Public Safety or Self-Defense? - Richard Hunsinger and X. Rivera Maya (2025)

“Populism is the future of politics” - Steve Bannon on Zohran Mamdani

Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City’s Democratic Mayoral primary election necessitates a critical intervention into the relevance of an electoral strategy in the class struggle. Some iteration of this debate occurs every election cycle, in varying degrees of intensity. The prominent role of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in organizing support for the Mamdani campaign and the enthusiasm of its participants regarding the prospects of this primary victory for socialism in the United States makes apparent the weaknesses of this strategy at present– and the particular weaknesses of the DSA, as that organization increasingly appears to be reliant upon such efforts. In the present balance of forces in the class struggle we find a split social movement, perhaps best symbolized by this present excitement over, yet again, a Democratic Party nominee promising reforms from a municipal executive office, and how it stands in tactical opposition to the uprising against the deportation regime’s military occupation of Los Angeles by the proletarians of that region. The geographical distance of these two political moments mirrors the practical separation of these strategies, and the lack of any organized coordination between partisans on these fronts. Such a distance provokes us to evaluate this situation and identify where indeed the real movement of communism resides, and to further develop the critique of bourgeois democracy and the state in these institutions’ relation to the emergent revolutionary proletariat.

I. What is “The Left?”

Our present political reality is that no coherently organized “Left” exists in the United States, at least on the terms that such a concept is currently addressed. While this claim may be controversial to some, it is simply a fact that the institutional landscape of U.S. politics does not have any specifically Left party organization, and the existing formations in the general terrain that would correspond to such are far from having any revolutionary orientation towards the antagonisms of capitalist social relations that they may or may not address. Those that exist and do aim towards a revolutionary orientation tend to be problematically separated from a base of mass mobilization. Forms of mass organization of the proletariat do exist, and are largely localized and predominant amongst various economic sites of the class struggle: organs of the labor movement that are unions in the “official” labor movement of affiliated trade unions integrated into party politics; unionization efforts of workers outside of this affiliation and that great majority of the workforce that is not organized; various networks of tenant unions and neighborhood-level housing struggles; local formations that are primarily community-based organized to meet specific needs or address specific issues. The smattering of explicitly socialist or communist organizations are largely of a marginal size, except for the DSA, which has its most notable presence and impact in electoral initiatives backing progressive candidates for office. These efforts still struggle with the task of building a base amongst the proletariat.

Revolutionary potential amongst the proletariat in our present has largely been of a spontaneous character, seen primarily as defensive mobilizations against antagonisms by the police and armed forces of the state. This self-activity of the class has not been able to cohere into an organized formation. The continuity of these uprisings as the political content of a left-politics relies upon various intermediary formations that possess formal organization in some cases, but not on a mass scale. The fusion of revolutionary organization and mass mobilization is still at an early stage of its development in our present moment. With this being the situation, we could say that what is at stake in the debate that we are engaging in is the very prospect of creating a viable communist movement in our context, the nature of its political content, and whether it is to become an element entrenched in the reproduction of capitalist social relations or a vehicle for the revolutionary transformation of our social relations and conditions.

This very statement of the dilemma, however, reveals to us an actually-existing difference in approaching the conditions for this possibility in our present moment. It is a difference that we cannot claim as an official phenomenon because of the lack of formal organization, but one that is emergent in the practical development of the class struggle and articulated in the current forms of its organization. The essential stakes of this split are most apparent in the differences between the struggle against ICE and the deportation regime developing in Los Angeles, spreading further into the mass deployment of federal forces in Washington, D.C., and the trajectory of a democratic-electoralist reform strategy in the Mamdani campaign in New York City. Where the former appears to be driving people away from the party politics of institutional state electoral machinery, the latter aims to develop a socialist political presence by taking advantage of a Democratic Party whose center is proving ineffective and obstinate in addressing the concerns of its base. These contemporaneous instances of political momentum crystallize the current separation that exists between left-wing organizations that is formed in the moments of the class struggle’s direct confrontations with the armed forces of the state: organizing in a defensive mode that must develop in the anticipation of repression, and organizing that aims to develop a democratic path to socialism through engagement with the electoral terrain, claiming representation within the public institutions of the capitalist state.

The task of assessing this terrain as one denoting an actual split in the composition of a political Left in the U.S. is complicated by the fact that there exists an overlap and proximity to these layers within the divergence of their strategic means and ends. It is not only the matter of individuals that either inhabit or work in proximity to both fields, but that this kind of political blending within and amongst milieus demonstrates an interdependence between differing tendencies in the broader social relations that comprise this organizational landscape.

While there are some that may claim a mutually-shared political objective between these different currents in the realization of a socialist project given the apparent conditions of common antagonists within the capitalist class, we wish to assert here that there is an antagonistic relationship developing between these divergent strategies in the objective conditions of the class struggle. This developing antagonism makes necessary a critical evaluation of the unity of means and ends in practice. It is important not only to clarify the political content of the class struggle, but to objectively understand the capacity of this struggle to become one with a revolutionary communist horizon.

To that end, we aim to orient our intervention around the most decisive and strategic point at which this antagonism is developing, and thus assess the organizational necessities of our present moment in order to call into question the veracity of the democratic-electoral path in our present conditions and the balance of forces in the class struggle. The decisive point is in the relation to the abolitionist character of the class struggle, or the orientation of the struggle towards the police, the armed forces of the state in general, and the carceral institutional apparatus of the state. The necessity of deliberating this position within the class struggle is necessary given that its terrain is currently comprised of clashes and antagonisms with the police and struggles with the carceral system, in which we see the reserve of militancy in the proletariat most manifest and activated, and the culmination in the Mamdani campaign of the democratic-electoral path’s capitulation of an abolitionist politics to public safety in its relationship to the occupation of state office. It is at this juncture that we must not only defend the revolutionary path to communism, but do so through a serious critical confrontation with the recuperative dynamics present within the class struggle that identify the present limits of organization to be overcome.

