Class
Class is the official podcast of the National Political Education Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America. We believe working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few. Class is a podcast where we ask socialists about why they are socialists, what socialism looks like, and how we, as the working class, can become the ruling class.
Class
The Punishment Bureaucracy
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Workers Deserve More, DSA’s new national program, has become a widely discussed phenomenon across national media and elections, making headlines and chyrons over the last few months as the right lashes out with fake outrage and centrists hand-wring over “the DSA takeover." Upcoming Class episodes will zoom in on different planks and demands raised in our program with expert guests and organizers from across DSA and the left, and talk about the why, how, when, and exactly what society must change, as well as the role of Workers Deserve More in that change.
On this episode, we talk with Alec Karakatsanis, author of Copaganda and executive director of the Civil Rights Corp, about the aggregation of the punishment bureaucracy under capitalism and recent left-wing criticisms of the abolitionist horizon that Workers Deserve More demands.
Center for Working Class Politics “The Left’s Coalition Crisis” report
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Hey comrades, and welcome to CLASS, the podcast of Democratic Socialists in America's National Political Education Commission, or NPEC. My name is Michaela, current co-chair of NPEC, and a member of North New Jersey DSA. And on this episode, I'll be speaking with Alec Karakatsanis, a civil rights attorney, the executive director of the Civil Rights Corps, and the author of COPAGanda, How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, as well as the Copaganda newsletter on Substack. Before we dive in, a reminder that Class is available on all major podcast platforms. Please consider becoming a DSA member by following the link in the podcast description. You can also send us a message about the episode and sign up for Red Letter, NPEC's Monthly Newsletter, using the provided links. Last week, we had Aziz Rana on class to discuss parts of the Workers Deserve More program that emphasize democratic participation and constitutional reform. And we talked about how socialist history is inseparable from clear, uncompromising demands for a new democratic society in the people's control. The calls to abolish the Senate and reconstitute the executive and the judiciary so they're accountable to the people are radical demands, but not unheard of. The attachments to an outdated, property-centered constitutional order are strong, but they've not created the same consternation on the left or the right that another one of our program planks has. Our demands to end mass incarceration and police immunity, which reads in full. Demilitarize police departments, disempower police unions, and redirect funding to public services as steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system which protects the rich and jails the poor. Treat drug addiction and mental illness as health issues, not crimes, end qualified immunity, and empower civilian oversight bodies with real authority over the police. The abolitionist horizon, the idea that one day in a socialist future, we will neither want nor require police or prisons, is not new to socialists. It wasn't invented in 2014 or 2020 or 2026. The Socialist Party of America's Eugene Debs called for a similar future in his only full-length book, his prison memoir, Walls and Bars, published the year after his death in 1927, when he said, in the introduction and conclusion, that the prison ought not merely to be reformed, but abolished as an institution for the punishment and degradation of unfortunate human beings. The time will come when society will be so far advanced that it will be too civilized and too humane to maintain a prison for the punishment of erring members, encage his brother as a brute, place an armed brute over him, feed him as a brute, treat him as a brute, and reduce him to the level of a brute. The idea that socialists can and should call for the end of policing in prisons is suddenly being placed under new microscopes, as DSA and socialism are enjoying increased popularity and mass pushback from the right wing, especially for taking an explicit stand on abolitionism, which some progressives and socialist electeds are avoiding and some socialist commentators are urging moderation on, or at least a change in verbiage. But the political moment we're in demands more insight than horse race polling and hot takes. Our discussion today with Alec and future conversations with Alex Vitale and Paul Heidemann will invite perspectives from experts and commentators on the issue in the hopes that it's helpful to bring the debate on the carceral system forward and discuss it frankly rather than entrench further into our current modes of thinking. However, it should be noted I'm not a completely impartial interlocutor. Simply put, I am Debsian. And while I think there's some use in refining language, socialists should not hide our lights under a basket in moments of crisis. Our class enemies will and have put words in our mouth anyway. And so far, all our exposure, their lies, and their faux outrage has only made us more popular. So what's to lose in talking about it? Welcome to class, Alex.
SPEAKER_01Thanks, Michaela.
SPEAKER_02All right. So we always ask the for uh the same question to first timers. How and why did you become a socialist? And um how and why did you join DSA?
