“Woke 1.0 was crazy,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said in a recent interview.
The congresswoman, speaking on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, seemed to distance herself from the positions of an era of Democratic politics around 2020, shortly after she rose to prominence. Some on the left now see the rhetoric of that time as ineffective and divisive. There has been a widespread retreat on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts among corporations. And some public officials, including Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, have walked back their calls to defund the police.
I think it’s nice to think that inherent to socialism/communism/etc is the idea that we’re all equal hence deserving of equal treatment, but if we don’t push that idea both socially and economically, I fear we won’t actually get there. Maybe after socialism we can work on it, but the idea that once socialism happens we’ll all just be equal strikes me as naive (no offense intended). It will take time even after whatever political ideology is implemented. You can make the argument that it’s easier to fight for that in a more equal society, which is very likely true, but in the interim you’re just telling the affected people that they have to wait their turn for equality.
I really do hope we get to an equal place economically, but people deserve to be heard and fought for in the interim. Somewhat tangentially, I never liked Platner, but the number of people willing to stick with him despite rape claims was really scary. People are willing to throw others under the bus if they think it will benefit them and I can speak from experience that it doesn’t engender confidence in the movement. If we care about two things equally we should be able to fight for them both. I believe in social and economic justice and I have no reason to believe that one will inevitably lead to the other any faster than the reverse (see women’s liberation leading to better economic outcomes for women and the push for civil rights leading to better economic outcomes for POC).
It’s very easy to make a “socialist” argument against any group, so if we don’t enter socialism with the goal of removing these social issues then we set ourselves up for failure. Is a womb not in some senses a means of production? Should it not belong to the public? If a woman opts out of reproduction is she not in some sense robbing a productive tool from the rest of society? Of course YOU would never make that argument, but if we don’t do our due diligence then someone else will. I know there’s arguments about what counts as real communism/socialism/etc but the USSR which had no religious reason eventually made abortion illegal. I hope we keep that in mind when we think about which rights we think need to take a back seat to what we view as economic freedom.
You make excellent counterpoints and I also need to consider that chauvinism may have still occurred under such regimes as the USSR, and it’s something worth educating myself about.
I appreciate the pleasant and levelheaded discussion. For what it’s worth I think people exclusively fighting the economic fight and people exclusively fighting the social fight are both needed as there’s only so much time in the day for education and activism. We should just always respect and support each other’s aims. We’re all in this together.