Hmm

joined 3 years ago
[–] Hmm@hexbear.net 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Part of it comes from the current mayor of the city, Eric Adams, having significantly played up his victory. Adams was a former cop in the city who then became a pro-cop politician, presenting himself during his run for mayor as a foil to the Black Lives Matter movement and as the opposition to an unpopular fringe left minority. Reality is more complicated of course, but the Democratic Party invented a reality about needing to go rightward with policies like giving police more funding and victories like Adams's were used as justification.

Here's how Adams spoke of his victory when he appeared to have won the Democratic party primary for mayor:

Look at me and you’re seeing the future of the Democratic Party. If the Democratic Party fails to recognize what we did here in New York, they’re going to have a problem in the midterm elections and they’re going to have a problem in the presidential election.

We have allowed a group to hijack the term progressive. So what I’m saying to the Democratic Party — stop believing a numerical minority is what the numerical majority is.

New Yorkers and Americans want to be safe and they don’t want to exist on programs; they want to exist on possibilities and opportunities. I believe my message is going to cascade across the entire country.

Adams declares himself ‘future of the Democratic party’ ahead of final election results - Politico on June 24, 2021

He claimed this when his Democratic primary victory was much less decisive than Mamdani's: 289,403 voters (30.7%) put him as their first round choice, there was a lower overall voter turnout, and ultimately when all ranked choices eliminations were completed he came out on top with merely 50.4% of non-exhausted ballots.

2021 New York City Democratic mayoral primary - Wikipedia

By contrast, Mamdani garnered 43.51% of voters ranking him as their top choice and with much higher turnout he had 432,305 people put him as their top choice. We don't have the final ranked choice numbers yet for this election, but his final vote tally is expected to also look much more decisive than Adams's was.

2025 New York City Democratic mayoral primary - Wikipedia

[–] Hmm@hexbear.net 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

To me he sounds opportunist with his continual references to expanding the "socialist" market economy (which walks and talks like capitalist commodity production). If he is a Marxist, why is he not openly criticizing these bourgeois economists in China that @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net mentioned and emphasizing a return to broader study of Marxist political economy?

Reform and Opening up Is Always Ongoing and Will Never End

Reform and opening up is a long-term and arduous cause, and people need to work on it generation after generation. We should carry out reform to improve the socialist market economy of China, and adhere to the basic state policy of opening up to the outside world. We must further reform in key sectors with greater political courage and vision, and forge ahead steadily in the direction determined by the Party’s 18th National Congress.

On the Governance of China, p. 87 of the English Translation

The “Invisible Hand” and the “Visible Hand”

We should let the market play the decisive role in allocating resources, while allowing the government to better perform its functions. This is a theoretical and practical issue of great importance. A correct and precise understanding of this issue is very important to further the reform and promote the sound and orderly development of the socialist market economy. We should make good use of the roles of both the market, the “invisible” hand, and the government, the “visible” hand. The market and the government should complement and coordinate with each other to promote sustained and sound social and economic development.

Ibid., p. 134

Revolutionize Energy Production and Consumption

...

Fourth, we must revolutionize the energy market. We will proceed with reform, restore energy’s status as a commodity, build a system of workable competition, and put in place a mechanism in which energy prices are largely driven by the market. In addition, we will change the way that the government supervises the energy industry, and establish and improve the legal framework for energy development.

Ibid., p. 149

(I credit this essay with making me aware of these statements: Against Dengism by The Red Spectre.)

[–] Hmm@hexbear.net 8 points 1 month ago

Tbh we need a "Socialism" with Chinese Characteristics struggle session for this site's news community soon. Maybe it will help people here awaken to the fact that they need to help further the class struggle internationally wherever they are instead of just cheerleading on the sidelines and thinking China will on its own return to the cause of international proletarian revolution.

[–] Hmm@hexbear.net 1 points 1 month ago

This quote is so relevant that it warrants its own thread, although maybe tomorrow after the activity in this other thread about Hexbear's ultra-leftism dies down.

[–] Hmm@hexbear.net 19 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

This is idealism.

