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 the book 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.
We did make an error on the introduction to last week’s episode with Alex Vitale, and the introduction was mismatched — human error on the backend. This *is* the Alec episode, fully collated.
Center for Working Class Politics “The Left’s Coalition Crisis” report
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Before we get started today, I just wanted to make a note that you're about to hear the same introduction that you heard last week. There was a mistake uploading on the back end and some confusion there. So the interview that you will be hearing is with Alec Karakatsanis, who will be introduced. The one you heard last week was Alex Vitali. They know each other, so it's unlikely this is the first time the two of them have been mixed up in some way. But apologies to everyone for the error. And enjoy the interview with Alec. Hey comrades, and welcome to CLAS, the podcast of Democratic Socialists of 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 Azizrana 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 foe outrage has only made us more popular. So what's to lose in talking about it? Welcome to class, Alec.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, great to have you. Um I just wanted to thanks, you know, thank you for coming by, and I'm really excited to start. You're the first in uh hopefully a series of conversations about this topic. Um, but first of all, just want to ask you about how you got into the work that you do. Um, where what was your start? What inspired you to start um doing civil rights work and the kind of work you do on mass incarceration?
SPEAKER_01I started my career as a public defender first in Alabama and then as a public defender in Washington, DC. And so I got into these issues through my personal experiences with my clients every single day in jails, uh, in courtrooms around the country, um, just experiencing with people the incredible brutality and crushing uh injustice of the mass incarceration, punishment, bureaucracy in this country, and seeing firsthand the impact that it has on people and human beings and their families, their lives, um, their children, their health, their well-being, their access to health care, housing, jobs. And then being inside the courtroom and listening to the kinds of stories that bureaucrats are telling themselves about what they're doing, and then also observing the kinds of stories, sometimes quite different stories, that they're telling the public about the reasons for the most significant expansion of human caging in modern world history, right? So the last 50 to 60 years in the United States has seen the uh expansion of human caging to such a degree that the world has never known. And in order to accomplish that, um I started seeing up close and personally every single night at the jail, every single day in court um the mythologies, the attitudes, the assumptions, the prejudices, the pathologies that are necessary not just for a massive bureaucracy to work efficiently at this task of transferring tens of millions of bodies from their homes and schools and jobs and and and houses and families into government-run um cages, into surveillance systems, uh, but the mythologies that are necessary to convince society that that transfer and that brutality and violence where all of these people are being housed in, you know, the jails that I'm in every single day around the United States have feces and blood and mucus and mold and urine all over the walls, people are sleeping on top of each other, there's incredible violence and sexual assault by guards. I mean, these are horrific places. So, what are the stories that are being told to our society? Not only to have people become indifferent to this and to sort of let it happen, to normalize it, but even to celebrate it and to call it the justice system. And I became kind of obsessed with that. And so what uh after a few years as a public defender, I I quit my job and I got a grant uh from Harvard Law School, actually, um, perhaps somewhat ironically, uh, to um to use civil rights laws to attack these systemic injustices around the country. And ever since then I've been working with my colleagues, um, as well as you know, attempting to build relationships with organizers, with directly impacted people, with artists, with musicians, with um uh journalists, with poets, you know, whoever we can to also try to subvert and to challenge the kind of cultural attitudes and assumptions that that go along with the sort of political economy of mass incarceration that we challenge in court.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I thanks for that. I do want to talk about the Civil Rights Corps, which is the organization you started with this grant. Um, and also talk, I really want to talk a lot more about this idea of the punishment bureaucracy, because it's kind of a term you might have think, I think in your book you say you coined it uh to describe it alternatively from the criminal justice system or even the criminal legal system. But maybe you could talk a little bit about what the Civil Rights Corps does primarily and how you would differentiate it from or how it fits into the broader left or liberal left legal advocacy framework, like groups like the ACLU, NAACP, National Lawyers Guild. Like, how do you see Civil Rights Corps um fitting into that or working within that? Um, in part because you know, the nonprofit industrial complex is not necessarily the most perfect thing itself. It also is very bureaucratic and has limitations. But it sounds like what you do is take things to court. And you said you use civil rights law in order to combat mass incarceration in particular. But yeah, maybe talk a little bit more about that with some examples if you want.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. I'm always excited to talk about our work. So it's also quite funny because I also am quite skeptical of the nonprofit industrial complex. I was quite naive when I started the organization, and I didn't fully understand how this world works and how philanthropy works, and the ways in which uh philanthropy has siloed uh a lot of the left into issue-based organizations and has sort of um shaped the radical or not radical nature of a lot of the work. And I have lots of lots about this. I do trainings and talks on this very issue, but to be really brief now, I'll I'll say part of my frustration with the nonprofit industrial complex has led me to co-found another organization, which we're incubating, um, which is an attempt to change the political economy of public interest lawyering in the United States and to shift lawyers away from government jobs and and and nonprofit jobs funded by philanthropy and into um starting their own sort of small legal collectives that are a decentralized network of movement lawyers that become self-sustainable through fees that you get when you represent low-income people and when you win civil rights and economic justice and disability and immigration and other cases, and to become kind of self-sustainable away from this uh philanthropic model and to create a vast, almost like mutual aid network where these firms are also tithing back into the fund to help other people start their own firms. So that project is one of my sort of big attempts, along with some of my colleagues, to kind of um create a new political economy of public interest lawyering. It doesn't rely on big philanthropy. And that's that effort is called the Hub for Innovative Law Offices, and that's something you know that we won't talk about here today, but it's something that it's very, very important to me as we try to build kind of decentralized um formations of attorneys that that are actually capable of meeting the challenges that we face in this, not just this authoritarian moment, but also in a legal system in a society that has never once in its entire history actually enforced most laws on the books to the extent those laws are being violated to harm the poor.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's really interesting because it sounds like what you're looking to do is figure out a way to develop sort of political independence as well. I mean, one of the things about DSA is that we have political independence in large part because we're completely dues funded. We don't have any foundation money, we don't have any grant money. People do sometimes donate money to us, but it's very few and far between. We we rely entirely on dues. Um, so that's really cool. Maybe spoiler alert a little bit for those who might not be aware of it, but I'd love to talk more about that at another time when we're not focused on this particular issue, um, which is uh policing and the way in which this conversation has gotten revived recently, um, in large part because DSA published our program a couple of months ago, and we have a very strengthened, I would say, but in some ways, you know, people have critiqued it for being maybe too direct or too um complex. I quoted it at the beginning. Um, but we revised it from simpler minimum demands like ending cash bail, treating addiction instead of punishing it, ending minimum mandatory minimums and demilitarizing police departments to now a broader, more forward-looking abolitionist horizon. Um, and there have been a lot of right-wing and centrist outrage, like kind of expectedly over this section of the program, but there's also been a revived critique on the left, which we'll maybe talk about. But one of the things that you focus on, besides doing lawyering, is copaganda. And you talked about this a second ago about the mythologies. Um, copaganda is a term that probably our listeners have either heard before or can kind of gather from the uh portmanteau of it that it's propaganda about the police. Um, but maybe you could talk a little bit about it from your perspective, like how you theorize it in your book, Copaganda, um, as well as like sort of your ongoing um sort of practice and like writing about it. Um so yeah, maybe just speak about the propaganda media ruling class strategy um in relation to the work you do, but also kind of this broader question of comms, like communications, like how do we communicate a liberated society free of the punishment bureaucracy when we have these barriers up in front of us?
