Hiding our goals is no way to win

In his recent Jacobin article,  “The Point of Politics is to Convince People, Not Grandstand,” Ben Burgis seeks to discipline the socialist Left and lower our collective political horizons to what he claims is electorally viable. He uses an iconic scene from the popular 1996 film Jerry Maguire, starring Tom Cruise, as a metaphor for his argument. The title character attempts to convince his fellow workers at a sports agency to join him in leaving. As Jerry Maguire leaves to seek his own professional path, he asks, “Who’s coming with me?!” The scene has a comedic impact because of its futility. Only one person follows Maguire.

Burgis uses this as a negative example: “Instead of pulling a Jerry Maguire” and pursuing the quixotic effort to build political independence, we should run candidates in the Democratic Party. The irony (and mistake) in Burgis’ metaphor is that the film’s lesson is that it was a good thing Jerry Maguire sought his own path, despite his seemingly irrational decision to do so. He leaves the firm after writing a manifesto expressing his principled vision of being an honest sports agent, truer to the professional athletes he represents. He then finds professional success and true love. We will argue here, contrary to Burgis, the Left should be like Jerry Maguire: stand on principle, write manifestos, forge our own (necessary) path to political success, all the while demanding of the capitalist class, “show us the money.”

Lowering Horizons

According to Burgis, “maximalist” slogans about abolishing the police and the family, or winning Palestinian liberation are “needlessly alienating” and “a waste of time.” However, Burgis’s argument is such an egregious hay bale of straw people that the only point of the article seems to be to paternalistically chastise sections of the Left with whom the author disagrees. Rather than engage with serious arguments about socialist strategy and winning people to his claims, he ends up being dismissive of critical social movements that have been key to radicalizing wide layers of new socialists.

In this article, we will focus on Burgis’s attempts to discipline the Palestinian liberation and the abolitionist movements—two high points of social struggle in the past half-decade. On one level, Burgis’s argument is so disingenuous that it does not deserve a response. However, his position reflects both a significant political tendency among social democrats as well as a cynical method of argumentation, so we believe a response is needed. Ultimately, Burgis seeks to ensure the socialist movement is tied to the arid confines of the Democratic Party. This has great consequences for our movements. By discounting and disavowing several key struggles that should be central to the rebuilding of a fighting socialist movement in this country, he does a great disservice to the entire Left.

Fundamentally misunderstanding the tool of Marxism, Burgis offers strategic shortcuts and schemes that bury political principles and adopt a lowest common denominator approach to “renegotiate the social contract.” He elides the principle that “the emancipation of the working class must be an act of the class itself,” or, in the words of family abolitionist Sophie Lewis, “If the world is to be remade utterly, then a person must be willing to be remade also.” Ultimately, Burgis offers a myopic and cynical vision that rejects the possibility that working-class and oppressed people can change the world and, in that, change themselves and their own conditions.

“Angry Demonizers From the Socialist Wasteland”

It’s typical when writing a polemic to provide the larger context in which the debate is taking place and to explicitly cite those parties against whom the arguments are directed. On its face, the exact point of Burgis’s article is unclear, as this context is basically absent. Reading between the lines, it could be the case that his polemic is a response to the recent Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) national convention, which some say reflected a move to the left, including the organization adopting a motion to become explicitly anti-Zionist. But this goal is not clear. The target of Burgis’s piece remains the unnamed, unquoted maximalists who don’t engage in mass politics but only “angrily articulat[e] our maximum program, demoniz[e] all who have reservations, and alienat[e] everyone who isn’t already on board.”

Who are these angry people, we wonder? Burgis gives neither example nor citation. These straw people, foils to “mass politics,” appear to be anyone who disagrees with Burgis’s central thesis that “we’re better off running candidates like Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani in Democratic Party nomination contests . . . which increasingly align socialists with the majority of voters against the centrist politicians and their wealthy donors.” This is the only path for winning socialism, they argue, that “doesn’t immediately end in a wall.” Burgis argues that a “serious strategic mistake” the Left can make is to turn certain political positions into “litmus tests for political allyship.” With his understanding that the primary strategic path for the socialist Left is via running Democratic party candidates, it seems the real concern for him is the Left adopting positions of principle that would complicate or potentially rule out endorsing these politicians.

