Mind you, I’m biased since I’m not from the US, I’m Balkan. So a quick heads up there. Plus I’m a hardline commie so yeah. Just did some research on this because It caught my eye.
I haven’t really noticed this here or at Lemmygrad. But a lot of online “leftist” spaces, especially on Reddit, are over hyping this shit too much lmao.
Zohran so far:
- denounces Hamas
- denounces Venezuela and Cuba as dictatorships
- intends to keep zionist Jennifer Tisch as police commissioner
- hired Obama staffers
- ‘don’t sell out bro!’
This circlejerk about a social democrat getting elected is doing my head in, people are acting like the October revolution happened.
Just don’t act surprised when magically not much actual change happens in New York. Also don’t give me “Oh but the pipeline!!!1!”. Yeah If the pipeline actually worked, Bernie and AOC supporters would have been actual marxists by now (Also as a Serb, fuck Bernie, Parenti was right about your dumbass).
I have a pet peeve with American “anti-capitalists” in general. Where they constantly just whine how everything is expensive, no public transport and no free healthcare. Yet they’d probably be fine with the world suffering as long as they got those three things + whatever treats they want.
Don’t forget to join a good org nearby you, read and organize folks!
Yeah If the pipeline actually worked, Bernie and AOC supporters would have been actual marxists by now
I’m not disagreeing with you but I will say that I was certainly an AOC supporter and now I Identify as a Marxist. I do think it’s possible.
Fair. I just think It seems to be an exception rather than the rule from what I’ve seen. Should have said that in the post.
I don’t think that’s accurate, is probably more like “30% of people in the pipeline move to the next step” or a number like that. I don’t think there’s a reason to expect Americans to be rushing to be as far left as they can go at the first opportunity.
I see. Forgive me for being misinformed then and expecting too much since you guys got a lot of that redscare stuff going on.
Oh you’re alright comrade, hate to see you disappointed if your expectations were so high.
Settlers arent gonna be willing to give up too much, even if they want good things, not to mention the immense right wing propaganda machine. You’re still correct that 70% (or maybe more) of people are happy to just sit back and hope they can vote their way out of bad things. The pipeline is small and stuffed with garbage.
Nah It’s ok. I’m sorry on my part lol. My org also supported at one point this president of a left-leaninig union, who was kinda like Mamdani, but sold out to the liberal opposition here and he didn’t even win lol. I just don’t want you guys to get disappointed is all.
Then again my org isn’t doing too hot either lol. Not to derail the convo but we too focused too much on electoralism in the past few years even though It claims to be “anti-revisionist marxist-leninist” (not maoist).
who was kinda like Mamdani, but sold out to the liberal opposition here and he didn’t even win lol
classic
(not maoist)
Well there’s your problem lol
You have nothing to apologize for, that 30% number is entirely made up.
The reason I turned to Marxism isn’t because socdems made great policies, it’s because they’re extremely terrible at it. They get peoples hopes up and will inevitably crush them, because they either have to betray their principles or get sabotaged by the system, so be there to offer the people whose hopes have been crushed an alternative vision. That’s when you can push them further.
This has always been my take. Keep crashing into the walls put up by electoralism with full force, then say “See? We tried it ‘the right way’ and it didn’t work. What now?”
Look how many of us will admit we’re only here because we loved Obama, or Bernie.
in my view the credibility of “this one’s different!” collapsed when he didn’t have the chops to avoid helping the US destroy the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela, or the rhetorical ability to center a people’s right of resistance against occupation and instead joined in manufacturing consent for genocide in Palestine. (EDIT: or at the very minimum, to avoid the question by centering New York and New Yorkers) I wish him luck in doing something good for the poorest residents of the empire’s beating heart but I won’t hold my breath.
I spit on zionist AOC
I spit on zionist Bernie Sanders
I spit on nazi Graham Platner
may they suffer horrific boils and hemhorroids and meet humiliating endsI see it differently and somewhat more optimistically than you, but I appreciate the “not holding my breath” attitude. Frankly, there is no reason to be pro or anti Zohran at this point unless you live in NYC. Lets just see where it goes and not pin all our hopes on one administration.
