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.
Not really the point of the post but I genuinely think that if you (royal), as a leftist, have a problem with Zohran you are missing the forest for the trees. Dude's running arguably what is the most successful left-wing campaign the US has had in awhile and while his opponent is generating AI slop to use as attack ads, he's going out and connecting with real working class voters at the gay club, at the airport, at the park, so on and so forth. I said it before and I'll say it again, not supporting him is really stupid as an American leftist when you look at how his mayoral victory in the largest city in the country may shape national politics.
I don't care about Zohran's ostensible authenticity because I'm not naive enough to be lead by the mouth over something so superficial.
I don't care about national politics or the laughable prospect of somehow tricking people into socialism, or becoming leftwing, with rhetoric and electoralism. American national politics is cancer. If you believe in it as an avenue for change, you believe cancer will deliver you a future. That is foolishness.
People want a feel good story about a man that is coming to save them. No such thing will happen. There is no savior for us. There is no rhetoric to convince anyone. The evidence of an absent revolutionary force is exactly the progressivism that you prescribe.
lot of assumption going on here in this comment but okay thank you for your input
If you have something to say, say it. Accusing someone of making assumptions while refraining from spelling them out is something I would expect from an unserious liberal.
lol
Your point has been proven
the anti-electoralism Hexbears who are too afraid to go outside are calling me a liberal
Never addressing the arguments :)
ok dumbass here I'll do it for you hope this helps
assumption about me being 'naive enough to be led by the mouth over something so superficial', also just a generic assumption about me thinking Zohran is 'authentic', whatever the fuck that means
assumption about me believing it any election is an 'avenue for change' I never said that
assumption about me wanting a feel good story
please continue to reply, i'm glad i gave you an sorely needed enrichment activity (based on the number of comments you've left under my OP), just remember - you're online and none of this has any bearing on your actual life!!! Go outside and join an org you dipshit.
To re-iterate my point… this isn’t about electoralism or what your opinions are on Mamdani. I am only pointing out that we have someone who identifies as socialist who will be the number 1 news story in the country for the next few days, and his ostensible “socialism” - whatever you want to think about - will be a big part of that story. Assuming the people in your personal life know you are a socialist, there is a good chance they will want to chat with you about it. What you do with that opportunity is up to you. I plan on leveraging it as much as I can. Maybe taking a strongly critical position is better for the people around it, but it is not for me and I would imagine for a very large portion of the American user base here.
Sure, and as an opportunity to talk about socialism with people it's great. But that doesn't mean the same as "supporting Zohran", who is running for office as part of a bourgeois political party and thus, no matter what his personal politics are, not "as a socialist".
It's a ballot line, not a marriage. You take it to be taken seriously. It doesn't mean you are beholden to worship Nancy Pelosi or something.
Stop thinking about this in terms of the symbolism and look at it as a tool to gain power. Heck, run as a Republican in certain places if it gives you a bigger soapbox and a better chance to actually improve people's lives!
He's gaining power as a liberal, not a socialist, by running for office as a democrat. He is granting greater power and influence to the democratic party, not to socialism.
Zohran is not as left as I want, but IDK if liberal is what I would call him. We'll see
I didn't say he personally was a liberal, I said he was running as a liberal. You're just queueing for
how does it make any sense to run as your enemy's ballot line. you can't be in opposition to dems and reps one day and then run as them on another. it is completely incoherent strategy.
Because it's just a label on a ballot? What the candidate actually does in relation to the party is what matters, not what line they run under.
There's no formal membership or controls over who takes the Dem or Rep ballot lines. There's no test. You never have to show up to any Dem events or take anyone's calls. That's on the candidate and if you get through the primary you get a bunch of "free" votes for holding that line.
If you run 3rd party people avoid you like the plague because of first-past-the-post. I wish it was different.
the point is to make it different. not to just submit to the two party structure. and ballot lines do matter if you want to build an oppositional party. it doesn't make sense to run candidates that would only boost your opponent's party.
I agree that we should have our own ballot line and be more out there with our views. I encourage Hexbears wherever you live to start running for local races and pulling that Overton window left.
Right now the Zohran campaign decided running under the Dem line was the best way to gain power and make people's lives better, and they were right!