Burgis argues for sacrificing or burying political positions, for example, how to achieve justice in Palestine or the fight for police abolition. But these positions are not only important in how they are tied to political principles, but also in their strategic importance.

Before turning to Palestine and police abolition, it is worth noting that Burgis also singles out “family abolition” as a target. Given the overall character of his strategic intervention here, rather than furthering a debate within socialist feminism about the nature of the family, Burgis’s targeting of “family abolition” and “debates about identity politics” reads more like a proxy argument about a whole series of liberatory struggles this century, i.e. around gender equality and bodily autonomy. Burgis risks giving credence to right-wing talking points that the Left is anti-family. As with Palestine and police abolition, it seems that Burgis is trying to distance the socialist movement from sections of the oppressed whose demands complicate his strategy. In doing so, he leaves behind some of the most oppressed members of our society, including those who are at the sharp end of the worst authoritarian attacks. In the midst of a substantial youth radicalization around politics of gender, sexuality, and bodily autonomy, like Palestine and abolition, Burgis wants to tamp down on some of the very struggles that have moved people into action and from which people are drawing radical conclusions.

Genocide as “sweet spot”?

Regarding Palestine, Burgis acknowledges that the one-state solution—a unitary state in Palestine with equal rights for all—is preferable to the atrophied two-state solution. However, he argues that since we cannot “snap our fingers” and bring it into being, it constitutes part of a “maximum program.”  It is thus “less pressing” for allies to oppose Zionism in a general sense than to oppose genocide and to demand a halt of arms to Israel. Organizing around genocide for Burgis is the “sweet spot” in finding something that “currently sounds reasonable to the majority of the general public.” Anything else, as he notes in his conclusion, is a “waste of time.”

There are three problems with this argument: the first is related to its lack of context, and the second is how it minimizes the question of Palestinian liberation.

As with most of his article, Burgis does not name his targets or cite any concrete examples. We wonder who it is that is wasting time by “denouncing every politician” who doesn’t agree with our “maximum program” on Palestine? Reading his article, you would think that his target is anyone who finds it pressing to agitate or organize beyond that of stopping the genocide. There are always some tiny sectarians who make shibboleths of certain political points, but Burgis singling this out around Palestine is curious, as his broad brush paints an illusory picture of the movement and its role in changing mass politics around these issues.

Since October 7, 2023, there has been tremendous organizing of weekly protests, civil disobedience, disruptions of events, sabotage, encampments of great variety, all of which reflect a movement for Palestine that was one of the largest explosions of mass politics during the Biden years. And it is continuing. Its main focus has been on ceasefire, ending the genocide, and the question of U.S. support for Israel—especially in the form of arms and military aid. This movement has captured a good deal of attention, radicalized a section of Jewish Americans, and transformed public opinion around Palestine. It is the majority position of the movement that the two-state solution is dead in the water, unrealistic, and a dangerous non-option. Over the past two years, we personally have been involved in a great deal of public denunciation of politicians, yelling at them in their meetings, protesting their fundraisers, and blocking the streets in front of their homes. All of these actions were centered on their rejection of a ceasefire, denial of genocide, or open political or material support for Israel.

In other words, the movement is centering the immediate broad demands “without disguising any of our fondest long-term ambitions or giving up on persuading whoever might be open to them right now,” as Burgis proscribes. Thus, his claim is inaccurate that there is some large section of one of the largest and robust movements of the past several years that is “wasting time” on “less pressing issues.” What is his concern? Perhaps Burgis’s worry is that the new movement has radicalized against the Democrats’ criminal and shameful role in providing material and ideological support for the genocide? Its leadership–including Biden, Harris, Obama, etc.–have villainized the movement and supported the violent repression of the student encampments. This could pose a threat to those in the socialist movement (who too often grace the pages of Jacobin) who insist that we are “better off” running as Democratic Party candidates. It takes a trick of political contortion or bald-faced lies by people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to present the Democrats as friends of the Palestinians. The disgust many have with the party about its role in the genocide—which probably played a large role in their loss of the presidential election—is legitimate and points to the truth of the Democrats’ role.