SPEAKER_01So, you know, I'm a fourth generation unionist. My uh the Vitalis were coal miners in southern Illinois. They were part of uh one of the insurgent caucuses within the United Mine Workers, and uh my father was in a union, and I've been in a union for over 25 years, uh, and was in fact a vice president of the union for a number of years of the Professional Staff Congress CUNY, which is part of the AFT. Uh my parents were involved in the civil rights movement. I grew up in Houston. So, you know, I grew up in a political household where candidates were around and people involved in struggles were around. And so, you know, that was just how I grew up. And I was involved in organizing as a student. And uh my links to DSA go back to the Harrington years. I mean, almost, almost. I was involved in the organizing of the Socialist Scholars Conference in the mid-90s, working with people like Stanley Aronowitz and Bogdan Denich, who were of that Harrington group uh of the early origins of DSA. Uh so uh I formally joined DSA during the upsurge. I don't even remember exactly when, but I was a national delegate in 2019 to the national conference, and uh it was motivated in part because when the end of policing first came out, one of the places where it got a lot of attention was within DSA chapters. And so I was traveling around the country meeting these young new generation of organizers, and I was just so impressed at what they were doing, how organized they were, the seriousness and the breadth of what was happening nationally. So I said, well, I I've gotta be connected to this. I've got to, you know, do what I can to support this endeavor.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and you're a sociologist, you're a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, and um wanted to talk about that because our topic is policing. And recently, some of the most high-profile criticisms of police and prison abolition have been coming from sociologists, Lois Wilquant and Adenar Usmani are what come to mind for me most recently, and they've been sort of cited repeatedly recently in in Jacobin and other places. Um I personally know several relatively newly minted sociologists on the left who are fully convinced by these critical arguments and the recommendations that they're putting forward. And I don't want to make you answer for your discipline um, you know, fully or psychologize anyone, but I am wondering if you could talk a little bit about your views on method and theory. Um, if you could. I'm not a sociologist, um, but I like we said um prior to starting recording, sociology is a big tent. And you'd mentioned that you aren't uh, you know, dyed in the wool sociologist, but maybe you could talk a little bit about your own methods and and sort of what you study, and then we can talk about what you think of this turn.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I'm definitely not a sociologist, sociologist, or even really an academics academic in a lot of ways. Uh, and sociology, like DSA, is a big tent. Uh, my undergraduate training was in cultural anthropology and urban studies. And then I went and worked at the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness and did, you know, organizing and policy work for them. And then decided to go back to school. And, you know, sociology seemed like a place where I could explore some of the questions that I was interested in around the global pressures on cities, the kind of race to the bottom that neoliberalism was engendering. And I had a chance to work closely with Stanley Aronowitz, uh, Bill Tabb, who was part of a monthly review, you know, really amazing Marxist uh political economist, you know. And uh so I found a home in sociology, but always a somewhat uh ambiguous or ambivalent one. And my work is multidisciplinary. I also teach in African American studies, and I my main like professional association home is actually in criminology, not in sociology, in part because there was really no interest in a systemic critique of policing within sociology. And I think part of the problem is that sociology got captured by a kind of Durkheimian structural functionalism. And we see this in all this carceral minimalism nonsense uh that's coming out of some sociologists. Uh, I recently um wrote a pretty skating critique of David Garland's new book that, you know, he's basically like, yeah, we need more money for police because and prisons because we need them to be professionalized so that they can carry out their punishment uh uh uh regimes more effectively to restore social order, because that's the point of society is to have order, and we need punishment as a central plank of doing that. And that's really what's behind a lot of this sociological carceralism is the rejection of historical materialism. And I yeah, I find it really fascinating someone like Adnar Usmani going around claiming to be a socialist, but actually not practicing the most basic historical materialism, which is what is the historical function of police within our political economic system? And he seems to think that it's about you know restoring balance between competing institutional forces and you know, punishment is this essential function. And you know, a Marxist analysis says these institutions exist to enable regimes of economic exploitation, yeah. And that is a fundamental difference. And so it I wrote a paper uh a couple years ago called Abolitionist Epistemology, in which I try to lay this out that there is a crisis of theory within sociology that is rejecting post-colonial theory, historical materialism, even feminism in any meaningful sense, right, is being rejected here. This this this problem is like a bunch of abstract thinking about the role of police in society that never talks to the people who are being policed. About what does it mean to be police? What does it mean to have your existence framed as criminal? And they just couldn't care less about any of that. And and for someone like Luik Vaucan, it is very distressing, it's disappointing, and I think you know, we need to go back and read our Mike Davis instead.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, I I'll just say I agree with you, um, partly because I have taught and uh read a lot about the police um and their origins, the the actual standing police having been created by an act of parliament in the you know during the Industrial Revolution and then exported with various um local variations across the entire world, you know, to discipline poor people, discipline workers, and ensure that the private property is protected. Um some people would say that that's no longer the function of police, that the police have been uh reformed. I mean, even even those who might say, well, what came before the police was actually worse. It was just mercenaries and like private security and like members of the military just kind of like controlling everyone. But I think that your point that people who are sociologists and also, you know, in Jacobin, Catalyst, like these, these um very I mean, these are these are kind of like bog standard American Marxists um who are behind these publications and then they're putting out this material. I guess, you know, you say that there's a crisis of theory, but what is the theory? Like, is the theory that we need the police, or is the theory that the police are something that um is kind of like a technology that capitalism produced, and now we have it, so we might as well use it.
SPEAKER_01So, so first about it can we use that same functional analysis about the nature of policing today? And so obviously, we don't have like slavery and colonialism in that 19th century sense anymore, which were those were key factors in the development of modern policing, was overcoming uh resistance to those regimes of exploitation.