II. Public Safety and Counterinsurgency

This analysis will refrain from going into depth on a historical reconstruction of policing in the U.S. to make its point. We will instead posit at the outset that a socialist movement cannot approach the police as public servants that act in a politically neutral capacity. In the case of the Mamdani campaign, we are witnessing a problematic equivalence of policing with functions that assume a social necessity of the institution absent its political or class character. The extent of the campaign’s platform on addressing the matter of policing sits firmly in the camp of contemporary initiatives for reform. Against the claims of antagonistic media, candidate Mamdani often makes abundantly clear that he does not intend to defund the police and that his plan has been developed in collaboration with the authorities in order to give the semblance of a sound and healthy working relationship. The main proposal is the establishment of a Department of Community Safety that will transfer the responsibility to respond to certain incidents from the NYPD to an apparatus of social workers, alleviating police officers from the responsibility of responding to calls related to incidents related to mental health and drug abuse.1 There are no significant cuts proposed to the NYPD's overall budget. The main intervention on police brutality is the proposal to disband the department's Strategic Response Group (SRG), a task force supposedly deployed to emergency situations, yet is actually used in the suppression of incidents of political protest and social unrest as well as in response to mass shootings. These efforts are not proposed as a recognition of the need to curb both the violence and political influence of the NYPD, but instead offered as functional proposals that will allow the NYPD to focus more on responding to and investigating the kinds of violent crimes that their institutional capacities should be reserved for, making the institution more efficient and responsive to public needs.

The notion of what social needs are satisfied by the NYPD is an important concern to this political development in the electoral influence of the American democratic socialist movement. The recognition of a need is a matter of the relations of a society, and the development of any need is a matter of the political, economic, and social history through which it is articulated. In a society where the capitalist mode of production prevails as the general condition of the social reproduction of material life, such a history of needs is one that is necessarily a history of the antagonistic relations of the class struggle. Needs cannot be simply accepted as they appear to us as a condition of our existence, but critically interrogated according to a recognition of their partisan class character, and thus the form of social reproduction that would be posited by the practical satisfaction of such needs.

The need for public safety appears unobjectionable on its face, the kind of concern that in its very expression poisons attempts to question what it means in concrete terms. It is a simple matter to point to any number of the violent incidents that people appear to be subject to on a daily basis, pulled from the headlines or the reports of official crime statistics, painting a picture of a society in which a certain kind of order is not only necessary, but desirable. It is an altogether different affair to approach public safety with a confrontation as to the question of whose safety is to be considered, how that objective is to be attained, and what is the social character of this conception of "order?" Crime must be recognized as a political category, just as much as its prevalence has an economic basis in impoverished conditions for the proletariat. Even when concerns over public safety and crime do emanate from the proletariat as well as the petit-bourgeois classes and capitalists alike, the concession to the need for a police presence is more symptomatic of an underdeveloped political response to the widespread violence and abuses characteristic of the proletariat's experience of policing. Only this dynamic of the political capacity of a revolutionary communist movement can account for the incoherence that prevails in the attempts to grapple with the question "what is to be done about the police?"

To address this question and its relevance to the needs of proletarian organization in the present, we will reconstruct a brief political history of the key dynamics and developments of the police as an active antagonistic force in the last few years following the George Floyd Uprising of 2020. The recession of a widespread recognition of abolitionism as a necessary position in relation to policing and the carceral state is a significant development in the course of the broader political reaction that has developed since the Uprising. The Uprising was itself not a singular event, but a culmination of the cycle of uprisings against the racist extrajudicial killings by police in the 2010s that positioned this site of antagonism into a more comprehensive social struggle, both within the U.S. and on a global stage. After the initial wave of militant assaults on policing infrastructure and looting that spread throughout the whole of the US subsided by mid-June of 2020, the revolutionary characteristics of that spontaneous moment transitioned into a series of intermittent, localized flashpoints, comprised of clear divergences between moments of proletarian unrest and confrontations with the police, and activist initiatives that concretized these mobilizations into definite sets of local demands. The multi-racial proletariat of the Uprising raised the matter of the abolition of police not as a mere demand, but as a need it could satisfy on its own, a moment best exemplified by the successful siege and burning of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis. Amidst this, the entrance of activist elements on the internet and on the street in the tamer, more organized daytime demonstrations in the first weeks of the Uprising began the effort to replace the slogan of abolition with that of defunding the police, positioning the struggle as an antagonism that could be redressed with effective redistributive policy.

There is a distance between even the defund demand and the militancy of the non-white racialized proletariat. The demand to defund police developed out of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC) of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) active in the effort to contain the open and widespread militancy of the Uprising to public non-violent demonstrations. The immediate watchword of the masses in the streets was Abolition. While the notion of Abolition itself was a term popularized within NPIC formations and often deployed to the end of advancing a policy-based approach to the struggle against police violence in the form of “non-reformist reforms,” the tactical development of widespread attacks on police and carceral infrastructure gave a concrete dimension to the practical implementation of an abolitionist program that exceeded the form of its discursive containment. The strategy of non-reformist reforms, exemplified in 2020 by The 8 Can't Wait or 8 to Abolition campaigns, does not provide theories of organization, but takes for granted organizational forms that are not based on building power amongst the revolutionary proletariat. The call to focus on defunding police on the basis of local municipal initiatives became an essential maneuver to walk back the escalation of the struggle set forward by militant mass mobilizations. Needless to say, this attempt at compromise was still met with open and violent hostility by the police, who themselves took up the slogan of defunding the police as a cudgel to wield against liberal and progressive election candidates alike in the years to come, as the police themselves in various cities would stage sick-outs and work slowdowns to demonstrate collective power as an organized labor force against municipal politicians being pressured by protestors to act on police reform.

