“Here lies the heart of the authoritarian dimension of neoliberal politics: the structure of the state may vary, the political personnel and its behaviour too, what is essential is that those in government be sufficiently strong to impose the constitutionalisation of private right and thus restrict the field of what can be deliberated upon.” - Pierre Dardot et al., Les choix de la guerre civile.

“Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday defended his plan to hire 580 additional officers and boost the overall NYPD headcount during his first appearance on WNYC’s ‘Ask The Mayor on ‘The Brian Lehrer Show.’ Mamdani said that once he came into office he was told that the Bronx needed two patrol boroughs because of its size and that rookie officers needed more on-the-job training… The decision to grow the police force was an unexpected reversal of a campaign promise. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, said while running for mayor that he wanted to keep the headcount of officers flat at roughly 35,000.” - Elizabeth Kim, Gothamist.

Mayor Mamdani is in a bind: stuck between his idealistic ideology and the forced pragmatisms of municipal office. A democratic socialist with an “NYPD is racist” heart and a “seize the means of production” soul, forced to make nice with cops and billionaires alike. These are just the facts of life; these are the breaks. He is swallowing a tough pill for us, so we (the movement?) can move on, can do big things.

Or maybe, rather, he is our Machiavellian mayor, biding his time to make his move, the right move. He just needs more goodwill; if the rent freezes, maybe then he (and we) can talk about the cops. Once we get the rent frozen and the buses running quickly, and after the World Cup, maybe then the working class will trust us enough to take on the police (who is us?). When he tells the New York Times that he is in control of the NYPD, that they are accountable to him, that was a wink and a nod–something to hold onto for later.

Pick your battles!

Or, otherwise, maybe Zohran is a Zionist sell-out (and perhaps always has been?). Maybe he was created in the same lab as Obama, each a vampire on the left’s naive neck. Maybe electoralism is a flop, and he and Tisch are clinking glasses at Gracie Mansion, laughing at us true-believers.

Or maybe he’s rightfully scared of being coup’d by the unaccountable, ungovernable, state-unto-itself NYPD. Maybe he doesn’t want to get De Blasio’d or, worse, Dinkins’d. The cops are too powerful to take on, and if we, or god forbid he, said this out loud, it would only show our weakness (but to whom?). Saying that we have no power to affect, much less transform, much less abolish the police is pointless. It gets us nothing (again, who is us?).

Even more, why should Zohran say what everyone already knows? Everyone knows the NYPD is an untouchable violent bastard, the drunk uncle at dinner liable to–who knows?–murder with impunity? Run drug rackets? Occupy poor neighborhoods? Bend the city to its will? Everyone knows this. So why even mention it?

But also maybe the cops aren’t so bad. The cops are sort of working-class; there’s more black and brown people in the NYPD than there are in NYC-DSA, so let’s be mindful. Working-class people actually kind of like the cops, and we have to follow their lead, right. Working-class people actually need the cops, you

know. The cops, like Zohran says, play an indelible role in our city’s lattice-work of care and safety. Imagine the subways without them??

Maybe all that 2020 jazz was just that, 2020 jazz. Abolition was a misstep: it’s what happens when you let the rowdy actionists (the outside agitators? the oppressed and dispossessed?) define the political discourse. It was a godsend to both the liberal NGO establishment and the fascists. It played right into both of their hands! It wasn’t strategic at all; it was self-marginalizing. We need to be adults. We are dead sick of merely critiquing power. Time to take some. But not over the cops, because they are okay and also ungovernable and far out of our measly reach.

So if Jessica Tisch tells us that the Bronx needs 500-odd new cops because the Bronx (duh) requires two patrol boroughs, what else can we (or he) possibly do but nod our heads and speak to the world, on WNYC, that public radio bastion of liberal truthiness, that the Bronx actually needs two patrol boroughs and so it’s just 500 more cops, okay? This isn’t political; it’s just the way it is. Rookie cops need training. If they didn’t have training, they might, you know, do something bad? Hurt someone!