SPEAKER_01I think in order to understand my views on propaganda in service of the punishment bureaucracy, which you know we can call copaganda, it's important to understand some of my biases and to really, you know, at least try to answer your first question about kind of what we do at Civil Rights Corps. And um, just broadly speaking, we we challenge systemic injustices in the punishment bureaucracy. And we pick issues that have been utterly normalized, where the everyday violence of the system and the ineffectiveness and senselessness of it is so common that the people who work in it and even people in the broader society don't even notice it, uh, let alone um you know find it problematic, and in some areas uh profit from it significantly. So we are, I think, are most well known probably for our work challenging modern debtors' prisons. So you know, our suits against the city of Ferguson, which averaged 3.6 arrest warrants per household when I got there in the wake of Michael Brown's death in 2014, almost all of which for unpaid debt.
SPEAKER_00My sibling went to prison or for went to jail for unpaid debt. So I'm familiar.
SPEAKER_01Oh my gosh, yes. I mean, uh that's devastating. And and oh and there have been hundreds of thousands of people um to whom that has happened all over the United States. We've won cases all over the country ending the notion that a human being can be put into a cage just because they can't make a monetary payment, or even that their driver's license could be suspended because they can't make a monetary payment. And and we brought a bunch of lawsuits all around the country, also under RICO laws, um uh about how there's there a lot of local governments, police, jails, and private companies, debt collectors, set up these kind of um racketeering enterprises where people would be um charged all these fees and then threatened them and jailed if they couldn't pay them. And so we became kind of prominent for doing that work. And then we also uh began challenging the money bail system and pretrial detention system all around the country. Our cases have challenged the notion that a person can be kept in a jail cell prior to trial without being convicted solely because their family lacks enough cash to pay for their release, and challenging the fact that the United States and the Philippines are the only two countries in the world that have a for-profit commercial money bail industry that decides with billions of dollars in profit at stake, who is at home with their families when they're charged with a crime and who's in a jail cell. And our cases have gotten hundreds of thousands of people out of jail around the United States and put into place policies all over the country that save tens of billions of dollars for the public, that reduce crime, that promote safety, that um reunite families, that dramatically reduce the number of illegal convictions, et cetera. And over the years, we've developed uh other streams of work that challenge systemic corruption in police and prosecutor, prosecutor offices. Um, uh we have a judicial accountability program. We've done a lot of work more recently on family separation. We have a whole right to hug campaign, um, trying to establish constitutional right for families to hug each other and to be each other in person, and and we're challenging the so-called child welfare bureaucracy, or what some people call the family policing or family regulation system that is separating so many families around the country. So basically we do a lot, I could go on and on and on, but we do a lot of work to re-sensitize our society to the incredible violence and brutality that exists all around us and that preserves a lot of the unequal distributions of wealth and power and privilege in our society. And we we try to draw attention to systems of repression, both government repression, but also the sort of um corporate, multi-billion dollar corporate industries at every single stage of the system that are parasitic on that government repression and that work in symbiotic relationship with it. So that's the general work that we do, and I think my interest in propaganda developed as we're winning these cases around the country and fighting them. Um we began to see a lot of backlash and a lot of uh sophisticated uh public relations campaigns on behalf of the companies, the police, prosecutors, the prisons, uh all of their unions to preserve this system of repression and surveillance and power and profit. And so I began to study and to pick apart those narratives and those mythologies because I saw it as really important to ultimately convincing the public that not only must we uh strike down and and and challenge the way these systems are working, but that we have to win the fight over what replaces them so that the things that replace them aren't just going to reproduce a lot of the same injustices with a different label.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so thanks for that um background and for that example. I think one of the things you highlight there is that the political economy of the punishment bureaucracy is about its essentially linkages with private profit, which are not a lot of people think about the prison itself being private, but what runs the prison is largely privatized. You talk about telecoms in your uh book. I thought that was a really powerful one because I mean it's actually one that is on in movies and TV, like people having to pay collect calls and those kinds of things, but um the billions of dollars that go into creating these economic links essentially between um the way that uh the state disciplines or otherwise controls um what it decides. Um, and you talk about this too. It's like the crimes that become crimes are decided by the ruling class. Um, but essentially how the state makes a determination about how to um regulate and solve um social ills, right? Um, and I hope people will put a link in the show notes with the book and also with your newsletter so they can keep up on this. But what you just said about, you know, kind of the mythologies and like trying to figure out how to kind of untangle a lot of these. Um falsehoods, but also these kinds of um sophisticated comms campaigns also requires, I think you would maybe say, and maybe you can fill me in here on what you think, requires a kind of countervailing comms. And in our program, um we use the term abolition or we say steps towards abolishing the police and prison systems which protect the rich and jails the poor. And it's been simplified in the media as defund and abolish. And those things have also been denigrated, unfortunately, by progressive and even democratic socialists as woke one or um just outright rejected, even though they were embraced prior to that. And from your perspective, I'd love to hear. I mean, you're an attorney, practicing attorney, you kind of wear a lot of hats, you direct this um sort of powerful, you know, given that it's a nonprofit, but a powerful kind of hub for um legal advocacy, but you also are an organizer and a like a public intellectual. And so maybe from your perspective, you can talk about what kind of language it is that you find or you need to use in order to be able to get the job done, so to speak. Um, because it's not just about what works in the courtroom, it's also about what works outwardly, like in the wider world, to try to um counteract these narratives. And maybe it would be good for you to talk about some of the narratives that you're seeing and then the ways in which that kind of effectively like affects what you're doing and then how you find to combat that, if that makes any sense. I basically want to hear what you think about the comms, um, because that's what everyone's always talking about these days is the comms, the comms.