The prominence of the conciliatory demand of defunding police within the 2020 Uprising and its afterlife is not reducible to the mere competition of slogans. The epiphenomenal appearance of such demands in contestation emanated from combined strategies of hard and soft counterinsurgency against the social force of the Uprising, itself politically indeterminate except in relation to its antagonism with the police forces of the state, and thus unable to programmatically set or advance any demands beyond what could be communicated through its tactical developments. The extensive deployment of armed force against the Uprising and the dragnet of state and federal prosecutions of its participants developed alongside the public prominence of reformist initiatives and the direction of potential insurgency into policy proposals. This is not a matter of an overarching conspiracy levied by extremely coordinated state actors, but an aggregate result of coterminous efforts from competing factions of a Party of Order, themselves engaged in open dispute about how to handle the matter of the Uprising. The single point of convergence upon which conservative and liberal forces of this Party of Order could find agreement upon was the essential support of the police, as the presidential election of 2020 and ensuing political developments demonstrate in the ongoing competition between candidates for office on the bona fides of their commitments to public safety.

In the ensuing years, a popular crime wave panic gripped the public, as told by the media, despite the decades-long declines in violent crime reported by every law enforcement entity’s own statistical evidence. This phenomenon was frequently attributed to effects on police capacities and morale as a consequence of policies intended to defund police departments, despite the fact that no such defunding of police had occurred anywhere in the wake of the Uprising. This political characterization of minor increases in the incident reports of petty and violent crimes overrode any analysis of the widespread economic devastation of the work shutdowns and unemployment surges caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic, and the abrupt ends of state-deployed financial aid amidst conditions of high unemployment and inflation. In the years since, police funding has only increased, as has the body count of people killed by police every year. 2025 is set to be the deadliest year for police killings on record, as was 2024 before that, and 2023 before that, and so on and so on.

That we are today seeing within the democratic socialist currents of the organized Left a concession of what was the forced-compromise demand of the 2020 Uprising is significant for what it reveals of the balance of forces of the class struggle as they manifest in the front of an electoral initiative. This also casts into relief the fact that the democratic socialist currents of the organized Left in the U.S. were never a demonstrably present force in the Uprising, nor are they typically present and organizing in such situations of heightened direct confrontations with the armed forces of the state undertaken by proletarians. The problem with organizational forms that make room for too broad of a politics (the so-called “big tent”) is that even the most radical people become limited by those on the right. The gravity in the organization is held in the right wing because the organizational form’s practical orientation in liberal democratic principles through the engagement with electoral politics does not sufficiently differentiate classes or the antagonistic relations of their respective needs. The moments where DSA have had opportunities to support and connect with militant masses, they have failed to do so.2

What the NGO’s, DSA, and related organizations advocate instead is a technocratic approach through policy and electoral campaigns, which, unwittingly or not, educates the propertyless classes in the responsibility of the capitalist state to pursue social change. At best, this is done out of ignorance, but at worst, the aim is to neutralize threats to the state and property. Participation in the project of social transformation is limited to participation in the electoral and legislative process through support of representatives. They aim to show that with enough effort, we can create harmony between classes through bourgeois democratic institutions. In reality, our task is that of lifting the veil from the class antagonisms of the capitalist mode of production’s social relations, and to demonstrate why bourgeois institutions need to be abolished and how we may do so through the class struggle.

III. The Class Character of Electoral Democracy

What is at stake here in the identification of this dynamic amongst that tendency is the crucial matter of the character of currently existing proto-party formations and their capacity to wage revolutionary struggle on the terms set by the concrete conditions and balance of forces of the class struggle in our moment. A strategy of organizational development and growth that is increasingly tied to a dependence on integrating its representatives into the Democratic Party’s electoral machine infrastructure places the democratic socialist movement into a necessary collaboration with the armed forces of the state, dependent upon the cooperation of their institutional bureaucracy’s capacity to advance its political and economic objectives. Whether it will gain the compliance of that cooperation remains to be seen, but it is apparent that even with the greatest efforts of conciliation, the police appear to meet any left-ward initiatives with hostility and organized defiance, if not open revolt.

This developing integration of the democratic socialist electoral strategy with the Democratic Party’s political machinery is the operative institutional site in which the antagonism with the tendency of militant proletarian uprisings against the police is taking shape. We assert here that this is not a matter of competing ideologies within the incoherency of the U.S. Left as a distinct political phenomenon, but one of the social composition of these sites of the class struggle’s organization in its distinct forms of appearance. In the case of Mamdani’s campaign, we can turn to the demographics of the voting constituency that won the primary election in the first round. It is significant that the vote share that Mamdani led in, on the basis of income, is comprised of people within an annual income range of $50k-$200k/year.3 With the rising costs of living in New York City, we cannot claim these at all to be exorbitant incomes, but they are significantly those that indicate a larger base of support amongst higher-paid workers and a petite-bourgeoisie that is coming under strain due to current economic conditions, a development of degrading conditions for the possibility of middle class life in the U.S. and globally since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. The shift here in the demographic composition and alignments of the urban electorate reveals as well the prevalence of another major development of capitalist accumulation in the 2010s following the GFC, that of the widespread urban gentrification that occurred in the wake of the mortgage crisis and financial capital’s expropriation of property, leading to the concentration of property holdings in asset management firms and a significant growth of market power amongst real estate capital. The exorbitant rise of rents and intensification of evictions in racializing concentrations nationally have fragmented and dispersed the historical urban proletariat of the US. It is notable that this tendency of demographic displacement of the non-white racialized proletariat, one which was seen throughout the 2010’s as the suburbanization of poverty, accelerated in the post-COVID economic fallout, with rents increasing exponentially amidst rising unemployment and inflation despite relative wage increases. If we are to wonder today where the militancy of the 2020 Uprising has gone in the ensuing years, we must look at this pattern of intense spatial displacement and economic degradation that has assailed the proletariat that took that initiative, finding itself as a force in the Uprising within and against the struggles against those very conditions throughout the 2010’s.

