im slowly turning into raul castro
The first one is for practice, to make sure we have the process down correctly. The second is the one that counts. And the third? The third is just for me
Lol, you all were shitting on me for calling this like 3 months ago.
his defense squad have been awful quiet the last few weeks
I critically supported him. Shitting on Cuba and Venezuela is a red line, so I don’t critically support him anymore. Pretending like half of hexbear are secret demsocs is an unfair characterization though.
Edit: I critically supported him because I saw him as helping to develop class consciousness without YET crossing any red lines. Sure, I suspected he could disappoint in the future but I believe and still maintain it’s ok to hold cautious optimism (and be ready for disappointment) instead of just assuming we’ll get fucked over as if it’s a given.
Edit 2: My position is that there are some positions, though correct, are positions that a US politician simply cannot take in public. I don’t like it but I accept it. Talking positively about Stalin, for example. Zohran’s comments about Oct 7 were right on that edge, IMO. But shitting on Cuba, come on. Cuba is like one of the safest ones to support. And shitting on Maduro is actively harmful rn
I critically supported him. Shitting on Cuba and Venezuela is a red line, so I don’t critically support him anymore.
Yepppppp. He’s literally just male AOC now. He has the exact same god damn positions.
one succ congresswoman has no power, a succ mayor can materially improve the lives of his constituents. he might become Obama, it depends how much he straight up lied about trying to do, but if the rent freeze and stuff come through then he’s still better than all of them. and my criteria here is him not even making the machine stop him but just preemptively giving up like obama didn’t try to codify Roe despite campaigning on it.
Successful socdem policy without laundering people leftwards by defending AES is actively harmful to socialism. It reduces the possibility of socialism occurring in the US and it reduces the support for socialism outside the US.
It is social chauvinism and reinforces capitalism rather than weakening it. Does it improve lives? Yes. Does it help socialism? Absolutely the opposite. Obviously we can not and should not oppose good policy that will help workers (accelerationism) but we should loudly criticise him for this position as harmful to socialists.
reinforcing capitalism is nearly every
politician isn’t it?he’s not and never positioned himself as the revolution, but a rent freeze and city grocery stores are incredibly radical for american politics.
Sure but I’m not going to do anything except give him shit and criticism now. Being good for a liberal is still being a liberal.
There absolutely were a set of Defenders who were fighting against criticism, claiming that he was actually great and principled and that the warning signs were strategic steps back or something of the sort. I agree that it wasn’t very fruitful to just complain about him, but the apologetics were very frustrating and now obviously incorrect
we’re not ‘just complaining’ about him. We are admonishing and correcting our incorrect “comrades” here who repeatedly pursue failed tactics and dead end strategies, and pervert and distort marxism in their quest to do so. We wouldn’t hammer on the succs this hard if people didn’t double down with succ ideology and just stopped being this way
Why is it so hard for the reformists and chauvinists to just admit they’re wrong and move onto more principled methods and positions? Why do they have to cling to this shit so hard? Why do they put their backs to the opportunists who betray us, while placing their front to us? Don’t they realize that makes them appear to us as our enemies?
Oh I agree with you, there are many doing much better than just complaining about him, by writing useful critiques and suggesting better methods. I just mean that only complaining isn’t useful. And so when a Mamdani-fan said to complainers ‘your complaining is useless,’ I agreed. But the apologetics when someone was doing good analyses and critiques was frustrating and now clearly incorrect.
I was of the opinion after the first few struggle sessions that we were pretty much out of things to criticize for now and just had to hold out til more dropped or the campaign was done. He was either a shitlib or not, and people had already drawn their lines in the sand with the evidence on hand. Recently more compelling evidence has come out that shitlibness is confirmed so I think this is a convo worth having again.
it’s irrelevant what his “true power level” is. The entire strategy of using the DSA to endorse democrats and opportunists is a dead end failure. It’s like saying “let’s hold out to see this yeast’s true rising power” while making your bread with just water and yeast. You’re doing the process wrong, you’re missing ingredients, the “true yeastiness” is irrelevant.
I know his true power level is irrelevant, people that think it is were going to continue to do so though until the failure of the methods were made apparent.
