Anti-Woke electoralism

After years of stagnation under the Biden administration, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has been revitalized with a series of recent primary electoral victories. The Democratic Party establishment collapsed after Kamala Harris’s disastrous presidential campaign, which allowed democratic socialists and progressives to emerge as prominent leaders in the mainstream opposition to Trumpism. Zohran Mamdani’s unexpected mayoral primary win and follow-up general election victory against disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo put the establishment’s fragility on full display, inspiring several other successful “insurgent” campaigns since last year.

At the same time, the problems that contributed to DSA’s stagnation in the early 2020s are resurfacing. Mayor Mamdani, Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and other prominent democratic socialists are distancing themselves from ‘radical’ commitments like defunding the police by labeling it “woke 1.0” craziness, even though DSA’s national platform commits to abolishing police and prisons. This certainly wasn’t the first time DSA officeholders contradicted the group’s proclaimed goals, but by embracing the amorphous label of wokeness as a pejorative, this time they also aligned with the wider right-wing campaign against free speech and public education.

Writers and caucuses on the right wing of DSA were quick to defend Mamdani and AOC. Ben Burgis at Jacobin accused critics of putting “radical-sounding but half-baked ideas” onto a pile, then pointlessly defending them even when they’re “unpopular” and “genuinely poorly thought-out,” simply to out-Left others. Eric Blanc, another Jacobin writer, is quoted by Burgis saying:

It’s frankly just a mistake that the national DSA took certain positions that are both marginalizing for us in the short term and just politically wrong even in the long term… In what world does it make sense, if our goal is to organize millions of people and to overcome the Democratic establishment and to defeat Trumpism, to take a position that you know is just going to give fuel to your opponents, and for which there’s no practical upshot right now? Taking that sort of doctrinaire ideological position seems to me a reflection of a lack of experience and a lack of engagement in mass politics.

In short, Blanc and Burgis are suggesting that it is not the officeholders’ “mass politics” that need correcting; it’s their critics’ “political instincts.” They shrug off the reality that ‘woke’ and initially unpopular movements like Black Lives Matter or Abolish ICE inspired millions of people to protest against state violence toward working-class people of color. These movements pushed a large share of young working-class people of color to embrace revolutionary abolitionist ideas en masse and inspired others to get involved in political or labor organizing.1More than 20 percent of Democrats supported abolishing the police and 34 percent supported defunding it in 2021. These might be minority positions but it took one year for them to be adopted by millions while it took hundreds of DSA campaigns and millions of dollars for a third of Democrats to support socialism in 2026. See https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/30/politics/cnn-poll-a-third-of-democrats-now-identify-as-democratic-socialists

So is it just wokeness to oppose workers being mandated to fund the high-tech repression campaigns run by various armed state agencies? What makes DSA’s electoral approach democratic or socialist if grassroots activists must be accountable to their rightward-drifting officeholders, and not to the working-class movements they belong to? DSA leaders criticize the limits of democracy under capitalism, but in what ways does their strategy challenge the capitalistic and technocratic logics of electoral campaigning?

Anti-wokeness and electoralism

Wokeness, a term coined by Black activists to raise awareness of racial injustices, is now a right-wing pejorative used by elites to dismiss movements for social justice. Identity politics, critical race theory, diversity, equity, and inclusion have served similar purposes for right-wing witch-hunts across U.S. public institutions in recent years. McCarthyite taboos around these terms were reinforced by right-wingers, centrists, and some ‘leftists’ to rally reactionary forces against movements like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and Abolish ICE in various institutional settings since the 2010s. For the purposes of this piece, I use ‘wokeness’ here descriptively—not as praise or condemnation—but to name the set of demands around abolition, racial justice, and opposition to carceral institutions that have been dismissed by electoralists as politically inconvenient.

