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!
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
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.
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.