Second, it is strategically important that the movement continue to raise the political question of how, collectively, we are to achieve Palestinian liberation. Stopping the immediate genocide is of critical importance. Burgis, to his credit, is clear about that. This cannot be overstated. The question, however, is how to connect the minimum program of stopping the genocide with that of ending the Nakba, the driving imperative of the Zionist project that has been unfolding for over 75 years. The current genocide is a dire escalation of the “everyday” ethnic cleansing of settler colonialism that has been ongoing for decades. So we have to ask, what does it mean to stop the genocide? A return to discussions around a withered two-state solution in which the Palestinian Authority—a partner in the Zionist occupation—takes control of Gaza? The reoccupation of Gaza by Israel? This would be a return to the status quo of October 6, 2023. For Palestinians, that was already untenable before the most recent phase of the genocide was initiated. It is politically naïve to talk about ending the genocide without also talking about how and what should be next. Burgis, as he notes, has also written about the implausibility of a two-state solution. With that, we agree. However, it is an error to reduce this question to one of “lesser importance.” Zionism is a racist, eliminationist ideology. Anti-Zionism is not the maximum program–it is the only position that makes sense. We need to make stronger arguments to better explain this, patiently and sharply, while we organize to connect the immediacy of stopping the genocide to ending the project of Zionism, which produced it.

How this plays out strategically is key. Yes, the socialist Left should be in favor of people like Bernie and other Democrats putting forward bills to cut arms to Israel. But that does not mean we should stifle any criticism, sharp and pointed, of the fact that Bernie focuses nearly exclusively on the Netanyahu government and not on a state that is explicitly and structurally racist at its core. The two-state solution maintains an illusion of a reformable ethnostate existing alongside a Palestinian state without any right of return for Palestinian refugees. Pretending that there is a possible negotiation around a two-state fantasy provides cover for the Zionist project while it evicts Palestinians, bulldozes their homes, steals their land, tears down their olive trees, jails and starves them. Catering to these fantasies – about a two-state solution or a redeemable Zionism–is what is truly a  “waste of time.”

“Yes, we mean literally abolish the police.”

The article is even more dismissive of another political demand, that of police abolition. This demand was a key component of the largest mass movement in U.S. history and one that we lived through only five years ago. Abolition, Burgis condescendingly tells us, is a “long-term goal that no one really believes is a good idea.” But Burgis’s concern is not that abolition is maximalist—the target  of his article—but that he disagrees that police should be abolished. Police will actually be needed in a socialist society, he argues, in order to keep people safe. His arguments are completely riven with ungenerous mischaracterizations that completely avoid engaging with the important work that abolitionists have done on this subject.

We need police, Burgis argues, because people will break laws and hurt each other under socialism. The only alternative he imagines is “decentralized vigilante justice.” “Be realistic,” he lectures us; crime will always exist. Moreover, the notion of police disappearing overnight for him is a dystopian, Mad Max-type nightmare.

If Burgis has read any of the serious abolitionist work on any of these topics, it would be surprising, as his comments are shockingly ignorant. Many serious works have analyzed these dynamics at length and deserve more than a brief argument, such as Ben Burgis’ assertion that it is simply “not realistic.” It doesn’t take the working out of theory or the reading of books to see that in a world in which people’s basic needs would be taken care of, there would be very little of what is today considered “crime.” Burgis seems to agree with this, to a point, but adheres to the narrow view that even then, there would still need to be police—an institution of armed individuals with the capacity to use violent force patrolling our streets.

Social problems are obviously not going to magically disappear under socialism, but Burgis has taken no time to engage a whole body of thought and organizational practice that envisions safety without police, reimagining how social problems like mental health crises and intimate partner violence can be dealt with in a noncarceral way that does not require large bodies of swaggering armed guards. One of the authors of this article responds directly to the fear of “Mad Max-style chaos” in their recent book on the topic. Using information from times in which police went on strike and high points of mass struggle that forced the police off the streets, the evidence establishes that it is not the case that the abolition of the police leads to society descending into chaos. Indeed, the notion that the police are the institution holding chaos and disorder at bay is one of the more pernicious myths of copaganda that is repackaged into leftist concern trolling in Jacobin’s article.