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_01As modernity becomes more complex, those informal systems of producing social order weren't working. And so they needed something that was more intensive uh and and also extensive. This kind of Foucauldian analysis here. So today, though, what do we have? We don't have slavery colonialism, we barely have industrialization in the U.S., which was another big factor. What we have is this kind of neoliberal system of financialization that is creating mass precarity and immiseration and simultaneously producing billionaires. And so there is resistance to that system, formal and informal, unionization, but also survival strategies, black market activities, and also a huge population of people who've just been abandoned, who are unhoused, who have untreated mental health and substance use issues, and their existence poses a threat to the system. It undermines commerce, it is disruptive to everyday life. And so what do police actually do all day? They're not finding serial killers, tracking down rapists, they are micromanaging the lives of those who are formally or informally resisting or interfering with this system of neoliberal redistribution up the economic ladder. So the criminalization of the unhoused, the criminalization of drugs and sex work, the and the criminalization of our movements. That is what policing actually does. So the function remains the same. A basic, just basic historical materialist analysis must lead you to the conclusion that this institution was not created, nor does it function today to produce public safety, it exists to produce a social order that allows neoliberal capitalist exploitation to run amok. And why on earth would a socialist want to enable the institution that exists to stop us? And that is the locus of the most right-wing conservative politics in the country.
SPEAKER_02Well, I think that there's a couple things that would be a response to that. I'm just going to let them go ahead and I'm just going to devil's advocate my comrades here. But um, one is okay, yes, the police are are imperfect, um, if even, you know, a kind of they might say necessary evil. But the issue is that people don't want to get rid of them. So, like this this kind of links up to I think the the polling that has been also accompanying a lot of this analysis in um, which will say Jacobin, because um the Center for Working Class Politics, which is like a polling outfit, um, that had put out a report recently called the Left Coalition, and I can't remember the subtitle. But it implies, amongst other things, that socialists ought to soften criticisms of police and demands to weaken the police in order to win over working class people. And with my conversation with Alec, I I outlined this, but the measure of working class, according to the Center for Working Class Politics, is a range of income and not having gone to college. So it is not all people who work for a wage, and it's not even all people who work for a low wage. Um, it's actually like only the middle two, what they call quartiles, which I was confused by that because income is measured in quintiles. So I'm like, okay, so what's the what are the quartiles? They say it's between 40 and 40,000 and 100,000, which is a very wide range. Um, and it also is anyone who doesn't have a four-year degree or or above. So it is a slice of what they're calling working class. But what's interesting is that the policing stuff that they say in there does indicate majorities, even for things like we want to redirect funding to the real causes of crime. But then if what is said in all in the alternative is we want to direct police to fight serious crime, and you don't talk about redirecting funding, it jumps up. So it's like it's a it's a majority of people supporting it in this narrow band of what they're calling working class, which doesn't analyze occupation or class status or anything like that. It's just income and not having a college degree, which I have some issues with. Let's just say cuts out teachers, cuts out nurses, cuts out a whole swath of uh working class people. But they're saying we need to, in order to be able to build like a mass coalition, mass politics, we need to de-emphasize um defund, essentially. And as you know, like, you know, the defund the police slogan that came out of um the George Floyd moment, Black Lives Matter moment, has been denigrated in the media. So maybe we could talk a little bit about this argument, which is that socialists, in order to be able to win this, need to um soften the rhetoric um in order to be able to like speak to some band of working class people. Um what do you think about that? I mean, this is the thing too. It's about comms versus principles or something like that.
SPEAKER_01But well, there's a lot to there's a lot to unpack here, and we'll see what I can uh get through uh through all of this. Okay, so uh first of all, there is a lot of support for the idea that there are other ways to produce safety than just police. And it depends a lot on how you ask the question and what the circumstances are in which you ask the question. I think everyone understands now that we should not be sending police to go on mental health crisis calls. Uh there's national polling that shows even a majority of Republicans believe this. Well, that's a central plank of like defunding the police. Let's send someone other than the police to do this. So part of the problem is treating this as like a free-floating abstract question that then becomes allied with a kind of broader cultural politics, right? We have the media 24 hours a day attacking this idea. And then when we ask people, do they like that idea? Turns out some of them, often without any real understanding of what's being talked about, say, oh no, I don't like that idea. Yeah. Also, this is driven by a lot of short-term electoralist thinking. And I'm like, well, why don't you guys just be consultants for the Democratic Party? Because this is exactly how we got into this mess was you know, licking our fingers to see which way the wind is blowing for the next five minutes, and then that determines what our politics are, with a potentially complete abandonment of core principles. And I think that's. Unfortunately, a big part of what's going on here is that they see these electoral victories, which are amazing and remarkable. And I'm close with the many of the DSA people in office around the country. And uh, you know, I'm not an anti-electoralist, but there is a continuum here, and it is quite possible to go too far in saying that we need to have poll-driven politics. Part of what it means, in my view, to be a socialist means to be an organizer. And part of what it means to be an organizer is to go and talk to people you don't already know about something you don't already agree about, and to move people. And anyone who's done the most basic labor organizing understands this, that we have to move people. And so to engage in this kind of short-term poll-driven thinking is to just throw organizing out the window and to say there's nothing we can do to move people. We have to take them where we are. And again, that's exactly how we got the Democratic Party we have, right? Which is no principles that are really meaningful, and just a bunch of consultants who do polling and tell us what to say. And I thoroughly reject that. So I think instead, and and the other thing is that these are things that have to be waged at the local level. Public safety is a local question. Almost all of our elections are local, our campaigns, our organizing is local. And so what's help, it's not that polling is not helpful. It's that is it in the service of organizing or short-term electoralism. So, yeah, we need to