Restoring the Political

I first became familiar with Adolph Reed’s work in graduate school. Having studied politics and philosophy as an undergraduate in the United Kingdom, my early introduction into American-style political science was a profound shock. Initially, the discipline appeared obsessed with the counting, measuring, and predicting of political phenomena—with only a passing interest in the practice of politics itself and the key question of who gets what, when, and why. Moreover, the dominant, almost hegemonic, account of politics was rooted in rational choice theory, which preferred parsimonious accounts of human action that dispensed with the need to pay attention to the historically contingent distribution of power and the function of corresponding political ideologies. Thus, I found myself bewildered.

It was, therefore, a revelation to be introduced to Adolph Reed whose scholarship stands in direct contradiction to the reductionism inherent in mainstream accounts of politics. Refreshingly, Reed aims, as he puts it, at “restoring the political.” ¹ In so doing, Reed grounds his analysis historically, while informing central theoretical questions in urban studies and beyond.

In his effort to “restore the political,” a key contribution has been Reed’s resistance to the lamentable tendency to “naturalize” political phenomena through abstractions such as the rational, utility-maximizing individual; the unitary city interest; and notion of a corporate black interest. I shall focus here on Reed’s critiques of the “city limits” frame developed by Paul Peterson (1981) and on the legion attempts by politicians, scholars, and pundits to assert the notion of a “collective racial interest” for blacks.

As will be familiar to many readers, Peterson’s (1981, 147) central claim is that any examination of developmental policies that

attempts to ascertain the power of one or another individual or group are probably pointless if not misleading. In this policy arena the city as a whole has an interest that needs to be protected and enhanced. Policies of benefit to the city contribute to the prosperity of all residents.

In this view, it is fortunate for urban dwellers that they have the same interest vis-à-vis development because Peterson also holds that any attempts at intra-urban redistribution are quixotic at best. But as Reed (1999, 164) shows, a historical perspective that pays close attention to power dynamics illustrates that “despite the fact that all the pieces fit neatly together, the picture rings somehow incomplete if not plainly false.” Indeed, his treatment of the black urban regime brings into sharp relief the shortcomings of the assumptions that underpin Petersonian analysis, most notably that the claim of a unitary urban interest confuses consensus with what “might simply be an ‘interest’ imposed by a dominant political-economic elite and may no more express intrinsic rationality than the divine right of kings truly expressed natural law” (Reed 1999, 165). As Reed shows, decisions about urban development inevitably create winners and losers and that those on the losing side tend systematically to be the working class.

Having laid bare the weaknesses of Peterson’s overly economistic view of urban affairs, Reed opens the door to political-economic accounts that take the quotidian operation of politics seriously. Building on the early work of Todd Swantstom, Clarence Stone, and Hayward Sanders, Reed’s insistence on restoring the political results in a sophisticated and compelling examination of the black urban regime. At first glance, the apparently reluctant embrace of pro-growth politics by mayors who led black urban regimes—such as Maynard Jackson in Atlanta, Coleman Young in Detroit, and Wilson Goode in Philadelphia—appeared to confirm the “city limits” thesis. After all, given that blacks were likely to accrue fewer benefits from pro-growth politics, one would expect black urban regimes to resist the demands of corporate interests. That they failed to fashion alternatives surely illustrates that such forces are irresistible.

It would be tempting to accept this reasoning without consulting the historical record, but Reed refuses to. Instead, he asks how did black urban regimes like Maynard Jackson’s in Atlanta “galvanize enough quiescence among the black electorate to cement blacks into the pro-development coalition despite the fact that the black community did not figure into the list of real beneficiaries?” (Reed 1999, 166). Reed (1999, 107) finds that rather than being forced to capitulate to business demands, the “key to penetrating the character of the ‘really existing’ black urban regime’” is to recognize that it “adhere[s] to the pro-growth framework for the same reasons that other regimes do: it seems reasonable and proper ideologically; it conforms to a familiar sense of rationality; and it promises to deliver practical, empirical benefits.” The key beneficiaries, of course, were business interests and the black middle and upper classes, suggesting that ideology and class politics rather than natural law resolves the apparent puzzle. As such, Reed’s analysis of the black urban regime restores the political and in so doing reveals the conceptual frailty of the city limits thesis.

In a related line of research, Reed’s Marxist perspective illuminates the mystification that surrounds the discourse on race and racism. He reminds us that “race is a taxonomy of ascriptive difference, that is, an ideology that constructs populations as groups and sorts them into hierarchies of capacity, civic worth, and desert based on ‘natural’ or essential characteristics attributed to them” (Reed 2013, 49). Attempts to essentialize and naturalize race can be found over time and across the political spectrum from the race pseudoscientists of the Victorian era, to black nationalists, and to present-day liberals who frame political struggle and social justice in fundamentally identitarian terms. Among the many deleterious effects of such a conceptualization is the claim of a “corporate racial identity” and a collective racial interest that will necessarily be advanced to the extent that black “leaders” can assume positions of power. According to this view, the emergence of the black urban regime, or indeed the election of a black president, is a harbinger of progress for “the community” as a whole.