SPEAKER_01So I think on the one hand, as I've written, language matters a great deal. How we talk uh dictates how we think, and we are extremely careful in our work about how we talk. And you know, I've written a whole book about propaganda, so I obviously care a great deal about language, and I'll say a couple of things about why I think it matters so much. But I also want to say that, and this is I think not intention with that what I've just said, but an important kind of distinction to make, which is that sometimes we can get wrapped up in disputes over labels and superficial jargon. And that can be used as it itself as a as a way of as a propaganda tool to prevent us from having a real discussion about how actually underneath all of that there's actually a lot more alignment between our values. We share a lot more of the same basic fundamental views on what's really needed for our society, for human beings to flourish and for communities and and ecosystems to thrive. And so there's a lot of like distraction and talk at a very superficial level about certain jargon. Yeah. So I want to I wanna I want to hold both those concepts and I want to say a couple of things about them. Okay. So, first of all, um language does matter. And that's why, for example, you see the police over the last 30 years in particular so focused on creating and testing and then deploying uh terminology like officer-involved shooting, for example, uh and the use of the passive voice and and you know all uh you also see over the last since World War II, prior to World War II, roughly speaking, the police were much more open about what they did. And for you know, for the first, since the late 19th century up until through World War I, up until World War II, the police were often quite overt about their main functions, you know, you know, to catch enslaved people who'd run away, uh, to crush striking laborers, to be used as a tool of the local political machines and landlords. Um and then, you know, post-World War II, right after it became really important for the US government, for example, to change the name of the Department of War to the Department of Defense, right? There was this era where it became really important to kind of put a liberal facade over institutions of either imperial violence or or sort of domestic repression. Yeah. Exactly. Um you started to see things like um the police putting slogans on their police car like courtesy, professionalism, and respect. And you started to see uh police talking about for the first time things like like public safety and quote unquote law enforcement, right? Um all these terms, like law enforcement is a term that the police use to try to convey that there's some kind of neutrality, like a law is broken, a law is enforced.
SPEAKER_00Or that it's democratic, right? That, well, you've made the laws and now we are here to enforce them, like that it's a symbiotic relationship.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. And the reality is, as you mentioned a few minutes ago, and as I talk about in an essay that I called The Punishment Bureaucracy, which you know you can read for free online, uh, it's the ruling class determines what is a crime and what's not through their control over the political system. But then, even more importantly than that, once certain things are illegal, uh there the ruling class determines uh uh which of those crimes are investigated and enforced and which are ignored. So the police only enforce some crimes against some people some of the time in some places. That's how you can have tens of millions of the poorest people in our society caged and separated from their children uh for drug possession, and you can have rampant drug use in the Yale University dorm rooms where I where I went to college, right? This is just how it happens, right? Um prosecutions for shoplifting in every jurisdiction all over the country, every single day in every courtroom, but hardly ever any prosecutions for wage theft or tax evasion, right? So only some laws are enforced against some people. And the myth of law enforcement is a very important myth for the punishment bureaucracy because it's all part of a uh a story about how we have a rule of law as a society and that these systems are kind of neutrally trying to improve life for everybody rather than they are a tool for the people who own things and control things in our society to control uh people who don't have uh stuff in our society.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and also those who need to be disciplined into conforming to capital, right? So historically, you know, like the standing police force that we know to be what the police looked like and was exported all over the world with, you know, local variations is essentially were invented during the Industrial Revolution in order to control factory workers and to um deal with the outcroppings of, you know, basically capital and miseration all across the English countryside.