As such, the changing demographic of the urban electorate in NYC is reflective of this dynamic of displacement, gentrification, and intensified economic burdens. The proletariat largely remains absent from the electoral situation, but as a potential base to be mobilized by those class strata that are most targeted and appealed to by electoral party machine politics. The petit-bourgeois elements that found themselves in a moment of alliance with the militancy of the proletariat in the Uprising channeled the urgency of that political moment into a mere confrontation with Trumpism, and the disillusionment with the Biden administration for its inability to mitigate inflation and its active participation in the genocide of Palestinians has become a ferment for a politics of affordability and national economic interest to gain ground, for this is the limit horizon of the middle class as it mediates its struggle for self-preservation amidst the contradictions of general crisis and imperialist war. The popularity amongst these class strata of a municipal candidate campaigning on the fortification and expansion of state-backed social support programs and intervention on market practices in certain spheres of social reproduction indicates a petite-bourgeoisie that is itself very reliant upon public services and reform on the state’s regulation of capitalist enterprise. This aspect places it in a tenuous alliance with proletarians that are dependent upon such programs and policies, but we must here be critical of the limits of a politics of affordability and the class collaborationist character of such a populist program.

Within this paradigm, the claims amongst the democratic socialist tendency of this as an embrace of a socialist political program does not adequately reconcile the absence of proletarian and working class political institutions in the practical advancement of that program. This alone is evident from the dependency on the strategy to run a candidate within the Democratic Party, and the open efforts to court the endorsements of members of its establishment despite its public rebukes and dismissals of its progressive wing. That there is a mandate amongst voters for this program does not indicate a proletarian insurgency within the party‘s electoral apparatus, but rather that the traditional petit-bourgeois base of the party is proving itself more adequate to taking up the electoral functions of the party than its establishment center. The overtures made by Mamdani in the wake of his victory to making the Democratic Party once again a home for working class voters not only reveals this character of the political strategy, but also the contemporary change in the economic stature of the petite-bourgeoisie in the US. What is here claimed to be a working class politics is actually a populism geared towards smaller capitalists and the aspirational class mobility within voting proletarians, primarily the labor aristocracy of professional workers within that class. This is most apparent in the campaign’s de-regulatory initiatives aimed at courting small business owners, the promises to “cut red tape,” and the political alliance formed with anti-trust figures that, like Lina Khan (to whom Steve Bannon has expressed his support), are former Biden administration officials intent on crafting an economic policy more favorable to capitalist competition for business. This is a base and program that will inevitably come to a head with the contradictory promise of the campaign to raise the minimum wage to $30/hour, given the petite-bourgeoisie’s historical reliance on lax labor regulations and lower wages to survive in competitive markets. Where populist political strategy aims to create a coalition across classes for a general benefit within the state, it absorbs the violent contradictions of capitalist social relations into itself and will soon be forced to choose to which class it is most loyal. Historically, this goes to the petite bourgeoisie that is its primary voting constituency.

This contradiction internal to the electoral efforts of populist politics is the ground upon which the orientation to abolitionism in the class struggle becomes decisive. What the question of crime and electoral politics leads us to is what a revolutionary proletarian movement's relationship is to the state. The history of proletarian political struggle in the US is one in which the police are plainly open antagonists that operate in a directly political manner, both federal, state, and municipal agencies and departments working in close collaboration to target repression towards communist and socialist efforts and autonomous proletarian self-activity alike. They are, putting it plainly, self-conscious agents of the capitalist class, and overtly ideological in their work. The open displays of institutional clannishness in opposition to protests and movements against killings by police, the ubiquity of the Thin Blue Line and Punisher insignias as emblems of contemporary American fascist reaction, are certainly evidence of a class that sees itself as the restoration of order unbound to the obligations of law, a conception of the American criminal justice system that sees these actors carrying out the normal procedures of its operations routinely undermining any substance to the guarantee of due process in many cases. The criminal legal system in the US is a site of asymmetrical class warfare, designed as such, and the police are the front-line soldiers in the reproduction of capitalist class society. In their own forms of institutional organization and the unionization of their labor, they recognize their own social power and capacity to act politically. This is becoming increasingly apparent as we observe the general cooperation of local police forces in the efforts of the Trump administration to federalize law enforcement functions on the street level. What began in Los Angeles as the militarized apprehension of migrants is extending to Washington, D.C., with open threats made to other cities.

The concern then that should be obvious to the proponents of Mamdani’s campaign as socialist strategy is that of how the hostility of police to a reform agenda will be met? There are already numerous instances of such responses occurring nationally, and even the NYPD’s revolts against Mayor Dinkins and more recent antagonisms with Mayor de Blasio show an imminent threat to what candidate Mamdani will attempt to do. It is clear that Mamdani is choosing a conciliatory relationship with the police in anticipation of these problems. Is the DSA an organization that is adequate to engagement in the class struggle on such terms? This question of the defense of municipal electoral socialism in this instance is thus not the only pressing concern that such a question raises, for it calls for an even deeper interrogation. What becomes clearer in asking this is that, within the democratic socialist tendency’s broader political strategy as it is currently developing, there does not exist a consideration of how state repression of their movement is to be met, let alone anticipated. This aspect of democratic socialism’s underdevelopment as a political tendency, much less even an explicitly socialist one, can be understood as a key factor in the concessions being made by the tendency to anti-abolitionist political positions and the inability to break from a growth model that is tied to the integration of its electoral candidates with the Democratic Party machine. Absent such an explicitly revolutionary and combative strategy for mass proletarian organization, the DSA's political positions will likely continue to flounder on policing, and there will be no basis to enforce such hard lines on the elected candidates it supports. The danger here is of a proto-party formation and attempted model for mass organization that itself has no capacity to concretely wage class struggle on the terms set by its very conditions.

