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WHY AM I EVEN AWARE OF ONE OF YOUR (NOT EVEN) MAYORS?? WAS RATBOY NOT ENOUGH??
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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
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chapotraphouse
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those "falling for it" = the large number of (well-intentioned) socialists who are now saying "wow we need to do Mamdani style campaigns everywhere!" and insisting that organisations that could be doing better work with their manpower throw themselves into stupid electoralism because of this
and of course we can't ignore that his politics might breathe new life into a Democratic party that was looking to be on its last legs
basically it's not particularly good to have socialist organising be redirected towards electoralism as the primary field of political struggle, and the hyper-focus on Mamdani and candidates like him achieves that. if he was a candidate running under the name of an actual independent party which could hold him to certain lines and not just have him end up being a new flavour of Democrat, that would be different.
Zohran Mamdani represents something in political energy and discourse that socialists would be foolish to write off as bourgeois electoralism. It's possible to engage with that energy to productive ends, even without believing that his tactics are ultimately going to be successful.
As socialists, it's our duty to understand every twist and turn of the history of struggle in our country. Like it or not, Zohran Mamdani is now a relevant part of that history.
yeah and my point is that this phase of his career is now over. now the game is to point out his issues, point out the deficiencies in the "democratic" structure that make it impossible for him to actually be the figure people wanted him to be. push further left and push for strengthening independent socialist organisations rather than subjugating them to the Democratic apparatus. people who want to keep backing him at this point will end up in the same dustbin as those who still back Bernie and AOC.
Why should we do this prior to him winning? If our whole point is to point out the contradictions in electoralism, wouldn’t it make more sense to get him to office and then point out and say “see? You can win as a socialist and the system will still prevent you from affecting change.”
I’m anti-electoralism but I don’t get this position. Doesn’t Lenin write that we should participate in it to highlight its contradictions?
I'll come at this from a different angle: Zohran's behavior in office is a measure of NYC-DSA's ability to discipline their candidates and their ability to learn from AOC.
We shouldn't be saying "Zohran is a sheepdog" or w/e we should be saying "DSA come get your man"
I'm the take validator and this is a valid take
That is more elegant than my response would've been
Zohrans victory doesnt invalidate third party bids, if anything it encourages them by giving them a successful template that can defeat DNC fuckery
The Democratic Party is still as unpopular as ever so that's not true, instead Zohran has caused an explosion of DSA and PSL membership and most importantly of all he is normalizing pro-Palestinian sentiment and proving once and for all that pro-Palestinian candidates can win and win big, THAT and that alone justifies the "hyper focus" we should have for Zohran, he's a newly divergent tributary that can one day transform into its own river
Otherwise the anti-electoral brigade needs to justify why it's actaully a good thing for Socialist development that pro-Palestine candidates lose to centrist dems
what, by running popular candidates within the Democratic party? handing them our best political figures while having no ability to actually manage or restrain them according to the democratic will of an independent socialist organisation? how does that defeat the DNC?
millions of people going into the streets and voicing these sentiments for years normalised it, not a single politician. you have it backwards and this is a liberal mode of thinking.
Bernie and a number of other candidates were already this and they've since proved their ultimate worthlessness, the phase of struggle in which these candidates are useful to the left is over.
NYC-DSA was very clear that running on the democratic party ballot line was an NYC specific strategy and a requirement to be a viable candidate in NYC.
Running on the democratic party ballot line is also not the same as running "within the democratic party". Its a weird nuance specific to US politics. Whose name gets a (D) or an (R) next to it isn't controlled by the parties but the local election commission. Mamdani doesn't have any obligations to the NYC democratic party and that's why they're still rallying around Cuomo. He effectively stole their ballot line.
He's running for mayor not congress or the senate, he has to maintain support with the orgs he's allied with to leverage their base for support within city goverment, a senator can ignore the unions and socialist orgs of their hometown, Zohran can't
This is idealism, a million westerners with their half-support for Palestine didn't do jack shit, in case you haven't noticed the genocide is still raging
Power in this country is in the hands of a small poltical class, but a pro-Palestinian candidate becoming mayor of New York City is something those politicians can't ignore like they do with a hundred protests
Bernie dammed up his own tributary, Zohran gave a rousing speech to the DSA the minute after he won, Bernie wouldn't have done that
You're plainly moving the goalpost. The person you are responding to explicitly said that the protests "normalized sentiments" of supporting Palestine, not that they have saved Palestine from the genocide.
Also, westerners have done something material, because they have at least given millions of dollars to organizations that actually help Palestinians in a number of ways. No, that is not remotely, fractionally enough, but to act like it's nothing when it has saved people's lives is gross.
I wasn't moving the goalpost, I was being charitable and assuming the person I was talking to wasn't a total dumbass, the genocide being broadcast all over the world is what "normalized sentiments" the protests were a reaction and weren't a major factor in shifting people's sentiments, that's literally getting the causation backwards
Now who's moving goalposts, we're talking about PROTESTS not the concept of "doing something material" a protest and a donation drive are not the same thing, and there's nothing "gross" about pointing out that as per the stated goals of the protests, they were failures, some people may find comfort in just the fact the protests happened, I don't
This is a strange reply. I don't think any protest had the stated goal of "immediately stopping the genocide" because that is obviously outside of their power. There were definitely protests that had stated goals of making this or that entity divest that failed, though there were also ones that succeeded. More to the point, do you not understand that the genocide being broadcast all over the world, though it has other causes contributing, was indeed something protestors have consciously undertook doing to the point that Zionists actively complain about those people disseminating pictures and videos for the purpose of showing the horror Israel is inflicting?
Do you not think that people were recruited and educated on this subject at protests sites around the world? Do you not think that the absurd response to Columbia's protestors, Mahmoud Khalil's case, and so on did not open anyone's eyes to how ridiculous the zionist orthodoxy is? Do you think there is no connection between all of this and the relative success of charities collecting donations with the help of these same protest groups? You said their "half-support for Palestine didn't do jack shit" and you're just wrong.
Give me a break, plenty of them did think that, not every protest was organized by steely-eyed Leninists with a realist perspective on politics, dare I say quite a few were extremely liberal in their messaging and outlook
Social media was the primary, secondary, hell even tertiary vector of dissemination for the images and videos that radicalized millions around the world, not the protests, I don't get how this is even remotely a controversial point, I summit the protests may in some or many cases imparted confidence to people to express their radicalized views, but they didn't create them wholesale
I'm not gonna just take that on faith, Americans and westerners in general are notorious protest tourists, I need to see data proving protests led to an uptick of recruitment and education, and I mean the protests themselves, not the reaction to the genocide broadly
No, seemed to me most Americans backed or tacitly supported the police brutality against Columbia protesters, the Mahmoud Khalil case was different, but I wouldn't place it under the banner of protests
No, I believe the relative success of the charities was by far a result of social media engagement
Then I'll amend my statement to be more accurate; aside from donations and charities, the half-support for Palestine didn't do jack shit, the world including all of the west failed Palestine, that's undisputable
You sure are mad at a group of people who I've never seen personally, and am not entirely sure actually exists.
literally the right wing of the DSA and a large part of the membership is what i'm describing
i think we have to trust people to understand the difference between mamdani and governor hocul or fuck schumer. It's his policies that are successful not the party.