SPEAKER_01So the use of terms like law enforcement or public safety, and when the police and and the news media often use the term public safety, they're actually not talking about the pollution in the soil or the water that your children are drinking or playing in, right? Um, they're not actually talking about um certain forms of violence that exist every single day, uh, like um being illegally evicted from your home or being um illegally uh assaulted by police themselves or or um any number of other crimes. There's hundreds of thousands, for example, of water pollution crimes by corporations, air pollution crimes. Air pollution alone kills 100,000 people in the US every year, so that's five times all homicide combined. A lot of it is just criminal, the criminal acts of air pollution, illegal dumping. Um we're not talking about that when the police talk about public safety. So the these this language is is very important. But at the same time, um there's often like an obsession with certain words like uh defund or abolition. And it's used a lot of times in the mainstream news ecosystem to kind of avoid a conversation about the underlying policies that are actually quite popular. So if you look at the Gallup polling, which is an incredible resource, Gallup has been polling for almost 40 years this question of should we invest more in policing in prisons or should we invest more in the root causes, social services? So things like housing, healthcare, education, right? And uh for for about 40 years, it's been a supermajority popular position to shift resources away from policing and prosecution in prisons to social services. You wouldn't know this from the mainstream news obsession with demonizing the term defund or or more recently the the you know sort of leftist kind of uh uh attacks, especially from people who think who who portray themselves as being interested in mass politics, which is that we'll get to that in a minute, maybe. Um the the demonization of of the label of like abolition. I think what those people are doing there is they're confusing um uh the fact that the public may not understand or have a real uh in-depth knowledge about what that jargon represents and what that what sets of policies though those terms are referring to. But the underlying policies themselves are deeply, deeply popular. Supermajority support among Democrats, Republicans, and independents, old people, young people, all across different racial uh demographics. Um people support shifting resources from the punishment bureaucracy and surveillance systems to things like early childhood education, housing, healthcare, mental health services, drug addiction treatment, et cetera.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Very popular policy. And only by focusing on the sort of quote unquote unpopular labels and never actually then digging a little bit deeper. So what are you actually proposing, right? Um, is our society able to let you avoid the conversation about the things that everybody actually understands they need in their communities?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, this kind of goes with the choice that you've made to label this the punishment bureaucracy, because well, you're obviously using it as a derogatory term, but also a very descriptive term. Bureaucracy is often used for us, you know, kind of colloquially to describe something that is impenetrable, kind of um deeply sort of opaque, um, and also confusing. And it feels like individuals or even, you know, groups of people kind of don't stand a chance against it. But it also, you know, describes this idea of neutrality that you bring up, right? That this is, you know, that the police are a tool, kind of like roads or something, right? There's been a lot of discussion um also in the mainstream media about how, oh, well, socialism, it's roads or it's fire, the fire department, or it's some someone even said I heard the army, which I'm like, okay, let's let's calm down here. This idea that it's just public good, you know, like this sort of like neutral social good, and the idea that the police themselves are just a neutral social good. And if the right people are in charge, then they can direct them where we need to go. Like if you need a road built um over here instead of over here, well, then you just um get somebody who can do that for you. And I think that describing it as a bureaucracy is resonant to me as somebody who also is like a fan of Kafka, because it gets, you know, it gets kind of into this like, well, this is like something that like regular people don't stand a chance against, right? But it also gets into this question of what power do people have to change this politically? Because when you're talking about the superficiality of a lot of these battles over words, it's about communication to like the broader public about the policies that people want to change. I mean, like it or not, we have, you know, mass communications in this country. It is almost entirely dominated by the right. Um, but propaganda, they wouldn't be doing it if it didn't have some effect. And I would say, you know, you wouldn't be writing about propaganda if it didn't have like this, you know, mitigating or, you know, sort of denigrating effect on people's ability to kind of be sensitized to the brutalities that are also hidden away from them, you know, like the bureaucracy part is also about the fact that people don't have to quote unquote face this because it's over here in the prisons. The fact is that prison and um this punishment bureaucracy does actually touch people's lives, millions of people's lives, all the time. Like I just mentioned, um, my own sibling has been um imprisoned, but also, you know, my dad, he was mixed up in some stuff back in the 70s and 80s when he was uh a young man and stuff like that. It's like we actually do have a lot of people, a lot of working class people who have some contact with the police in prisons, and it's not entirely positive. I think that the idea that the that people believe that the police are good is actually like quite wrong. Um, and something I did want to talk about, speaking of polling, is the Center for Working Class Politics, um, which is this polling group, um, study group that is uh closely allied with uh Jacobin Magazine. And they just put out a report called the Left Coalition Crisis that talks specifically about lots of different kinds of comms. And what they do in the study is they do testing around the popularity of certain messaging among a subsection of the electorate, which they define as working class, which they decide it's the middle two quartiles of income with no four-year degree, which I think is somewhat problematic considering that it cuts out, you know, huge sections of workers, such as nurses, teachers, other technical healthcare workers, um, in order to kind of make sure that they it's nobody with a four-year degree, which is about 40% of the population at this point. But what's really interesting is that they test two messages on a whole bunch of different issues: abortion, trans rights, public safety and the police, which we'll talk about. Others, one they call liberal elite resonant messaging, and the other they call working class resonant messaging. And in every one, the narrative that they produce in their report is that working class resident messaging works on working class people. So we should use that. And I think that the suggestion is that if we use this, we will also get these other people who are not considered within our, you know, kind of range of working class that we've decided. But what's really interesting is that the sections about public safety and police in the report actually garner majority support from their own segment of the working class that they're studying. So in each of the examples they use, you can see that it's either it's over 50% every time. But then also in some cases, the use of the working class resident messaging only improves reception by a couple of points. Basically, it's showing that, and maybe this goes to what you're saying about the fact that this is these are actually popular policies, it's showing that kind of no matter how you say it, or maybe not no matter how you say it, but at least between this idea that there's a liberal way of saying something and a working class way of saying something, it still garners majority support among this like coveted section of the electorate. So why do you think we're seeing this amount of worry coming from the left about current socialist messaging on safety and police specifically, when a lot of it it just seems like it's actually not as big of a concern, even though the right is making it into a huge concern, which to me, I feel it's like tailing the right on this kind of thing doesn't really seem like a very good strategy for socialists, but maybe you can expand on what you're thinking as far as comms and why why this is happening right now.
