electoralism

Okay. Again, I've specified I am talking about this one particular situation and not more generally:

Keep in mind I am talking about Zohran Mamdani, who is running with the Dems, and not making a broader point about running as a democrat.

That I am not saying there's anything particularly noteworthy about running as a democrat:

All I am getting at is that if someone is running as a democrat it shouldn't be surprising when they are compromised, because the democrats are a bourgeois political party.

And indeed that there are other things a politician would need to do to defy the liberal ptb:

could have been part of building a worker's party but has been convinced by liberals that actually the defectors can change the character of the party rather than vise versa

"Building a worker's party" would (I think obviously) also entail building whatever organisations are required to make that worker's party effective. That would include a paramilitary and historically it has.

At no point have I been saying that it's anything other than material conditions. In fact my first comment said as much:

I thought that here of all places we understood that idealism is a dead fucking end.

I also implicitly acknowledged the role of state violence in a later reply:

I don't think he's a Bad Man who is doing what the cops say because of some internal moral failing. But his actions are compromising. A theoretical candidate who ran with DSA or as an independent or whatever who capitulated due to a gun to their head is also compromised.

Now I realise I didn't say it word for word but I thought that made it pretty clear that I know he's capitulating due to the threat of violence. Mamdani is running as a democrat precisely because he is not being a good materialist and isn't working in line with a material analysis, which is the same reason that he wasn't prepared to deal with threats from the police. It is, as I have acknowledged repeatedly, a symptom of his circumstances, not the cause of his behaviour. The only way in which it is "noteworthy" that he was elected on a democratic ticket is that anyone running as a democrat definitely hasn't done the work required to defy the NYPD. Just because anyone else who hadn't done that work would also cave doesn't mean the fact he ran as a democrat tells us nothing. It does. It's a symptom of the same problem that leaves him vulnerable to the NYPD.