know what people think about public safety. We need to know what are the specific public safety concerns they have. And is there a rational basis for that, or is it because they watch too much TV news? And then we can try to unpack it, talk to people about what would actually be more successful in making them safe. And it turns out, and there are campaigns all across the country doing this. I'm I'm currently here in Detroit. I'm I'm you know, meeting with people doing amazing community-based anti-violence work, setting up non-police mental health crisis services. And these ideas are extremely popular in the context of actual organizing, of elected officials defending these ideas, speaking aspirationally about them. Uh so it is, you know, very possible to win elections. And frankly, let's just look at Mom Dani for a second. Mom Dani was very clear. I don't want to hire more police. He was the only candidate in the primary and the general election who said that. And he said, instead, I want to invest in community-based safety initiatives. I want to put a billion dollars into that. And that was very popular. He took leadership, people went out and knocked on doors, and they changed the conversation. And this just seems essential to me.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I I agree. I mean, one of the things that has come out of this debate, actually, like particularly around abolition and defund, kind of the revival of this conversation has been sparked by the publication of DSA's Workers Deserve More Program because that was, you know, came straight into the media. It was um dropped, not it was the timing could have been better if if they if it if it had been on time, it would have come out in the spring, but it ended up coming out in the middle of um an electoral cycle, right? So electeds and the candidates were being faced with this question: do you support defunding the police? Do you support abolition? And actually, a reporter asked Zaron this at a press conference. He says, I do not support defunding the police. And AOC said her woke what is crazy comment. Francesca Hong also said, I don't believe that anymore. There's like a number of these um kind of distancing tactics. But as you said, organizing is different than comms, right? And also electoralism, I mean, which I I kind of am on the fence about whether the, like basically the idea that elections are are a core pillar of the democratic road to socialism, how these socialists in office act once in office, and once they actually are in charge of a mass sort of institution like the police throws complications in. It's like you can get people, you can move people on the doors to vote. But then when it comes to what you actually have once you're in office, I think that there's a lot of consternation there that, and it's not even just about making the police mad or something like that. I think that could be part of it. There's a political issue there. But then there's also what about people who are like, what's gonna replace the police? Because the police, as you noted, are so integrated into the culture. It's they're they're everywhere, first of all. Um, even though you have these so, you know, so sociological analysis or or think pieces that say we actually need more police, they're under, you know, people are under police, which Alec had a lot to say on his on his interview about the the validity of that. But this question of organizing, to me, I I I'm kind of baffled that even though there's majorities, like regardless of how you ask the question, even if you use what the Center for Working Class Politics calls liberal elite resonant framing, which they just named basically anything to do with social justice, that um even that gets a majority, right? Yeah. So what is I I don't I I feel like I don't want to repeat myself. What is the turn? Like what's what's the point of the turn?
SPEAKER_01So, so a couple of things, right? So, first of all, we're under attack, right? Like, so in 2020, there was this moment where people are saying defund the police, which was a great uh advan development over reform the police, which is just total nonsense, uh and signaled let's get to the core of the issue here, right? So there was a moment where the mainstream media and some politicians were like, What is this? and people like myself and and many others had access to the mainstream media, and once they figured out what it was, they're like, Oh, we have got to put a stop to this, and then the full on attack. Why? Because they realized just how important and radical a demand it is, how it really directly threatens the political apparatus of both parties, yeah, right, because the Democrats are fully implicated in this critique. So, what is the critique, right? Let's get what are the principles that are at stake here, right? When people defend policing due to this short-term thinking or a really bad theoretical framework, what they're saying is the way we solve problems in our society is the mobilization of coercive state violence directed almost entirely at the poorest and most vulnerable populations in our society. People with disabilities, people who are unemployed, people with substance and mental health challenges, right? This is what this is who is in our jails, this is who is in our prisons, this is who actually experiences policing. So what the carceral socialists are saying is I'm very happy to throw them under the bus if I can get a few middle-class, working class white voters to vote for a socialist candidate, and that this somehow is the socialist movement, a collection of people who occasionally vote for a socialist candidate. That's not a movement. That's short-term electoralism. A movement is building organizational capacity, putting people in motion, exercising power on a broad front. And this doesn't do that. So what abolition says is a different set of values. Different set of values. It says that we should treat people with as much human dignity as possible, that we should try to solve problems through repair, through restoration, through compassion, through mutual aid, that we understand that it is capitalism that is producing these social problems, it is capitalism that is labeling these social problems as crime, while allowing the poisoning of our children, the destruction of their minds with social media and AI, the actual utter destruction of the planet through global warming, potentially, right? That somehow this is not crime, is not to be, you know, that's not a matter of our public safety anymore. So the carceral socialists have just accepted a set of incredibly right-wing pro-capitalist framings in an effort to get a couple more short-term votes that don't really integrate people into a working class movement. So I do want to say that I'm not opposed to the idea that we need to understand and relate to where the working class is at. I've had many working class jobs, and as I mentioned, my family, you know, were coal miners. Uh this these are not abstract questions to me. And of course, it is the Democratic Party who's rejected that population and pushed them into the Republican camp. And I don't think that we start the conversation with this population talking about abolishing the police. I don't use that language in my public-facing work, and I don't think we need broad abstract statements about that. What we do need is a different vision about public safety that includes why do my why does my kid have asthma? Why does my uncle have cancer living next to this factory? Why, you know, am I constantly unable to get adequate health care? You know, those are real public safety questions. And we should be the party of public safety, which means investing in community mental health services, community-based violence intervention work, right? And all these things that are evidence-driven that we know will make us safer, that are rooted in socialist principles, not capitalist principles.