The leftmost version of anti-wokeness has become influential in DSA and Jacobin since 2020. Adolph Reed was the initial figurehead of a movement centered on accusing George Floyd protestors of embracing ‘professional managerial class’ privilege and an identitarian outlook that is antithetical to working-class politics. Since Reed, other anti-woke Leftists like Burgis have taken the mantle. Anti-wokeness allows its proponents to rationalize the de facto deprioritization of oppression struggles, deprioritizing campaigns against repressive state policies that disproportionately impact women, people of color, and queer people. Anti-woke writers and activists argue that because large sections of the working class hold ‘culturally’ conservative attitudes on these issues, wokeness is a political liability in organizing workers, particularly around electoral campaigns.

Yet in the explosive moments that woke movements dominated news cycles, socialists like Mamdani and AOC had embraced woke demands like defunding the police and abolishing ICE, even when their popularity remained far from universal even within DSA and the Left. DSA officeholders only became less vocal about ICE deportations and U.S. support for Israel under the Biden administration. But more recently, DSA electeds re-embrace some woke policies, as boycotting Israel and abolishing ICE became much more popular through the uprisings that involved participation by DSA members.

This flip-flopping on wokeness is a byproduct of the electoralist logic embraced by right-wing DSA caucuses that make up DSA’s leadership majority (Groundwork, Socialist Majority, North Star, and the right-wing of Bread and Roses). Electoralism refers not to electoral participation itself but to the logic that treats elections as the primary or exclusive mechanism for building working-class power. Right-wing DSA caucuses view electoral campaigns as the vehicle for a legislative transition to socialism, and these ideas have dominated the largest chapters of DSA throughout both waves of DSA’s growth (2016-20, 2025-now). Given the limited time and resources electoral campaigns have, electoralists argue that DSA must prioritize organizing universalist reforms, such as Medicare for All or the much more amorphous “affordability agenda,” at the expense of ‘woke’ demands like defunding the police or abolishing ICE. DSAers who have tried to reframe this (unnecessary) contradistinction by advocating for progressive redistribution of police funds have had an uphill battle within DSA, with electoralist leadership factions gaining more influence from wins while pushing against efforts that center demands they deem too woke.

Electoralism became the dominant approach in DSA because the group’s growth came from its chapters’ involvement in Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns and their more localized successors. Electoralist caucuses grew more rapidly because they were the ones primarily recruiting cadres through these campaigns. Many of these organizers had already internalized the logic of electoralism and believed Sanders provided the opening we need to take advantage of in the absence of strong workers’ movements.

However, for most members, electoralism has not been a stepping stone toward becoming more active in DSA or getting involved in other organizing. Most DSA members (70–80%) are not active in the day-to-day activity of their chapters outside of elections. Electoralist caucuses reinforce this dynamic by moving decisions about political direction to caucus spaces or online and only bringing major questions back to members in their chapters when they can outnumber the opposition or limit the scope of discussion. As a result, there is very little reason to attend chapter meetings in many DSA chapters beyond just getting updates on campaigns that are ongoing elsewhere.

Other critical currents (Marxist Unity, Reform and Revolution, left-wing of Bread and Roses, various anarchists and popular frontists) position themselves further to the Left by identifying electoral wins as reflections of movement power, but not as mechanisms of class power. The DSA-left is also involved in electoral campaigns, but it defends holding endorsed officeholders  “accountable.” Nevertheless, these groups rarely agree on what accountability should mean. The disagreements around how to enforce accountability policies have fragmented the Left for years, undermining its ability to end an ongoing de facto non-accountability policy.

AOC and Mamdani, who rode the waves of radicalization generated by grassroots movements to abolish ICE, defund the police, and end the Israeli genocide, embraced anti-wokeness in this context where they are aware that DSA currently has no enforced accountability mechanism to pressure them and that DSA needs them more than they need the organization.

What’s so bad about electoralism?

While anti-woke stances might help electoralists and officeholders reach their short-term aims under certain conditions, embracing these stances is fundamentally anti-solidaristic. Discounting movements that center the rights of oppressed communities moves the socialist movement away from the long-term goal of building strong and democratic working-class organizations that can challenge and overturn capitalist rule. DSA’s leading factions’ alliances with officeholders ultimately limit the organization’s willingness and ability to stand up for independent working-class movements that might conflict with electoral imperatives.

