“Our Platform was Strong on Public Safety”

Interview with Robin Wonsley Worlobah, newly elected socialist council member in Minneapolis 

By Kip Hedges, facebook.com/kip.hedges, Twitter @CWHedges15

Robin Wonsley Worlobah got elected to the city council in Minneapolis in November 2021. She ran as a DSA member and as an unapologetically independent of the Democratic Party (and its Minnesota franchise, the DFL). Her campaign, born out of the uprising for Black Lives in 2020, had to overcome the backlash against the demand to defund the police and inspire working class people to get involved in the struggle for a different kind of safety for working class people, for rent control and much more. Kip Hedges spoke with Robin to elaborate on the campaign and the next steps forward in movement building. 

In the summer of 2020, you decided to run for city council in Minneapolis, in Ward 2. What were your thoughts at that time?

Summer 2020, we were in the middle of one of the most historic uprisings in US history after the murder of George Floyd, here in Minneapolis. And Ward 2 was right at the core of it. We had the combat zone, which was the Third Precinct of the Minneapolis Police Department. So I spent most of my summer alongside my DSA comrades doing mutual aid work for neighbors and many of the civilian protestors, making sure that they had access to food, supplies, and medical care. 

For me, the decision became very clear when I went to a Ward 2 event. The incumbent City Council member in Ward 2 held a meeting about the pathway forward around public safety. Everyone there was so upset because he had no proposals. His only proposal was, send an email. It was so uninspiring. We were in this moment and my City Council member was unaware of what was happening around him. 

People at the meeting, several hundred, wanted to transform public safety so we don’t have black and brown people being killed again and again. And the state was attacking working class people who were grieving again and again.

So I think that was the moment that it was clear. No proposals. Nothing from the City or any political leaders throughout the summer of 2020. The political establishment couldn’t meet the needs and the will of the people. In fact, it was working class people and community groups on the ground that were organizing to meet those needs in the absence of the state. It soon became very clear that our city was entering into a revolutionary moment. And with that realization, it also became clear that our city had been and was in dire need of revolutionary leaders, who could bring the working-class power that was being built and demonstrated on the ground into spaces of power. Spaces like City Hall which had  been complicit in creating the conditions that lead to the execution of George Floyd,  and the uprising that followed. So, it was no surprise that those transformative months of the uprising ultimately inspired me to step up and throw my hat in the ring for our upcoming City council elections. 

There were three other candidates that ran, and you were able to defeat a 16 year incumbent, Cam Gordon, a green party candidate who was regarded by many as pretty progressive. And you alluded to him in your last answer. And you also defeated Yusra Arab, a Somali woman who had the backing of the monied class of Minneapolis. And then Tom Anderson who was similar in politics to Yusra but was not the chosen candidate of those with a lot of money. How were you able to actually win?

I was very fortunate to be able to pull together a team of experienced Marxist organizers. I’m being very clear about that. We walked into this race knowing that, yes, we had an incumbent that represented left of center progressive politics in Minneapolis. We also knew there was a counter movement to the uprising that took place in the summer of 2020. We saw the political and corporate establishment really consolidate around this question of public safety as a way to maintain the status quo. They were galvanizing working class black leaders to speak against reform. 

This was partly due to the weaknesses of the proposal, a ballot initiative, for a new public safety department that was proposed to replace the MPD. The proposal lacked clarity. This particular weakness would ultimately be leveraged by the opposition in successfully defeating the ballot amendment.  . And partly it was due to a spike in shootings in the Black community. 

The Star Tribune, Minneapolis’ major newspaper, was printing regular editorials raising the fear of crime and speaking against meaningful change. They didn’t want to take up any new proposals to actually address structural inequities that exist under capitalism.

We knew we were in a moment of reaction and I knew it was going to be imperative that I had a team who could understand the political conditions that we were in and how to navigate that and how to study and adapt to the ever changing terrain. I mean, we were talking about starting in summer 2020, and already by spring of 2021, we were still knee deep in a devastating pandemic and our city and state was failing to respond to that in a meaningful way. 

Then we also had the trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer who killed George Floyd, that only happened as a result of the uprising. And then we had the public execution of Dante Wright and a revitalization of a smaller uprising in Brooklyn Center. There was the struggle around the pipeline, Line 3. We had so much happening in that moment and I needed a team that was going to be very clear and focused. What is the political program that we’re building? How are we going to test this on the ground?

