{"id":14258,"date":"2025-10-04T08:00:42","date_gmt":"2025-10-04T12:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/?p=14258"},"modified":"2025-10-09T18:27:51","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T22:27:51","slug":"hiding-our-goals-is-no-way-to-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2025\/10\/hiding-our-goals-is-no-way-to-win\/","title":{"rendered":"Hiding our goals is no way to win"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span>n his recent Jacobin<\/em> article,\u00a0 \u201cThe Point of Politics is to Convince People, Not Grandstand<\/a>,\u201d 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<\/a> from the popular 1996 film Jerry Maguire<\/em>, 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, \u201cWho’s coming with me?!\u201d The scene has a comedic impact because of its futility. Only one person follows Maguire.<\/p>\n

Burgis uses this as a negative example: \u201cInstead of pulling a Jerry Maguire<\/em>\u201d and pursuing the quixotic effort to build political independence, we should run candidates in the Democratic Party. The irony (and mistake) in Burgis\u2019 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, \u201cshow us the money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lowering Horizons<\/h4>\n

According to Burgis, \u201cmaximalist\u201d slogans about abolishing the police and the family, or winning Palestinian liberation are \u201cneedlessly alienating\u201d and \u201ca waste of time.\u201d However, Burgis\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

In this article, we will focus on Burgis\u2019s attempts to discipline the Palestinian liberation and the abolitionist movements\u2014two high points of social struggle in the past half-decade. On one level, Burgis\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u201d He elides the principle that \u201cthe emancipation of the working class must be an act of the class itself<\/a>,\u201d or, in the words of family abolitionist Sophie Lewis,<\/a> \u201cIf the world is to be remade utterly, then a person must be willing to be remade also.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cAngry Demonizers From the Socialist Wasteland\u201d<\/h4>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/a> 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\u2019s piece remains the unnamed, unquoted maximalists who don\u2019t engage in mass politics but only \u201cangrily articulat[e] our maximum program, demoniz[e] all who have reservations, and alienat[e] everyone who isn\u2019t already on board.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who are these angry people, we wonder? Burgis gives neither example nor citation. These straw people, foils to \u201cmass politics,\u201d appear to be anyone who disagrees with Burgis\u2019s central thesis that \u201cwe\u2019re 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.\u201d This is the only path for winning socialism, they argue, that \u201cdoesn\u2019t immediately end in a wall.\u201d Burgis argues that a \u201cserious strategic mistake\u201d the Left can make is to turn certain political positions into \u201clitmus tests for political allyship.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Before turning to Palestine and police abolition, it is worth noting that Burgis also singles out \u201cfamily abolition\u201d as a target. Given the overall character of his strategic intervention here, rather than furthering a debate<\/a> within socialist feminism about the nature of the family, Burgis\u2019s targeting of \u201cfamily abolition\u201d and \u201cdebates about identity politics\u201d 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Genocide as \u201csweet spot\u201d?<\/h4>\n

Regarding Palestine, Burgis acknowledges that the one-state solution\u2014a unitary state in Palestine with equal rights for all\u2014is preferable to the atrophied two-state solution. However, he argues that since we cannot \u201csnap our fingers\u201d and bring it into being, it constitutes part of a \u201cmaximum program.\u201d\u00a0 It is thus \u201cless pressing\u201d 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 \u201csweet spot\u201d in finding something that \u201ccurrently sounds reasonable to the majority of the general public.\u201d Anything else, as he notes in his conclusion, is a \u201cwaste of time.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cdenouncing every politician\u201d who doesn\u2019t agree with our \u201cmaximum program\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2014especially 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.<\/p>\n

In other words, the movement is<\/em> centering the immediate broad demands \u201cwithout disguising any of our fondest long-term ambitions or giving up on persuading whoever might be open to them right now,\u201d 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 \u201cwasting time\u201d on \u201cless pressing issues.\u201d What is his concern? Perhaps Burgis\u2019s worry is that the new movement has radicalized against the Democrats\u2019 criminal and shameful role in providing material and ideological support for the genocide? Its leadership\u2013including 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<\/em>) who insist that we are \u201cbetter off\u201d running as Democratic Party candidates. It takes a trick of political contortion or bald-faced lies<\/a> 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\u2014which probably<\/a> played<\/a> a large role in their loss of the presidential election\u2014is legitimate and points to the truth of the Democrats’ role.<\/p>\n