Yet this is also, at its core, a problem of the social composition of the organization and its growth model. The resignation to tailing petit-bourgeois grievances on public safety and the capitulation to tepid, ineffective reforms that are unlikely to be implemented because of the absence of an organized proletariat are merely symptomatic of the base the DSA is cultivating. The developing discontent with the Democratic Party has maybe shifted potential allegiances of its electoral base, but it has not changed the social character of that base. In this shift, we can observe a direction that is worth taking seriously as a possibility. The attacks on federal grants as funding sources by the Trump administration has the potential to open a vacuum for the role that NGO's played in the mobilization of counterinsurgent soft power amongst the petite-bourgeoisie, and leaves its social base looking for places to turn for progressive politics. Given this situation, there is the possibility that a mass organization like the DSA could become a home to this energy, and itself begin to organically take up the counterinsurgency functions led by NGO's in the 2020 Uprising and the uprisings throughout the 2010s, channeling the political energy and institutional crises brought about by the self-activity of militant proletarians into electoral mobilizations of the petite-bourgeoisie for the Democratic Party. This danger currently exists not merely as an exogenous potential, but as what is clearly already the general trajectory of the DSA in its inability to break from its candidates’ dependencies on Democratic Party affiliation, quite apart from the more left-leaning outcomes of the organization’s internal factional struggles.

IV. The Need for Self-Defense

It is here that we will make explicit our position that, in the U.S. context, it is a mistake to organize a strategy of proto-party organization and development that assumes political freedom in its operation and does not anticipate violent repression by the state in the manner by which it forms its organizational practice, or in the ultimate achievement of the ends of developing a socialist political movement as a transitional program towards realizing communism. There is certainly a history of democratic strategy in past and present socialist struggles, but the historical conditions and balance of forces in the class struggle in the present day U.S. is distinct in the manner by which the political institutions of the state are insulated from proletarian influence, much less representation, and by the absence of such political institutions established and directed by the proletariat that would make a democratic strategy viable in the first place by being able to enforce its program. Given this balance of forces in the class struggle and their historical development, the pursuit of seats of power in the election of political representatives in the capitalist state undermines the conditions for the development of revolutionary class struggle itself, deploying the social forces of mass mobilization towards an end that will be compelled by the forces of the Party of Capital to curb or suppress any substantively revolutionary development.

The necessity of an abolitionist position in relation to policing and the carceral state is thus not for any moral concern of the character of the struggle we are to wage, but one of a practical necessity of the movement of communism as given by the self-activity of the proletariat in the revolutionary potential of its acts of its survival. It is in this practical necessity that we see the exact importance of the two Lefts that we outlined in the beginning of this essay, and the divergence of their strategies ultimately being a result of their social compositions. The development of tendencies within the reformist and revolutionary camps of the class struggle are interdependent in certain ways, and the actions of their collective activity will have consequences on each other. It is in recognizing this that we posit the necessity of our critical stance and the articulation of that position, to better understand the antagonism that is developing in this intensification of the class struggle and the polarization of various forces that is occurring in their respective relations to the matter of confronting the armed forces of the state. This confrontation is already occurring and will be decisive both in the overall achievement of any revolutionary communist project and the transitional efforts of socialist organization.

This places us in a position now where the elaboration of the dynamics of a revolutionary party formation adequate to this struggle is crucial. This essay can neither be the final word on the matter, nor do we pretend to, as two people, possess complete knowledge of all that is essential to the fulfillment of that task. Today, the proletariat finds itself in a disorganized state. There is virtually no force that matches the past form of proletarian communist internationalism. Rather, what we observe is a loose aggregation of activists projected into an imagined unity according to affiliated ideas, not a revolutionary proletariat as an organized class.

The social existence of classes in the capitalist mode of production is their realization as distinct forces in their respective relations to the process of the production and appropriation of surplus value. These social relations of production are made concrete in the realization of the state as the essential unity of the capitalist class‘ various factions engaged in the project of reproducing the conditions necessary for ensuring that the sale and purchase of labor-power remain the foundational terms for proletarian social reproduction, and the expropriation of this life-time as surplus labor-time the terms for the social reproduction of capitalists and the various layers of society that subsist off appropriations of these shares. This very historical form of the social existence of classes—the notion of a proletariat that exists in itself as a social reality and can possess a distinct interest in relation to the organization of its exploitation and oppression by the state of the capitalist classes—positions the practical satisfaction of the needs of the proletarianized classes in antagonism to these institutions. This negated condition of existence is the starting-point of the proletariat’s organization as a class.

At this stage of conceptualization, the starting-point is one in which the class in-itself initially exists in a state of disorganization. This negative image of the class in its relation to the state of the capitalist classes is what posits the organization of the proletariat as a necessity, but it is here only apprehended in its immediate condition, and as such the question of necessary forms of organization remains abstract. It is only clarified by the intensity of the class struggle in which the balance of forces engaged can be recognized most acutely.

But this is not an automatic process, for spontaneous outbursts of struggle left to their own devices will not yield a concrete direction, much less one of a revolutionary character. The capitalist state cohered in the era of bourgeois revolutions for what those contending classes could realize of their own condition in the organization of production relations towards the production, realization, and valorization of surplus value. Such a logic is that which undergirds the degrees of consciousness with which the Party of Capital comprehends its historical task, one of the reproduction and maintenance of a specific mode of production. Against this, the laboring classes of the proletariat created by the historical trajectories of capitalist accumulation have had to organize themselves in various defensive positions, as a form of protection against capital’s ceaseless drive for surplus-value that degrades the proletariat in the conversion of its many life-times into a social substance of potential surplus labor-time to be exploited by capital. An adequate defense requires a positive politics that points the movement in a determinate direction.