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, actually, I just, you know, because the single plank, and even just words that aren't even in there, we don't in the plank use defund particularly. What we do say is redirect funding away from police and towards social services. And there is also this abolitionist horizon. This basically steps towards abolishing the police and prison systems which protect the rich and jail the poor, which on their face is they're defensible because it's like, what do you want to protect the rich and jail the poor? Is that what you think the police and prison system should be doing? But the sticking point, like you said, is this term abolition because I think, and just to kind of go with what you said earlier, people think of that as too radical, right? That there's that the the language of abolition actually, well, when we were abolishing slavery, what we're doing was um displacing an economic system, right? We were displacing something that was core to um empire and to the ability for um, you know, sort of like mass production and global capital. Um obviously it was quickly replaced, but nonetheless, like the abolition of slavery slavery was considered at the time to be, you know, the most radical thing happening. Um, and the abolition of police and prisons, a lot of people have said, well, we don't want to abolish them. What we want to do is make them better. What about the Nordic system? And I know that you've commented on this before, um, and I want to hear what you have to say about this, but the way that a lot of these critics are kind of framing it is um safety is so top of mind for a lot of people that in order to be able to organize them, we can't throw up a barrier and say, actually, your idea of safety is wrong. You have to adopt our idea of safety. And that does seem abstract to a lot of people because people don't associate something like Medicare for all as a public safety measure. I do and you do, but other people think, no, that's just free health care. That doesn't have to do with my safety. And a lot of this has to do with copaganda and the idea that people think that there's way more crime than there actually is and that kind of stuff, but also the labeling of certain kinds of um social ills as crimes themselves. So I just kind of want to like talk about that a bit because I think that a lot of people who would defend um what you're calling, you know, carceral uh socialism. And they would say, no, it's penal minimalism or carceral minimalism, this idea that we can't get rid of all of it um all at once. And even in the future, in a socialist future, we have to account for the fact that people need to feel safe in order to be able to flourish. So on this question, this is a little wide-ranging, but I just want to like kind of drill down on this question like, how do we persuade people that the things that they think of as bread and butter issues are actually also public safety issues? Because I would also even say that education, like people being able to have high quality, free, um, accessible education all the way up until whatever field of study they want to do, like that to a lot of people just seems stupid and implausible. To me, as an educator, I'm like, no, that's actually what keeps us safe.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Is people being able to do what they want and being able to freely access however much education they want. Those are the kinds of things that keep us safe. But how do we persuade people that that's the case?
SPEAKER_01So, you know, who's deciding which demands are too radical? So, on the one hand, we're talking about completely transforming our healthcare system, trillions of dollars of vested interests, insurance companies, health conglomerates. We're talking about, you know, radically transforming housing markets, which is like tens of trillions of dollars. You know, uh it's unbelievable transformative approaches. I mean, we're talking ultimately about dismantling capitalism. Abolishing it, actually. And somehow having a deep critique of the role of police in prisons and propping up capitalism is off limits. So, how do we get in? How do how do this well, who is driving this discourse? Well, it is mostly folks, or I don't know, there are a lot of people whose training is like economics and a kind of sociology that unfortunately has completely lost track of issues of demographic diversity. Notice that in that study that we've been talking about, they don't break a single thing out by race or gender.
SPEAKER_02They do on race, actually.
SPEAKER_01Uh, not on the public safety stuff.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah, yeah. They don't think about that other stuff, like kind of in the appendix, they do. Yeah. But yeah, not on gender.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I I frankly, I think there's some people who when 2020 happened felt left out. That the sh the center of political discourse around radical change somehow their views just didn't matter that much. That there would that the that the experts that we needed to hear from were not people who had their life experiences. That we and think that they can build a broad working class movement by pretending that race doesn't exist. Well, I just don't see race, right? This kind of class reductionism has reared its ugly head again. And basically what they're saying is it's okay to throw a bunch of young black and brown people under the bus, feed them into the carceral system, if we can win over a few upper middle class black votes and working class white votes. And that doesn't sound like socialism to me. It doesn't sound ethical, and it also won't work.
SPEAKER_02And it kind of sounds like Chuck Schumer whenever um Hillary Clinton was running for get a couple of people in up the upper upper reaches of Pennsylvania by throwing other people out. Exactly.
SPEAKER_01Well, that that is the Chuck Schumer strategy for sure. What win the suburbs by by throwing out working class people? That and that's ironically what they're doing here in a lot of ways. And yeah, so uh it's very frustrating. I don't think it's a lost cause. I think we have to just stay the course. You know, in New York, the Racial Justice Working Group put forward a proposal for the New York City convention that calls for you know reinvigorating what I would say is an abolitionist uh aligned program of getting rid of broken windows policing, anti-gang policing, investing in the alternatives. And it is by far the most popular, most co-sponsored proposal. So I really do think that the rank and file of DSA is very sympathetic to these ideas. I think it just needs to be operationalized in a responsible manner in the context of actual on the ground organizing campaigns and not as free-floating slogans or virtue signaling. So so the I I can appreciate the critique uh even of AOC saying about woke point 1.0. Yes, there were a lot of people going around saying things disconnected from actual organizing that wasn't helpful, yeah, that wasn't rooted in any kind of real strategic analysis about building power. But that is not what we're talking about here. This work is happening on the ground with popular support all over the country. How we talk about it matters, but just leaning into carceral minimalism is not the solution. They have a non-socialist analysis that is enabling the institutions that exist to stop what we're trying to do.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, I uh I think that we're gonna, you know, go overboard with the case.
