the years since Cedric Johnson picked out that quote and commented on it later in the introduction during the time the book went through the publishing process, I think the author or Verso editors should have revised the identification, or picked a different quote from someone else so the issue addressed wouldn't be distracted by Adams' later controversies.
August 14, 2025
I love Johnson's work - the essay collection The Panthers Can't Save Us Now was a formative book for my thinking on race and class politics in the US. This one did have a lot of ideas I was already familiar with and was a bit vague in terms of the associations it was trying to make, but overall I loved the conclusions and loved the experience of reading this clear-eyes and critical book.
April 11, 2025
read for class
December 4, 2025
At times genius, at times infuriating, After Black Lives Matter is certainly worth reading for anyone with a background in left discussion around the Black Lives Matter movement, and although at times I had a sour taste in my mouth from the brutally honest takes Johnson delivers, I could not help but be compelled by many of his arguments; I think they deserve serious consideration as well as critique. He is far from always right, but even when he's wrong, he at least tries to make an interesting argument, for example, when he argues for the plausibility of the labor movement incorporating police unions. Not worthless, but also not the book that gets us to where we need to be in terms of discussing Black Lives Matter in its entirety; overall, I enjoyed it.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews