chat

are we just going to kick the issue of systemic racism down the road

They are liberals comrade, of course they will

It's no surprise that a meaningful amount of the response to this post is "tailism is cool, actually". I really don't know how to reach such people.

Agreed. I don't expect everyone to be leading with "death to United Snakes of Amerikkka" but socialist electeds need to lead on issues and sometimes those issues won't be popular yet...that's why they need leadership

I'm curious what your approach would be instead.

I mean this with no snark intended and would appreciate it being kept our of my replies.

My thoughts:

• dismantling the police state is difficult
• dismantling the police state is dangerous
• dismantling the police state is unpopular, even among certiain minority groups
• it needs to be done at some point, but a "transition plan" (to what and how?) Needs to be developed and communicated. Maybe I need to read deeper on police abolition theory, but I dont think these ideas are well developed even among the US left, and even among people who are interested in seeing it happen.
• Just because one has won a mayoral election doesnt mean you have the power to restrain the police in your first year of governing if you are doing really well, you probably get 1-2 major reforms per year. Each accomplishment develops your legitimacy and political power further, accumulating "political capital".

Maybe I am exaggerating your expectation (straw manning your argument) by focusing on police abolition，when you meant something else?

To me Zohran is completely within expectations of a Democratic Socialist politician in 2026. My expectation is that major police reform would be a second or third term project, due to the risks involved.

Without backing from an organized, armed movement, I don't think it's possible for a mayor to dismantle the police in any comfortable timeframe. Who's going to enforce the reform? The police?

Bro elect just one more democratic socialist bro, I promise literally something somewhere will measurably and noticeably improve if we just keep pushing the genocide party left bro

Fundamentally the defeat of the George Floyd rebellions meant the American and Western left in general ate compete shit over the topic of policing; the police are objectively worse than then they were in 2020, yet trust in police WENT UP over the last few years

White people are positively hopeless on the subject, and minority communities are literally incoherent on the topic, everyone knows the police are racist and corrupt yet simultaneously they "trust" them and want their budgets increased

This bizarre state of affairs isn't the result of some inextricable organic love for the paramilitary hordes that roleplay as public servants, it's the result of the utter non-existence of an independent worker's politics and a mass movement presenting an alternative

Zohran presented the best technical example of a policy alternative in the form of diffusing police responsibility and defunding them sneakily through surrounding budget inflation, but that's all it is, a technical proposal, without a mass movement behind it, capitalist realism and the nonviability of Great Man Theory means it runs smack into a brick wall

And even with a mass movement, the policy has to be advanced in the face of the most powerful and vicious police department in the country, a political juggernaut that is so powerful it could kidnap a previous mayor's daughter without media or institutional pushback, Zohran isn't dumb for taking a overly-cautious route in such circumstances, the fault lies with DSA and it's inability to scale and communicate on this issue

Leadership has a right to caution, the movement underwriting it absolutely does not, DSA is filled with cowards and backbenchers, eternally disillusioned Berniecrats who want to follow their old master into comfortable political obscurity with just enough e-fame to keep it fun

Breaking up and stripping police of responsibilities through the cover messaging of "Reducing police overwork" is a winning strategy in the face of the currently incoherent American public, but it's not Zohran sole reasonability to advance it on his lonesome, that is a mass movement strategy, "Build third party public safety institutions" is hardly radical nor dangerous and yet DSA is incapable of unified messaging around this basic first step

It's not even necessarily about an ideological tailism. If a movement's strategy is to seize control of the minority-crushing machine, it will always seem pragmatic to keep it crushing.

socdems doing this is perhaps the most predictable historical trend in human history

I'm honestly at the point of just saying electoral victories are counter productive for the left in the imperial core cuz the candidate always end up being a let down and we spend all our time arguing about them. I sometimes question if above ground organizing is really worth it at all because most of the US "working class" are global equivalent of kulaks.

As a matter of fact, the exact opposite is the case. Marx's idea is that the working class must break up, smash the "ready-made state machinery", and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.

On April 12, 1871, i.e., just at the time of the Commune, Marx wrote to Kugelmann:

"If you look up the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire, you will find that I declare that the next attempt of the French Revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it [Marx's italics--the original is zerbrechen], and this is the precondition for every real people's revolution on the Continent. And this is what our heroic Party comrades in Paris are attempting." (Neue Zeit, Vol.XX, 1, 1901-02, p. 709.)[2] (The letters of Marx to Kugelmann have appeared in Russian in no less than two editions, one of which I edited and supplied with a preface.)

The words, "to smash the bureaucratic-military machine", briefly express the principal lesson of Marxism regarding the tasks of the proletariat during a revolution in relation to the state.

• Lenin

They are severely idealistic about political power and don't understand that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. This blinds them to the need to immediately undermine/physically weaken their local reactionary paramilitary force at the cop shop. Within their flawed framework though, it's just one issue among many, so it's entirely reasonable to tactically compromise on it or put it on the back burner until a more opportune time and focus on a different issue. That's the charitable read at least

Besides policy changes (which do require buy in city council and also is restriction by state and federal government), the number one thing that a bourgeois politician (as in, a politician within the bourgeois state) can do to help the socialist movement is to remove reactionaries from government positions and replace them with loyalists.

The implementation of genuine harm reduction policies would go much easier if a cycle of purges was established.

You can't do a mass purge right away for obvious reasons. It could provoke a massive reaction. You have to chip away at it. Start with the easy targets (corrupt officers and open white supremacists) then move towards tightening the rules to cut more reactionaries out of the police. It would be good to put as many of them in prison serving life sentences as possible.

Weakening the police union is also important, as is creating alternative armed organisations (such as, perhaps allowing for the arming of some militant groups and unions). I'm not too sure about the feasibility of this. But the priority in dealing with the police state is naturally to wrest control of arms away from reactionaries such that it becomes easier for further developments.

The main problem with electoralism-as-strategy is it individualizes a movement. Mamdani can do nothing by himself against capital, no matter how awesome he might be. The people are the power source. Every choice he makes and every speech he gives ought to raise the power of the people, and diminish his own, since his own historical role is fleeting.

You're describing this as tailism but I think it is flipped around actually. Rather than try to strategically adopt right wing positions, socdem electoralists actually want to do the right wing policies while claiming (moderated) left positions. Their strategy is one of cooption of the left while inevitably catering to the bourgeois state interests of the office and their perceived ability to stay in office (especially the careerists surrounding the "elected"). They do moderate when liberals push them, which is a tailist tendency, but that isn't what they would actually prefer to do. They'd prefer to say, "abolish the police!" and then have 30 excuses for why they couldn't. Then tell you thay you gotta really put effort into their next election campaign and then it might happen.

In terms of a plan, I gotta level with you, the plan is to get and stay elected. Everything else is secondary. They will likely jettison just about anything that gets in the way of that. This is because they face immense pressure and both personal and organizational material interests to stay in office and play ball with the bourgeois state apparatus. Internal organizational discipline could counteract this, but accordingly electoral formations reject and actively push back on organizational discipline because it is directly against their interests. And in this case the DSA is utterly undisciplined to begin with (and does not have a larger on the ground organizational base to rely on), so it all comes down to whether just one guy, Mamdani, decides to stick his neck out.

I mean, I don't really think anything is going to come out of electoralism at this point. At least nothing that is going to actually change things significantly. I think the only thing that can happen is how ease of a off ramp we will get before the inevitable crash and rebuild comes. At this point I do not think the DSA can actually defund the police let alone abolish it for anything that actually has a function because inevitably they believe in the American idea of police.

The way I see it, if something good happens out of electoralism then great! But i'm not going to waste my time or energy on it. I've tried and it just feels like it takes way to much energy for how little comes out of it. No wonder you have people feeling doomed all the time. The whole apparatus is designed to take your energy and turn it for the good of the empire.