this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2026
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I'm honestly at the point of just saying electoral victories are counter productive for the left in the imperial core cuz the candidate always end up being a let down and we spend all our time arguing about them. I sometimes question if above ground organizing is really worth it at all because most of the US "working class" are global equivalent of kulaks.
Above ground organizing from a revolutionary perspective is necessary for any actual popular movement, the issue is these dsa and socdem (and dsa socdem) candidates were never interested in supporting something compatible with revolution.
A 100+ comment thread on a fucking mayor. He could be a fascist and it wouldn't change things much because mayors are pretty low on the totem pole. In a decade, we went from caring about a potential presidential candidate to caring about a mayor. Said potential presidential candidate from 2016 was also a mayor for a while, but notice how he only became nationally relevant once he stopped being a mayor and went to pursue more important offices. This is how far we have sunken.
internet comments are basically free. also the meta discussion isn't about one guy, don't backflip into great man theory.
To be fair, there is a major difference between Burlington (43,000 people) and New York City (8,600,000 people) in terms of both population and capital accumulation. It’s 200 times bigger and likely several thousand times more wealth accumulated.
However you are totally correct that mayor is small potatoes and has very little power, as demonstrated by the excuses of “what is he supposed to do, NYPD will kill him if he tries to exert any influence beyond free childcare”. Yeah, kind of defeating your own argument there Soc Dems
The population doesn't really matter if we're playing by bourgeois electoral games. Sanders only represents around 322330 people (because he shares 644663 people with another senator), but he is far more politically relevant than Mamdani because Sanders is a senator while Mamdani is just some mayor. Neither of them have a paramilitary, so their real political power is effectively 0.
on the other hand one mayor has way more of a direct impact on someone's life than one out of 100 senators.
i also don't think
is correct analysis, you vote for each senator separately and give or take deaths, moving, and teens growing up it's the same population this year as it next time ~~and then they represent their donors rather than the public~~
Right I was comparing mayor to mayor
Sakai showed us all this already, I thought.