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.

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