I think the bigger story is still the fact that being called a socialist, and being pro-palestine by American standards, as well as being a Muslim experiencing the most insane racist attacks funded by millions of dollars, did not stop him from winning. It feels like a good omen, even if this is just the beginning.
I think it is important to keep in mind that America, and New York especially, is the core of anti-socialism/ anti-communism. He’s not the savior of the left. The left shouldn’t have a savior anyway. The movement towards socialism is a rolling ball. Mamdani is that ball blowing through a blockade built by the capitalists. The path is now open for more leftists with more rigid ideology, and the more he delivers, the more momentum the ball will gain.
The capitalists will build bigger defenses, and the work is far from over, but it’s a sign of good things to come.
i’m not convinced social democracy does all that. i mean, have swedish communist parties made significant gains recently? in america, there’s a good case to be made that fdr saved capitalism. im not convinced there’s anything to be won with mamdani
I never said it did, I said it opened the door. It is only opportunity, and it must be seized. The ball rolls slowly now, but it will pick up speed exponentially.
In america, there’s a good case to be made that fdr saved capitalism
I’ll admit I haven’t done a ton of reading on this particular topic, but as much as you can argue the New deal eased class tensions in America I’m sure you can argue that it was a failure of the American communists to take advantage of the concessions to foment further labor militancy.
it was a failure of the American communists to take advantage of the concessions to foment further labor militancy.
this is a good point. how can new york communists take advantage of the mamdani win to agitate? i would imagine communists elsewhere in the usa can look to mamdani and say “we can make that happen here” but what happens after that?
There are better people to ask than me, I’m sure, but I would say the next step is community outreach + education. Get people used to the idea of publicly being communist and explain what it is. Get people to understand that even under electoralism, politics does not stop once they leave the voting booth.
Ah, but if he doesn’t deliver and even starts making standard Dem excuses, how will this alleged momentum be maintained? There is no reason to assume Mamdani is going to die on the hill of any principal. There is no party he is answerable to. And there are many opponenta with resources.
Really, I am skeptical of all claims about momentum and electoralism. Generally speaking the election itself is the height of momentum and then they have to eat shit for their entire term regardless of what they try to do. To keep up momentum you’d need to have a small army that you can mobilize coherently. I’ve seen communists do this to success. I’ve never seen DSA do anything remotely like that. They are too busy getting a paycheck or looking to the next election or squabbling about exactly how chauvinist to be on some chat or meeting or what the new rules for their chapter should be when it comes to being sufficiently pro-green new deal. NYDSA entertained a proposal to avoid criticizing Mamdani when in office. Not sure where that went, but I’m guessing it didn’t pass since I haven’t seen people making fun of it.
The only momentum that matters is that which can mobilize coherently. That which gets people involved, educated, and taking concerted action. The momentum we can use it to try and peel off the good vibes for socialism among many young people and focus it into something better than NYDSA types of things.
I don’t disagree, but understand that we are not anywhere close to that point. Mamdani’s win is celebrated simply because it shows that the American people are viewing actions dubbed socialist as neutral if not positive. That’s how far away we are from actually winning.
This is the opening of the door to begin building those structures in earnest. It will take fresh blood and new organizations (dsa and cpusa are dysfunctional and need to be either reformed or replaced) and a ton of work by real communists. Instead of being negative, look at this as an opportunity and do not let it go to waste.
I think this gets the cause and effect reversed, though. For example, by this logic, the Bernie Sanders campaign demonstrated the same thing 9 years ago and opened the same door. But is that really what happened? The campaign itself was dismantled and the leftovers sold to the DNC. The hangers-on of campaign staff that are still relevant are basically liberal chauvinist hucksters. Some generally left formations grew, but this was largely after he failed, not succeeded. The campaign didn’t really open doors, the doors were already open but people hadn’t thought to enter them, they didn’t think they existed, the campaign said some of them did and then arguably stood in the way of them in lockstep with the bourgeois party. And so afterwards those who were inspired and then disaffected looked for and found those doors again.