It was imperative to not only have a team of folks who had a Marxist analysis but also those open to it. I was really proud of the fact that our team brought in a lot of new DSA members who had not organized before and we were able to have political discussions and debates amongst our team to really assess what we were doing. How should we be framing our own program around public safety? There was a massive vacuum on the left in relation to how working class people should orient themselves towards our pro-MPD opponent’s effective organizing.  After many discussions and debates, my team decided that we  would put out a  socialist vision of public safety to the public and test its receptivity on the ground. 

While we were building out our political program, we still had to hit doors. We were still running an electoral campaign and thus had to do all the typical things you need to do when trying to run a successful electoral campaign. We door knocked-many times-, held phone banks, and organized numerous fundraising events. 

Through developing a strong political program and electoral strategy, my team was able to not only defeat a 16-year Green Party incumbent but also a corporated-backed challenger. By complementing a socialist program with a focused field strategy, we were able to expose a number of things about our opponents that helped to crystallize that our Socialist  vision and leadership was what was most needed in City Hall at this historic moment.  

What I am most proud of is that we ran an effective Socialist electoral campaign that both pointed out the ways   that racial capitalism failed to meet working class people’s needs and offered ideas about what would work. Neither one of our opponents were doing that. They brought nothing new to the table and the advocacy for failed “progressive” tactics and the status quo simply  didn’t resonate with working class people.  Both of my challengers failed to inspire people in such a critical moment that our city was undergoing. And we were able to do that.

You and your team, I noticed on your website, did not call for defunding the police. Why was that?

That took a lot of internal debates, because many of us were involved in the defund efforts of summer 2020 and we saw how the state went on an aggressive attack against that. They wanted to discredit and defeat a charter amendment that was proposed at that time to revamp public safety in Minneapolis. All across the country the political establishment was on the attack against those who would make fundamental changes to public safety. The uprising here inspired uprisings in all 49 other states. So every single city and state in this country was wrestling with the failures of the police state in the wake of George Floyd.

Corporate mouthpieces like the Star Tribune were ramping up fear around an increase in crime, murders and car jackings. And these crimes were actually increasing and they used this to say that we cannot entertain defund. We saw that dynamic and, again, because we had a disciplined team, and we dedicated time to note these political shifts. We recognized that we had to come with a different type of political approach. The political establishment was able to frame “defund” around this deficit, this framework of absence. And I think our proposal was really able to say like, “No, there’s a presence of something more. We actually have the ability to abundantly invest in our communities and build a public safety system that guarantees everyone’s safety.”

Under racial capitalism, we know the police are largely used to protect private assets, private capital. And if you do not own private capital and are not considered to be a part of the public, which has historically been black and brown and working class people and women, and LGBT folks, then safety for you looks like  random traffic stops, “use of force”, stop and frisks, tasers, pepper spray, tear gas,  and rubber bullets. Our socialist public safety program was able   to get at the core of that and effectively relate it to the public. 

We were effective because our program focused on the public aspect of public safety. It also recentered  public safety as a public good and thus everyone, no matter their race, class, immigration status, gender,, deserves the most equitable and highest quality public safety system possible.   We also highlighted that public safety is much more than policing.  Real public safety requires public stability.  Meaning, government’s should be  making mass investments in housing, public education, and healthcare. The things that actually keep working class people safe. 

Our program also advocated for the expansion of the unarmed workforce. City data showed that 70% of 911 calls required an unarmed response. So, why not invest in an unarmed workforce where we actually send out mental health providers, we actually send out trained professionals who specialize in domestic violence to tend to the various types of crises that ordinary people experience daily.

To summarize, our program basically said , “Look, the current offering of policing that we have, it’s a bread crumb.” A socialist platform offers you a whole buffet of things to really help you navigate crises but also stabilize your lives. And that’s inherently contradictory to racial capitalism.” We were very clear too that whatever we do, as long as the system of racial capitalism exists, the police state is always going to be there to reinforce those conditions. 

As socialists, our charge is to rectify those unequal conditions but also with the goal of weakening racial capitalism and replacing it with democratic structures, structures that aren’t governed by profits, by shareholders, by CEOs, but actually the working class people. So we got to test these ideas throughout the campaign trail.  I This is why I think electoral campaigns offer really good terrain for Socialist to organize around socialist ideas. That ability to connect our Socialist ideas, especially around public safety, directly to working class people at the doors,   is largely why our platform was among the strongest in this public safety debate here in Minneapolis and still remains one the strongest as we try to figure out how we move forward.