SPEAKER_01It's a very important question for the left. I don't purport to be able to speak to why I think any particular person is pushing this narrative. I think it's quite complex. I think what I what I would say is that uh what we're seeing is is reminiscent of COINTELPRO. It's reminiscent of very effective uh corporate and government-run counterinsurgency operations that I write about in the book. Uh if you look throughout history within uh radical social movements, these elements always exist, and often throughout the history of the 20th century, they have been government and corporate infiltration um operations. And so I think it's it almost doesn't matter sort of what the individual intent is. There obviously there could be some of these people that that are espousing these views in good faith. Um there could be ideological differences, there could be some people who think of themselves as socialists who don't really understand the history of policing and prosecution in prisons, don't think of it as central to the socialist agenda and in good faith and and and can be moved and convinced. There could be other people that have their own personal or career incentives. So I describe, for example, um some of those institutional political incentives for some of the more elite academic so-called leftists and socialists who are writing in pro-police uh ways in the book. And I think one of the most important chapters in the book is where I dissect the role of some of the so-called socialist academics who are pro-police. There's not very many of them. This other thing to understand is this conversation is being driven by a very small group of so-called socialists who are pro-police and pro-prison, uh, pro-surveillance, etc. And uh, some of them are more sophisticated than others, some of them are better propagandists than others, and I don't think it's important to like I actually determine which of them are operating in good faith and which of them aren't. Yeah. Which of them are being, you know, it it it's important to know, for example, that when Spike Lee made the movie Black Klansman, he had a uh a lucrative marketing contract with the NYPD. Like it it helps to know who is being paid uh by who, but it actually at some level it doesn't matter. What's important is that we are able to identify the role that this particular kind of argument is playing to uh to uh uh obstruct or de-radicalize a broader uh anti-repression agenda. So let me say one thing that I think is absolutely vital for every socialist to keep in mind when thinking about these discussions. Since the modern era of policing and imprisonment began, and you can sort of define when that began, you know, in different ways, but let's let's say sort of the the end of the 19th century to the present, the police and prosecution and prison bureaucracies have attempted to infiltrate and crush every single progressive social movement, every single working class social movement that has ever been attempted. Okay? So if you think back to Haymarket, if you think back to the anti-slavery movement, if you think back to the organizing that was attempted against the Jim Crow laws, if you think about women's suffrage, think about the World War I uh opposition movement, you think about the imprisonment of Eugene Debs, if you think about um the civil rights movement following World War II, the the the Black Panthers, all the Contel Pro stuff, the indigenous people's movement, you know, encampments on an incredible new documentary about Leonard Peltier and his being targeted by the FBI. If you think about the LGBTQ movement, the environmental justice movement, the immigration movement, if you think about the modern anti-genocide movement, um, I could go on and on and on and on. Um in every single case we now know, uh established without a doubt, uh, through incredible historical uh and archival work, that there were intentional efforts at the highest levels, uh, all the way down to the lowest level. So, for example, in Chicago alone. The time Fred Hampton was killed, there were 500 undercover cops just in Chicago alone targeting the Panthers and the civil rights leaders. So we know this stuff. And so any socialist who is telling you that we need to increase police funding is either willfully ignorant about where that money is going now, like the intelligence units of the NYPD, the training by the IDF, the flock cameras and surveillance and incredible power that has been amassed by local, state, and federal agents, the cooperation with ICE, all of this stuff. They are ignoring, and I have not seen a single example in any publication. I looked for my book, there's not a single example of a progressive or leftist person who is arguing for maintaining existing expenditures and programs of police who even even acknowledges, let alone makes an argument about the effect throughout history, not just in the United States, mind you, but everywhere, of the apparatus of state repression, policing prosecution in prisons, on working class social movements and liberation movements. They're completely ignoring it. And it's a shocking omission and a very telling one.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean one of the things that I think has been in the discourse is the idea that, I mean, I don't know exactly what flavor of leftist you are, but to the extent that one can be a socialist and still believe in an existing state, a worker's state, um, people have kind of made the argument, well, you know, the police powers of the state will still exist under socialism, but we will have socialists in charge and therefore they will be transformed. The view that I have is that what are called the police are not the same as the um, you know, state authority or plenary power over public health and welfare. They are the police. They're an invention that was made um by acts, you know, by acts of law in order to um create a standing armed, practically um, practically immune, um, or actually immune um to any kind of control, um, army, basically, domestic army. And I think, you know, historicizing it is really important in part because what a Marxist would do is historicize it. And I do think that some of these studies um that are coming out, um, you know, I'm not going to and and I agree. It's like people could have good faith disagreements and disagree also about methodology and and various other kinds of allegiances when it comes to how you prefer to kind of couch these things. But I'm finding myself, and I, you know, hope that the debate kind of goes on within DSA and elsewhere, I'm kind of finding myself at a loss when I see dehistoricized, kind of almost apolitical arguments about why certain kinds of things just aren't allowed to be said anymore. Um, when the role of social movements and the role of a vibrant socialist movement is to persuade people through the principles that are being kind of put out there, that, you know, not just that this is in your individual interest, but this is for all of us, right? Like in order to create, you know, a mass political, you know, active, um, you know, militant workers' movement. What we need is actually, you know, not everyone's going to necessarily agree on every single detail all at once, but it doesn't seem to serve socialists very well to just refuse to talk about socialism when we're talking about something like the transformation of the state. Um, or it just doesn't seem to really work to say, well, we've measured this particular set subsection of the current electorate. And therefore, we think that this messaging is better than what we're calling elite liberal messaging. Like I mentioned before, the elite liberal messaging doesn't actually suffer that greatly compared to the so-called working class messaging. But be that as it may, I am finding myself at a loss to explain this sudden um just high-pitched hand-wringing really over the messaging when it seems that this is just kind of tailing the right, which we wouldn't be doing necessarily if they were, you know, the right saying anything else about the program. I mean, they they might be if we if we didn't say certain things in the program about and ending mass incarceration, they would be turning towards other aspects of the program because the purpose of you know our class enemies and the media that they use is to try to inoculate people against our social movement. So yeah, while while to the extent that I'm not asking you to like mind-read anyone, I do think that um the pro-police view might even be coming out of like the class position of some of these um individuals who are who are doing these things because you know, maybe they're like, I haven't had any contact with the police. They're, you know, they're essentially, you know, part of a an academic, um, themselves elite uh kind of subsection, despite, you know, the politics that maybe even animates the reasons why they want to say certain things, if that makes any sense. I I certainly don't want to obviously psychologize any individuals, but I do think that this um kind of fever pitch of articles coming out that that seem to be responding in this um overly critical way of a movement that's actually been around for decades. Like it's not as if police and prison abolition are coming out of nowhere. It certainly didn't only come out of 2020. It didn't even only come out of 2014. It actually came comes out of you know long-standing um, you know, opposition to uh brutality and police brutality and um prisons that people like Eugene Debs promoted.
