cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/72561
In 2020, a record number of people across the United States took to the streets in the movement for Black lives, demanding justice for George Floyd and victims of police violence. Last week, two of the country’s most popular progressives — Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — threw this historic movement under the bus.
Speaking to ABC, AOC said that, “Woke 1 was crazy” — a phrase attributed to a tweet by New York City Council member Chi Ossé, referencing his social media posts from 2020. Days later, Mamdani more explicitly repudiated a key demand of the uprising, saying: “I’ve made very clear that I do not believe in defunding the police.”
But what’s actually “crazy” is calling yourself a socialist while believing in peaceful coexistence with the police.
Betraying Black Lives Matter and the Working Class
As many as 26 million people participated in protests in 2020 with the central demand of defunding the police. Many realized that cops — descendants of slave catchers and strike breakers — have nothing to do with public safety, and only exist to protect private property and repress the working class, including breaking strikes and brutalizing Black and Brown people, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ people.
AOC and Mamdani’s statements are a betrayal of this generation of people who have only seen police budgets and murders grow, with the backing of progressive Democrats. In fact, it was precisely this young, multi-racial coalition that brought progressives like Mamdani to power. The politics of these sectors were irrevocably forged in the fires of the BLM uprising, and we cannot separate the uprisings in 2020 from the movements of the following years — like the massive strikes and unionization efforts that led 2021 to be dubbed “the year of the worker,” the movement for Palestine that have shaken U.S. institutions and both parties to their core, and the fight against ICE.
To the extent that there were laughable aspects of 2020, they exposed the absurd notion that capitalist institutions can meaningfully address oppression. Like cops taking a knee before beating protesters, Democratic lawmakers draped in Kente cloth while brutally repressing protests, and brands posting hashtags in solidarity with Black struggle, only to reject any semblance of “woke” as soon as the political winds shifted.
But overwhelmingly, nothing materially changed — no excessively progressive policies were even implemented. As lawyer and organizer Dericka Purnell points out in The Guardian, “Ossé and AOC did not introduce any ‘woke 1’ legislation or resolutions that they now have to retract.” Mamdani, for his part, immediately began backtracking on his campaign promises, and only reversed course on expanding the police following immense pressure from the Democratic Socialists of America.
In this sense, as Maryam Alaniz explained, AOC and Mamdani “expose the political limits and contradictions of attempting to transform society while remaining inside the Democratic Party and administering institutions built to defend capitalist rule,” like the police. By governing as Democrats and facing the pressures of the political establishment and state apparatus, progressives betray both their supposed values and the masses who brought them to power with the hope of reforming this exploitative, oppressive system.
Why Leftists Must Be “Woke”
AOC and Mamdani’s supporters may argue that the two are simply being politically savvy. After all, many voters oppose defunding the police, so why not soften or outright abandon our more radical positions to gain popular support?
This logic is part of a broader perspective among reformist sectors, like those represented by Jacobin, that advocate focusing on economic, bread-and-butter demands at the expense of social issues in order to “win” sectors of the working class. But this perspective is incompatible with socialism, and counterproductive to building working-class power.
The working class is full of oppressed people, whether Black, Brown, or queer. This means that it is composed of the very sectors that police, in particular, exist to violently repress. And at the heart of socialism lies the notion that the working class holds a strategic position under capitalism due to its ability to grind the system — and profits — to a halt. As I wrote with my comrade Sybil Davis:
By organizing and withholding their labor, workers have the power to win key demands and force concessions from capitalists. Working-class unity is only possible by fighting against all these forms of oppression, taking up historical and theoretical studies of these different oppressions to better understand them, and taking up the specific demands of these marginalized groups, who often contain the most active and combative workers.
In other words, the fight against oppression, and against the police, cannot be separated from the fight against capitalist exploitation. This means that we must fight efforts by AOC, Mamdani, and others to reject the legacy of 2020 and minimize the struggle against oppression. And at a moment when record numbers of people are drawn to socialist ideas precisely because they help explain the brutal realities of capitalism, including policing, we need to seize the opportunity to break with the capitalist Democratic Party.
The post AOC and Mamdani Should Stop Throwing the Black Lives Matter Movement Under the Bus appeared first on Left Voice.
From Left Voice via This RSS Feed.
" Actually I never wanted to abolish ICE"
Agreed, but linking to a liberal, paywalled rag like Vox in the beginning of the post does not help the case for this premise. They’re known for obfuscation and browbeating sycophancy for centrist dems.
It’s just laughably easy to divide the left.
Whenever any politician to the left of Adolf Hitler gets popular you just claim that they are not ideologically pure enough and leftists will rally with torches and pitchforks to drive out the impure spirit instead of enjoying the modicum of progress we’re getting.
A politician who picks their battles to get shit done? Such an insult to the values of Marxism-Leninism must not be tolerated!
Meanwhile the ruling class and their fascist minions are holding their bellies laughing at the infighting of those stupid peasants. 🙄
Don’t get me wrong, AOC has disappointed me as well. The two-party system is an embarrassment to the country which considers itself the home of democracy. The mere fact that someone like Mamdani is considered unusual in politics is mind-blowing (shouldn’t all politicians be public minded like he is?).
