This is a revised version of a June 13, 2020 lecture delivered at the Global Center for Advanced Studies.
The title of this article announces my preoccupation with a probing question raised by the towering intellectual and committed activist Vincent Harding—“Is America possible?”[i] To critically probe the contours of this question in our contemporary moment requires us to develop a requisite orientation to the question. In other words, we must engage in reflexively thinking the languages, concepts, and categories that may adequately host and respond to this pressing concern.
It is here where we can turn to the work of C.L.R. James. It is James and members of the small but influential Johnson-Forest Tendency in mid-twentieth century America that offer us a critical axis which can guide and inform our exploration of this question. In The Invading Socialist Society, James and his collaborators offered a critique of contemporary politics and Marxist theory.[ii] In a foundational critique of the theoretical and political limitations of actually existing socialism, they write, “What is so terrible is that fundamental concepts are being changed, altered, transformed, shifted around, without the theoreticians ever stopping to think of what they are doing.” Underscoring how the movement of politics on the ground outstrips political language and concepts, they underscore the necessity to avoid a technocratic and mechanist deployment of the concepts of Marxism in trying to comprehend the emergence of a new political formation. To do so is not only theoretically and methodologically naïve, but also fails fully to appreciate how and in what ways the possibility of a struggle for a new politics creates the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a new society.
In our contemporary moment that can be termed “The American Spring” —the latest episode in a sustained struggle to realize fully the worth, value, and dignity of black life in the context of world historical configurations of capital, commerce, and culture in America—a fundamental confusion, born of the same logic that received criticisms from James and his collaborators, persists:[iii] rendering the multiple and complex meanings of the current uprising to the dominant logic of the categories and frameworks deployed to make sense of this moment. Our contemporary political discourse tethers these political developments to a logic determined by our already existing political concepts and categories. Thus, we foreclose the possibilities of what may emerge from a protracted struggle for a new society by (un)consciously telescoping our future to more of the same.
In the space opened by this critique, we can more keenly and critically engage our contemporary conjuncture and host Harding’s open question. In his collection of essays, Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement, dedicated to “all those magnificent, often unnamed teachers of democracy who were ‘able to see things differently and act according,’” Harding takes up this question in order to plumb the depths of the condition of possibility for realizing a project and a people of America.[iv] America is not a foregone conclusion nor is it one that was fully realized at its instantiation in 1776. Rather, Harding’s text and question open a space to focus critically our attention on developing requisite theoretical and political practices capable of ushering a new reality born of the struggles for a new world and an America that has yet to exist.
Harding’s text also situates us as intellectuals with a particular vocation and vision. He provides us with a critical orientation to the practice of intellectual life that attuned to the necessity of dialogically engaging theoretical labor and political labor. By cultivating such a practice, Harding properly locates us to understand how and in what ways these movements enact fundamental shifts for societal transformation. In order to develop such a disposition and not rendering this episode to a logic of the same requires comprehending and enacting of a particular practice of the intellectual in service to the broader collective. Thus, intellectual labor is pressed into the service of the struggle for a new world.