SPEAKER_01I want to say something that I think is really important about polling, but and and this Center for World Class Politics report that you mentioned. But I first want to just take a step back and say a couple of things that I think are really grounding for a discussion like this. Number one, there's basically a scientific consensus. It's it's kind of like the consensus around climate change about which things make us safe. And what everyone kind of understands who studies this is that the levels of interpersonal harm and violence in any given society have to do with like big features of that society, like levels of inequality and poverty, access to housing, the design of neighborhoods and communities, uh access to early childhood education, health care, uh treatment, um, certain big cultural uh things like levels of isolation and loneliness, uh levels of alienation, um toxic masculinity, um you know, exposure to certain toxins like lead. I mean, these these are the kinds demographic shifts, uh these are the kinds of things that determine how much people harm each other in any given society, basically, right? This is like well established, like this is overwhelming empirical consensus. Similarly, everyone who studies this stuff knows that big levels of of harm are not impacted at all by whether there are 13 cops on the beat here versus 11, or whether the sentence for this crime is six and a half years or three, or whether this prosecutor who's too progressive because they are only prosecuting 48% of the cases and their predecessor was prosecuting 53%, right? So all of the stuff that's in the mainstream news and that people are arguing about really superficially, even on the left, about the difference between you know a progressive politician and a non-progressive politician, and these things have no impact on even police reported crime. So let's just understand that. So a lot of the discussion is just completely and utterly lacking in grounding in basic scientific evidence. That's number one. So we know what works, we know how to produce safety, and it's exactly the kinds of things that tend to be in the socialist agenda.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Investment in the sort of things that people and communities and and ecosystems need to be safe and to thrive. That also, it turns out, ends up creating societies with less harm interpersonally, less violence. So it takes an enormous effort, actually, to go against the grain of all of that science and to convince people that in fact these little tweaks to punishment policy, so you know, increasing the police budget by a few percentage points so they can hire more cops or pay for more overtime or whatever, um, meanwhile, only 4% of all police time is focused on violent crime. Think about that. Only 4% of all police time is focused on violent crime. Um so, or whether it's the Democratic Party saying, oh, the solution to ICE and to police violence is to more body cameras so the police can have more surveillance technology and more training so that you know they can go to these incredibly violent right-wing police training industry junkets and and like this stuff is just completely unrelated to levels of crime and harm in our society. And you know what's fascinating about the polling? The polling actually reveals that most people get this when you ask them the right questions and when you give them the right context. And this takes me to just a couple of comments I wanted to make about this, you know, uh lefty think tank report that you brought up. I think it's absolutely essential that people on the left understand some basic uh points about polling. First of all, I'm not a big fan of polling. I don't think political strategy should be based on polling primarily, right? Um, especially as polling is currently practiced.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And I don't think it's typically used in an intellectually honest or helpful way in the news or consulting. This particular report is laughable. I mean, it's wrong at every level methodologically. It's in the way that the questions are asked, the framing, the inferences, the assumptions. I mean, it's kind of an embarrassment. Uh and and you know, we could get into all the details, but let me just make the high-level points first. Polling tends to be done by people who already have a particular agenda. Most polling in our society is done by people with a lot of money because it's expensive, and it's done by people who want to prove something to you and want to convince you of something. It's not primarily done as a method of determining what people think. It's primarily done as a tool for the for shaping how people think. That's a really important thing to understand about polling. Second, based on the way questions are phrased and what context is presented, a skilled pollster can essentially get the public to answer almost any question the way that they want. So that's why uh depending on how you ask, you can get people to sit supermajority, as Gallup has done for the last 40 years, supermajorities of people support reducing funding in policing, prosecution, and prisons, and increasing funding in social services. But if you phrase the question a little differently and you manipulate the words a little bit, you can come away with with some stuff like what this poll supposedly found that they're basing it on, which is, you know, that that the working class supposedly doesn't support reducing funding for policing and increasing funding for social services as much as is commonly thought of in like the Gallup polling. Um, you know, another really sort of way of understanding this is when you give people basic information right before you ask them a polling question, you can completely invert their answer. So it's like if you ask someone, are you happy in your marriage? you might get a certain response. But if you were to tell the person right before you polled them that you that you had caught their spouse cheating on them, right? Or if you know, for example, that on Monday morning they're gonna learn that, then the poll question on Friday afternoon becomes almost useless. So this is what organizing and political movements are all about. What you what you have to like trust is that your organizing operation and the and the campaign and the political movement that you're a part of is going to politically educate people such that their responses are not static. They respond to information, they learn about the world, they respond to being inspired, they respond. This is why Martin Luther King was incredibly unpopular in the polling at the time. And um, like if we just went by the polling at the time, right? When when even when King was assassinated, one of the most unpopular figures in the country, uh, by according to a lot of the elite-based polling that was done at the time. And yet, um, the values that he was talking about, uh, there's been a complete sort of like elite rewriting of King's image and obviously in many respects a certain whitewashing of it. But I guess the point is that at virtually no moment in any of these movements, from the women's suffrage movement to the civil rights movement to any number of other movements with respect to labor and economic justice, at the time that these things are starting and people are organizing around them, the job is precisely to politically educate people and to inform them of certain basic facts about their relationship to the world and their relationship to power, their relationship to each other, what's possible, right? Um that's what our work is. And so to come in at the very beginning and to say, oh, it's all hopeless, we have to just expand police and prisons and give the people who control our government uh more power to expand ICE and to expand detention facilities and to expand the collaboration between police and ICE and surveillance and flock and longer sentences and all of that because it's popular right now, is to fundamentally misunderstand the socialist project. Because all of those institutions are then used by the ruling class to prevent the very transformations to make a more equal society that socialists say they want.
