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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
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Yeah it’s just about 5 minutes of showing up. That’s all electoralism is. It isn’t a drain of millions of dollars of resources and thousands of hours of volunteer labor! And it certainly isn’t the crux of the social reformist worldview about how change is done, which you proselytize to the detriment of all other forms of activism. No way is it the underlying principle around which you convince others to organize
Election already happened big dawg. Candidate is on the ballot. I doubt you are doing any electoral organizing given how clear you’ve made your stance on the subject.
Because of the hard work of other leftists, it would just be a 5 minute walk for you to freeze your own rent, the rent of millions of proletarians, and keep billions of dollars out of the pockets of landlord.
Armchair Leftist Final Boss type thought process to not simply participate at that point
Yeah because rent freeze is definitely an actual possibility here lmao
for me the question is, if a rent freeze happens, how is that different than all the other "progressive charities" that do genuinely provide a lot of necessary support for poor people but do not mobilize those people in any way to scale up the project and seize more power?
If there isn't a coherent political program that each voter gets plugged into and participates in daily/weekly/monthly at least, all you are doing is bribing people to vote for you again the next time. FDR famously said he "saved capitalism" with the new deal, and this is the type of imagery people like AOC have used as well with the green new deal. providing charity is nice and really helps people who need it, and probably gets you reelected next time, but how does that become a greater movement? If the only answer is to have thousands of Mamdanis run for every office and take over, maybe if every major local office is taken and held for the next 15-20 years they can begin to do something, but this isn't possible or realistic with the timeline of climate change. slowly take over city by city with socialist cities, and then the greater state? through bourgeois electoral cycles?
I'm hoping the DSAers organizing this are actually creating an engaging program that turns at least 10-20% of the workers who vote for Mamdani into political cadre because without that crucial piece this isn't really political organizing in a revolutionary way, it is just doing populist bourgeois political organizing the way plenty of populist bourgeois politicians have set out to do in the past. Since DSA hasn't managed to have a membership reflective of average workers, it is obvious they don't yet have a way to turn this campaign into a political project that average workers will be involved in and dedicate their precious free time to, or else they would already have unleashed it.
Hot take: they’re not, because they’re in the DSA. Would love to be wrong but build within a reactionary white supremacist framework, get what you’d expect.
Oh ok, so this is the final Democrat Party election the DSA is participating in since they already sunk the cost and they'll change their methods going forward?
No, I can assure you that there will always be some leftists who will keep fighting like this forever, despite your protests. Every so often, despite the inefficacy that often accompanies electoralism, despite the fact that you believe those organizers are engaged in work you may deem a waste, you will be handed you a praxis layup that involves nothing more than taking a 5 minute walk on your end. This time it happens to have made something possible on the scale no other leftist organizing in the U.S. has managed to achieve in a very, very long time, and directly improves the material conditions of millions of proletarians at the explicit cost of the landlord class.
Refusing to engage with it at this point IS upholding Armchair Leftist Final Boss Thought. ”I disagree with the work those leftists did, so I will categorically deny the working class the benefits it could provide them at literally no mental, financial, or physical anguish to myself.”
My point in bringing that up was that your previous comment is bad faith bullshit. It's not about a 5-minute walk or not. It's about our strategy, and what should be done. What you do, and what you are saying is to be done, is wrong. But instead of discussing that you zoom into a tiny little contextless scenario of "5 minute walk or the landlords get 100 billion dollars". You aren't taking into consideration any of the things I've been talking about like the resources, the labor, the opportunists exploiting you, the loss of activists and burnout, the betrayal of the chauvinists, the lack of democratic centralism, the lack of mechanisms of accountability, the dead end of actually getting anything done in a capitalist system through minority reform, the historical failures and betrayals, giving your resources to the fucking Democrats who will sell you out anyway. It all goes by, slicks right off you, and it's all ignored. Just like how Democrats do their lesser-evil gambit to force you to endorse genocide to protect trans people or whatever they're bad faith contextless framing of the day is.