SPEAKER_01Well, hold on. Let me I just just before I lose my sorry, before I lose, I want to say one more thing about carceral minimalism, right? So their argument is that, well, abolitionists are like we have to get rid of all police in prisons tomorrow. I've had some of them say this to me. This is in David Garland's book, this is in some of the Jacobin stuff. It's outrageous. It's outrageous. They know that it is not true. They are lying about this. Because I know these people. They are lying about this. They are intentionally misleading people by repeating a totally nonsensical rhetoric. And I have argued with them, face some of these people face to face about this. They are creating this bugaboo that completely misrepresents what we're doing. Right? There is no organizing abolitionist involved in the work who labors under some mystical fantasy that there's some magical switch that we can just turn off all police. You know, the or if we just win one particular election, then we can like all police just disappear. No, everything is incremental. Healthcare for all is incremental. Incremental, right? Changing the housing market is incremental. Everything is incremental. You have a logic, a set of values, a strategic orientation that guides your incremental choices. So could there be common cause between carceral minimalists and abolitionists on a particular campaign, on a particular incremental strategy? Of course, there could be. But there will also be disagreements, like building feminist jails. You know, we understand that that is not a road to liberation. That is a road to more incarceration and reinstilling validity into the logics of repressive state power at the expense of working people. So this idea that, well, we can just if we that that to do things incrementally means to reject abolition is completely false.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, I've also had some of these arguments because I think the name of abolition for the movement itself is it's a movement. And a movement itself has movement within it. It has a history, it has all of these different strategic kind of like nodes. It obviously has many different thinkers in it. Like Angela Davis, you know, giant of the field, really, um, has even said in interviews, um, it's essentially a big tent. You know, abolition, abolitionism is a big tent. Um, and the carceral minimalists or the penal minimalists, I think, are focused on the idea that we'll never be able to not punish people, right? That and that whatever that punishment or discipline needs to be is the police. That the police can be um essentially gutted, reframed, um, redirected or whatever, but we'll never be able to get rid of punishment. And the historic like just to kind of go back to the point.
SPEAKER_01That's the Durkheim structural functionalism rearing its head. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Right. And it's also the idea that human beings, or there's this idea that there's a core human nature, and that even if the core human nature can be transformed by a socialist revolution, right, or a socialist transformation, to the extent that people are willing to let go of their individualism or whatever, there still are these like features, both that people crave safety and that the safety itself looks like policing, punishment, knowing that the person who did the bad thing is no longer able to do the bad thing, um, and that people get sort of social recompense for that. What you know is called um uh what's it called? Fuck well, let me forgive my core. Yeah, let me sorry, sorry, sorry. Let me let me let me just start over. Um the thing I want to ask is that when we're not just organizing people, but when we're trying to persuade our comrades that the abolitionist movement, forget about, you know, the abolitionist horizon is like kind of like this thing that is the maximalist, like, here's what's in the future. But even the abolitionist movement has room in it for what we might call reformers, even when there's disagreement. I think that this is actually the difference between the progressives and the socialists, right? Like, I mean, if we talk about theory of change here, we're also talking about something that is on paper. There's a lot of um exactitude, right? Like we believe in trying to get certain things um for the working class. But for progressives, it's making capitalism more tolerable to more people. Whereas socialists are like, no, we actually do want to get rid of this. And we, and I personally don't think that we should be hiding that ball, right? Like, I don't think that we should be hiding it from each other, and I don't think we should be hiding it from the public, especially because now we have this Gallup poll that just came out, and socialism is at the highest rate ever. And it was measured, that poll happened between August 3rd and August 24th, when the program and when all of this stuff was like being thrown out into the news. So people are seeing and listening and hearing, you know, all about what the socialists really believe. Oh, they really believe this, they really believe that. Yet our our popularity ticked up four points from last year, especially among independents who I mean, I would say it's not, you know, exact science, but independents, they signal that they are more open to a political alternative. I'm wondering about the abolition movement and how without renaming it, we can persuade people that it's actually it it isn't so um, it is radical, but it isn't so like unrealistic, you know?