SPEAKER_00To be totally fair, I don't think that this particular report is saying we need to do everything that's popular. It's more like here's how we need to message it in order for us to be able to get uh durable majorities, which if it were just about that, I think that you could make an argument that that's important because of the, again, the comms aspect of all of this. Um, our program's been under fire in part because there have been talking points that have been distributed, but we don't have, you know, DSA doesn't have our uh people who are endorsed by us or who are, you know, considered to be our electeds or socialists in office. We don't have them on a tight leash. That's not the kind of organization that we have. Um, so the thing that I think a lot of people have have done is said, well, I know that they have because they've said it to me, is why why haven't you prepared people enough or why didn't you involve them enough in creating these kinds of um, these kinds of planks that you had to have known would have ended up, you know, causing all this consternation. From what I can tell, especially knowing, you know, the hundreds of thousands of people who've now visited our program site since it went live in the middle of July, unprecedented volume. Um, so people are hearing about it and then going and reading what it is. And it's very possible and likely that many people are reading it and saying, I don't believe in this. Other people are actually reading what it what it says. But on your point about political education, this is a political education podcast, the power of the media is that they can they can essentially cut that off. They they can um beat anyone to the punch at anything and completely inundate um people's ears and eyes with the messaging that they they want to give. So, I mean, in your view, you know, we can't talk to everyone one-on-one, but what can socialists do in this uphill battle? Because to the extent that I do want to say that, because we can't know, you know, good faith or whatever, we can't know that people aren't absolutely persuaded by not just this polling, but like their own convictions that um there's just certain things that we should be leaving out of the conversation in order to pull people in. But I would say the role of socialists is not only to tell people this is what we want and this is popular, right? We want Medicare for all, we want increased social services, we want um accountability, um, reduce corruption, all of these things, but also to stand on the side of the oppressed. And, you know, as we talked about at the very beginning, people who are in prison and people who are victimized by the police are an they're some of the most oppressed, or maybe the most oppressed, especially because of all the oppressions that end up making them be targeted by by uh the state. Um, in our, you know, they are in fact like the people that Debs was talking about when he famously said, you know, if there's a criminal class, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free. I mean, this is somebody who is the bog standard for what an American socialist is. And I think that, you know, just to wind up, like what would be your thoughts about how socialists can kind of fight back against this propaganda and also maybe try to persuade those who are in the big tent, you know, are on our side, are, you know, left inclined to um be more nuanced about their um their thinking here and be more um maybe uh collaborative um instead of kind of um yeah, basically saying, oh, we have to give up. We we have to go lowest common denominator on this messaging.
SPEAKER_01Well, first of all, I highly recommend people to read actually Eugene Debs' short prison memoir, Walls and Bars, written, you know, as he was running for president as a socialist when in prison. And his conclusions in many respects are just as relevant today as they were then. And his conclusions are consistent with the quote that you've just described, but it's very powerful to see him reckoning with what he's seeing in the prison and the conclusions he's drawing about what is the role of the prison in a deeply unequal society where the ruling class gets to determine what's a crime and gets to choose which crimes are enforced against which people. He's grappling with all of that. And I think it's a it's a very important book for socialists to read and grapple with. And also, your your question is sort of why I wrote my book, Propaganda. I I try to give people, and it's I try to be funny in the book too, because I think it's very important to approach all these issues with as much humor and and a smile. You don't laugh, you'll cry. Exactly, exactly. So, you know, I give little awards to to people here and there in the book and try to make some jokes. And and but I but I what I'm really trying to do is give people a framework for becoming more critical consumers of information in these issues and opening people up to um just how propagandized they are. I was blown away myself, even as someone who works in this system, when I took a step back and I started archiving and documenting all of this propaganda, when I started learning more about it. For example, when I started researching the chapter in the book on police public relations departments and what they do in every city, um. I just learned so much in the process, and I hope the book is useful. And I also want to say all the royalties for the book are donated to an incredible organization called the Stop LAPD spying coalition, which works with unhoused people in Skid Row in LA. And we also have free books for any student who can't afford it, teachers, right? Um, and we also have free books for anybody in prison or jail in the United States. So the idea is to just get the ideas in the book out in into the world. And they are an attempt to provide the left with the way of thinking and talking about these issues without a lot of jargon, without being precious about labels or unwelcoming. You know, I'm very, very interested in creating a big tent um movement here. That being said, uh uh I have to say, this report, this Center for Working Class Policy Report, is not just about messaging. In fact, they say in the report, and this is one of the things that I think is incredibly irresponsible, they say, quote, note, this is not a reframe of an existing reform tactic, but a substantive change to the policy bundle. So they are actually arguing and then and then uh after that sentence they say more cops. Okay. So they uh they are arguing for more cops. They they also say they want they want what they call strict accountability for those cops, which is if you as you if you read my my writing and if you read copaganda, you understand that um the the police accountability within the existing police bureaucracy is completely impossible and has never occurred ever once in any city in the United States. Is there a meaningful mechanism of accountability on the police? It's not a democratically accountable institution, but they are explicitly calling for the left to call for more cops, and this is shocking. And I don't know the authors of the report, I I I you know, whatever. I don't, it's not a personal thing. It's just absolutely shocking that people affiliated with the left and a socialist uh uh agenda are calling for more cops in the given climate that we're in right now, at this moment. It's absolutely shocking.
