Jacobin Show: The Downfall of Defund w/ Cedric Johnson
Jacobin Radio
Jacobin
4.7 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 14 April 2022
⏱️ 70 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jen Pan takes a look at the politics of the pentagon budget and Daniel Zamora discusses how American-style identity politics somehow found a way of suffusing the ideological debates around the French election. Then, Jen sits down with Cedric Johnson to discuss why the defund movement failed, and why the Left should prioritize a politics of increased social spending to eliminate the very basis of what Johnson terms "stress policing" of working-class communities.
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The Jacobin Show offers socialist perspectives on class and capitalism in the twenty-first century, the failures of liberalism, and the prospects of rebuilding a left labor movement in the US. This is the podcast version of the show from April 13, 2022.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Music |
| 0:29.5 | Hi and welcome back to the Jacobin show. So the topic of today's show is I think a pretty |
| 0:37.5 | important one facing the left today. I'm of course talking about the D fund, the police movement |
| 0:43.0 | and what its general trajectory and some of its limitations have been since the demand really took |
| 0:49.8 | off during and after the George Floyd protests in 2020. So this is really something we've been wanting |
| 0:56.9 | to talk about in detail on this show for quite a while because I really think that if we're serious |
| 1:04.2 | about stopping police violence and ending mass incarceration and finding a way to enact real public |
| 1:10.7 | safety, it's really important to be able to talk about proposals like defunding the police and |
| 1:16.3 | I think really taking a hard look at what they can and cannot achieve. So to that end today, |
| 1:22.9 | I thought it would be useful to sit down and address exactly what this demand entails, what it |
| 1:29.0 | has achieved so far and and where it might be going with somebody who researches not just |
| 1:35.4 | policing under neoliberalism, but also the evolution of black power and black politics since the |
| 1:41.4 | postwar era. So of course the person I am talking about is Cedric Johnson. He is a political scientist |
| 1:48.2 | over at the University of Illinois at Chicago. You might remember that he's been on the show before, |
| 1:53.8 | actually to talk about some of these themes policing incarceration and what the less response to |
| 2:00.2 | those things should be. He has a really great essay in Cadillus called The Panthers Can't Save Us Now, |
| 2:06.8 | which I cannot recommend enough and that has recently been turned into a book that's now out from |
| 2:12.8 | so we will be linking that below. Now for my part, also in the context of these kind of ongoing calls |
| 2:19.3 | to defund the police, I actually have my own comments about Biden's recent Pentagon budget proposal, |
| 2:26.9 | how that relates to municipal policing and really just what kinds of money and resources it's |
| 2:34.2 | going to take to build an actually functioning welfare state rather than just pouring money into a |
| 2:39.8 | war machine or a police state. So that is coming up as well. But first on a slightly different topic, |
... |
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