New Jersey’s gubernatorial primaries are a month away, and in the crowded Democratic Party field one candidate in particular has stood out as the progressive option: Ras Baraka.
The mayor of Newark and son of Black liberation activist and poet Amiri Baraka, Ras Baraka has been putting forward a campaign which speaks to the anti-racist aspirations of Black and other oppressed communities that are his current constituency in Newark.
However, in a shock to many people who follow NJ politics closely, Baraka’s message has resonated beyond Newark. It is not uncommon to see Baraka signs in front of the large homes and in the windows of small businesses that make up the affluent suburbs bordering Newark. These are suburbs that were heavily redlined and have well-documented histories of anti-Black racism and, more recently, rampant anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia, and yet Baraka has managed to gain a foothold among voters there.
Adding to Baraka’s appeal is the fact that many anticipate that New Jersey is on the verge of flipping red. This has resulted in many NJ Democrats running for governor who were already right-wing or centrist Democrats (such as the raging Islamophobe Josh Gottheimer or girlboss warhawk Mikie Sherrill) to move more to the right on issues like immigration and trans rights. The only other ostensibly progressive candidate with any weight, Jersey City mayor Steven Fulop, is a non-starter for the Palestine movement given his waffling on whether or not Palestine activists’ have a right to free speech, as well as his shameless raising of the Israeli flag in Jersey City earlier this month.
In such a right-wing primary, Baraka is acting as a safety valve for the anger of the oppressed communities and social movements that the vast majority of NJ politicians want nothing to do with. Some pro-Palestine activists see him as a lesser evil since he is the only candidate who isn’t staunchly Zionist. On issues like immigration, Baraka has stood out as highly combative in his support for anti-ICE demands, even suing the private prison company GEO Group which is reopening an ICE detention center in Newark. At the time of this writing, Baraka, alongside immigrant rights NGOs, have been participating in daily protests outside of the recently reopened detention center known as Delaney Hall and was just arrested by the Department of Homeland Security.
By presenting himself as a candidate that takes up struggles of the oppressed in New Jersey, Baraka has racked up endorsements from a wide range of NGOs and unions, including the Rutgers faculty union (Rutgers AAUP-AFT), SEIU 32BJ, the immigrant rights organization Make the Road Action NJ, New Jersey Working Families Party, and CAIR NJ.
Our Power is Not in the Democratic Party
While Baraka has stood up for oppressed communities and social movements in New Jersey in a way that is rarely done by elected officials, it would be a mistake for working people and the Left to organize around his bid for governor. The main impact his campaign will have is to redirect those of us fighting the systemic oppression and injustices of capitalism back into the fundamentally capitalist and imperialist Democratic Party. By now, it should be clear that the Democratic Party, even in its most progressive form, can never represent the demands of workers and social movements.
New Jersey has been fighting for years to ban ICE detention in our state. In 2021, a combative movement in the streets won a near-total ban on ICE detention. Democrats throughout the state were not at all the leaders of this movement. Rather, they showed up once it was the only way for them to maintain their legitimacy in the eyes of the immigrant rights movement. The movement had built its own power (aided by the increased immigrant rights sentiment in Trump’s first term and bolstered by the BLM uprising) to impose its demands on the Democrats in the state. But in 2023, when the energy in the streets had died down, in large part due to the co-optive role of the Democrats, the Biden administration backed a lawsuit by a private prison company to overrule New Jersey’s ban. Baraka’s response at the time was much less timid than today. In fact, he openly backed Kamala Harris’s pro-police, pro-genocide, pro-militarization of the border campaign.
Baraka may very well be serious about not wanting ICE to reopen a detention center in the city he governs, but it is no coincidence that his more combative resistance to ICE is developing in a context where Trump, rather than someone from Baraka’s party, is the president.
It was the Democratic Party that set the conditions for ICE to pursue the detention build-up in New Jersey that activists are now fighting. Baraka’s strategy for confronting ICE is not to encourage leadership by the combative movement in the streets that won anti-ICE concessions in the first place. His strategy is to use the Democratic Party and the legal system that allowed our movement’s wins to be eroded. To the extent that Baraka is currently encouraging protests, it is to bolster his fight within the system that two capitalist parties (Democrats and Republicans) control. In doing this, he’s using a powerful anti-ICE struggle to strengthen the influence of a political party and political system that are carceral and anti-immigrant through and through.
