This work reflects only the opinions of the author and not the consensus position of North Alabama DSA membership.
The recent primary election in Wisconsin has amplified a debate that has split DSA and the broader left. The controversy centers around “Woke 1”, a phrase being used by prominent members of DSA as a pejorative shorthand for the left’s demands and rhetoric during a period that roughly overlaps with Biden’s presidency and reached its peak during the George Floyd Uprising and its immediate aftermath. For some, the phrase is a savvy way to distance ourselves from demands that have proved unpopular or undesirable. For others, denunciations of Woke 1 are seen as a weak rhetorical cover for a retreat from struggles against the police state and for working class power.
The phrase Woke 1 seems to originate from Chi Ossé, a member of both DSA and the NYC council. Perhaps the most notable example of him using it is to not really answer someone asking if he would still say as he did in 2021 that "A cis white man should not be the next speaker of the Council". So... is that a demand he would still make? Presumably not, but why? And why did he make the demand five years ago and why did he change his mind? All he gives us to go off of is that apparently he and/or his beliefs were "crazyyyy". I don't think that this is a particularly good way to dodge actually answering a question that's on a lot of people's minds, though of course that's not something that people who represent DSA should be doing in the first place.
Conventional electoral wisdom, developed mostly from observing contests between the two parties of capital and therefore often not applicable to a mass, independent, socialist organization like DSA, holds that candidates need to moderate to appeal to "normal" people. We can set aside for now the kinds of issues that might arise from conceptualizing DSA as an organization for non-normal people who have to trick normal people into supporting a falsified, sanitized version of our actual positions. Does moderating on rhetoric actually work? DSA candidate for WI governor Francesca Hong had some "Woke 1" tweets discovered in which she, anong other things, called Thanksgiving colonialist. She disavowed all of that, and AOC's entry into the current discourse started when she defended Hong and tried to help distance her from her past tweets (while declining to endorse a fellow DSA member). Hong lost the election anyway by a few thousand votes to a guy who suspended his campaign for a month but then resumed it when he took the appearance of a "red bird" to be a sign from God. Let's not forget that this took place in a country where a person as scandal-ridden and manifestly criminal as Donald Trump has won the presidency twice. While of course our candidates should choose their words carefully and craft messages intended to appeal to their target audience, we're not going to get very far by accepting a definition of "electability" that is promulgated by billionaire Republicans and health insurance executives.
I'd go so far as to say that the kind of backtracking that the Woke 1 phrase excuses can actually hurt our candidates. We win when we can credibly appeal to voters by telling them that we’re going to fight MAGA, the Dem establishment, and the ruling class they serve and not stop fighting until we win transformative victories like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. If at the same time we show that we will immediately and effusively apologize when confronted with ancient tweets and that we don’t want people to take the things we’ve said too seriously, then I think that actually makes us sound too weak and insincere for people to believe we're capable of delivering on our promises. There's also just nothing we can do to save ourselves from being accused of being "woke". Republicans are always going to do that to us just like they do to even the most right wing Democrats, and as a slightly less right wing party the Democrats have proved more than capable of doing the same to us when we run in their primaries and even after we win in some cases.
Here is a full transcript of the interview in which AOC quoted Ossé. AOC uses Woke 1 to distance Hong from both "the Thanksgiving dust-up" and "abolished prisons, abolished police", saying that Hong has "moved away from it". She dismisses Defund as "rhetoric" used by people angry with Covid shutdowns and unemployment. A lot of people were also angry about George Floyd being murdered in the street in broad daylight by the police, but like in so many of the current discussions of Woke 1 and Defund, this fact just doesn't get brought up for some reason. Also, when told "you briefly supported the idea of defunding the police", AOC did not say "yes and I still do". She didn't say anything indicating that she still supports the abolitionist position contained in DSA's Workers Deserve More program[1]. So while there has been a lot of focus on the rhetoric of Defund, I really can't see this as anything other than a retreat from the demand itself. Zohran is at least open and honest about his change of heart.
When disappointments like these occur, there is a tendency to obsess over the character of individual electeds and bash them as traitors, liberals, etc. An analysis that goes no further than "well this person is just bad" is not one that is going to point us towards how we can develop DSA to a point where we no longer have this problem. Let's consider Zohran's retreat on Defund and total capitulation to the NYPD, which was foreseen well in advance by some DSA members.