These many defensive organizations—labor and tenant unions, abolitionist organizations, formations of proletarians in uprisings against police brutality, student movements, workers’ councils, neighborhood and district assemblies, various social clubs and informal outfits for meeting subsistence needs—have all demonstrated that in themselves they cannot match and overcome the internationally-spanning maneuvers of capitalists. One major weakness can be found in the single-issue politics approach inherent to this form of organization. For all the limitations of these individuated and isolated sites, however, the intensification of their engagements in the class struggle have driven the antagonisms of the capitalist mode of production towards the irreconcilable relationship between the needs of the contending classes, and have thus given rise to the recognition of a revolutionary communist horizon as the ultimate end of the proletariat in its struggle for survival. In the heavily-politicized repressive maneuvers of the state we can identify the threat of the proletariat that lingers in this period of defeat that has followed the uprisings and the present conditions of activist organizations and milieus. The persistence of these defeats without any substantial reform institutionalized as a means of counterinsurgency gestures towards a capitalist class and state that is content in the further degradation of the proletariat. The activists have failed to stop cop city, genocide, or ICE—some of the most significant defeats of our time. The activists in their pursuit of single issue politics, or vague political content such as “social justice” or “anti-oppression”, cannot penetrate the economic relations that are the basis of class struggle. Conversely, purely following the economic logic of struggles, such as tailing progressive candidates in elections or tenants’ and workers’ grievances within the confines of specific struggles, does not intrinsically contain a revolutionary political content. The political content cannot be degraded to suit the needs of electoral politics, aligning with the very class the proletariat must defend against. The Party is the mediating form that unites and advances these sites beyond their limitations. The organization of the revolutionary proletariat is the recognition of the unity of the economic and the political in practice. Historically, these disparate sites of the class struggle in the crucible of revolutionary communism’s necessity have given rise to the form of the Party as the vehicle for advancing the class struggle to these ultimate ends. The organization and coordination of revolutionary communism coheres into a general movement to strategize engagement in the class struggle and direct its discrete sites towards a definite end.

In the last few years, serious engagements with the party form have re-emerged amongst the scattered and disparate milieus of what can be called the Left in the U.S. If there is a necessity to the party form’s realization, it is becoming most apparent in the arrival of so many formations at the limits of their various fronts of the class struggle, clarified by the mounting unity of reaction in the state in its ever-increasing deployments of violent force and abandonment of any institutional responsibility for social reproduction. Riots and uprisings are significant advances that see the class struggle generalized and diffuse throughout the whole of society, yet they cannot form communist social relations on their own. Elections mobilize people and become public forums for political engagement, yet continue to meet their demise in either open suppression by machine politics or the inertia of a capitalist state in crisis, and no organized base to enforce any program. The need of the party is still the matter of debate amongst the partisans of revolutionary communism, just as much as is the question of its form. We assert here, however, that the historical necessity of the Party as a vehicle for revolutionary struggle is present in a socially objective manner. It is that realization of the communist horizon of the struggle as a universalist project that becomes concrete in every act of solidarity that establishes linkages between segments of the proletariat.

Amidst the incoherence of the so-called Left, there is a recognition of the need for some kind of unification and direction of the class struggle. Given the political underdevelopment of a revolutionary communist tendency, we can say that this question of the Party is still in its early stages of both practical and theoretical development. In this regard, the development of the DSA represents a rudimentary emergence of the recognition of the Party’s necessity, yet it is still a partial one, for it has not yet become a critical encounter with bourgeois democracy or the form of the Party. The democratic socialist strategy at present is still a nightmare from dead generations, spoken in the language of a past that cannot be lived again. For the need that is recognized in the course of that strategy’s development, it remains unsatisfied for the lack of a concrete base of proletarian self-organization according to a revolutionary communist political program. This is the primary task of the Party that must emerge from the real movement of communism.

The nature of this party, however, is not one that seeks representation in the state as a means nor a final end, but is driven to satisfy the need in the class struggle of the proletariat to seek the revolutionary conditions that abolish its existence as a class, and thus an end to class society and the capitalist mode of production itself. Recognition of the proletarian struggle’s demands by the capitalist state, the class’ various relations to representation in the legislative apparatus of the state in the historical iterations of the class struggle, can only be understood in relation to the realization of this revolutionary end as an objective historical necessity. The form of the Party necessarily develops in relation to the state. It is our contention here that the proletarian party of revolutionary communism must not be understood as a potential state actor, but as a vehicle for waging revolutionary struggle that sees the state as a reason for defensive mobilization and the target of preparations for the offensive stance of revolution. The organization of the Party requires the development of revolutionary institutions outside of the state’s purview, not merely as means of subsistence but as part of a broader defensive strategy against counterinsurgency. In this, the Party is a historical necessity that only exists in so far as communism has yet to be realized.