In fact, just recently Newark police (who Baraka is the boss of) mobilized a huge presence to prevent anti-ICE and pro-Palestine activists from taking the streets on May Day. This is not because Baraka is uniquely hostile to our movements, but because his job as a capitalist politician is to maintain stability, even if that means restricting the street activity of movements that he ostensibly supports. Right now, his job as mayor of Newark is to maintain the stability of class relations in the city, sometimes making concessions to appease activists, and sometimes relying on police to keep movements in check. As governor, his job would be the same, but instead he would be playing this role for the whole state.
Movements in New Jersey very well might get concessions from Baraka if they are strong enough, but by binding our movements to Democratic politicians, we lose the independent power that we will need to fight beyond mere concessions that can be reversed by the institutions of the capitalists, as Biden’s attack on Jersey’s ICE ban has already shown.
Our Power is in the Streets and in Our Workplaces
One might argue that even if we can’t have faith in Baraka to genuinely deliver on our demands, it still makes sense to vote for him given how much more to the left he is than other candidates. But this perspective still operates from an assumption that our power ultimately lies in capitalist institutions like the governorship and the Democratic Party. As B.C. Daurelle wrote recently:
The Democratic Party cannot serve as a vehicle for social movements; it is the graveyard of social movements. For example, consider DSA-backed Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, who has shifted from championing “defund the police” to expanding the Chicago Police Department. Similarly, witness the complete capitulation of once-promising DSA endorsee Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the DNC.
Our movements have shown that every concession we win comes from our own power. We shouldn’t be putting time and energy into mobilizing people to support the least terrible Democrat. We should put all that effort into building independent organizations and movements that are so powerful that they can impose our demands no matter who is governor. This will be especially important since many people in New Jersey are concerned about the potential of a Republican governor. All the Republican candidates are likely to attack basic democratic rights, and no doubt there will be even stronger calls by the Democrats to “vote blue no matter who,” even if that means supporting politicians like Gottheimer and Sherrill who have spent the past year and a half attacking the basic democratic rights of Palestine activists.
In order to wage the strongest fight, our movements need to use every space for struggle to articulate a vision of institutions that are ours alone, independent of the Democratic Party, no matter how combative certain representatives of that party may be on certain issues.
The movement against ICE clearly has support from broad sectors, including the socialist Left, liberals who are becoming more politicized in the face of the Right’s attacks, state-wide unions and local combative unions like Newark Public Library Workers, immigrant rights activists, and youth activists organized in the Palestine movement at their universities and in autonomist and mutual aid groups like NJ B.U.R.N. and Newark Solidarity Coalition. This activity across sectors could serve as the basis for all people in New Jersey to take up struggles against oppression and capitalist exploitation to create our own spaces where we debate strategy and form the type of coalition that can fight oppression without following the lead of whatever capitalist politician is running for governor. Instead of looking to someone like Baraka to tell us when to mobilize to strengthen his legal challenge to ICE detention, we must look to ourselves to decide what it is wesee fit to demand in the face of oppression and state violence, and decide among ourselves how to use our collective power to impose those demands.
Importantly, social movement activists must form relationships to labor, which has an unmatched amount of firepower to offer to our struggles. The power of labor actions to bring business as usual to a halt has been exemplified in the 2023 Rutgers strike, the 2024 port strike, the looming NJ Transit strike, and countless other labor struggles that have taken place beyond New Jersey.
Imagine for example if the unions that are campaigning for Baraka, such as SEIU and Rutgers AAUP-AFT, instead called on their members to hold pickets outside of Delaney Hall so ICE can’t move in and out. This was a tactic that immigrants rights activists used in 2021 which galvanized support for the anti-ICE movement, thus playing a role in forcing ICE detention centers to close. Just imagine if instead of a few combative activists doing it, it was some of the most powerful unions in the state organizing their large membership at actions alongside immigrant rights activists and other social movements.
Organizing in this way is possible, but the potential to do that becomes impossible when we are constantly directed to campaigns by politicians in a political party that would rather restore people’s faith in the oppressive institutions of the capitalist system than unleash the full creativity and power of our movements, our class, and our communities. This is why it is a mistake for activists in New Jersey to support Baraka’s campaign. Instead, it is time to strengthen our movements by building our own institutions by and for those of us willing to fight to the end for our rights as workers, immigrants, Black people, Palestinians, members of queer communities, women, and all who are under attack from this system.