They were already primed, they just had nobody trying to organize them, and the campaign didn’t really do that either. The growth was through self-organization where people out their hopes into whatever group seemed most aligned with them. It requires that vacuum, because no Sanders campaign was going to pick them up and organize.
So today we have another electoral campaign, and this time the person won. Same thing, they call themselves socialist and run on the Dem ticket, and play a bit fast and loose with what socialism is, trying to conflate it with minor social democratic reformism. What doors are now open that had previously been closed? There are few disaffected, as he actually won. He is going to actually govern and have to own the conditions that will likely continue to degrade. The DSA, particularly NYDSA, is too disorganized and unprincipled to be a force behind him to agitate sufficiently for what is needed. Perhaps their numbers will grow based on this win. But who is joining and what will this means in an org that has literally no education program or consistent actions? Will other orgs grow because of this? Probably not through positive vibes about a Mamdani win. Maybe through criticizing his eventual mistakes and betrayals, but how will that compare to those soured on the socialist that stabbed them in the back or didn’t do anything?
I just don’t see a tangible connection between “socialist brand won an election” and “things are looking up for organizing”. I can note that from personal experience a municipal socialist in office made an area basically poison for socialists for about two decades.
For example, by this logic, the Bernie Sanders campaign demonstrated the same thing 9 years ago and opened the same door. But is that really what happened?
Two socialists ran for mayor of New York and one of them won. In all of my responses I have never endorsed electoralism. Or really any form of entry-ism. What I said was that a socialist went up against big money and won. Which is a better result than we had 9 years ago. It is slow but I still call that progress.
But O.K. then don’t believe me. The doors are shut. Elections cannot be a litmus test for general sentiment. No progress has been made. What’s the next steps then? What’s even the point of trying?
Don’t bother answering, because what I really want to know is ARE YOU GOING TO GO ORGANIZE OR NOT? Obviously the NYDSA isn’t. You have to. Every one of us has to. Now is the time to do so.
So you don’t endorse entryism or electoralism but when I point out the specific flaws in logic around celebrating an election win by an entryist DSA member I am saying there has been no progress made and there’s no point in trying? I didn’t make you say the things that are flawed or respond to me when I point out those flaws.
I do organize, so why are you lecturing me on this? You are saying irrational things and getting personal. Am I supposed to take away from this that you are not overly invested in Mamdani and electoralism?
The path is now open for more leftists
Every sheepdog inspires this insipid line
You’re right. I’m sorry for having hope.
There are supposed communists on this website showing their whole ass over this lol. Like sure, it’s cool if some people get fed in NY. But trying to claim this as a huge win for socialism is embarrassingly liberal. People are still falling for this shit? Almost ten years after sanders started his shtick?
Many are still infected by liberal electoral brain. Even when they’ve learned a bunch of communist stuff, a person may perceive merely winning an election as a concrete victory, when of course we know it absolutely is not. The exaggeration of electoralist wins is essential for electoralism itself and the exaggeration of wins in general is always a bad sign for any org a person might join. It means the core of organizing work is achieving a fantasy, not grounded in the task before us, and tends to mean that those with level heads get harassed for insufficiently supporting those who “worked so hard” for the “win”. It turns the supposed communally-oriented project into one of self-actualization and vendettas. And it means that when deliberation creates new goals and plans, they are wrong goals and plans.
If universal suffrage had offered no other advantage than that it allowed us to count our numbers every three years; that by the regularly established, unexpectedly rapid rise in our vote it increased in equal measure the workers’ certainty of victory and the dismay of their opponents, and so became our best means of propaganda; that it accurately informed us of our own strength and that of all opposing parties, and thereby provided us with a measure of proportion second to none for our actions, safeguarding us from untimely timidity as much as from untimely foolhardiness–if this had been the only advantage we gained from the suffrage, it would still have been much more than enough.