  1. You're trying to place hope just in the "third world" despite the presence of the class struggle throughout the world. The conditions of different countries require different tactics. For example in the US there is ripe ground given the unpopularity of what the government is doing.

  2. You need to consider why active Maoists (who in many cases would identify themselves as Marxist-Leninists or Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, not Maoist Third-Worldists) do not have much love for China. The Communist Party of China hasn't just abandoned the cause of international socialism with the victorious capitalist roaders in the party (the bourgeois and petty bourgeois nationalists, as @SamotsvetyVIA@hexbear.net and I discussed here) using the excuse of building up productive forces, but they even will engage in such blatant acts as selling weapons to the government of the Phillipines which are then used to fight the guerillas of the Communist Party of the Phillipines.

[–] Hmm@hexbear.net 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

As far as I know in the CPC there is a thin layer of the proletariat and the nationalist sentiments are very strong and if you will not conduct genuinely Marxist-Leninist class policies and not conduct struggle against bourgeois nationalism, the nationalists will strangle you. Then not only will socialist construction be terminated, China may become a dangerous toy in the hands of American imperialists.

Joseph Stalin, 1949, https://revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv16n1/china.htm

I found the quote in this article: Against Dengism - The Red Spectre

 

Archive Link

Choice quote from the Article:

For the better part of a decade, American discourse has been consumed by emergency politics: a collective insistence that we are teetering on the knife’s edge of collapse, an anxiety that both parties were all too happy to exploit in order to hold their voters captive. This year that impulse reached its apotheosis.

What we just went through was not an election; it was a hostage situation. Our major parties represent the interests of streaming magnates, the arms industry, oil barons, Bitcoin ghouls and Big Tobacco, often without even pretending to heed the needs of voters. A political system like that is fundamentally broken.

A poll from this spring found that about half of voters 30 or younger believe that it doesn’t matter who wins elections. Describing the burgeoning nihilism of this generation, one pollster told Semafor, “Young voters do not look at our politics and see any good guys. They see a dying empire led by bad people.”

[–] Hmm@hexbear.net 21 points 8 months ago

Copying over a comment I made in another thread:

I think this article I shared earlier in the week on /c/history is a pretty good piece to send to people, especially those at least sympathetic towards socialism. It outlines how the abolitionists actually managed to achieve lasting change in the United States, despite its 2 party system and powerful slave-owning aristocracy.

Basically it lays out what was done by the abolitionists to achieve a better world. That could help us start a serious discussion on what is to be done in our time.

The Abolitionist Dirty Break by Ben Grove

From the introduction of the piece:

How can a small movement challenge the Leviathan? How can it find strength in its independence? How can it topple a power that seems omnipotent and achieve a revolution?

In 2024, these tasks may seem hopelessly difficult to socialists in the United States. But defying the powerful has never been easy, and we will always have lessons to learn from our predecessors. One of the most important, yet also misunderstood, is the American abolitionist movement.

It’s easy enough to celebrate abolitionists for their righteous principles: activists of every stripe invoke their legacy. Yet abolitionists and their Radical Republican allies were more than just moral idealists. They were also cunning revolutionary strategists. Using principled independent politics, they successfully attacked America’s slaveholding oligarchy and the two-party system that protected it. Their insights and debates have tremendous relevance for modern socialists, because abolitionism helped to ignite the most important revolutionary rupture in U.S. history: the Civil War and the downfall of chattel slavery.

And these were the conditions that their movement built itself in:

By the 1820s, a two-party system of Whigs and Democrats was developing, nurtured by the brilliant New York politician Martin Van Buren. Van Buren’s explicit goal was to use the excitement of party politics to distract the masses from more dangerous conflicts over slavery. Whigs and Democrats would have fiery conflict and genuine power struggles—but both sides suppressed opposition to America’s true ruling class: the planters of the South, the Slave Power.

[–] Hmm@hexbear.net 12 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I think this article I shared earlier in the week on /c/history is a pretty good piece to send to people, especially those at least sympathetic towards socialism. It outlines how the abolitionists actually managed to achieve lasting change in the United States, despite its 2 party system and powerful slave-owning aristocracy.

