The NYC mayor's race is the most watched political race in the US right now, by a large margin too (I guess the second most is Prop 50 in CA? Either way that one is way behind). After Tuesday, Zohran's win will probably be the big story that normies IRL will be talking about here. "Socialism" will be a topic on top of everyone's minds.
And I think everyone here - even if you have major issues with Zohran specifically or electoralism in general - should be ready to speak to it among the people in your life.
Opportunities like this don't come around very often. Right now Americans are getting a ton of misinformation about what socialism is due to a demsoc running and very likely winning the job of mayor of the biggest city in the US. On top of that, this misinformation is transparently bad ("Zohran wants to sieze all the grocery stores in New York!") that if you simply point to what's actually being proposed, you will look pretty knowledgeable by comparison. This is all very low hanging fruit.
But you have to be prepared. Like literally, you should practice how you will respond to people who want to talk to you about Mamdani and socialism. The other day, AcidSmiley made a comment that I've been thinking about ever since: she said she had to deradicalize herself a bit from this site because she was having trouble interacting with normal people and not sounding like she was unhinged. I absolutely do this too. Whenever a topic tangential to socialism or imperialism comes up with people IRL, I end up overshooting. I scare people away even if they have a sense that I'm right. What I say sounds totally reasonable to us here, but to people who aren't engaged with stuff it doesn't matter how correct you are; if you can't meet them where you are they will tune you out.
So for me, today and tonight I'm gonna skim through Ha-Joon Chang's "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism". It's not straight Marxist analysis but it's written for the people I'll be talking to. I'm also going to try and brush up on my knowledge of Zohran's specific policies (like freezes on rent for rent controlled apartments, that seems to be one everyone brings up and I don't feel I know enough about it).
For those of you who are strongly against Zohran or electoralism.... do whatever you want ofc, but I'm just saying if a normie asks you about Zohran and you say "he's just a social fascist" and scoff, then that will be a missed opportunity. People will have no idea what you are talking about and frankly probably won't be interested in hearing more.
I've said before that electoralism has it's uses, including spreading the word.
EDIT: @FunkyStuff@hexbear.net said it best:
I said 'electoralism' when I meant 'tactically participate in elections'. A good reminder to myself that word definitions matter.
I don't know if this is the standard use of the term, but to me electoralism = we will achieve our goal (socialism) by voting in politicians who will enact it. IMO tactically participating in elections to further the socialist position, without necessarily staking your movement on their outcome, is not electoralism, it's just basic Marxist Leninist strategy.
That is a better definition, except then it also means the same thing as demsocism, and also a lot of baby leftists and ultras end up using it to mean any sort of electoral participation
Well in my head "electoralism" is a word almost always used in an explanation of why that strategy doesn't work so it carries a different connotation to "democratic socialism" (which just translates to "social democracy" in practice, and those who call themselves social democrats are just neoliberals). The remaining examples of people using the term are, as you said, baby leftists and ultras who just use it to mean participation in electoral politics.
This has always been my interpretation of “electoralism” as well.
Does Mamdani have a "revolutionary position and party standpoint" to bring to public attention? This is starting to sound like Vaush and Hasan misrepresenting Lenin to justify voting for the democrats.
And? That means anarcho-bidenism is a good idea now?
No, I'm agreeing with you. The joke is that the same arguments keep happening in 2016 (more like 1916 lol), then in 2020, then... and so on.
This time it's different