But it did more than this by far. In election propaganda it provided us with a means, second to none, of getting in touch with the mass of the people where they still stand aloof from us; of forcing all parties to defend their views and actions against our attacks before all the people; and, further, it provided our representatives in the Reichstag with a platform from which they could speak to their opponents in parliament, and to the masses outside, with quite a different authority and freedom than in the press or at meetings. Of what avail was their Anti-Socialist Law to the government and the bourgeoisie when election campaigning and socialist speeches in the Reichstag continually broke through it? - Introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France, Engels
Get a load of Lib Engels over here
I am once again begging people to understand that these communist theorists were speaking about RUNNING IN ELECTIONS AND STANDING IN BOURGEOIS PARLIAMENTS AS POLITICALLY SELF CONSCIOUS MEMBERS OF A WORKING CLASS PARTY AND AS PART OF A WIDER POLITICAL PROJECT.
Find me a quote of Marx, Engels, Lenin, any non-revisionist communist theorist or revolutionary, endorsing entryism into a 150 year old imperialist bourgeois party that is completely controlled by capital, endorsing misleading the working class into believing that entryism into these parties is a vehicle for proletarian revolution and working class liberation. You won’t find one because it doesn’t exist. In fact, abusing quotes from Marx or Engels to justify liberal entryism is the quintessence of revisionism.
Like dude, it’s fine for you to get the warm and fuzzies over mamdani because there’s a little liberal deep down that you haven’t killed yet. We all feel that way sometimes. But please don’t use the words of some of the most intelligent and dedicated revolutionaries of all time to post-hoc justify what essentially is a vibes response from your limbic system.
And I’m begging know nothing online posters to look up the history of how successful third parties emerge in the United States, it’s through interparty RUPTURES
WE DON’T HAVE A POLITICALLY SELF CONSCIOUS WORKING CLASS PARTY and you’re not gonna build it from scratch in the imperial core, 100 years of sectarians trying has made that clear enough
We are one step behind the self-conscious conception, so we are forced to meet the masses where they primarily engage with politics and that’s the two party system, the point is to create a rupture within the party, pushing the capitalists out or more desirably forcing them to push us out so we can use the resulting rallying-cry leverage to create a viable third party with the self consciousness you’re looking for and that requires victories, Bernie’s dumbass couldn’t give us that baseline, Zohran has gotten far closer
All the benefits of electoralism that quote outlines are fully realizable even within the degraded conditions we find ourselves in, the quote isn’t promising imminent revolution, it’s observing the emergence of self-consciousness among workers after electoral contention and that doesn’t always require your book club conception of a ‘workers party’
look up the history of how successful third parties emerge in the United States, it’s through interparty RUPTURES
That is how successful bourgeois third parties completely captured by capital have emerged, yes. Not sure how it’s relevant though.
Not sure how it’s relevant though.
Again, how are these images relevant?
Ah yes I forgot, American “socialists” get to have a little exceptionalism, as a treat
You’re just throwing out buzzwords now, nothing I outlined above implies exceptionalism, a multitude of countries face similar degraded conditions that require interparty ruptures to generate more radical third party challenges to the status quo
Mexico and the emergence of Morena is a good example
I think the difference with Engels is that he advocated for communist electoralism and not hiding or shirking from true communist beliefs. Not triangulating your way into a more lib position just for power.
We cannot ignore modern conditions, we live under degraded conditions that prevent the organic emergence of communist electoralism
Our goal has never been to turn the democrats into a worker’s party through some socdem alchemy, the goal was always, whether some of us were conscious of it or not, to rupture the Democratic Party wide open and destabilize the two-party system
We weren’t supposed to be the Democrat version of the Tea Party, we’re supposed to be the socialist version of the early Republican Party when it burst out of the Whig party, using the modern breakdown of liberal institutions as the fuel for that rupture, mirroring the national breakdown that led to the demise of the Whigs
The proof of this potential for a party rupture exists right in front of our eyes; the popularity of Zohran-type candidates versus the universal disgust a supermajority of Americans hold the DNC, DESPITE both of them being “Democrats”
That’s our ticket to third party emergence and THEEEEN WE CAN START the building of communist electoralism
Modern conditions aren’t spontaneously creating communists. Existing leftists are creating new leftists through education, and opportunities to educate are created by events. The conditions just make people more susceptible to the education, they do not perform the education.