These movements have been more central to DSA’s and the Left’s growth in recent years than electoralists give credit. Others have shown that DSA’s electoral successes have been more reliant on external movements, including Black Lives Matter, specifically the George Floyd protests, and Abolish ICE actions. These movements transformed mass consciousness in major cities, far more than any one group’s internal strategic decisions. They also created the space for DSA campaigns to present themselves as mechanisms to institutionalize movement gains. But when DSA leaders move right, the mass energy dissipates to be replaced by burnout and disillusionment. As a result, DSA had been stagnant for multiple years until the Palestine solidarity encampments revived grassroots energy and provided political foundations for the Mamdani campaign’s success by discrediting the Zionist establishment in New York and elsewhere.

The woke Left movements’ direct connection to DSA’s growth suggests that organizing outside of the electoral arena is not only important but essential to shifting class consciousness. This is not to say socialists should abstain from elections. Dismissing certain avenues of Left organizing as woke prevents socialists from building the mechanisms of working-class power that can pressure elected officials to act instead of waver. Even if some of these movements do not exclusively center the economic inequalities generated by capitalism, they show how repressive state institutions enable capitalist rule in oppressed communities. The real question is how socialists can help to sustain working-class movements without falling into the dual traps of ultra-Left self-marginalization and electoralist compromises as exemplified by DSA officeholders.

DSA and infrastructures of working-class dissent

There are at least three areas where electoralism limits the socialist movement’s ability to drive transformative change: labor organizing, community organizing, and internationalism. By prioritizing ties to officeholders at the expense of supporting bottom-up movements, DSA electoralists limit the group’s capacity to build independent infrastructures of dissent within working-class communities outside of elections.

DSA’s labor organizing work has contributed to some new union campaigns through the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), but so far EWOC has functioned autonomously from DSA’s much more visible electoral campaigns. In practice, this meant the group primarily functioned to direct workers to the relevant allied unions and organizations such as the CWA, UE, Workers United, Labor Notes, and others. Beyond EWOC, DSA’s local labor working groups and various bureaucratically run union-endorsed national labor campaigns were short-lived with only limited exceptions.

While there is no doubt that some labor activists in DSA hold broader conceptions of “class struggle unionism” and “rank-and-file strategy,” DSA’s outsourcing of labor activist training through EWOC depoliticizes the group’s overall approach to labor activism. The scope of EWOC and DSA labor work in general is limited by the priorities of electoralist leaders. Electoralists have to retain good relations with union leaders to get campaign endorsements and support for efforts like EWOC. The partial dependency of DSA on labor leaders’ endorsements and resources limits DSA’s ability to organize against leadership conservatism within unions.

At the neighborhood level (at least in NYC), DSA canvassers no doubt contribute to normalizing the socialist label, usually by equating socialism with redistributive demands. However, when it comes to organizing against landlords, police, ICE, and for trans people, people with disabilities, and immigrant workers, the organization’s leaders often take sectarian stances, insulting activists as “unsatisfiable” instead of fighting the policies that oppress working-class people. These stances often undermine the organization’s ability to retain activists from diverse communities, contributing to the outsized representation of white professionals from elite colleges in DSA membership and leadership.2NYC-DSA membership poll from this year shows that the group is 60 percent white and 12 percent Jewish with 63 percent of members participating. Most recently, NYC-DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo has been exposed for misrepresenting his home address and employment history to falsely claim being a tenant and a union member. This is not an inherently unresolvable problem, but the current practice of DSA provides little-to-no space for young organizers who do not prioritize electoral campaigns. Engaging with neighborhood-level activism like tenant unions, ICE-watch, or progressive diaspora organizations can allow the Left to recruit and develop cadres from more diverse backgrounds.