Zohran is a municipal executive without a majority on the city council. Yes, the council has 46 Democrats out of 51 seats. But there are only four DSA members. So Zohran is limited in what he can actually do to deliver on his campaign promises. This is in addition to the inherent limits of what can be achieved at the level of municipal government in the first place. For instance, Zohran's childcare program requires funding from the NY state government. This has forced him to cozy up to the state's right wing Democratic governor, and even the national party. This is the context in which he has started to explicitly identify with the Democratic Party and even talk about how that enemy of DSA can be built up into a better and stronger organization. Zohran's recent disappointments can in part be attributed to limitations inherent in the office he now holds. It should also be noted that to run for that office was not just his decision, but also the decision of our largest chapter.
Zohran's administration is also pretty clearly pursuing a strategy of "deliverism" in the tradition of municipal socialism. The idea is that relentlessly focusing on delivering incremental but real improvements to the everyday lives of ordinary people will build a social base that can later be used to elect more socialists and eventually achieve our more long-term demands. There are plenty of critiques of this strategy. Lenin wrote a whole book about the perils of adopting a narrow economistic focus. People who don't limit their horizons are going to continue making other worthwhile demands. If we don't keep up, we're going to be rightly criticized as an organization that doesn't live up to its own ideals. This division and loss of DSA's credibility will be disastrous for the unity and effectiveness of the American left. Finally, if this is the trouble with deliverism in NYC, then how are we supposed to apply that strategy in the South where state governments step in to do things like prevent cities from raising the minimum wage or even tearing down Confederate monuments?
The root of the problem is that it is hard to develop strategies that will help us reach our goals and build up a party that can discipline its electeds and hold them accountable to its program. That is the hard work that we're all called to do together.
If there really were excesses of the Woke 1 period, if “cancelling”, “censorship” or “identity politics” were real problems rather than right wing smears against movements for racial justice, then this is only to the extent that there was no mass organization in a position to channel widespread and deeply-felt outrage into sustained and productive action. Individuals, without the guidance of democratic working class institutions or a theory of change like the one championed by DSA, were spurred into frantic and uncoordinated action in order to feel like they were “doing something”. The energy unleashed by the George Floyd Uprising could not be sustained indefinitely and fizzled out, especially as the election of Joe Biden in 2020 caused many people to become complacent now that Trump was gone and also caused DSA’s membership to enter an extended decline that didn’t reverse until November 2024. The loss of that energy set the stage for the current retreat from Defund just as surely as Biden’s disastrous presidency set the stage for the return of Trump.
DSA must transform itself into an organization that will be able to sustain the energy unleashed by the next police murder that sparks a potentially transformative level of nationwide outrage, as well as an organization that can expand and win even when someone other than Trump is president. If that murder takes place in a city with a DSA mayor, will they be on the side of the protestors or the police? That depends on whether DSA can become an independent mass organization of the working class that fights for the long term goal of the class’s liberation, or if it will be a broadly progressive organization whose representatives disavow their own program.
I want to defend "defund the police". It emphasizes the ridiculous proportion of municipal budgets that goes to police and how that money is spent on police instead of programs that can improve people's lives and actually prevent crime. It also diverts attention away from "reforms" that often require more money for policing, expand its role in society, and accept the false premise that policing is effective at (or even intended for) preventing crime. Moving towards police abolition by slashing their municipal budgets is also an immediate-term demand, and therefore great for agitation.
But it's true that the phrase has some weaknesses. Defund is functionally synonymous with abolish, and so prompts people to ask what policing is going to be replaced with. There are some answers to this question that I don't like. It's most common to say that we don't really want to fully abolish the police and therefore don't really want to defund them either so we should just abandon the slogan. Well, I and many others really do want to abolish the armed formations of the capitalist state, including the police. Not only would we be better off without those institutions, but I really can't envision any kind of durable transition to a socialist future that leaves them intact. It's also common for people really committed to abolition to say that we should abolish the police and replace them with new institutions that perform the same functions as the police but in an equitable, or nonviolent, or even socialist way. So we're going to abolish the police and replace them with Police 2.0. This entirely misses out on the fact that modern policing evolved out of specific social conditions and institutions (American slave patrols and European colonial occupation) in order to carry out specific functions (preserving the rule of the capitalist class and the regime of private ownership). Complex, historically contingent institutions like policing do not have a reset button. Police 2.0 arises out of a desire to hang on to Defund, but it isn't enough.
I've come to favor a demand that seemed very strange when I first heard it but which I now think is the key to answering how we could possibly propose to defund the police. I am referring to the demand to abolish both the police and the standing army and replace them with a people's militia.