I didn’t say conditions are spontaneously creating communists, where are you getting that reading? My comment is about how a rupture can occur within the current two-party system and how that can lead to a viable third party that existing leftists may use as an opportunity to educate (I’m using your words for the highlighted bit, because in the event of realignment after a rupture, I’d hope leftists would do more than educate, they’d organize)
Apologies then, it came across to me as suggesting that things like Bernie weren’t really responsible for the growth of the left, but instead simply the conditions. What I worry about is that people think the conditions are all there is to it. The conditions are creating the events, and the events are where the left grows. Bernie’s near miss was a result of conditions. Zohran’s win is a result of the conditions. The communist’s job is to seize the moment and use it correctly. A lot of people seem to one to dismiss the moment rather than seize it though.
We cannot ignore modern conditions, we live under degraded conditions that prevent the organic emergence of communist electoralism
Then citing Engels in this way is silly, isn’t it?
No you’ve made one of the classic blunders - when I quote theory to support my argument I am a dialectician who is applying prior experimentation to my own unique material conditions, when you quote theory to support your argument you are a dogmatist book worshipper
No, because those are general observations that can and have been replicated under multiple different sets of conditions, modern or otherwise
They are general observations that apply to the US right now but also the US has special degraded conditions so they don’t apply? Friend, you are blatantly contradicting yourself.
Get a load of Rosa over there and how that worked out for her.
What is this sentiment besides a complete embrace of defeatism?
It is reminding you of the history and context that you are either unaware of or intentionally conflating. Engels is describing the German Social Democrats, specifically, and their entry into electoral politics, framing themselves as a class struggle party using this means to wage class struggle itself. If you know your history here, the German Social Democratic Party (you might know them as the SPD nowadays) consistently moved right and failed to respond to fascism, instead framing itself against the new and more militant faction of the communists, the Communist Party of Germany, the KPD. As part of these developments, where the SPD protected its status in the bourgeois stare apparatus rather than enjoin class struggle, Liebknecht and those repeating him proclaimed the famous, “Wer hat uns verraten? Sozialdemokraten!” Both him and Rosa were murdered by the party Engels is describing and allowed the rise of the Nazis through the ownership of material decay and attenuated and unbelievable attempts to agitate.
And just to be clear, NYDSA isn’t even remotely as principled as the SPD ever was. So what is “we”? They don’t think of communists as part of them, they sneer at you and call you tankie and conflate imperialist urbanism with socialism. They have no real functional relationships with labor, they just sometimes show up at labor actions with posters and awkwardly mill around. This is “us”, the Marxists fomenting class struggle? Are you sure?
Yes, the German Social Democrats are the only party in history to ever experience the electoral benefits described in that quote, no other party has been able to replicate the observations Engels was making in his time
And electoralism is definitely the reason Rosa was murdered by the Freikorps…WW1 and the devastating effect it had on the SPD? Never heard of it
Instead of writing silly sarcastic comments, please try your best to engage with what I actually wrote.
Yes, the German Social Democrats are the only party in history to ever experience the electoral benefits described in that quote, no other party has been able to replicate the observations Engels was making in his time
Who are you arguing with? I think you’ve entirely forgotten what we are even talking about. You’re getting angry at people in your head, not me.
And electoralism is definitely the reason Rosa was murdered by the Freikorps…WW1 and the devastating effect it had on the SPD? Never heard of it
Who were Noske and Ebert and what did they have to do with the SPD and Rosa? Do these actions say anything about why we shouldn’t be blanketly optimistic about electoralism by “socialists” and be cavalier about who we, by default, consider to be in our ranks or count as wins?
who is claiming it as a huge win? the huge win is how mad Cuomo and shit are. Everything else is a potential mild improvement at most, and manufacturing consent for imperialism at worst.
I’m not gonna name names or link to arguments in other threads because that’s petty shit, but trust me that I have been having back and forths with users who have called this “a victory for socialism”, like, verbatim, lol.