And holding that line makes a difference right now because voters are taught to only look at the two party lines and ignore third party options. There's actually, what, 7 people running for Mayor? But only 3 get any attention or get invited to any debates. That's a many-faceted problem, and the Zohran team gets to sidestep that problem by taking one of the two major party lines. If he ran as "Socialist" or something yeah he'd be a more "pure" candidate but would have polled at 1% and been ignored by everyone. And we'd be talking about Cuomo getting coronated tonight instead of likely getting destroyed.
to me the point is not "pureness" of a candidate, its that individual candidates gaining power does nothing to build a working class party. because why ever bother with another party if you can vote for the good dems?
I don't agree with that. Having someone like this as Mayor of one of the largest cities in the world goes a long way towards building that working class movement. He will have the ability to switch parties and be a figurehead for a new party in the future. This election is building excitement all over and left orgs are going to grow as people see its possible for people with Zohran type platforms to take power. PSL will have an influx of members after today.
The biggest disagreement I have here is the expediency of this new party. I agree I want a separate party too! But I want new Yorkers to have their rent frozen, their busses cheaper, their groceries more affordable NOW, not years from now when a workers party organizes enough to win this seat.
I care more about having the right people in power than what line they run under.
If he does all those things as a democrat, all the influence that accrues as a result will go to the democrats.
I doubt that he will actually be able to achieve them all as a democrat anyway, and not meeting campaign promises is par for the course for Dems but likely to tank Mamdani's reputation.
Well then he's just a another disappointment, but I'm choosing to be positive & hopeful today.
What turns people off from organizing with the left is all of the negativity and purity testing. It's exhausting. I get it, nothing anyone does is ever good enough and if no one meets all 250 of your specific policy points then they are liberal scum who deserve no support. Cool, enjoy your book club and getting nothing done while the rest of us actually work to make people live better lives. So sick of this negativity that is everywhere it makes me want to quit the left completely. I want to win not complain all day!
Were they? He hasn't even won yet, let alone started exercising the power he would gain in doing so, but he has already started compromising with democrats. He is subordinate to a bourgeois political party. This isn't purity testing or optics. He is on target to prove Lenin correct that people should run in liberal elections as part of a worker's party, not just run in them any way they can. This is just anarcho-bidenism all over again.
I'd love to be proven wrong, but as I say the man has already started compromising before he has any power.
For New Yorkers' sake I hope you're wrong and the guy does the things he promises.
And if not maybe it's time for some Hexbears to run for office? And if you have to take a Partisan line you don't want to becayse it gives you the better chance of winning I'll understand ;)
This is different from the statement in the reply by abc though, right?
Zohran isn't left wing he is just a liberal that pushes the official narratives of the establishment. How can you not see this despite living in usa I don't even live there and it's so easy to spot. He is glowing like his counterparts in Europe
IIt's obvious to some but most are hopeless. It takes so much effort to just to critique liberalism. Everyone has to be held by the hand and treated like a child or else they will have a tantrum. They are as fragile as they are obtuse. This is not just because they are merely naive, it because it allows them to control the narrative and center white, liberal, imperial subjects as moral and measured. They are inherently conservative, protecting the status quo by foreclosing revolutionary futures and advancing imperial sensibilities.
I have long wondered how the American imperial left will manifest the political power extracted from Palestinian resistance. Zohran appears to be one of the most cynical manifestations. I have always believed that the attention from the American left on Palestine will inevitably benefit Americans most of all. I am waiting to be proven wrong because regardless of if Zohran is "successful" or not I think my suspicion will be correct
Are they wrong? Zohran is running for the democratic party. The fact he's calling himself a socialist while doing so is potentially a great opportunity to discuss socialism with people, but he's not running as a socialist. He is running as a liberal, for a bourgeois political party whose politics are... Liberalism.
I can’t believe we’re doing the “Bernie calls himself a socialist so that makes the word more palatable for the burgerreich” thing again in 2025
Literally the only concession I am willing to make is that normalising the word is an opportunity to talk about it. Maybe even that's too much - maybe treating it as just an opportunity is giving Mamdani too much credit and instead it forces us to talk about it or let the term be even more tortured away from its actual meaning.
Time to make socialism more palatable by making it not socialism!
I do think there is a small amount of utility in any positive association with socialism. I have encountered many, many Americans who think socialism is when all the citizens of a country are enslaved. Linking anything positive with the word is better than that. But yeah, Mamdani calling himself socialist and running as a democrat is overall a bad thing.
No.
Zohran has triangulated so much that his stans go into hiding nearly every time he is mentioned on this website.