Cedric Johnson

The Urban Precariat, Neoliberalization, and the Soft Power of Humanitarian Design

This essay examines the humanitarian design movements efforts to address the crushing need, social precarity, and ecological frailty that define global megacities. The aims and character of the humanitarian design movement have been shaped by both the ethical demands of antiglobalization struggles and the rise of nongovernmental organizations as a principal means of social service-delivery in the Global South. The emergent humanitarian design movement offers a compelling critique of the failure of mainstream architectural and industrial design practices to address profound human suffering. Champions of humanitarian design, however, offer a technological fix (e.g., life straws, paper log houses, and hippo rollers) for problems rooted in imperial histories and neoliberal restructuring. In failing to address the dynamics of structural underdevelopment, do-good design performs the grassroots ideological work of neoliberalism by promoting market values and autoregulation. Within the humanitarian-corporate complexes, the global poor are construed as objects of elite benevolence and non-profit largesse, rather than as historical subjects possessing their own unique worldviews, interests, and notions of progress. This essay concludes by briefl y sketching an alternative approach to self-determination for the poor where technological development is grounded in egalitarian cultures of anticapitalist social movements.

Gentrifying New Orleans: Thoughts on Race and the Movement of Capital

This article examines contemporary discourses of race, gentrification, and demographic change in post-Katrina New Orleans. Although much public debate over gentrification has often centered on the displacement of black and brown communities, and the loss of neighborhood identity and cultural authenticity, this article emphasizes the underlying class interests and broader urban processes that drive rent-intensification. Without a critical analysis of political-economy and the complex roles that culture, race, and nostalgia play in place-making and real-estate valuation, we may well lose sight of how urban land development actually unfolds, and fail to devise effective public solutions that can guarantee adequate housing for all.

The Half-Life of the Black Urban Regime: Adolph Reed, Jr. on Race, Capitalism, and Urban Governance

In a series of critical essays published during the eighties, Adolph Reed, Jr. examined the origins and political contradictions of the post civil rights black urban regime. This article revisits Reed’s formative analyses and how well these writings captured the concurrent historical processes of black political incorporation and urban neoliberalization. Reed counters the commonplace tendency to view the black population as a singular constituency with deeply shared interests, and instead, renders a more insightful portrait of black political life and its internal class dynamics. His work continues to provide a useful approach for understanding the machinations of black New Democrats, who remain central to the advancement of corporate-centered economic development strategies and pro-market initiatives like school privatization, which exacerbate urban inequality.

Between Revolution and the Racial Ghetto: Harold Cruse and Harry Haywood Debate Class Struggle and the ‘Negro Question’, 1962–8

This article revisits an historic exchange between two black ex-communists, Harold Cruse and Harry Haywood, a debate that prefigured many of the central contradictions of the black-power era. Their exchange followed Cruse’s influential 1962 essay for Studies on the Left, ‘Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American’, which declared that the American Negro was a ‘subject of domestic colonialism’. Written against the prevailing liberal integrationist commitments of the civil-rights movement, his essay called for black economic and political independence, and inspired many of the younger activists who would give birth to the black-power movement. In a series of essays for the Bay Area black radical journal Soulbook, Haywood criticised Cruse’s mishandling of class politics among blacks, and his retreat from anti-capitalism. This forgotten episode is important on its own terms, for what it says about the character and limitations of left-political thinking during the sixties, and equally for understanding and contesting those commonsensical notions of African-American public life in our times which too often remain rooted in the vanished social context and political realities of the twentieth-century racial ghetto.

James Boggs, the “Outsiders,” and the Challenge of Postindustrial Society

The immediate subject of James Boggss The American Revolution is the far-reaching transformation of American industry through automation and cybernetic command. He offers a political reading of these new forces of production that greatly diminished the power of industrial workers on the shop floor and in U.S. politics more generally during the post–World War II period. In light of the new social and economic terrain of postindustrial society, Boggs urges a rethinking of leftist revolution. In this essay, I excavate certain aspects of Boggss formative critique of automation and its implications for working-class life and politics and consider how well his analysis of the social contradictions produced under postindustrialism anticipates the emergence of the New Right. In contrast to Cold War liberals and latter-day purveyors of underclass rhetoric who emphasize alleged cultural dysfunction to explain inequality, Boggs saw the new urban poor, those who face chronic unemployment under automation, as potential agents of social change and developed a novel concept of cultural revolution whereby the “classless society” could be achieved through a revolution in values rather than the pursuit of statist transition. Cooperatively organized production might eliminate material need, deliver more leisure time, and enable a freer, more socially just order than that available under liberal capitalism. For Boggs, this was the profound, cultural challenge facing Americans under postindustrialism.

Black Radical Enigma

The Essence of Reparations by Amiri Baraka; Somebody Blew Up America and Other Poems by Amiri Baraka; Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual by Jerry Gafio Watts; Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka by Harry T. Elam; A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics by Komozi Woodard This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Beyond the barricades: class interests and actually existing black life

In his 1962 essay ‘Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American,’ Harold Cruse quipped, ‘American Marxists cannot “see” the Negro at all, unless he is storming the barricades, either in the present or in history’ (Cruse, 1968). An ex-communist, Cruse took issue with his former comrades who only focused on resistance that comported with socialist sensibilities. Their selective history produced a view of the black population as ‘a people without classes or differing class interests.’ And yet, Cruse ultimately undermines his sharpest insights regarding the complex internal political life of black communities, insisting that like the wage laborer and sharecropper, who are discriminated against and exploited, the ‘educated, professional and intellectual classes suffer a similar fate.’ From this common Jim Crow predicament, Cruse urges the Negro bourgeoisie to operate as a national bourgeoisie who will undertake the tasks of building group economic and political autonomy. The myth of an organic black constituency has gained renewed legitimacy as thousands have returned to the barricades to protest police violence. Sadly, some contemporary leftists can only ‘see the Negro’ when he appears in viral videos of police wilding, or the demonstrations that follow. In contrast, this essay calls for a critical analysis of actually-existing black life, one that ventures beyond the barricades to account for the historically-contingent political and material interests that animate black politics and connect the situated-class experiences of blacks to those of all others living under capitalism. The slogan, ‘Black Lives Matter,’ crafted by three queer feminist activists after the vigilante killing of unarmed teen Trayvon Martin, reasserts a common black plight and demands an end to racist violence. The phrase challenged the discourse of post-racialism that accompanied Barack Obama’s ascent to the presidency and his approach to governing, which was defined by a willingness to confine racial grievance to the past and a penchant for underclass moralizing. In the wake of the election of Donald J. Trump, debates have sharpened between the poles of nativist, pro-policing reaction and liberal anti-racism, and race and racism have ossified as the central categories for discussing American inequality. The vicissitudes of the moment have encouraged an accounting of black life that fails to learn from the more than half century of black political development and meaningful progress that has taken place since Cruse’s formative criticisms of the Left’s inability to see black life as possessing multiple classes and historical interests. Black Lives Matter, and kindred analytic frames like the New

“Happening to a City Near You”: Luisa Dantas on New Orleans and the Craft of Documentary Filmmaking

In this interview, filmmaker Luisa Dantas discusses the origins and development of Land of Opportunity, her acclaimed documentary about post-disaster reconstruction in New Orleans. She also talks about the multi-media platform that grew out of this film, and how it connects the discrete experiences of New Orleanians to broader social justice issues facing urban dwellers across the United States and around the world.