The NYC mayor’s race is the most watched political race in the US right now, by a large margin too (I guess the second most is Prop 50 in CA? Either way that one is way behind). After Tuesday, Zohran’s win will probably be the big story that normies IRL will be talking about here. “Socialism” will be a topic on top of everyone’s minds.
And I think everyone here - even if you have major issues with Zohran specifically or electoralism in general - should be ready to speak to it among the people in your life.
Opportunities like this don’t come around very often. Right now Americans are getting a ton of misinformation about what socialism is due to a demsoc running and very likely winning the job of mayor of the biggest city in the US. On top of that, this misinformation is transparently bad (“Zohran wants to sieze all the grocery stores in New York!”) that if you simply point to what’s actually being proposed, you will look pretty knowledgeable by comparison. This is all very low hanging fruit.
But you have to be prepared. Like literally, you should practice how you will respond to people who want to talk to you about Mamdani and socialism. The other day, AcidSmiley made a comment that I’ve been thinking about ever since: she said she had to deradicalize herself a bit from this site because she was having trouble interacting with normal people and not sounding like she was unhinged. I absolutely do this too. Whenever a topic tangential to socialism or imperialism comes up with people IRL, I end up overshooting. I scare people away even if they have a sense that I’m right. What I say sounds totally reasonable to us here, but to people who aren’t engaged with stuff it doesn’t matter how correct you are; if you can’t meet them where you are they will tune you out.
So for me, today and tonight I’m gonna skim through Ha-Joon Chang’s “23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism”. It’s not straight Marxist analysis but it’s written for the people I’ll be talking to. I’m also going to try and brush up on my knowledge of Zohran’s specific policies (like freezes on rent for rent controlled apartments, that seems to be one everyone brings up and I don’t feel I know enough about it).
For those of you who are strongly against Zohran or electoralism… do whatever you want ofc, but I’m just saying if a normie asks you about Zohran and you say “he’s just a social fascist” and scoff, then that will be a missed opportunity. People will have no idea what you are talking about and frankly probably won’t be interested in hearing more.
The first thing you can tell people is to just read his website: https://www.zohranfornyc.com/platform. I was talking to someone recently, and we were talking about grocery stores and how in many parts of the country there are like 3, and one of the three is trash. It’s almost like they keep that one around because it needs to exist for there to not be a “monopoly” on groceries. Which led to the person I’m talking to telling me about all the construction companies getting consolidated across the region (he was a former construction worker).
I think it was Richard Wolf that I first heard this from, but eventually I said something to the effect of: People always say that capitalism thrives on competition. Competition drives innovation; innovation increases productivity; increased productivity means greater abundance for all of us. But when two people compete, what usually is the outcome? Someone has to win, and someone has to lose. Capitalism breeds winners and losers, and everyone likes to win, and no one likes to lose. What do winners do when they’re winning? They keep trying to win. The way you do that is by buying out the competition; that way they never really have to compete, and so they never have to lose. So instead of innovation, you just get fat and bloated companies that have no reason to do anything new or innovative.
In my town, through subsidies the federal government provided, they were able to provide me and my family with a considerable amount of produce, eggs, and dairy 2x a month for 5 months for only $350. That’s gone now, and I know several older people, as well as families living on limited income, who really benefited from that program. Local farmers benefited as well, because the town sourced all its food from those local farmers.
All these “government-run grocery stores” do is precisely what my town’s CSA program did: deliver people food at a very low cost. You could imagine a situation where these government-run grocery stores set the baseline for other local chains and ensure that people in areas that are under-serviced by the private grocery chains have access to food in their area. There is no way to “buyout” a government-run grocery store; the only way you can get close to a buyout is by forcing the government to close them. That’s what happened to our CSA. It was thriving when the funding was pulled.
Occasionally you have to dance around the subject; it’s not fun but you have to get your foot in the door somehow.
Thanks, I’ve been looking at that website now.