SPEAKER_00Is that coming from the I sorry, I I did over maybe overlook uh exactly where it said that, but is that coming from the um Usmani uh the the study about under policing or that you know that you also critique in um in your news?
SPEAKER_01That's coming from the report that you shared with me and mentioned earlier on the other.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but did they did they cite the Usmani? Did you did you see?
SPEAKER_01There's no footnote and no citation, no support for it. It's just an assertion. Yeah. Um it's very confusing. And it's the kind of thing that like a left think tank, you know, you lose all credibility when you make claims like this that are completely divorced, not only from the scientific consensus on on whether more cops produces safety, but without even referencing all the social costs of adding more police.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Right? Like in a world where all over the country police are targeting uh abortion providers, they're targeting environmental uh activists, they're targeting uh immigration uh activists, they're they're they're doing they're infiltrating and and arresting people for union organizing, I mean for protesting genocide. I mean, you you like it's completely absurd for a leftist publication to call for more cops at a time when we have the largest number and highest amount of police budgets, there's rampant uh and unprecedented levels of of surveillance and infiltration into the policing bureaucracy by by huge contracts for Palantir, Amazon, um, all kinds of uh Blackwater-like uh uh private security companies. I mean, none of this stuff is mentioned in here, and of course, all of it has to be part of any leftist agenda, has to be thinking about how are we gonna stop government repression from crushing our own organizing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, historically, as you mentioned, this is um, I would even say a primary purpose of having a standing police force and what um, you know, Mark Neoclius in his book Critical Theory of Police Powers talked about as order, the fabrication of order, right? I mean, a big part of what passes as order, passes as um, you know, sort of civilization is worker discipline and um the oppression and repression of poor people and those who would um fight for their rights, right? So I do think that I agree with you there. I I I think you know, more conversations are going to be had about um this, I wouldn't call it a schism quite yet, but this um strong disagreement, I think, um, within wings of uh the democratic socialist left about how to respond to the critiques against not just our program, but like the entire social movement uh ecosystem around abolition, which is also a big tent. You know, you have a lot of people with different politics kind of residing under um, you know, police and prison reform and abolition uh advocacy, including you, um, but also lots of people in different in different areas. And part of the conversation that we're trying to have right now is not just how we communicate it as socialists, but also how we're communicating to each other um, you know, within the broader movement for justice, because, you know, not every abolitionist identifies as a socialist, but I think that I agree with you that a person who is a socialist would have a very difficult time getting over the cognitive barriers that it would take to actually say, we think we should have more police and that prisons serve a social function that is actually a good. Um, it's, you know, to me, I think it it sort of defies reason, but I am still willing to hear out the views of those who um think that there is some way to uh transform this institution. My own thoughts here kind of point me towards if we want to perfect the messaging um more, we always can do that. We're a democratic organization, we can change the messaging. But what we believe and what what our principles are, I think that's that's a very much longer uh you know political conversation. And within DSA, we can actually have those conversations, which is great. Um, but this one is turning out to be quite a fiery one. And I really want to thank you for coming on and talking to me and talking to our audience about your work and everything that um kind of goes into it and also your comradely but sharp critiques of um some of what's going on right now.
SPEAKER_01It's my pleasure, and I just want to say it none of this stuff is personal, although we we we can't let a desire to be comradely make us shy away from calling out stuff that is really dangerous, and and especially when a lot of people's lives are on the line. And I'm not precious about how we talk about this stuff amongst ourselves, you know. Like I'm I'm uh very willing to to uh uh maybe the best that could be said of my whole career is that I've been working on incremental changes, you know, and and like I think it would be totally fine to have a conversation about you know getting police and prison budgets to where they were in 2020 and 2018 and 2016. And and I think um, you know, we don't need to be like insistent on full abolition right away. You know, that it's it that's more of a of a it's a it's a it's a it's a prompt for us to think about what we would have to build and and invest in, what kind of beautiful systems would we have to create so that some form of what we think of now as policing and prisons would not be necessary at all? Um and I think to start on that path, we could we could do really simple things like and and by the way, when I talk to like frontline police officers, there is enormous support for reducing the size and budgets of police departments. People will be shocked. And what one of the stories I tell in the book about the Seattle Police Department actually did internal surveys and concluded that a bunch of their own divisions should be done away with, including the folks that that that police the homeless and various mental health stuff and like transitioned to non-police um bureaucracies within the county, right? Um and that was nixed by the police PR department and the higher-ups, right? But often the police themselves actually would much, and and this is very true for prison and jail guards, would much prefer different kind of job that was working on more holistic public safety uh outside the context of a prison, right? And so um we can actually, there's so much common ground. And if we just started ratcheting these systems down and taking those resources and investing in things like community-based violence interruption, mental health first responder teams, early childhood education and theater and music and art and athletic programs for young people, the things that the evidence actually shows improve safety. I think like a lot of a lot of these people would be shocked at how popular all of that would be. And then we could say, okay, now we've we've we've taken us down to 90% of the current police imprison budgets, and now it looks like it did in 2022. Why don't we try to go back to what it looked like in 2017? Um, you know, and then we can sort of keep going. It's not it's not the case that we have to like tomorrow keep everything about our society the same and just eliminate all prisons and police. That's just no one is really advocating for that at all. And and the richness of these discussions gets lost when some of these so-called socialists just start pontificating without any citation to evidence, without any argumentation, without even acknowledging the the context within which they're talking, when they just start saying things like we need more cops. Um it it it's really unfortunate and and I think quite revealing that none of the people whose work I criticize in the book and and who I've been trying to get to have public conversations about this will even respond on the merits to any of these challenges. And I think that's it's revealing as to the state of discourse on the left. And so I'm grateful to you for opening up this conversation, and I'm hoping that some of these folks will be more willing to try to explain what they why they're doing what they're doing and what they mean by it, and be open to changing their minds.
SPEAKER_00Thanks 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.