The question of “public safety” is presented by Burgis in the abstract, assuming its expression in capitalist society is eternal and unalterable. Since some form of “public safety” would be needed under socialism, it then becomes impossible to question the police as such. Yet abolitionists do not seek to abolish “public safety” but the specific and concrete institutions that protect capitalist power and oppress the working class, particularly its Black and brown members.

Burgis’s ahistorical and limited vision here is related to his misunderstanding of what would truly be necessary to win reforms and build socialism. Burgis’s top-down approach to socialist strategy makes it impossible for him to imagine the organized working class taking on the responsibility for public safety themselves and organizing it in their own interests. Burgis can only imagine an organization essentially separate from the rest of society, and so he cannot imagine the institution of the police being abolished and replaced. According to him, we must therefore defend the existence of the police, for they will be needed under socialism.

Now, it is the case that abolition is not a position held by the majority of Americans. It is also the case that the George Floyd Uprising was not consistently abolitionist in its slogans and program. However, it’s clear that these politics were at the movement’s core, held by many of the individuals and organizers who, after organizing local abolitionist campaigns for years, were cast to the front. During the uprising, abolitionist demands gained much greater purchase among the radical youth who leaped into the streets en masse, found greater prominence in the broader culture, and translated abolition to the organic (if not politically contested) demand of the movement to defund the police. These abolitionist politics found purchase and were translated into popular campaigns like Chicago’s Treatment Not Trauma initiative. These politics came under massive attack not just by the political right but also by the Democratic Party. With the lack of a sustainable organizational vehicle, the radicalization following the movement has been pushed back by reaction, often taking the form of a mania around fictitious rising crime and a demand for “law and order.” Burgis seeks to adapt socialist strategy by conceding to this reaction. Rather than standing on principle with an understanding that the dynamics of U.S. society will inevitably bring these demands to the fore again, Burgis seeks to chastise those sections of the Left that will not abandon those principles to make his socialist strategy of electing unaccountable Democrats more feasible.

As with the movement for a free Palestine, the necessity for the Left to center abolitionist politics is not just about “sounding radical” but understanding that strategically the question of the police is always one facing the working class movement. This is increasingly the case as we see the rise of “cop city” training facilities, bloated budgets, swarming ICE raids, and the intensification of the police state under Trump. As one of the clearest markers that we do not live in a democratic society, as a reminder of the monopoly of violence held by the ruling class, and as the most brutal guarantors of the racist order, how we talk about the police is essential. Globally, police violence is often a detonator of social struggle. As we write these words, in Indonesia, a worker and student strike has erupted into an uprising after the police killing of delivery driver Affan Kurniawan. It is a dominant feature of social eruption that manifold grievances explode in response to police violence and repression. We have to clearly argue that the police are a tool of capitalist class terror and be able to articulate why they are, in the end, unreformable, even as we fight for immediate reforms to dull their violence. To argue that the police can be reformed into some benevolent force that can operate in the interests of the working class–as the evidence of volumes of work has argued–is what is unrealistic.

A brief word on the Democratic Party

Burgis counsels us against illusions in trying to immediately build working-class political independence, saying that all attempts to do so are doomed and go the way of the Green Party.

As a counter, we offer a possible alternative history to the past decade of socialist politics in the U.S. Let’s imagine that the leadership of DSA, rather than consistently channeling its membership of tens of thousands of members into election campaigns for a capitalist party, had instead channeled that activity consistently into social movement and labor activism, in order to build power from below. Instead of adopting an NGO model, where a small core of activists makes decisions for a large and passive membership, the DSA had sought to integrate its members into a truly democratic and activist organization. If, instead of standing aside from the largest social movement in U.S. history in 2020, it had engaged with that struggle in a consistent and principled way to further develop its base of working-class power and to strengthen a multi-racial socialist movement. Could we imagine how much closer to a viable independent working-class party we would be in such an alternative history?