Using your bread example, you’ve pointed out that they are missing ingredients, they deny that is a relevant factor. You are essentially arguing with a brick wall at that point until the bread doesn’t rise. The initial comment was made, and it is useful to remind them when the bread that should’ve rose has not, but before that they’ll just say, “This bread will rise.”
With the bread not rising, some will reasonably realize they are using a failed recipe book. Should the fact there is evidence the recipe is failed before something that should be enough, yes? But if they were listening to that, they wouldn’t be insisting it will rise at all. If they didn’t know at all and were open to reason without having to watch it fail real time, the moment you said they were missing ingredients, they would have asked what you meant and would adjust what they believed, meaning the reiteration is unneeded because this group would already convert after the initial providing that trying to make bread this way failed every other time.
his geopolitics can suck, he’s running for mayor. It’s disappointing and we certainly shouldn’t lionize the guy but if he actually does a rent freeze he’s automatically better than 99% of liberal politicians and that would be a material improvement in the lives of thousands of people. I don’t see a mechanism where the effort that went into the campaign could cause a rent freeze in a more principled manner, at some point you’re interacting with an elected official you might as well have one that promised to do it.
no. this chauvinist apologism needs to end. he’s calling for war. he’s no better than any american politician, and if americans are willing to sell out the global south and kill them all for some rent freezes then I wish infinite high rents on American chauvinists.
The primary contradiction is imperialism, not rent freezes. Until Americans figure this out they will keep betraying the global working class.
i think it is difficult for someone barely surviving to concern themselves with issues that do not directly affect them. reactionary thought breeds in precarity. if you’ve got some realistic way to address both at once and help a similar amount of people with the same immediacy then you know some secret techniques i don’t.
fuck mamdani but fuck everybody else in his position more.
I’ll cosign everything you said here o7
I critically supported him. Shitting on Cuba and Venezuela is a red line, so I don’t critically support him anymore. Pretending like half of hexbear are secret demsocs is an unfair characterization though.
you are during election season. Then once that’s over and the high tide of American chauvinism recedes it’s more like 10% instead of 50%. The never ending cycle of westoidism
No they’ve been loud as shit telling us he’s paving the way for the democratic socialists of amerikkka to elect more democrats in New York
yeah it’s honestly amazing how shameless they are. L after L and they still arrogantly battle on, repeating the same disproven wrong arguments even as they are openly being proven wrong in that very moment
i just want people to have their rent frozen and that’s more than any serious electoral candidate has promised in years.
That’s fine, so long as you accept he’s an anticommunist liberal Zionist. You can vote Biden if you don’t want Trump; you can vote Mamdani if you don’t want cuomo, just don’t pretend he’s anything more than what he is: a left imperialist
i hate this comparison because biden didn’t promise anything good. mamdani has, and he didn’t run on not being cuomo he ran on positive things. this is a HUGE difference. he’s got his foot so far in his mouth i’m expecting it to come out of his ass soon but he’s categorically not the same as establishment democrats.
My take is that these kinds of unforced Ls 100% do deserve criticism, but on the other hand, his politics are way better than NYC mayors usually get (e.g. Eric Adams and the Cuomo family) and he might warm people to the left and the term “socialism”. Electoralism will never be the solution and pretending otherwise is quite silly.
Basically just like we treat people like Bernie around here even though he has been making some serious Ls since at least the 1990s
Except he won’t if he won’t actually claim socialists or at least shut the fuck up about them. I pray that he is lying, but this does not help us at all, it distances us from these ideas and concepts, and for what? A sniff at the ass crack of power? At least compromise your principles for something real.
HOW ARE PEOPLE SURPRISED
i’m surprised a mayoral candidate keeps saying stuff about geopolitics
he’s running for mayor this doesn’t actually matter, it’s just punching himself in the balls for no reason.
That was actually my take at the time.
He was gonna Lib out, but lets be frank, would him fucking Tankie posting really help him win this campaign? Outside of us and some weird old Maoists left over from the anti-Vietnam era, every “leftist” in this country is Lib as fuck.
Critical support I guess.
He didn’t have to say this, it doesn’t help his campaign at all. It wasn’t even prompted. He said this because he believes it, because he’s an American chauvinist social democrat.
yeah i don’t understand who this is for. it’s not to help him win. he could and should just say nothing about geopolitics.
Yeah, I guess at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter.