And Tisch, she’s irreplaceable. Or she doesn’t matter. Or she’s just a figurehead. Or she’s a battle for another time. Or she’s harmless. Or there are no actually better options. There just aren’t enough qualified candidates, people who can actually do the job (what is the job?). See?

See, when the cops patrol through the park on my block and start giving out tickets and arresting kids for smoking pot, when they drive squad cars through the park, over the basketball court, when they break up the barbecue on our block, this isn’t an occupation per se; it’s just standard procedure, safety-making. When they block the way as ICE agents carry off their battered kidnapee, when they assault Chi, when they enforce evictions in every single neighbrohood, when they shoot a kid having a mental breakdown, when they beat the shit out of a guy at a liquor store, when they build another jail, when they go on strike so as to protect their right to torture, when they serve as armed security for war criminals marching in genocide parades–this is just business as usual. Nothing can be done about it. But also, Zohran has it covered–they are accountable to him. Thank you, first responders.

And just to be sure, what the cops do here in the city has nothing to do with those other cops in New Jersey beating on our friends outside the concentration camp where detainees hunger strike. Totally different. And those protestors were getting a little out of hand anyway, right. And the NYPD’s ties to the genocide in Palestine–that’s just Marxist adjunct professor propaganda. These are our cops. New York City is the only city in the world.

“I'm from the government and I'm here to help." No longer the most terrifying nine words in the English language!

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Zohran and NYC-DSA’s dual refusal to clarify the relationship between his person and the cops constitutes a failure on the part of both parties. If there is one thing that ought to separate a socialist politician and a socialist party from our bourgeois and reactionary counterparts, it is a deep fealty to the truth.

It is not our responsibility as socialists to make the world nicer or more comfortable for the working class. Our goal is not for the heterogeneous, fractured, contradictory-laden working class, of which we are a part, to like ‘us’ more. It is instead our responsibility to arm the working class with the clarity of vision and purpose such that it–we–can abolish the present state of things. Police included. This means, above all else, honesty.

Our politicians ought not be like other politicians, not only because we have the right answers or the correct analyses, not just because we are free from the clutches of moneyed puppeteers, but because we are truthful. We do not say one thing on the microphone and another behind closed doors. We do our politics out in the open, among the people, as the people. What shines most about Zohran is precisely his candor, his conversations with people on the street, his openness.

But if our politicians succumb to the immense pressures of elected office, of managing the capitalist state and negotiating with the vultures and lackeys, of constantly staring down the barrel of a tax-funded terrorist organization, if they feel this pressure and flinch–that is on us. That is the party’s responsibility. That is an organizational dilemma.

By not clarifying the relationship between our elected mayor and the NYPD, we have debilitated our capacity as an organization. It means that we cannot respond coherently to any emergent crisis caused by this recalcitrant institution. Zohran hiring 580 new cops, given the whole state of the world, is a rather small issue. Certainly not a crisis. But it is another in a now-endless series of instances of the police flexing insubordination and sovereignty. Zohran, let’s be clear, was repeating standard copaganda on WNYC. The police, in this country and this city in particular, have become a structural force of reaction through continued claims of civic necessity. When the NYPD next kills, when the next insurrection against the police state erupts, we will be even less prepared than we were the last time. Those leading any revolt against carceral violence will not trust us as a party, and why should they?

When we chose to endorse Zohran’s mayoral campaign, we were choosing a possible future in which he would become both the most visible socialist in the country (if not the world) and the party’s single most prominent figure.

And now our organizational orientation to Zohran is one that, perversely, mimics his toward the NYPD. Benign compliance. A peculiar fear. Hiding our true thoughts to avoid upsetting our partner in ‘co-governance.’ Having closed-door meetings where the important, difficult stuff gets discussed. Executive session. ‘Showing strength and unity’–but again, to whom? For whom? Why are we more scared of the NYPOST or Peter Sterne reporting on a schism between us than we are of, say, repeating the failures of DSA in 2020 or, moreover, of lying?

Solidarity,

Holden Taylor