Did you forget Justice Democrats? Did you forget Indivisible? Did you forget Bernie becoming a Democrat and giving all of his donors' phone info and emails to DNC databases? You are being exploited. Every attempt at this entryism into the Democrats has ended in disaster, with millions of dollars stolen from the working class into DNC consultant pockets.
Again, why doesn't it bother you that you are funding and aiding Democrat politicians, while echoing and mimicking their lesser-evilism and harm reduction arguments towards the left to a communist? That you also mirror their tactics in addition to their rhetoric, seeking electoral office within the system? That you are siding on behalf of the social chauvinist right in an intra-left disagreement? Why does that not bother you and cause you to self critique for even a moment? Have I sold out? Have I turned coat? This is what should be going through your head, not bullshit trolley arguments.
I don’t know why you seem to think I’m an electoralism dead-ender when I’ve been more than willing to tell you multiple times over your participation across this post that electoralism is not the be all end all of organizing and is wrought with shortcomings in terms of directing organizational energy and leftist fervor.
I’m a Marxist Leninist, as you seem to be. We both understand that bourgeois democracy will not bring about revolution in any way except for its own failures that radicalize the working class and galvanize them against capitalism, where socialism would then grow out of capitalism, as Marx and Lenin wrote about extensively. There is no reforming capitalism into socialism. My take on electoralism is that electoralism will happen regardless of whether or not anybody on the left chooses to engage with it, and it is impossible for the electoral system to bear fruit anywhere near reliably. If the electoralism that is happening though does indeed present an opportunity to remove some pressure from the boot off the neck of the working class, it would be stupid not to engage in it in a high profile manner. If you succeed, you have alleviated that pressure, good for the working class and your prospects of organizing in the future. If you fail or are ratfucked, you have opened up the door to radicalization for so many people. You’d be lying if you said the failure of Bernie Sanders in 2016 or 2020 weren’t the very driving factor that galvanized and grew the now significantly more prominent, albeit not yet major political force, of the emergent American left. You may have lost some demoralized people along the way, but they were reached for a time, and it was the left that reached them.
I don’t think you, or many strictly anti-electoral leftists think about that enough. The cultural hegemony of the right in our media and social contexts MUST be pierced, and that includes in the news and politics, which are now media that are as widely consumed as culture and entertainment as any other legacy media. The long game we are playing now isn’t the same it was 100 years ago. We can’t sit these out and be complete no names out there in the public cultural sphere anymore and expect to see any major success. Electoralism is entertainment that is widely consumed. It’s culture that’s widely consumed. It sets agendas that are widely consumed. If we seriously ignore the opportunity to get our ideas out there, or worse, let our “camp” be publicly represented in a public forum believed to be legitimate by our least thought out, most opportunist, most chauvinistic, least consistent, most internally criticized bunch of us on the left, we are doing ourselves an immense disservice. Why are we preemptively disarming and stripping ourselves of any free legitimacy we may receive by simply existing prominently in the public eye. How is it good for base building to simply not exist to the average person? Why should we surrender our ability to be heard in a public forum seen as legitimate by the average proletarian, regardless of how useless that forum actually is at creating change itself? Any time even a drop of our agenda slips into mainstream electoralism, people flock to it in numbers we don’t see represented in our other organizing work. Why is that?
It’s where the working class is looking, and there is no possibility of stripping a critical mass of people away from it in a way that can effectively redirect that energy elsewhere independent of the failure of the electoral system itself. It is not possible in a society in which dire and obvious civil rights have been extended to the entirety of the population and where crisis capitalism has driven the working class to constant attentiveness to cultural, economic, and political crises bundled up for their consumption. You have to be present anywhere the working class is to be found. You are willingly turning over the airwaves the working class are tuned into to the forces of the right if you simply surrender electoralism to them.
Every success the left gains through electoralism is a success that at best is neutral and at worst eats short term revolutionary potential. Every victory of the right is a radicalizing setback for the left. What you are actually doing is teaching people they deserve rights in a setting n they actually pay serious enough attention to and can learn that there are other people out there to be reached that feel the same way. You are building a critical mass of people who actually give a fuck that you and each other exists. The working class will not win through electoralist victories. The working class will win through electoralism failing it dramatically and in a way it can’t ignore.