Harding provides an exemplary articulation of this position when he stages a critical confrontation with the role and function of the black scholar and the struggle of the black community in his germinal essay of 1974 for the Institute of the Black World’s Education and Black Struggle collection. It is here where he identifies and elaborates the vocation of the black scholar as one of using the gifts of critical scholarship in service to the freedom struggles of the black community. Indeed, Harding’s opening essay to the collection defines and is defined by a critical task:
The Institute was born into a national struggle over the control of the definition of the black experience. . . . At the same time, it was impossible to confine ourselves simply to the black community or to reshaping the black experience without a fundamental encounter with America. For America confronts black people with questions which we, at the pain of our life and honor, must answer. That is why “speaking the truth” about racial colonialism in America presses itself to the center of any search for the vocation of the black scholar. Most Americans have abandoned the pursuit of such questions, at their own special peril, but black scholars must not fall into that fatal trap.[v]
Vincent Harding reminds us of the critical stakes involved in shaping the discursive frameworks which are deployed to make sense of particular phenomena. Attending to the logical and categorical functions of the theoretical is a fundamental task when taking up the black experience both historically and in our contemporary moment. Less than critical attention often render opaque the knowledges and practices of black people as well as render flat the depth and diversity of the forces that in/form a particular conjuncture. Harding offers us an acute formulation of the pitfalls of (mis)reading black formations in reducing the horizon for understanding the depth and potential of black led social and political transformation:
The conventional term civil rights movement is too narrow a description for the great, Black-led eruption that shook the anti-democratic, white-supremacist foundations of this nation not long ago. Indeed, when we look back now from the vantage point of Beijing and Prague, from Berlin and Soweto, we realize that the post-World War II African-American freedom movement was our own [germinal] contribution to the massive pro-democracy struggles that have set the globe spinning in these times. At its deepest and best levels, what we so often call the civil rights movement was in fact a powerful outcropping of the continuing struggle for the expansion of democracy in the United States. . . .[vi]
By underscoring how a category of thought limits the horizon of thinking, Harding offers a powerful caution to categorical thinking. To be sure, in his famed 1969 lecture “Black Studies and the Contemporary Student,” C.L.R. James amplifies this line of thinking when discussing philosophy: “I know from personal experience and I am sure that when Jaspers and Heidegger say that, they know what they’re talking about. They say that all these people writing about philosophy—they don’t know what they’re saying. Because for them philosophy is something that they write from books; they read Kant and they read Plato and Aristotle and they write about it. They say that is nothing. . . . And it is people in the midst of a struggle today who can write about Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips and really illuminate them.”[vii] Thus, for James as well as Harding it is an imperative to develop an intellectual practice whereby the experience in general and black experience in particular is not subsumed under the weight of the dead letter and rendered one dimensional nor static across space and time. Just as importantly, black experience must not be thought “without a fundamental encounter with America” —that is the conditions of possibility for the idea and instantiation of America.
In this American Spring, precipitated by a pandemic and the uprisings after the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, the question raised by Angela Davis provides us with the critical orientation to our moment: “How do we imagine a better world and raise the questions that permit us to see beyond the given?”[viii] This is not a question that can be answered declaratively for all time. Davis, along with Harding and James, elaborates a critical intellectual practice by raising a question and opening possibilities that gives rise to a communal intellectual and political practice to respond to the exigencies of the moment.
Davis’s question facilitates a fresh engagement with the broad and expansive idea of abolition democracy. It is this idea which critically captures the thrust of this contemporary moment in the long struggle in creating a context for fully affirming black lives.
Indeed, the almost decade long movement #BlackLivesMatter shares a two centuries long genealogy of black critical thinking political action in redefining the boundaries of the political. From the 18th century abolitionist motto “Am I Not a Man and Brother” to Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” to the affirmation “I Am a Man,” #BlackLivesMatter powerfully redirects our attention to the narrow and prescriptive confines of politics and political discourse in an attenuated version of American democracy.[ix] The latest eruption in this moment and the planetary resonance of #BlackLivesMatter offers a critical moment to understand (again) the import of Sylvia Wynter’s closing statement in her open letter to her Stanford University colleagues, “The starving (or the jobless inner city N.H.I. [No Humans Involved], the global New Poor or les damnés), Fanon pointed out, does not have to inquire into the truth. He is, they are, the Truth. It is we who institute this ‘Truth.’ We must now undo their narratively condemned status.”[x] #BlackLivesMatter punctures the order of knowledge and reopens the terrain of political to hosting the emergence of a new understanding of what it means to be human as well as a new order of social and political life.
In this context, Angela Davis’s call for abolition democracy expands the horizon of possibility for actually existing democracy to transform into a space for a new human and life itself as crystalized in the #BlackLivesMatter movement. More importantly, it seeks to liberate democracy from capitalist democracy as Davis astutely notes, “Today, the tendency to assume that the only version of democracy available to us is capitalist democracy poses a challenge. We must be able to disentangle our notions of capitalism and democracy so to pursue truly egalitarian models of democracy.” Davis perceptively argues for a conceptual freedom for democracy predicated on new egalitarian norms. In this respect, it is not wonder why there is conceptual confusion in public discourse regarding calls for defunding police. Outside of a framework of abolition democracy grounded in a new order of public priorities affirming black lives calls for defunding the police cannot be heard conceptually or politically. Thus, the challenge is not to funnel forms of political struggle into the outmoded conceptual and political forms of actually existing democracy.