Finally, the electoralist dominance of DSA promotes very narrow and unprincipled conceptions of internationalism. While DSA moved toward a more pro-Palestine orientation in 2017, this did not mean consistent opposition to the Israeli occupation. Current NYC-DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo and others on the DSA-right defended then-Congressperson Jamaal Bowman, voting to dismantle the Palestine Solidarity Working Group after it had campaigned to censure Bowman in 2021. Bowman provoked this by voting to fund the Israeli Iron Dome and visiting Israel and the West Bank on a propaganda tour by the liberal Zionist political advocacy group J Street. The Palestine working group became subordinate to the International Committee, whose leadership is appointed by the DSA’s national leaders.

DSA’s International Committee (IC) also took a largely one-sided ‘campist’ position on the basis of opposing U.S. imperialism. The first major step in this direction was pushing the national organization to align with the São Paulo Forum in 2021. São Paulo Forum includes leaders of the Latin American center-left like the Brazilian Workers’ Party and Bolivian MAS, but also other authoritarian parties like Venezuela’s PSUV and Nicaragua’s Sandinista movement. By aligning with parties of government, DSA positioned itself against grassroots opposition movements in these and other countries. While defending these regimes against U.S. imperial interventions, independent of their political content, the IC remained skeptical of opposition movements in Ukraine, Venezuela, and Iran, as backing them could be perceived as U.S. imperial policy. The dismissal of the working-class agency in favor of alliances with ‘anti-imperialist’ regimes is anti-solidaristic, much like anti-wokeness, and it discourages DSA and U.S. Leftists from engaging with independent working-class struggles in these countries.

While there are disagreements in DSA on all these questions, the prevailing consensus has been to try to prioritize good relations with U.S. progressives and foreign heads of state, whether they be authoritarian, social democratic, or communist, even if that means ignoring or dismissing some independent workers’ movements.

The Roads to working class power through dissent

In this context, movement-focused forces on the socialist Left must prioritize building independent and democratic sources of power in workplaces, communities, and across borders to withstand the pull of electoralism and other forms of socialism from above like campism.

Recent surge of organizing among city workers, public school teachers, higher education workers, nurses and services point toward some sectors with openings where socialists can contribute to the formation of a new militant minority. These efforts could help socialists move beyond a referral model of labor organizing by building rank-and-file committees in key bargaining units. Promoting socialist and solidaristic abolitionist views against repressive policies is essential there not only on moral grounds, but on tactical grounds if we want to redirect the trillions of dollars that go to the military, police, ICE, and other armed forces of capitalist rule.

Community-level organizing among immigrant workers against police violence, ICE, brutal working conditions in service jobs, and slumlords can also help us build ties with workers in more precarious jobs or living conditions. Precarious workers in low-income minority and immigrant neighborhoods must rely on community connections to sustain their lives in the absence of social welfare provisions. If we dismiss minority and immigrant workers’ more localized rebellions against state forces that are putting their boots on their necks, how can socialists expect to build an active majority of workers who fight for their own liberation?

Finally, by positioning socialists as defenders of independent and democratic workers’ movements internationally and learning from limited precedents, socialists can help build solidarity networks across borders to develop foundations of cross-border actions. Some limited but meaningful examples of cross-border worker resistance emerged in response to the war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza, even in the face of political repression. If socialists waver on principled defenses of working-class democracy in all its diversity within and outside the U.S. to win votes, we are simply counterposing democracy in one country against that in another.

There is no doubt socialists have a long way to go building an international working-class movement capable of pushing back against capitalism’s increasingly authoritarian turn amid ecological collapse. While the growing popularity of socialism and progressive ideas is no doubt encouraging, the driver of the socialist movement cannot be the goodwill of elected officials. If we do not build the democratic infrastructures of dissent across areas where workers can leverage power independently of electeds, our movement is bound to repeat the cycle of electoral ‘wins,’ reaction, and political disillusionment on the Left.

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Featured Image credit: dbking; modified by Tempest.