If nothing else it’s a propaganda victory for now and I don’t see why you can’t admit that
It could certainly turn into a propaganda failure if he ends up betraying his base or just failing to do anything but that hasn’t happened yet
I dunno though, is it a propaganda win if a bunch of people now consider themselves “socialists” but think socialism is when the mayor opens a grocery store?
Like sure quantitative change leads to qualitative change but it seems to me it’s gonna take a whole lot of education from actual communists to turn those libbed up Mamdani voters into class conscious proletarians…. Which is kind of the exact situation we were in beforehand.
If it is a propaganda victory, who is receiving that propaganda and how will it change them? Will I have an easier time recruiting and educating people for my org?
Yeah If the pipeline actually worked, Bernie and AOC supporters would have been actual marxists by now
I just want to say that probably half of the old subredd (and this site) were that before becoming what they are today. It does work. Not in like mass numbers, but it does work. You need a lot of these events to create more.
I agree with you though mostly, and have said the same in a few threads. I was initially very optimistic about him but I don’t see a functional difference between him and AOC right now.
There is also the survivorship bias where the people who ended up the furthest left talking to each other in Marxist forums start thinking that every other lib who loved Bernie and AOC would also be like them.
The reality is that the vast majority of the people who participated in those campaigns never moved beyond the milquetoast socdem phase.
Yes but one thing is certain, there are more real communists in the US today than there were 20 years ago. Various events happened to cause that and it didn’t just spontaneously manifest itself. Bernie was certainly the biggest of the events.
I think continued backsliding of material conditions for the working class (especially post-2008) and what the mainstream calls “rising inequality” (aka capitalist monopoly tendency) are the biggest drivers of creating new communists. When people are getting fucked by the system, some of them look around for alternatives, and if enough of them look a bunch end up finding socialism.
Sanders was just the figurehead of a popular movement that was an expression of the same energy, he didn’t “create” communists by any conscious positive action of his own. Although his abject two times failure and comfortable relationship with genocide and capitalism in general definitely drove some people to become radicalised via feeling betrayed/lost.
The reality is that the vast majority of the people who participated in those campaigns never moved beyond the milquetoast socdem phase.
Some moved the other way.
I think it’s significant for US politics because it shows a modicum of class consciousness in a large population of the US. People understand that there are people out there that we call “landlords”, “billionaires”, “oligarchs”, and they are the enemy. NYC has more people than about 4 out of 5 US states, and they unambiguously chose someone that proudly calls himself a democratic socialist and that seems to be because they like his platform and his rhetoric. 20 years ago, socialist was probably the worst political insult and a complete thought terminator. We are not politically dead anymore and that’s kind of exciting.
Personally, I think social democracy is a dead end because the rate of profit is now too low, and my understanding of democratic socialism is that it starts with social democracy and graduates to democratic socialism when the government does enough stuff
, so I don’t think it will work, but if it does, I will be happy because I think it is the easiest path. So people don’t want the status quo anymore. They want what we want. If social democracy can’t give it to them, some of them are going to choose revolution over putting their hope for a better future away. People want social democracy because the system is not providing for the basic material needs for too many people. So we should try it, and if we actually try to fix the system but the system can’t be made to provide basic material needs for people, the system does not work and must be replaced.I mean, the occupy wall street stuff from years ago showed that there was class consciousness in a large part of the population. I was a kid, but that’s when I learned of “the 1%” for the first time. But it never really went anywhere, right? I always wondered where all that energy went.
The energy had nowhere to go. No organization, no plan for escalation or how to achieve demands, and no representatives to speak on its behalf. Spontaneous horizontalist approaches naturally wind down or get cooptes by bourgeois interests and both happened to OWS.
If We Burn by Vince Bevins has a great analysis of those types of movements, and essentially ends with Bevins saying (in so many words) “we need a Leninist party”, lol
But it never really went anywhere, right? I always wondered where all that energy went.