The Chamber of Commerce and the Downtown Council, the developers have really portrayed themselves as having been triumphant in the 2021 election. They say their candidate for mayor won, Jacob Frey, and he defeated two more progressive candidates for Mayor. Frey’s efforts to give himself more powers as mayor won in the form of a city charter change. The amendment that you were referring to earlier around public safety was also defeated. And there were some progressive city council members who were defeated and replaced by more conservative city council members. At the same time, there’s three socialist DSA candidates on the city council. So how do you analyze that? What do you make of those apparently contradictory phenomena? Are we witnessing the birthing process of something new?

I think absolutely. In 2017 a “progressive” majority was elected to the Minneapolis City Council. They said, “we are going to change all the things.” And then the pandemic happened, George Floyd happened, and then the uprising happened. What the ruling class and the political establishment, the Downtown Council, Chamber of Commerce were able to say was, “The failures that we’re experiencing right now are because the progressives don’t know how to govern. They are the ones who created these conditions that we’re experiencing.” 

So they were able to manipulate the failures of racial capitalism to be the fault of  progressive wing. And the liberals did contribute to George Floyd. We had these progressive Democrats who were helping make these weakened policies around public safety, constantly regurgitating reforms that have been tried and tried, not really taking on the forces of capital that have the desire to protect the status quo at all costs. Progressives go in to basically nibble around the inequities and all you do is end up deepening them.

So I think we are seeing the birth of something new because the progressive wing was decimated. I mean, we’re talking about one survivor from that wing right now on the City Council. It ultimately showed the failure of liberal politics. And while I know a lot of working class people, especially on the left in Minneapolis felt a huge wave of despair with the election results,  I do think we’re seeing something different in the wake of three socialists being able to win and one of those three socialists, myself, being independent of the Democratic Party. 

So I think there’s a multitude of things that’s happening. You’re seeing working class people are open topolitical options outside of the Democratic party, and political options where it’s grounded in a populist political framework, that not only prioritizes the public good but also   places working people are at the core of deciding how our city is going to be run.

But also people are interested in how we make that happen? We clearly tried the tactic of electing the good folks into office to do these things and that didn’t happen. So it also creates this opening of, wait, so there’s a different way in which we have to create change now. All of us newly elected council members, Jason Chavez, Aisha Chugtai and myself, were the ones who ran really impressive ground games and that showed in the voter results. Across the board, our election results showed that voters in our ward were not supportive of the ballot initiative, Question One, which consolidated more power in the mayor and really the ruling class of Minneapolis. We all turned out higher voter support for Question Two in amending the city charter to create a new department of public safety. And across our respective campaigns and in our wards all voted in support of Question Three, creating a pathway to pass rent control. So all of us not only said we support these key things to create a more just and equitable democracy, but we publicly called attention to the forces, like corporate developers, that are not  allies in this fight to guarantee housing to everyone or to provide a system of public safety that doesn’t only work just for the rich. We were not only able to successfully create a public campaign around this Socialist vision and these specific issues, but we were actually able to connect working class people to the movements organizing behind it. Not only did they show up at the polls, they showed up at rent control events. They showed up at protests against police violence. So I think we are seeing the birth of something new and I’m really excited to work with my DSA comrades to expand these openings  even further, especially around the rent control fight. I think that’s going to offer really good grounds for us to show working class people how to fight differently for our interests under right wing conditions.

You and your city council staff have decided to donate a portion of your salaries to fund a community office right in Ward 2. How does that fit into your vision of mass politics and creating mass politics around a multiracial working class movement? Are there other things? You’ve mentioned rent control and the movement around that. How can those kinds of movements or fights be used to create that mass politics?

My team is super excited about moving forward with creating a ward office. People can come by to talk about fixing potholes. But we also want to be an organizing hub. We want it to be an extension of exactly what we did during the campaign. How are we bringing in Ward 2 residents, also residents across the city, to have these conversations? And even debates about the issues that impact our everyday lives and to connect them to new ideas which working people are organizing around, both locally, but also across the nation.

We know rent control is going to be one of the key fights that our office is going to take up. We want our ward office to be a hub in organizing canvases, organizing national forums where we’re bringing in experts to talk to residents about the ways in which we can actually address housing inequities. There are cities that have passed rent control, especially stronger control policies and they’re surviving. 

So we want our office to be a source of information and to discredit the false ideas of our opposition. We want our ward office to be a place where working people can break out of isolation and collaborate with each other. Solidarity is the key to our success.

More on Robin Wonsley Worlobah’s campaign: robinformpls.com, facebook.com/Robin4Mpls/ , twitter.com/robin4mpls