Instead, what has the strategy of adaptation to the Democratic Party actually achieved? The “successes” that Burgis defends so dearly are a few electeds who are invariably brought into the structures of the Democratic Party, and over whom the membership has absolutely zero democratic control. The practical result has been confusion, passivity of the membership, and disillusionment, all of which is reflected in the volatility of DSA’s membership numbers. You do not build working-class independence by conceding what power you have to alien class forces, over whom you have no say, while demanding nothing from them.

This raises the question: Is Burgis’ choice of targets actually due to the unpopularity of these demands among working-class people, or rather to how they cause difficulty in integrating the socialist movement into the Democratic Party? Some evidence to help answer this question is provided by Jacobin’s own poll, in which 42.4 percent of working-class respondents said they favored defunding the police, while 39.9 percent supported increased spending on mass transit, a demand that Burgis would presumably defend. Only 25.5 percent support “increased government regulation.” But while the Democratic Party is much more likely to tolerate measures on public transport or regulation, it is structurally incapable of tolerating demands opposed to the police. The same is true for the question of Palestine. Palestine is a line the Democratic Party cannot cross. Burgis’s politics ultimately seek to tame and contain these two struggles in hopes of advocating for socialism while leaving intact the monopoly of police violence of the capitalist state and the priorities of US imperialism. So does Burgis perceive the impossibility of winning the working class to these demands, or the difficulty of finding Democratic Party acceptance (or at least tolerance) if the socialist movement does not abandon them?

Conclusion

“The Point of Politics is to Convince People, Not Grandstand” exemplifies a method often deployed by social democrats, and in journals like Jacobin, that argues that socialists should look almost exclusively to what “currently sounds reasonable to the majority of the general public.” Fighting around those demands, they argue “forces confrontations” with “establishment Democrats” and their wealthy backers, thus providing an opening to socialist politics. There is some truth in this; socialists need to distinguish themselves as the most principled fighters around broad demands like Medicare for All, democracy, and other struggles that resonate with large numbers of people. However, while we engage in those struggles, we need to simultaneously point towards the larger horizon to connect those immediate aspirations with the need to overthrow the system of capitalism and replace it with socialism.

Curiously, Burgis seems to agree with this when he describes the desire to balance a maximum program (like expropriate the capitalists) with a minimum program (like universal health care). “Sometimes,” he writes, “when a fundamental point of principle is at stake, it may be worth taking deeply unpopular positions, come what may.” We would argue that these positions, like the liberation of Palestine and police and prison abolition, are fundamental even when deeply unpopular. We have also seen that their unpopularity can be overstated. Mass consciousness is not static and can often change quickly with social developments. Look at the swing of public support for Palestine, which was up until recently a fringe issue. Yet now, in one Harvard poll, 60 percent of young people in the U.S. said that the October 2023 attacks by Hamas were “justified” by Palestinian grievances. Look at the shift in consciousness in 2020 when a majority in the U.S. thought the insurrectional burning of a Minneapolis police station was more acceptable than both candidates in the presidential race. Many of us on the Left have organized and struggled around abolition and Palestinian liberation for years; even when these issues were unpopular, it was still right to do so. Indeed, the notion of socialism itself was very unpopular for a long time. Should we have seen that as a political point to be buried in the desire to appeal to Democratic party politicians? No.

So why does Burgis single out these specific issues as not worth taking up, as “lesser,” or as a “waste of time”? Either he has a pessimistic notion that working people are only motivated by narrow self-interest, or his priority is running candidates acceptable to the Democratic Party. Support for Israel and the police have been unshakeable pillars of imperial class rule, which the Democrats have helped maintain. But now, amid the memory of 2020, and as disgust with the Democrats around Palestine is sharp, reformism is still the default perspective and starting point for most on the Left. Nonetheless, there is an accumulation of experience with its failures and disappointments. Burgis’ article is an attempt to circle the wagons around a more limited political imagination to buttress this politics. This is not the role socialists should play.

This is not to say that masses of people have revolutionary consciousness and are chomping at the bit only to be held back by reformist leaders. Rather, it is to say that if we water down our politics as we hide our principles, we weaken our ability both to win lasting reforms and to maintain the possibility for more fundamental liberation.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”