NM's blog

The doubts raised after Mamdani's victory were legitimate. As  Eric Blanc writes , “ history is  full  of examples of movements demobilizing and subordinating themselves to their friends in power. It would be a tragedy if that happened in New York City…” But, Blanc suggests, “a  more useful and important debate is how to organize enough New Yorkers to win Zohran’s agenda — and to counteract the inevitable pressures on him from capital and the political establishment…  Effective Left strategy always should combine an openness to criticism of electeds with a rigorous  power analysis . More specifically, the intensity of our criticism of Left politicians on a given issue should correlate with our degree of power.

“Because working-class politics has so much potential to displace Democratic centrism and Republican authoritarianism, a successful Mamdani administration poses a serious threat to establishment leaders in both parties, to say nothing of hysterical billionaires who see even modest tax hikes as the advent of communism. We should expect elites, starting with President Trump, to do everything possible to stop Zohran from implementing his agenda.” There are cracks and there is space that opens up from time to time, but how much Mamdani keeps his promises and delivers, resists pressure and do not concede, and how much class struggle plays out will decide whether such a victory becomes victories. And one should not ignore that only  one million voted for Mamdani and New York and the US today are nit those of 1910. Yet like in UK, now there are more chances of creating a new party and abandon the criminal and imperialist Democratic Party.

The attempt to account for America’s anti-socialist exception has sustained a thriving academic cottage industry among historians, sociologists and political scientists over many decades. As long ago as 1906, the German economist and sociologist Werner Sombart was asking: “Why is there no socialism in the US?”  The answer, he thought, lay in the success of capitalism and the extent to which American workers identified as a result with the prevailing social and economic settlement. “On the reefs of roast beef and apple pie,” Sombart wrote, “socialistic utopias of every sort are sent to their doom.”  There were other factors at work too, Sombart argued. America had no feudal past, which meant that workers there felt the political system was largely responsive to their needs, in a way that their European counterparts, who’d had to fight to achieve the franchise, did not. Greater social mobility led most Americans to value self-improvement over collective action, while the open fr...