SPEAKER_01So first I want to say something about this whole like punishment thing, right? That the the carceral minimalists just desperately holding on to this idea that the way to solve problems is through punishment. And they are claiming to have this, you know, realistic understanding of human nature. And I'm just like, you don't seem to know the first thing about the actual people you're talking about here. We we've been punishing people for drugs for almost a hundred years in this country, and in the last 50, we have thrown literally millions of human beings into intolerable conditions to try to punish our way out of the harms around drugs, and we have absolutely nothing to show for it except human misery and more death. This does not work. They've had too many classical economics classes, they really don't know what they're talking about. That people are not these rational cost-benefit calculating robots. We are impulsive, emotional, irrational beings. And if we don't try to get a grip on that, we're you know, we're going to commit real abuses in the name of socialism. So do we need to have mechanisms of regulation? Do we need to have a formal and informal system? Yeah, of course, we we need to have that under any, but this idea that punishment and a massive armed coercive state bureaucracy is how we produce justice and safety, it's outrageous. And it flies in the face of work that's happening in hundreds of cities across the country where people in the highest crime communities are begging for something other than just police to solve their problems. And yet, part of what's standing in the way of accomplishing that is these carceral socialists telling DSA politicians that they have to lean into police power. And I would just point out that a hundred years ago, when we had a bunch of socialists in office, it was their police departments that often were the key political power in driving them from office. They are going to be, and I worry about that in New York City. He has left up in place a billionaire commissioner who totally disagrees with his overall agenda and is being groomed to run against him. Why on earth would you leave that apparatus in place?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, just to I'm I'm I am curious what you think about the abolitionist movement.
SPEAKER_01Sorry, I yeah, so I got off on this other thing. So on the socialist movement, so I think that, you know, we yes, we have to make broad statements to the public so they have some idea of where we're coming from. Would I have used maybe slightly different language? Possibly. I'd have to think about it some more. Um but we're gonna build this movement through local organizing. And then it really matters. What are we fighting for? How are we fighting for it? How are we talking about it? And yes, it we don't build this by standing on the soapbox trying to get people to sign a petition to abolish the police tomorrow. And I would never support such an initiative, right? We build it the way it is actually being built, which is like the cops killed another unarmed person having a mental health crisis. Why can't we have actual mental health care instead of police? Who supports? Okay, that means shifting resources into services that actually make people safer and healthier. Simple. Let's just, we should be the party that says we want to build public safety through a set of principles that are aligned with our positive human vision, not capitalist exploitation and profit and violence, right? It's capitalism needs to solve its problems through violence. I'll just say this one last thing, right? It is super important to the rich to say that the problem of homelessness is one of disorder, moral failure, and crime rather than the alternative, which is to say it's the result of capitalist market failure. Because if the former framing, if the billionaire framing is held, then the solution is repressive state power and criminalization. But if our framing comes through, the solution is to reorganize housing markets and tax the rich. And they cannot abide that. And then to hear that same language coming out of the mouths of self-proclaimed socialists is outrageous.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think we agree there. I mean, one of the things that I'm I'm sticking on, and I'm going to be talking to Paul Heidemann next week, is this idea that um the police are reformable and that we can without redirecting funding away from them, we can either put more funding into them or reorganize them into a more kind, just, and humane force. And I'm not even trying to hyperbolize that or anything. It's really actually what they're saying. I know. And with that in mind, I mean, one of the things that's just come out, um, I'm really looking forward to reading the book Blue Power, which is um Stuart Schrader's new book on police unions, which, you know, socialists know that police unions are a brotherhood of protective force um that is like for essentially a formalized internal HR for the police that allow them to get away with a lot of stuff. But it also is a political force, right? Um and and to the extent that we're talking here about what's possible now, you're saying like local organizing. How can how can local organizing pressure electeds to act? Because if if what they're facing is this massive bureaucracy under their power, but also, as you said, kind of this antagonistic relationship between, well, you know, Jessica Tisch and Zaron Momdani, but this replicates itself all across the country because this is also what the police are in a lot of places. How and and how can how can the failures really of the of the post-George Floyd moment not be replicated, right? First of all, I don't want it to happen, or I'd prefer it not to happen with more more killing, but actually like real organizing to get people to pressure these um people to face down this bureaucracy and face down the unions and face down these um um you know capitalist puppets basically who are acting as the heads of these departments.
SPEAKER_01You know, one of the important things about Stuart's book, right, is understanding that the police unions don't just exist to produce impunity, uh, which politicians are happy to give it to them anyway. But they are in fact a locus of a political worldview that is in line with the interests of billionaires, right? That says that all the world's problems are the result of moral inferiority that we label crime and that needs to be repressed through violent, you know, uh state action. And any talk of market failures and all that is out of bounds. And again, carceral minimalists thinking that somehow empowering those institutions by giving them more money and more members is part of the road to socialism is just ridiculous. I think the earlier question was about police reform.
SPEAKER_02So you got it. This is just nonsense.
SPEAKER_01This is just nonsense. The the, you know, after the Ferguson uprising, that's what we were told. Oh, don't worry, we're gonna reform the police. Billions of dollars went into police reform. The officer, you know, Minneapolis was in fact like this poster child for adopting all these reforms. But the officers involved in killing George Floyd had had implicit bias training, de-escalation training, mindfulness training, we're wearing body cameras, we're operating under a new, more restrictive use of force policy, we're operating under a new bystander policy. None of it made any difference because the reformers, their goal is to restore public trust in the police, not to reduce police violence or liberate people. And the these people who think they can reform or reimagine policing fundamentally misunderstand the nature of that institution. Again, they labor under this Durkheimian idea that punishment is an essential feature of any complex civilization, and they throw out a historical material analysis that says that when you give the state this kind of power, it will be used to reproduce class inequality. And that's a big part of what this comes down to.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think that and you know, we'll we'll wrap up here. I don't want to, you know, retread a lot of this, but um, I think that a lot of the critics and the the ones who are pushing a penal or a carceral minimalism are are looking towards the future and thinking under a socialist system, the police will be socialists or that the police themselves will have like a different different kind of objective because they won't there won't be capitalists. I I'm wondering what you think about that, because I think that that just won't be the police anymore. It will actually be completely whatever it is, it will be completely different. But the insistence that no, it'll still be the police, but it will be like more Nordic or it will be more um connected to the community or what have you. Um, that's the the sort of sticking point. Because you mentioned before that people um are fundamentally misunderstanding the abolition movement and that they are doing it with willful kind of ignorance, or you even said that they're being they're lying. But I actually do think that some of these people think if we just had socialists in charge and we hired different types of people, then that will change things. And I I myself am doubtful about that, but I also wanted to kind of run it by you because you just said the objectives are are distinct. They are they are for the you know, they're in the service of capital. What if what if they weren't? You know, like what if there was something different?