But for fuck’s sake, can we please enjoy a good thing while we’ve got it? Doesn’t mean we have to give up the fight. Just stop squandering our energies on drivel like this article.
IKR!!! we should focus on important things like winning primaries that the last century has proven doesn’t change anything and not let silly little unimportant things divide us – like genocides or ethnic-cleansings or human rights violations or crimes against humanity.
WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!!
</sarcasm>
e: accidentally a word
Cool snark you got there but entirely unrelated to my post. Thanks for taking the time, though.
My comment directly addresses your point and the core issue here is that you don’t understand and don’t care to understand; but I do understand because I once believed in it too.
You can’t understand my comment because it’s a pain in the ass to get the receipts that disproves the narratives that you’ve heard echoed for so long that you’re utterly convinced that they’re right. Therefore everyone who believes otherwise is a silly tankie or maga or a bot or an asset or etc.
Those narratives keep you ignorant of why the left is divided like it once did to me – so where that ignorance makes you think that the problem is ideological purity; anyone who has looked at those receipts understands instantly that genocide for the sake of profits is at the heart of the problem.
we should focus on important things like winning primaries that the last century has proven doesn’t change anything
Not what I said. My focus was on Mamdani, who is not running in any primaries and already has an important job (which does seem to change things by all accounts). Wrapping a hit piece on Mamdani in a valid critique of AOC is dubious and unnecessarily divisive.
and not let silly little unimportant things divide us
Not what I said. Defunding the police is not silly, little, or unimportant. But I don’t think it’s the panacea that its proponents tout it as. More importantly, it is not a promise that Mamdani ran on to become mayor. Even the article admits that.
I believe in holding politicians to their campaign promises, none of which he has violated to my knowledge. The people of NYC elected him on certain issues, and he is tending to those.
Maybe you are belittling the democratic expression of the will of the people? No politician is obliged to do what you and your friends on the fringe demand, just what they promised and were elected for.
genocides or ethnic-cleansings or human rights violations or crimes against humanity.
The amount of funding for the police falls under none of these categories.
You’re conflating issues, which is a slippery slope to arguing in bad faith.
Speaking of genocides specifically, Mamdani has taken a remarkably clear stance on the conduct of the Israeli government. If you ask me, he deserves praise and support instead of criticism.
There are much better targets, like the DINOs in the Democratic party, its corrupt leaders, or its members who don’t believe Americans have a right to healthcare.
Trying to smear a politician who is actually doing his damn job is divisive not just because it pits the left against itself but also because it ultimately erodes the possibility of having a functioning political process in the first place.
If you start a moral panic each time an elected official doesn’t do exactly what you want, you’re adding fuel to the fire of those who would abandon the democratic form of government entirely. Let’s not do that.
One last point: you are just as susceptible to “narratives” as anyone else, including me. Pretending that it isn’t so makes you look ignorant, not me.
Are you saying we shouldn’t pressure our electeds? That we should just be happy with what we get and shut up?
This gets everything backwards! A politician picks their battles based, in part, on what they’re hearing from voters. If you just shut up and let them do whatever they want, you should expect them to ignore you in favor of the people who make their voices heard.
No point in winning every side battle if it means you don’t win the war.
It’s easy to call police brutality a side issue when it isn’t your son being murdered.
Fighting the only people who might possibly ever be in a position to change it is a strange decision if it means so much to you.
I’ve pointed out the same here and you simply won’t get anywhere with these “ultra ideologically pure leftists”. As I mentioned before I suspect some or even many of the loudest voices in left spaces are plants. Otherwise you would have to deduce that left wing people are intellectually challenged as to not see this but given my lived experience that is not remotely the case.
Woke 1.0 was terrible:
Woke 2.0 will be much better. Defunding the police stays in. AOC and Mamdani are out.
As a poc this seems like an odd stance for a white dude named Otto to make about other poc on behalf of black lives matter. Especially considering black lives matter was an organization that did not encompass the vast array of beliefs that belonged to people who marched during the movement.
I think it’s a bit patronizing for a white dude to assume that poc who participated in blm cannot possess a nuanced understanding about navigating being an elected official in the US while attempting to defang the police.
As a poc who hates amerikkkan cops, have you considered that the point is correct even if a cracker says it?
Zohran Mamdani and AOC, along with other “social democrats”, have been stabbing the left in the back. That’s not ruling with nuance, that’s betraying the movements they lied and said they were part of.
I think that unless you are giving up on electoralism completely there has to be a foot in the door somewhere. I don’t see how limiting the amount of time/interactions the police engage with the public like mamdani has done really betrayal the spirit of blm.
BLM was a hashtag. The “founders” of it were just opportunists who need to read theory. Defunding the Police must be separated from the selfish fame seekers of twitter movements.
I am just sad they use google analitics. Like you are pretty radical yet you use that trash