This is something that an mind-boggling amount of ink has been spilled on. The main issues are that there was inadequate organization by the leftist factions and it got coopted by liberals and petered out like every directionless liberal protest project.
got coopted by liberals
Thank goodness that isn’t gonna happen with mamdani
liberals can’t co-opt something they founded
Class consciousness among entitled, imperial classes is exactly what breeds reaction and ultimately drives the danger of our present moment. Mamdani is not separate from MAGA.
Saying Cuba is a dictatorship shows his true colors. There doesn’t need to be any other explanation. Cuba is the litmus paper of politicians in the west and it’s periphery. If a politician from the west says that cuba is a dictatorship and all that bullshit you know it’s just another liberal bullshitting hard asf.
If I was running this place I would have made defending this guy a bannable offense the second that shit came out.
The pipeline does work but only through their failures. Give hope with vaguely left ideas, then expose yourself as a huckster or expose the system you operate in as fundamentally corrupt. This is how the AOCs and Bernie’s assisted radicalization. It was not by directly inspiring the youths to read Das Kapital and so on.
Mamdani would likely need a similar path because he is not backed by a party and they don’t do education or even really agitation. So fingers crossed that it is failure through systemic pushback and pointing the right fingers, as all of the forces in the country will try to make him own it and cowardly make excuses for the system.
I mean yeah but It’s more so that the average American will blame his failure because he’s a “dirty evil lying commie jihadist” or that he was “too radical” rather than recognize that anything left of social democracy is a better option. Forgive me If I’m being pretty cynical here btw.
Oh yes and that’s because it’s what bourgeois media will push. They will try to make him own every problem in New York, real or fictional, regardless of what he does, and will apply every label, and will try to get him killed.
So the only variable here is how the political formation operates in response to this, and it seems that this would be an exaggerative term for the Mamdani campaign, as it appears to just be a bourgeois electoral campaign leveraging the free labor of lefties, no strings attached. The formation is just this one dude and every question therefore becomes whether he, personally, can strategize against and withstand the machine as it operates against him. No longer just with PR, but with cops and capital strikes and bureaucratic undermining. He’d need to be ready to finger point ad nauseum and have the political cache to make this actually work. He’d need to have the ability to actually mobilize large quantities of people to push popular, material policies through.
And again it is just one dude that has always come across as slick and practiced and personally ambitious, not particularly principled. It is the opposite of a socialist formation.
I had flirted with Marx and felt inspired by socialist movements in Latin America prior, but the Bernie and AOC shit sent me off the rails for sure. I think that if Bernie had won, his mask would’ve slipped eventually and I would have ended up on a similar path, but it would’ve probably taken another 5-10 years for me to get where I am now, which STILL isn’t terribly far.
It would have been interesting to see, at least - Bernie doesn’t seem up to the task of using the biuly pulpit let alone using or building an organization behind him, so he would have owned his failures like any typical bourgeois politician.
Oh definitely, I guess I just mean that it was better a failure than a success because it accelerated my political development past electoralism into (striving towards) principled marxism
Yeah that makes sense. It’s easier to be disaffected by a party ratfucking than to realize the person your wanted to win actually sucks.
Definitely. And at the time I didn’t really think to dig into Bernie’s positions on particular things. I had done it in the past with other politicians but I was limited in my ability to really find out what I wanted to know so it would take me hours and hours of searching to really figure out my position on politicians. My first election was for Obama’s first term and even then I was like “man all of these candidates are saying a lot of nothing but I GUESS his platform is the best”… So after that, with Bernie’s rhetoric it was easy to ride the wave and not put the effort in since even his milquetoast positions were way more radical
Other than Dicky, Kissinger and that nazi debater taking forever naps this is like the first moderately good political thing that has happened in the US in a long time. Just let me have this lol
Not aimed at you, but hexbear on the Zohran issue feels like one group of people going, “nice, I just found $5 on the ground” and the other group goes, “UHHHH that’s not gonna pay your rent you still need to work this isn’t your retirement CALM DOWN”
Spending the $5 when it’s actually an IOU from an unknown character is the thing folks are being warned against.
“nice, I just found a ‘nordic’ socialism on the ground” - “That’s a counterfeit, leave it”
I have a pet peeve with American “anti-capitalists” in general. Where they constantly just whine how everything is expensive, no public transport and no free healthcare. Yet they’d probably be fine with the world suffering as long as they got those three things + whatever treats they want.
