He will be America’s Lenin.

ok comrade cmon I know this must be a joke

You’re seeing a lot of Hexbears coping because this place is too cynical/defeatist to take the W.

I do agree that Mamdani is a W, but jumping to him being America’s Lenin is silly and I expect you know that. But I’ll share a little bit of info from my direct experience based on why Mamdani is such a big win for the left even if he himself is all of the bad things he’s been accused of by Hexbears and others.

As everybody knows, I’m a very active member. Last year, I had a prominent role in Ohio’s PSL presidential campaign. In the end, that was a huge success for the party, roughly doubling our membership nationwide and significantly increasing our public profile while building up the skills of a lot of cadre at doing direct political outreach. However, one low point locally was volunteer engagement. Over the whole course of the campaign, my city only managed about three volunteers. We put a huge amount of effort in the early months of the campaign to turn the high interest into active volunteers, but that attempt was absolutely a failure (only speaking locally, can’t say how it was in other states and I know another Ohio city managed a core of 10 or so consistent volunteers).

A month ago, we launched our campaign for Senate in Ohio. Obviously not as high profile as a presidential race, but we have reason to believe that it’s the right strategy for the moment based on where the party’s at and what the political mood in the state and country is. And this weekend we held our first volunteer event, inviting people who’ve been interested to join us in putting up flyers all around the city. How many people showed up?

All in all, in our first day of actual volunteer activity, we garnered about 45 people who showed up and put in hours of their day to promoting our campaign. Not just that, but this is no Dem primary - we are explicitly and firmly running as a revolutionary socialist third party with the intent of defeating the duopoly and turning these volunteers into a mass movement. And about 90% of these people cited Mamdani as a primary reason they wanted to get involved. He didn’t sheepdog them into the Democrats; he pulled them away from it, whatever his intent was. In a single day, more than 10x the volunteer engagement of an entire year - and that campaign was a wild success by every metric! Mamdani’s win, if we capitalize on it effectively, could easily triple or quadruple the size of the party in one of the country’s most politically significant states.

The Mamdani effect is much bigger than who he is as a person, the organizaiton he’s involved in, or the city where he ran.

He will be America’s Lenin. You’re seeing a lot of Hexbears coping because this place is too cynical/defeatist to take the W.

You really can’t say that the US left isn’t even at step 0 (true) and say that he’s the US’s Lenin. The US Lenin either hasn’t been born yet or is just a toddler at best. And Mamdani isn’t particularly young either. At his age, Mao was already in command of what would become the PLA and Castro had already overthrown Batista. Lenin himself was around Mamdani’s age right now when the 1905 Revolution happened. Mamdani’s a bit too old to have any serious political development outside of gradual shift over decades. What you see is what you get.

Currently, there’s no US equivalent of Lenin or the Bolsheviks. There’s no real US equivalent of the Narodniks either, which can’t be ignored either in understanding the Bolsheviks. The Narodniks failed so the Bolsheviks can succeed after all. People talk shit about the Narodniks for being adventurists, but the US left wishes they were half as effective as the Narodniks. Forget the Bolsheviks, the US left can’t even rise to the level of the Narodniks.

I think Palestine Action US and Lugi (allegedly) liquidating that CEO, while not being the US equivalent of Narodniks themselves, are glimmers of what US Narodniks would look like. There’s a difference between cowardly nerds who get social anxiety talking to strangers saying adventurism doesn’t work and ex-adventurists realizing after doing adventurism that adventurism doesn’t work. Direct political experience is needed to weed out the hacks and cowards from the principled and brave. With this crop of revolutionaries, a further crucible is needed to weed out people with terrible ideas (“Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.”). It’s from this crucible that a US Lenin would emerge from.

Even taking the most optimistic view of mamdani, it’s a lot of personality + right place right time. Opponents being disorganized, doomed losers hated by all. Do we even know what his actual political goals and motivations are? Everything I have seen is directed at an audience who is primarily less left than he is. It is a lot of gently explaining why free buses are OK and such.

Is there any reason to think there is some sort of plan here? A theory of change? Or is he just less of a coward and more competent than other grumbling leftlibs? Is there a plan to build power? Volunteers to doorknock are nice but only powerful in so much as they can make decisions collectively and enforce them against resistance. And hate to say it but he is extremely vulnerable to getting knocked off. If that happens before he has sufficiently built up replacement leadership then it’ll all be a sad memory of what couldv’e been.

He will be America’s Lenin.

this is babe calling his shot over the wall. generational take. let’s fucking go.

I want whatever you’re having.

He’s Bernie Sanders 2. One that hopefully teaches the American left the necessity of ground level proletarian organization and that demsocs will be inevitably neutralized under a bourgeois system.