Davis develops the theoretical framework of abolition democracy in conversation with of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. Du Bois’s text provides a historically nuanced account of a new state of political affairs precipitated by the general strike, the actions of black labor, and the struggle for a new form of democracy. He also links the emergence of the carceral state (and its concomitant policing practices) and the evolution of capitalist political economy. In Du Bois’s words, “This penitentiary system began to characterize the whole South.”[xi] Davis’s turn to Du Bois facilitates a critical rethinking of the limits of democracy in which “the abolition of slavery then corresponded to the authorization of slavery as punishment.”[xii] This expansion of the carceral logic in tandem with capitalist political economy would accelerate in the 1970s and 1980s as neoliberalism rendered black labor redundant and reinscribed black life within the carceral logic that supported and maintained the logic of an arrested American democracy.[xiii] Thus, Davis’s notion of abolition democracy does double work. It surfaces the panoply of processes in and through which a democratic polity is intimately shaped by carceral ideas and practices while foregrounding the necessity for foundational political change.
The contemporary crisis bisected by a global pandemic and global protest is unfolding a new terrain of struggle. Again, Angela Davis is instructive in this regard when she writes, “What we manage to do each time we win a victory is not so much to secure change once and for all, but rather to create new terrains for struggle.”[xiv] The terrain of struggle in our new moment is planetary. That is, the limits of national sovereignty which resonates with previous struggles is eclipsed in this moment of global health crisis, global climate crisis, and global crisis in democracy. The horizon of the planetary owes its formulation to the critical elaboration of the “global level horizon” in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois by Nahum Dimitri Chandler in Toward an African Future—of the Limit of the World. [xv] It is this text which underscores how a critical globality anchors Du Bois’s thinking—from the global dimensions of the color line (of which the United States is one instance) to the global operations of capitalism to the global dimensions of white supremacy. The planetary forces theoretical and political actors to develop frameworks that are not absolutely bounded by the limits of a national order predicated on maintaining imperial orders of sovereignty.
Vincent Harding’s critical examination of the question “Is America Possible?” opens a necessary space to think new forms of politics and political subjectivity appropriate to a project of America that has yet to emerge. Taking up Angela Davis’s thought of abolition democracy in our current conjuncture enables us to critically think the limits of actually existing democracy as well as imagine new forms of planetary possibility. In the space of this moment, we may begin anew and not trap ourselves in the prison house of the same from which we are all trying to escape.
[i] Vincent Harding, Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement, 177–89.
[ii] C.L.R. James, F. Forest and Ria Stone, The Invading Socialist Society, 3.
[iii] For another use of this phrase see Jelani Cobb, “An American Spring of Reckoning.” My formulation and thinking have been influenced by Ronald Judy, ed., “Tunisia Dossier: The Tunisian Revolution of Dignity.”
[iv] Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement, 2.
[v] Vincent Harding, “The Vocation of the Black Scholar and the Struggles of the Black Community.” See also Derrick E. White, The Challenge of Blackness: The Institute of the Black World and Political Activism in the 1970s,
[vi] Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement, 6.
[vii] C.L.R. James “Black Studies and the Contemporary Student,” The C.L.R. James Reader, 401.
[viii]Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture, 23.
[ix] For an intellectual history of this formation, see Christopher J. Lebron, The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea.
[x] Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues.”
[xi] W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880, 451.
[xii] Angela Y. Davis, “Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition,” 97.
[xiii] See Marie Gottschalk, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics.
[xiv] Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture, 20–21.
[xv] Nahum Dimitri Chandler, Toward An African Future—of the Limit of the World, 13.
Corey D. B. Walker
Corey D. B. Walker is the Wake Forest Professor of the Humanities at Wake Forest University.