It is thus that we can then say that it is not the case that there is no connection between the social uprisings of revolutionary struggle and electoral politics. The concern in this critique is of the nature of their relationship in a specific historical instance of the class struggle’s development as the fundamental criterion for evaluating the efficacy of a democratic electoral strategy in relation to the militant self-activity of the proletariat in its moments of resistance. While the electoral strategy operates at a great remove from the uprisings, it benefits and receives direction from the momentum generated by them in recent years. The difference is that while some aspects of the electoral strategy recognizes the expression of the social needs of the proletariat in its struggles, it addresses it as a particular form of mobilization in relation to the recognition of these struggles on the terms of the state’s imperatives of capitalist reproduction. In so far as it does so, it is primarily as a populist front in collaboration with the petite-bourgeoisie, ceding the grounds of the class struggle to an insufficient differentiation of the social needs of these classes in their historical development. The momentum generated through confrontational forms of practical political activity in the militant proletariat is directed towards their expression as the specific class interests of the petite-bourgeoisie, rather than towards a revolutionary communist class politics. As such, no substantive opposition to the interests of capital is formed, for the electoral front seeks to integrate the frustrated middle classes as junior partners of capitalist accumulation through redistributive policies, mitigating the risk of the development of social forces capable of carrying out the expropriation of the expropriators on its own terms. The rise of progressive sympathies amongst the petite-bourgeoisie thus does not indicate an organic site of alliance for a socialist politics, but rather that the terms of the class struggle are set in the decisive initiative taken by the proletariat in its moments of militant confrontation. This remains the key site of necessary organization in the advance of a transformative, revolutionary project. Populism may talk class politics, but it is an articulation of the class politics of a bourgeois society: an elision of the key differentiations between classes that are thrust into movement by the antagonistic actions of the capitalist classes.

The historical development of the capitalist state in the US and the class character of its institutions makes it necessary for us to recognize that in this balance of forces of the class struggle, reformist and revolutionary politics do not share the same aims or have a common recognition of the stakes of the class struggle. The populist strategy towards reform seeks to make peace between disparate class elements against the development of a revolutionary set of criteria for the proletariat’s needs. In this dynamic we can observe this trajectory as not merely serving as a way to mediate and recuperate militancy back into state politics, but as, more dangerously, one that will create a political coalition that will become increasingly hostile to the revolutionary necessities of the proletariat that will be expressed in its moments of militant confrontation. There is the matter of leveraging democratic strategy to force a confrontation between left and right positions, but can such a strategy achieve its desired results when its efficacy is dependent upon entrance into an electoral machinery that possesses a greater force of gravity to pull its politics to the right?

This critique of political ideology is not a matter of taking issue with personal beliefs, but a critical evaluation of actual social relations being expressed in these political struggles. Democracy as an abstract principle remains one of bourgeois democracy in so far as its practice does not drive political development towards the necessity of revolutionary class struggle. Ideological critiques are then a practical matter of contestations over the form and content of the class struggle’s organization. The form of the proletariat’s revolutionary organization must consider, above all, need–the social and historical conditions of distinct needs of the class in its revolutionary potential, how to identify and articulate these needs according to a distinctly communist project, and what forms of organization will meet those needs. The priorities and tactics of party organization must be a matter of mediating the unity of the means of satisfying these needs according to the end of the emancipatory conditions of the proletariat’s abolition of itself as a class, and thus all of class society. Where in the development of this trajectory does working as the left wing of the Democratic Party fall? How is the need of the proletariat misrecognized by this attempt at socialist strategy?

"[C]rime was both the result and a part of the main tasks of 18th Century capitalist development."4 The history of the capitalist mode of production is one of the state’s development of an entire proprietary legal code based upon both cultivating the discipline necessary for wage labor amongst the proletariat and the management of its self-activity within the constraints of maintaining this condition. It is from this position that we can further engage the necessary critical encounter with the notion of “public safety” as a need. For the revolutionary proletariat, public safety cannot be related to as an abstract matter in which their interests are identical with those of the petite-bourgeoisie and the capitalist classes. Every articulation of the specter of crime places the proletariat on the receiving end of the force of the state, for the capitalist state’s enforcement of law in immediate social reality is that of social relations of production as discrete rights to property, and recognizes as the ever-present social substance of criminality the dispossessed proletariat that must sell its labor-power as the only legitimate means of its survival. If we are to take the premises of public safety seriously, the conditions of capitalist society in its present crisis show that there is in fact a threat to social reproduction taking place. As a need, “public safety” is an articulation of the worsening living conditions for impoverished communities even amidst decades-long declines in the rates of violent crime. Everyday life becomes a struggle against threats to well-being. The politics of reform appears to offer a way out of this through the expansion of forms of state intervention, but the transition of policing responsibilities to social workers still poses an impediment to the satisfaction of needs, for it merely aims to stabilize proletarians as sellers of labor-power reproducing themselves on the market’s terms. The exploited classes remain passive objects in the class struggle rather than engaged in the development of their own self-activity. As such, it is unlikely that the implementation of such a program would result in conditions any different from policing, if it is at all able to be overcome or avoid being met by resistance from the NYPD. The politics of affordability appears to be a salve on the rising costs of living, but its populism is one that already concedes that conditions in which the matter of being able to afford something, a problem that certain classes do not suffer from, is an adequate redress of current conditions. The needs of the proletariat are once again translated into a petit-bourgeois program through the notion of affordability, and socialist politics finds itself becoming a means of staving off further degradation, rather than staging the conditions for a revolutionary offensive.

What is the communist answer to this? The organization of the revolutionary proletariat and the direction of that class’ self-activity towards revolutionary ends requires us to name and address the specific proletarian need that is created by bourgeois society’s need for “public safety.” This need of the proletariat is one of the means of self-defense. The police are the organization of bourgeois society’s means of self-defense. The movements of recent years in which we see a militancy of the proletariat being expressed as a revolutionary potential have been defensive mobilizations against repressive forces of the state. The task of building up the capacity for self-defense is the organizational imperative given by the self-activity of the proletariat in the class struggle. It is in the necessity of organizing self-defense for its own survival that the proletariat develops the means of becoming a class capable of waging a political offensive. This is evident in the character of its forms of organization, from labor and tenant unions that form in response to the antagonisms of specific capitalists to the community defense centers being organized in the resistance to the federal government’s declaration of war against Los Angeles to track Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity and alert others to its presence in order to disrupt raids and apprehensions.5 As we are seeing such organizations such as the Los Angeles Tenant Union (LATU) take initiative in furthering the development of these community defense centers, the nature of self-defense as the need of the proletariat in the class struggle is seen as an organic extension of the practices of the class in the organization of its own self-activity.

