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!
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