He’s not even running for that influential of a position. IDK why everyone makes such a big deal about it either way. Rather he wins than Cuomo but that’s damning with faint praise.
He’s not even running for that influential of a position. IDK why everyone makes such a big deal about it either way. Rather he wins than Cuomo but that’s damning with faint praise.
I agree with you. I just think many people think of him as a leftist leader, which is both wrong and harmful.
People need to realize there will never be a leftist leader in the United SSnakes of Amerikkka. What would an Amerikkkan leftist leader even run on? More tasty treats for the labor aristocracy?
“leftist leader” is a fuzzy term here. there are some in unions. the PSL has leadership. maybe one of them can sneak into congress (not that they’d accomplish anything other than a bully pulpit) if the stars align.
yeah he hasn’t backed off of the busses, grocery stores, and rent freeze (yet?) so he’s still the best serious candidate in untold decades. that’s not praise, the bar is just under the hudson.
I’ve been saying this since the start, calling him out for liberal Zionism 27 days ago, posting the Jorge Ramos episode from weeks ago where he condemned them but didn’t use the word dictator. Seems like even the fencesitting was too far left.
Didn’t you catch a temp ban over it, too?
Nah I think that was somebody else
And where did that bring you? How many times do I have to teach you this lesson?
apparently infinite in a never ending cycle
shut up shut up shut up
you’re RUNNING FOR MAYOR shut the fuck up
You’re running for LOCAL OFFICE. You don’t need to field these questions. Cuba and Venezuela are not your concern.
At least with Israel they can say “NYC is largest population of US Jews, plus generally Americans are concerned about an ongoing genocide, so it is slightly relevant to the NYC mayoral position”
But the mayor of NYC needs no position on Venezuela, it’s really easy to just say nothing instead of cosigning war crimes
but if you’ve got dogshit opinions please do air them so everyone knows who you really are
Why do this
Because he believes it, because he’s a piece of shit American. None of these people are hiding it.
Who are these statements even for? The right will see it as a bold faced lie, people on the far left will hate these statements and see it as a betrayal of core values, and I guess people on the centre left get to use it as a token statement to try shut down right wing critique. Yay.
and Trump is acting just like those authoritarian dictators too!
Can they just invent like ONE good American pls
This is getting a bit silly
There’s lots, but as a rule you won’t see them on the democratic ticket
I believe that’s what the kids are calling survivorship bias
Fuck this social fascist piece of shit
Reading his Wikipedia article and comparing it with other people like Corbyn and Maduro makes him look so bad in comparison. But I’m not taking about the obvious like comparing what they are now or what they have done because Mamdani obviously hasn’t done much by virtue of not having a real political career. Even comparing their very early forays into politics make Mamdani look like a fraud.
Maduro:
- Formed an illegal union and slowly climbed up the ranks within unions.
- Went to Cuba where he was ideologically trained by Cuban communists.
Morales:
- Started out being just some dude who’s really interested in football, which was his foot into a coca grower union.
- Slowly climbed the ranks of the union until he became general secretary of the union.
Corbyn:
- Joined the Labour Party and various student activist groups at an early age.
- Attended a May Day parade in Allende’s Chile which radicalized him.
Mamdani:
- Ran a bunch of fake elections (student president and so on)
- Worked as a foreclosure prevention and housing counselor
- Got involved in NYC politics
Overall, Mamdani’s backstory paints him as some dude who just wants to be an elected politician and have always wanted to be an elected politician since he was little. He was never involved in any labor organizing or political activism. Given his backstory, it will isn’t that surprising he would completely capitulate because none of his history thus far show him as someone who cares about anything but the trajectory of his own political career. He’s just young enough that he doesn’t have much of a political career yet, so there’s less opportunity for him to go mask off in being a careerist.
Edit: I thought about it some more, and my impression of him is even worse now. Let’s look at Sanders. Sanders started out as a participant of the civil rights movement. Mamdani is a millennial, and the millennial equivalent of civil rights activism is stuff like anti-Iraq war protests and BLM. But was he even a participant in those activism or any activism at all? Was he protesting against the Iraq war? Was he protesting against police brutality? Was he even involved in Occupy, the millennial movement that first started in the same exact city he’s running for mayor?