The electoral politics strategy cannot accomplish this not only because the responsibilities of public office necessitate cooperation with and subordination to the interests of police and carceral institutions, but for the fact that elected officials do not constitute a base of organized proletarian self-activity. The police need to be understood as a social force that forms and pursues its own interests, coming directly from the pressures of its rank-and-file. Public safety becomes a way for reactionaries and liberals across class lines to collaborate on the task of disciplining the proletariat. When the potential revolutionary base and certain racialized and criminalized elements of society are the same, the outcome of this class collaboration can only be understood as a form of counterinsurgency. That is not to say that the politics of the restive masses and lumpenproletariat are automatically revolutionary, but that more than a need to be safe, there is a need to be organized as a revolutionary proletariat which includes elements of the racialized and criminalized class. This task of organization is the only bulwark against the reactionary and opportunistic tendencies that form amidst these layers of the proletariat. What must be identified as the real issue to be dealt with is the threat to social reproduction taking place, one that threatens people's ability to stay in their homes, to feed themselves, and in the case of migrants, to even exist in public. Abolitionism alone is not a revolutionary political program, but a necessary practical element in the historical development of a revolutionary movement in our present situation. We have to organize a hard line around engaging with police and the carceral system. We must identify the real threats--is it the racialized and criminalized parts of society, or is it the classes that reproduce themselves through allegiance to capitalist exploitation and the state?

Beyond the conception of “organizing” as an abstract idea towards imprecise ends, what we must cultivate is a self-conscious practice of what social relations we are developing and positing in and through the tactics of organization as a model for social reproduction. Organizing community self-defense requires building relationships autonomous from the electoral process. Bourgeois democracy limits the expression of political power to individual participation at the ballot box, atomizing our social conditions as so many special interests seeking representation. Communist struggle is the organization of the revolutionary proletariat which can defend itself against the repressive forces that develop a program through the electoral machinery of bourgeois democracy. The prevention of intra-community violence is best addressed through the mass organization of the capacity to challenge the state’s monopoly on violence through the development of the means of self-defense, and this requires organization that prepares and develops individuals as participants in a revolutionary movement who understand their survival as tied up with the survival of their communities.

Building consciousness among the proletariat as a revolutionary class is in contradiction with the attempt to mobilize it as a voting bloc. The difference is, where the former position sees itself as the maker of history, the latter sees itself as a passive spectator who can only be on the receiving end of politics. The former understands itself as a dynamic force with its own capacities to act, while the latter cedes force as the possession of state actors. Only the proletariat that can defend itself is a proletariat that can realize communism. The relationships built through the organization of the party are transformed through the very means of organizing the party. Only a revolutionary proletariat can build the revolutionary party, and only the revolutionary party can organize the proletariat into a force that can overcome the party of capital's repressive forces. Communism cannot seek democratic solutions on the terms of the capitalist state because its very means are necessarily a determinate negation of bourgeois democracy; it is not the abstract rejection of the democratic principle, but an attack upon the social conditions that make the reconciliation of antagonistic class interests in the state appear to be necessary, exposing this state as but the social necessity of reproducing the conditions for the capitalist mode of production. Differentiating the project of communism from the project of bourgeois democracy means that from the first to the last point of organization, the liberal ideals of bourgeois society need to be interrogated.

This antagonism of the communist necessity of the dispossessed proletarian classes to the institutional practices of bourgeois democracy makes itself felt in the revolutionary situation as a historical law. Even the democratic form of universal suffrage becomes a brake on revolutionary development that the proletariat must overcome through the direct confrontation with the armed forces of the capitalist state and bourgeois classes. This happened in 1848 in Paris, where not only was the proletariat met with the bullets of the bourgeoisie, but the abolition of universal suffrage by the very classes that relied upon it to ascend to power in the republic, laying the foundations for Napoleon III’s restoration of the empire as the essence of the bourgeois state’s war against the proletariat. In 1871 in Paris, the National Assembly would claim legitimacy against that of the workers that created the Commune. In the German revolution of 1918, the conservative forces of the monarchic and semi-feudal order became republicans and supporters of the national Constituent Assembly in the face of the revolutionary proletariat and the democracy of workers’ councils. In that same year, Lenin’s dissolution of the Constituent Assembly just months after the October Revolution was a necessity to further organize the capacity of the soviets and the party to defend the revolution in the face of civil war and foreign invasion, and to suppress the bourgeoisie that was maneuvering towards counterrevolution within the first body elected by universal suffrage that Russia had ever known. The limits encountered by the revolutions of national liberation from the colonial governments of capitalist imperialism throughout the 20th century in the ascension to state power of a bourgeoisie amongst the colonized demonstrated the necessity of emancipation to lie in the advance of the proletariat in the class struggle beyond national sovereignty. Overcoming the limits of past revolutions does not mean retrenching ourselves in that which the proletariat has shown itself both having need to overthrow and even the capability of doing so. We need not fear the enormity of this task, for we have been here many times before, and we will be there again whenever we must rise to the occasion of the class struggle. We need only to be clear about what true victory will require of us.

• 1Read the full proposal for the Department of Community Safety here.
• 2For an account of DSA’s distance from the Uprising by way of a critical engagement for what this means for proto-party organization, see Mohandesi.
• 3Zenith & Public Progress 2025 New York City Mayor General Election Poll.
• 4Stuart Hall, Brian Roberts, John Clarke, Tony Jefferson, and Chas Critcher, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978).
• 5This individual post contains graphics on how to assemble a community defense center.