Basically it lays out what was done by the abolitionists to achieve a better world. That could help us start a serious discussion on what is to be done in our time.

The Abolitionist Dirty Break by Ben Grove

From the introduction of the piece:

How can a small movement challenge the Leviathan? How can it find strength in its independence? How can it topple a power that seems omnipotent and achieve a revolution?

In 2024, these tasks may seem hopelessly difficult to socialists in the United States. But defying the powerful has never been easy, and we will always have lessons to learn from our predecessors. One of the most important, yet also misunderstood, is the American abolitionist movement.

It’s easy enough to celebrate abolitionists for their righteous principles: activists of every stripe invoke their legacy. Yet abolitionists and their Radical Republican allies were more than just moral idealists. They were also cunning revolutionary strategists. Using principled independent politics, they successfully attacked America’s slaveholding oligarchy and the two-party system that protected it. Their insights and debates have tremendous relevance for modern socialists, because abolitionism helped to ignite the most important revolutionary rupture in U.S. history: the Civil War and the downfall of chattel slavery.

And these were the conditions that their movement built itself in:

By the 1820s, a two-party system of Whigs and Democrats was developing, nurtured by the brilliant New York politician Martin Van Buren. Van Buren’s explicit goal was to use the excitement of party politics to distract the masses from more dangerous conflicts over slavery. Whigs and Democrats would have fiery conflict and genuine power struggles—but both sides suppressed opposition to America’s true ruling class: the planters of the South, the Slave Power.

[–] Hmm@hexbear.net 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Haven't gotten around to trying to really read this article in full but it looks like you've got a pretty serious misquote.

That last paragraph you quote, which is at the end of the article, is followed by a single sentence given its own paragraph. So it actually reads as follows:

The promise of an end to the drama might be enough to elect Kamala. I want it to be true.

But it is a lie.

Emphasis mine.

So he's not saying it'll actually happen. Of all things he's rejecting the "40k Ork logic" that you're trying to pin on him. It sounds more like he's lamenting that 'If Democrats weren't lying, maybe Kamala Harris winning would lead to better circumstances, but they are lying.'

Cutrone has had some completely garbage takes (e.g. Palestine) but we don't need to stoop to the level of misreading him so carelessly. That benefits no one.

[–] Hmm@hexbear.net 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

blob-stop

Why do people on this site keep saying, without checking, that there are no resources available whatsoever to help people get out of evac zones? Making claims like this without checking first could get people fucking killed. Do better.

There are government resources available to help people evacuate. I actually made a thread that lists some resources including for the county that Tampa is part of: https://hexbear.net/post/3632288

[–] Hmm@hexbear.net 3 points 9 months ago

For those who may be in need of it, I made a thread that includes info for using public transit to get to storm shelters: https://hexbear.net/post/3632288

 

There are public resources being mobilized in the Tampa Bay area to help people evacuate. I want this thread to be a place to collect information to help people weathering the storm. Further down in the body of this post I will link some of the resources I have already found.

There was another thread, which I won't be linking here, in which a lot of users were saying that no resources are available to help the poor, disabled, etc. evacuate as Hurricane Milton approaches Florida's Tampa Bay area.

Short rant regarding the doomposting I saw:

spoiler"No investigation, no right to speak."

I don't want to downplay the many failures of the people have to live in, but doomposting about there being no help available at all when that is not the case risks getting people killed.

When these systems fail, criticism is fully warranted. But no one was posting about how they or someone they know had tried to use these resources unsuccessfully. Instead, it seems like there was a collective assumption made about no services being available at all, and without investigation! This is incredibly irresponsible. Double-check yourself before making claims, especially about important matters.

General information on the storm for some of the counties near where the storm will likely have the greatest storm surge

The current estimate (as of 5PM EDT from the National Hurricane Center) is 10-15 feet of storm surge in these counties

Information for those in the above counties in need of transportation assistance to get to shelters

view more: next ›