Damn, I didn’t care for him at all, and even I feel bamboozled after reading his Wikipedia article. Shoulda done the bare amount of investigation by reading a Wikipedia article and going off on him when a lot of his stans are still around lmao
Wasn’t his father like a very influential academic of african geopolitics or something i feel like it’s kinda bad faith to leave that out.
That literally means nothing. Castro’s father was some shitty plantation owner, yet Castro threw out Batista (around the same age as Mamdani I might add) and expropriate all plantations to the socialist state, starting first with his father’s.
long line of shitlibs with based dads
That baffles me. A child of a Marxist becoming an imperialist ghoul would at least make sense, but instead we get people like Kamala or Buttigeig who seem like they haven’t spent 5 minutes in a room with a marxist, or they wouldn’t be shocked that “titans of industry” side with fascism.
Its not that they rebel against their parents or use what they’ve learned to evil ends, its like they go their entire childhood without ever listening.
That makes him look worse and not better, tbh.
In western academia that means more like helping a think tank manufacture consent to overthrow african governments or inform the cia on how to best archive it.
I haven’t personally read his work but that’s not really what the leftists i’ve seen talk about it made it seem like. Made it seem more marxist or marxist-adjacent. anti-imperialist at the very least
Its a generalization.
Was he protesting against the Iraq war?
He would have been like 12 years old.
During Occupy, at least a teenager or maybe 18.
I agree with the rest. The “millennial” category just spans such a large range and I guess he’s closer to the zoomer end.
He was never involved in any labor organizing or political activism.
Didn’t he play a prominent role in his campus’s SJP, before the 2014 war?
Next year when I’m eating affordable Halal while in the sewers taking pot shots at the invading South Carolinian Nation Guard I’m going to remember this.
One of the tags for
should be Mamdani.It’s going to keep happening until the socdems are purged.
It was like a month ago that criticizing Mamdani would get you waves of angry socdems saying “but the right opposes him!”
but you would lose their valuable discourse like “we have to vooote” and “harm reduction” and “lesser evil” and “hiding power levels”
Social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.
Nope you can’t say that, it’s not allowed, we’re a left unity forum not a commy forum how are you gonna court the socdems talking like that please consider how you build a movement out of this, mods mods mods (context, I’m just complaining)
Left unity and non-sectarianism is unfortunately and usually code for allowing opportunitists, left-coms and chauvinists to destroy/deenergize/disarm leftist movements.
As more and more people need to „get“ even good intentions and „benign motivations“ will be used by the empire.
insert engles quote here
This is just one moderator’s perspective (mine, if that isn’t clear); take it as such:
Nowhere on the site do we officially advertise as a “Left-Unity” community, which I believe is a colloquialism used in an attempt to succinctly describe the site and its vibe, especially to people outside the site. That being, we don’t discourage baby leftists from joining the site, and we don’t explicitly advertise as either an Anarchist forum or a Marxist/Marxist-Leninist forum. We’re going to inevitably have new users on the site where this is their
dealing with this kind of opertunism. People’s understanding doesn’t come with age, it comes with education, and I’ll be real here and tell you it’s comrades on this site that became the catalyst for me to read more theory, which has sharpened my understanding of electoralism in the context of revolutionary struggle.My interpretation of the rule:
Respect that people have differences of opinion and that every leftist has a place in our community. Discussing differences in theory is fine and encouraged, just don’t make it personal. Remember: Sectarianism is liberalism.
Is that it is intended as a rule for mediating the existing tensions between Anarchist and Marxist-Leninist tendencies. I can’t speak for historical rulings on the matter, but that is my understanding and interpretation. So threads like this one, do not fall under that rule, in my opinion.
Criticisms of socdems on here pushed me to read theory too and radicalized me further left while I was a socdem, so I personally appreciate that policy
I told you people this almost a century ago, but you didn’t believe me. Why didn’t you believe me?
Path of least resistance or something idk
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Fuck. There’s no pragmatic reason to fold on this, gusanos in NYC aren’t going to tank his race. This is just naked ideology and opportunism.
I issue a formal apology to whomever it was I argued with some months ago in defense of Zohran. I didn’t expect a ton from him but I expected better than this. I was wrong. I’m sorry I was wrong. I tried to go back in my comment history to find you and give you the gloating rights you deserve, but it crapped out after 10 pages of looking.