In light of the myriad injustices and indignities suffered by blacks in America, especially before the civil rights victories of the 1960s, these shifts surely were signs of progress. That said, it would be too glib to skip onward without asking the essential question of political analysis: who benefits? On this crucial point, Reed reminds us that while middle and upper strata blacks improved their position as a result of the black regime, the black working class has not. Moreover, the sleight of hand involved in the dominance of the “discourse of symbolic racial collectivism” “allows the black regime to claim in effect that whatever stances it takes on growth-related issues are ipso facto expressions of generic black interests” (Reed 1999, 104). Along similar lines, Reed insists that thinking about social justice in terms of identity drains political discourse of its programmatic content. Seen though an identitarian lens, which equates the elevation of African Americans to high office as a collective achievement, the election of Barack Obama was in itself progress, irrespective of the fact that he offered little more that “left neoliberalism” that does little to advance the material interests of the majority of black Americans (Reed 2014).

Reed’s trenchant criticism of the Obama administration and of the moribund American “left” undoubtedly reflects the central place of critique in his intellectual contributions. Indeed, the list of targets of Reed’s often acerbic pen is lengthy. It includes liberals, neoliberals, conservatives, neoconservatives, Trotskyists, back nationalists, and many, many others! As a result, Reed has been accused of “electoral nihilism” and of excessive pessimism (Goldberg 2014). Despite considerable energy devoted to critique, I want to suggest that Reed’s positions on race, the left, and “city limits” urban regime are profoundly optimistic. By unshackling us from the ersatz forms of political activism associated with identity claims and performance, Reed redirects our attention to the concrete alternatives to neoliberalism, which is all too easily compatible with these approaches.

As Reed (1999, 166) argues,

restoring the political reminds us that even within constraint in the urban polity a span of choice does exist and that how those choices are made and by whom says much about the character of the democracy in our society.

This realization also opens the possibility of alternatives to neoliberalism at the urban levels and beyond. For Reed (1999, 196), of central importance is to locate the sources of injustice “in the operation of the American political and economic system” and forge alternative strategies that aim to disrupt the structures and ideologies that reproduce it. In terms of a practical strategy and program, Reed, alongside Mark Dudzic, suggests that rather than trying to “mobilize around every one of neoliberalism’s daily outrages,” the left needs to engage in strategic “movement-building requires mobilizing around an agenda of substantively anti-capitalist reforms that directly and militantly assert the priority of social needs over market forces, bourgeois property rights and managerial prerogative in the workplace and production process” (Dudzic and Reed 2015, 364–65). More concretely, this would involve engaging in struggles

to preserve and expand public institutions and to decommoditize basic human needs like housing, transportation, healthcare and education could begin to address the immediate challenge, which is to create a new popular constituency for a revitalized movement, instead of reorganizing or re-mobilizing an already existing but totally marginalized left. (Reed and Dudzic 2015, 365)

The key to effecting this shift is the “transformation and revitalization of the institutional labour movement” that speaks directly to “the felt concerns and real daily struggles of working people” (Dudzic and Reed, 2015, 370–71). ² None of this, however, will be possible, Reed suggests, without a profound ideological assault on neoliberalism, which can only be done once one comes to terms with the degree to which the Democratic Party and its fellow travelers have become trapped in the neoliberal mire.

The above discussion has suggested that through his commitment to “restoring the political,” both in his academic work and in his political deeds, Adolph Reed has helped to demystify a series of tropes that work to demobilize progressive forces: the fallacious “city limits” claim, the specious notion of a unitary urban interest, and the shibboleth of a corporate racial identity with a corresponding set of uniform interests. In so doing, the door to a genuine alternative is opened. Yet, having offered a compelling interpretation of the world, Reed is well aware of the Marxian injunction that the “point is to change it.” As such, a few questions about how to build the new Jerusalem are in order.

The first set of questions involves the most fruitful level of struggle. In light of the apparent dearth of progressive avenues at the national level—either in Congress or in the Executive—should we focus instead at the local level and build from the bottom up? Can local solutions ever be anything more than quixotic? Even if national action is plausible, what might be done to build alternatives at the urban level? And, irrespective of the locus of action, how can we take short-term gains without jettisoning the prospect for long-term transformation? A second series of questions concerns the state, both local and national. Should the capture and/or transformation of state institutions be a central goal? Can the state ever be a reliable agent of social justice? Finally, given the centrality of rebuilding the labor movement, how might one respond to those who say that the new structure of the economy has rendered the prospects for powerful organized labor unlikely? Whatever the answers to these questions, there is no doubt that the need to build a counterforce to neoliberalism is urgent indeed. Restoring the political will be a central element of this monumental task.