Do anti-capitalists in the periphery not want nice things? I think there’s a lack of awareness among many Western anti-capitalists as to how the sausage gets made, but that’s not the same thing as bloodlust. This also puts socialists in the periphery on a bit of a pedestal; they can be just as self-interested as their counterparts in the imperial core.
Chauvinism is rampant in the US, and so is racism, across all age groups.
I think what OP is saying gets across a lot better if you don’t treat it as a value judgement and instead just a statement of where people’s interests are. If FDR2 came and won the presidency together with a giant progressive blue wave in the US, they fix the imperialism machine to keep it going for a few more decades before we’re at +4C, would there be any significant mass of Americans who would have a genuine interest in dismantling their empire? Sure, in the Trump years when the empire machine is broken it does seem like there is a trajectory where masses will just keep getting radicalized further and further. But if the collapse of empire plateaud or reversed momentarily, who’s gonna get it back on track?
It would have to be the most marginalized, alienated, and oppressed people; yet we know that the ruling class is capable of giving enough concessions to contain those threats.
Bottom line is, the question of whether social democracy winning is productive for the purpose of dismantling empire is at least worth considering.
If FDR2 came and won the presidency together with a giant progressive blue wave in the US, they fix the imperialism machine to keep it going for a few more decades before we’re at +4C, would there be any significant mass of Americans who would have a genuine interest in dismantling their empire?
maybe you could dismantle it on the back of liberal support for the troops and the 30+ year old idea of a peace dividend. it’s never happening because all of us yanks became third-worldists.
Imma be pedantic and say: it depends. A timeline where the fascist slide eventually reverses is also likely one where China’s rise continues. If it reaches a point where the fossil fuel dominance the American empire is built on is no longer sustainable and China’s sitting on all the tech and resources needed for batteries and renewables, America isn’t going to have much of a choice but to play by the rules of a new global order. Which is to say, just as the imperial core uses the periphery to maintain itself, changes in the periphery can collapse the empire; the Vandals cross the Rhine.
While the American empire is something that should come to an end, there can be a Monkey’s Paw element to thar. A post-imperial America that’s just a collection of fragmented, fascist states that’s constantly destabilizing global politics is not ideal. The “how” of the collapse is important.
Now, that’s not to say I think social democracy has revolutionary potential. I just see the core limitation being that the bourgeoisie only tolerate it as long as there’s largesse to go around and the moment things tighten, social democracy is the first thing to go. And history has made it clear there’s not a revolutionary response to that.
For many people Mamdani seems like October revolution because in all honesty American society is heavily insulated. They’re the empire but they act like they’re the victims of the system on equal footing as Sudanese, Palestinians, and Congolese. American society is a society of settlers and their mind works like this, once I get my treats I will move on to next step, when in truth concessions only happen when bourgeoisie of a society are truly threatened so even for concessions an unconditional solidarity with the most oppressed of the world is required. There’s a difference between how black panthers achieved goals of providing healthcare and food and how a lot of white leftists seek to achieve them, black panthers knew that the system that excludes them will never truly include all of their community so they themselves opened clinics and breakfast programmes for their communities but white leftists try to make the system give them the crumbs in exchange for selling out the most oppressed people.
I’m mostly happy because he faced a campaign of terrible, Dem-backed Islamophobia, plausible threats from Trump, and of course extensive, extensive Zionist smears where, though his position is plainly inadequate as I’ve said before, he still always spoke against the idea of an ethnostate and against the genocide and to the end refused the calls for Hamas to lay down arms. He’s no leftist champion, but I’m very happy that the people of New York voted for him rather than buckle to complete Democrat orthodoxy.
It’s totally fine to be happy this happened, and to enjoy the gnashing of teeth from the chuds and Democratic establishment (but I repeat myself). It’s quite another thing to claim this is some victory for socialism tho.
American “leftists” generally care a lot more about treats for white people like healthcare than they do about millions of brown people