SPEAKER_01They're suffering from a lack of knowledge, a lack of imagination, and a really poor analysis. I mean, they just can't imagine something other than a massive arm punishment bureaucracy to help produce a liberated social order when there are examples all around them. They're first of all, safe communities are not safe because of police. They're safe because people's basic needs are met, and they what they don't want to treat people certain ways, and they don't want to behave certain ways, right? This idea that the only thing holding civilization together is this constant threat of punishment is uh just not true. And also not obscenity. Yeah, it's not helpful. So will there need to be mechanisms, institutions, people who help produce a stable social order in a socialist future? Of course. But will they be agents of armed coercive state power? I certainly hope not. Now, that's not to say that there will never be some moment where some person has to be restrained physically or something like that. Of course, harms will still happen. But this idea that, first of all, that policing and prisons exist to reduce harm or are successful in reducing harm is just nonsense. That is not why they were created, and that isn't, and they are not very good at it, right? The vast majority of truly harmful behavior that even that we call crime is never even reported to the police.
SPEAKER_02Well, to the extent that we are talking about what a socialist order could look like, I mean, how do you picture it? Because what what we have in our in our program is essentially like we're looking to get rid of a system that serves the rich and jails the poor, which is of course are are related. Um a system that I think could be in place is not one that sort of rejects state power. But I do think that, and I believe, and I think every any socialist should believe, that once we have socialism, not just socialists in charge of a few cities or or even you know in power electorally, but actually when we have socialism, there will just be so I mean, first of all, there'll be way fewer crimes because we won't have so many property crimes, um, because those were invented essentially in order to be able to catch up with capitalist development. You have to have crimes that dissuade people from stealing to survive in order to be able to make them work. And all of all the other things to protect um you know private property that's accruing and accumulating. But for you, like what do you picture whenever you think of a future without police and prisons?
SPEAKER_01So look, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about that. I I'm not I personally am not in the future imagining business that much.
SPEAKER_02Uh but you just criticize people for not having imagination. So that's the way I'm putting it on the phone.
SPEAKER_01Yes, but they're they can't even imagine the things that we already have in place. So, yes, I mean, if first of all, we should not be thinking in terms of crime. We should be thinking about public and community well-being. People lose money from wage theft by their employers than they do from all property crime combined by multiple factors. More people die of air pollution than they do of homicides. So, what are we doing to Actually, make people safer. So part of it is like, let's actually talk about safety and well-being. If we fix the environment, if we stop corporate polluters, if we create a real healthcare system, people are going to be happier, they're going to live longer, they're going to be healthier, they're going to live stable lives. But let's just take the things that we currently call crime. Like I'm not trying to avoid the conversation, right? What drives those behaviors? And we have to understand the drivers individually. This is also part of the paucity of knowledge and imagination by the carceral minimalists and carceral socialists. They just think there's crime, which is bad, that makes people feel unsafe, and we have to repress it. It's like, no, hurt people hurt people. People experience trauma, traumas related to poverty, traumas to related to cycles of violence, traumas related to police and state violence, and they enact that on others. We have to break that cycle. So to the extent that we stop traumatizing people and provide them with services to help deal with the traumas they've already experienced, we can dramatically reduce a lot of the harms that we currently experience. If we want to stop burglaries, car thefts, break-ins, shoplifting, legalize drugs. It's almost all driven by drug-seeking behavior. Right? So if we had, first of all, if we had decent interpersonal social relations outside of the framework of capital, rapacious greed of an exploitation of capitalism, people's mental health, their addictive behaviors, their heart would be dramatically lessened. And we would have access to medically based treatment and support services. And maybe that would include some drug legalization schemes which have been shown to reduce levels of addiction, reduce crime, reduce overdoses. This is just common sense. But the carceral socialists are either ignorant of these realities or just suppress them because it doesn't fit their worldview. So show me a problem, and I will show you a non-carceral solution to that problem that's rooted in evidence, and that will only be easier to achieve to the degree that we dismantle co-capitalist social relations.
SPEAKER_02Thanks as always to our guest and our production crew, Emma, Michael, and Tim, who put this all together. CLASS is a podcast of DSA's National Political Education Commission, or NPEC, which works to expand the knowledge of DSA members and non-members in the service of winning the struggle for socialism and democracy. You can find out more about NPEC by searching for us online or following us on social media, but the best way to find out what our committee's up to is by signing up for Red Letter, NPEC's monthly newsletter. And if you aren't already, you can become a DSA member by following the link in the podcast description. Okay, until next time, solidarity.