This demand originated in the Italian merchant republics of the Renaissance, where proto-liberals like Machiavelli favored militias as an alternative to mercenary armies accountable only to wealthy aristocrats. Marx, Engels, and Lenin all held that the replacement of the armed organs of the capitalist class with those of the working class was an absolute necessity for the establishment and defense of socialism. This demand featured in the Erfurt Program of the SPD[2], the program of the RSDLP[3], and even the first program of the British Labour Party. Even the framers of our undemocratic Constitution felt it necessary to limit the establishment of any standing army to a term of just two years! Members of Congress arguing for the ratification of the 2nd Amendment openly argued that one of its benefits would be to prevent the establishment of a standing army. Last but not least, this venerable demand features in the Florence Program of DSA's Marxist Unity Group caucus:
Abolition of the police, professional military, special forces, and the security state. Establishment of a people's militia with democratic and constitutional rights reserved for service members. Universal service and training. Reorientation towards public infrastructure projects, disaster relief, and safety. The right of conscientious objectors to alternative service options.
Capitalist society perpetuates oppression in large part by creating barriers between essential social functions and ordinary working people. Capitalists and landlords take over the function of planning the economy and allocating resources. We want to abolish the distinction between owners and producers. The politicians of the two major parties, elevated to power by our undemocratic electoral system, take over the function of organizing society. We want to abolish the distinction between those who govern and those who are governed. The police and the military take over the function of providing security, but due to the class character of our society they provide security for the ruling class, and this often necessitates that they perpetrate violence against the working class abroad and at home. We must also commit to abolishing the distinction between those who are bound by the law and those who are protected by it. Our goal is essentially the removal of the barriers between political/economic life and social life. You can't have that if cop or soldier continue to exist as categories that separate people from the masses, no different from capitalist or landlord or politician.
Policing and modern armies were developed relatively recently in human history, and that development was shaped and driven by the ruling class in order to serve their interests. These institutions will have to be radically altered in a society that is built by and for the working class, and we'll never get to see such a society if we do not disarm the ruling class. The existence of armed groups that stand over and apart from society are not necessary to keep the peace and deliver justice, but those groups are indeed necessary for the capitalist class to rule over the working class. A people’s militia would have no ability or desire to wage wars of aggression in the Middle East, the Caribbean, or anywhere that America’s ruling class has spent this century trying to subjugate. Consider also that the standing army has been the capitalist class’s weapon of last resort for crushing movements for socialism and democracy from Germany in 1918 to Chile in 1973.
I know that this demand is not as popular on the organized left as it used to be, to say nothing of broader society. The abolition of slavery was once extremely unpopular. It wasn’t pragmatic. It couldn’t win elections. Many people favored compromise positions that were viewed as more moderate at the time, like emancipation with financial compensation for slaveholders or deranged “colonization” schemes that would have all Black people, free or enslaved, removed from the country. It was even particularly unpopular among the working class. They feared that competition with free Black workers would reduce their wages. They didn’t understand that slavery undercut their wages far more effectively than free Black labor ever could, and so abolition was the obsession of a relatively small number of well-to-do eccentrics for much of Antebellum history. That didn’t stop them from building a mass movement that would eventually replace one of America’s major parties. There was also a time not too long ago when socialism itself was similarly unpopular, and those days are over only thanks to people who did the hard work of popularizing the ideas necessary for organizing a mass movement that can achieve collective freedom.
Workers Deserve More is formatted like a classic minimum-maximum program and can be treated like one even if that might not have been the intent of everyone who took part in its creation. This would at least be a good starting point for future revisions to the program. The program opens with the maximum section, briefly summarizing our overall political perspective and presenting a vision of the better world we want to create. Then the minimum section lists concrete demands that must be won in order for the working class to have the political and economic power necessary to enact the changes described in the maximum section. The minimum demands describe the conditions that must be met in order for the working class to become the ruling class. These demands are our roadmap to power. They are non-negotiable. They are not chosen based on what makes for the best slogans, what polls well, or what makes life easy for DSA electeds. They are an acknowledgement of the load-bearing pillars of the entire edifice of capitalist class oppression that we seek to destroy. Free healthcare, free housing, and a Green New Deal are minimum demands because the working class cannot rule if most of us are struggling to survive on a dying planet. Voting rights for all U.S. residents and the abolition of the Senate are minimum demands because the working class cannot rule without universal, equal, and direct suffrage. Defunding the police is a minimum demand because the working class cannot rule while power is concentrated in the hands of armed bands of people who stand apart from the working class and are loyal to the capitalist state. It’s not a pie in the sky demand to work towards in the very long term. We need it now.
Now it’s time to commit to the hard work of building that movement into a mass, independent, socialist party that fights for the realization of the democratically-determined demands in its program.
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