this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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Chapotraphouse
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i thought he sounded cool too but in the end it's just another counter-insurgency candidate trying to capture and waste as much socialist organising capacity as possible.
never vote for a democrat
what insurgency?
the one that revolutionaries have been trying to build against American capital since the 1960s? including the campus uprisings and the largest wave of rioting in the US in history that both occured in the past 5 years? if you aren't aware of the use of that term to describe the role of left-liberal politicians in capturing and containing radical dissent that would otherwise lead to an escalation of struggle then you can just avoid participating in the conversation, you know.
mainly by legitimising the bourgeois electoral process as a means to achieve power against capital, which forestalls the development of revolutionary consciousness. if the DSA were more like a Bolshevik party (or a party of any kind, really) then these campaigns would be more useful bc they'd be able to dictate his moves and use him to demonstrate the inadequacy of bourgeois electoralism, but instead this campaign is leading the DSA in the direction of further participation in electoral politics as a route to achieve "socialism".
it's more about how over-emphasis on electoral struggles in imperial countries prevents the necessary development of revolutionary capacity. the only usefulness of these kinds of candidates is when they inevitably move into the Democratic mainstream and inadvertently disillusion a lot of people who were hoping they'd be more radical, which results in SOME of them developing more revolutionary ideas as a by-product (while pushing more of them into apathy or outright reaction)
Lol
wow the proportionally tiny number of left-liberal politicians to achieve prominence over that period did an incredible job knifing all that revolutionary energy
it may be hard for you to conceive of this but the DSA is a relatively large (by the standards of the US left) organisation which can direct its membership to participate in different political activities, and if they choose to direct them to do one thing, then they can't actually do others as much. so the decision about what is prioritised does matter. this is called "political strategy".
setting aside whether we can call DSA "revolutionaries" or adjacent to them or whatever, didn't their ranks swell up quite a bit due to the Bernie campaign?
there are revolutionary socialists and communists within the DSA, i'm not trying to call them a revolutionary org, but there are factions within it that are struggling to make it more of one
yeah they swelled their ranks due to the Bernie campaign but that was more of a by-product, and as we're seeing, a lot of those people basically want the org to be a Democrat-supporting NGO because their thinking didn't evolve beyond "elect socialists as Democrats". I don't think Mamdani's going to have the same kind of effect, either.
If the Actual Leftists within the org weren't able to take advantage of that surge of membership and win the newcomers to their side that doesn't speak very highly of said Actual Leftists or their tactics
Is there any evidence at all indicating that there was a revolutionary moment about to boil over in NYC, and that Mamdani's candidacy interrupted and de-escalated this?