Tell Lies, Claim Easy Victories

It is easier to look to a figure like Mamdani as a means to an end and keep gobbling up our imperial superprofits than it is to confront the fact that only we can save ourselves.

As with all my writing, feel free to republish/share wherever you see fit. You can repost it from my Twitter and Instagram.

Zohran Mamdani’s victory was historic. So was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s. So was Barack Obama’s.

The blissful ignorance in response to Mamdani’s victory demonstrates a vast, abysmal void in revolutionary consciousness, organization, and leadership in the so-called United States. It speaks to our collective hunger for any supposed victory to grasp onto, no matter how illusory, a hunger to make ourselves feel like we have achieved something, anything, satiating our guilty selves with false hope.

No matter how much he spits on the name of the Palestinian resistance, Mamdani obviously won because of the political ramifications of the Al-Aqsa Flood. The bar was incredibly low and his nominally pro-Palestine position was a breath of fresh air for an electorate reshaped by the Flood’s wide-reaching ripples. The Gaza Holocaust put the final nail in the coffin of a Democratic Party that was already on the brink of death. A shiny new face with sexy graphic design and video editing, a soft alt Gen Z Jolanist wife, and better communications skills than, say, AOC, was desperately needed to rehabilitate the Democrats’ image, especially amongst young people, regardless of the push-back Mamdani did receive from some of the Democratic establishment. Whether it was conscious of itself as such or not, this is the epitome of a counterinsurgency.

The enemy state benefits from nothing more than the funneling of potentially revolutionary energy into reformist electoral politics in the face of an earth-shattering armed uprising in Palestine, the sparks of anti-imperialist conscience it nourished within the imperial core, and the threatening levels of mass mobilization and direct action we saw — particularly in New York City — against zionism and US-led imperialism. The Democratic Party and their NGO apparatus, which includes the Democratic Socialists of America, is the most insidious arm of counterinsurgency in the US, defined by co-optation and neutralization of liberation movements.

In “Anatomy of a counter-insurgency,” Martin Shoots-McAlpine outlines how this process played out in 2020, when a mass, militant uprising was decapitated and its militancy then erased from history, its participants locked up, disillusioned, or funneled into cash-rich NGOs and unthreatening “abolitionist” political frameworks, far away from a framework of anti-imperialist resistance. It was less so the state repression on the ground — after all, 300 towns/cities were burning, thousands of cops were calling out sick, the National Guard was expended, the feds were running out of tear gas and rubber bullets — and more so the political counterinsurgency that neutered this rebellion, undermined militancy, handed fat checks to self-proclaimed leaders to buy mansions, and fed the idea that Trump, not the illegitimate existence of the US in itself, was the problem at hand.

Black Liberation Army founder Dhoruba Bin Wahad aptly terms this consolidation of white supremacy in the post civil rights era under the guise of democratization and freedom as “democratic fascism.” George Jackson said, “We will never have a complete definition of fascism, because it is in constant motion, showing a new face to fit any particular set of problems that arise to threaten the predominance of the traditionalist, capitalist ruling class. But if one were forced for the sake of clarity to define it in a word simple enough for all to understand, that word would be ‘reform.’” Just look at how Mamdani’s rhetoric changed from the height of the 2020 rebellion to now.

The Palestinian liberation movement, in Palestine and the diaspora, has long experienced a similar phenomenon of counterinsurgency and NGOization. In the imperialist countries, the development of “terrorist” lists and designations severed the diaspora from the resistance — the leadership of the Palestinian cause. Besides those who never abandoned the path of armed struggle, the neocolonial, liquidationist path of Oslo transformed the cause into a “human rights” issue of managing and reforming the occupation rather than overthrowing it. In the US, especially since the Al-Aqsa Flood, the counterinsurgency has served to silo Palestine into a single issue devoid of any analysis of US-led imperialism, framing the zionist entity as a unique evil instead of as an organic extension of the imperialist West, absurdly suggesting zionism can be reformed away while keeping the US and the rest of the empire intact.

Readers may already be well-aware of the promises Mamdani has already sold out on, and the ways in which he was compromised from the beginning. It would be cheap to call them “betrayals” because he was betraying nothing — not DSA’s political line or “accountability” processes, not his own class interests, not his electoral party, not his role as a paid representative of the genocidal Amerikan state. I will summarize some of his shortcomings anyways: Mamdani condemns the Palestinian resistance; he condemns the chant “globalize the intifada” because he says it evokes suicide bombings; he says Hamas should disarm; he condemned direct action against an IOF-owned business; he backed down from his oath to arrest Netanyahu, suggesting that doing so would be a Trumpian fascist move; he called Cuba and Venezuela dictatorships, manufacturing consent for genocidal US aggression and regime change in those countries; he has sworn to fill his administration with zionists; he issued a public apology to NYPD for calling it “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety” in 2020; and he commended and committed to keeping on rabid Likudnik Jessica Tisch as NYPD Police Commissioner, commander of an astoundingly racially diverse militarized police force that evolved out of slave patrols and is larger than the armies of most small countries.

The last point is arguably the most problematic, because it is where Mamdani would actually have the most sway with his mayoral powers, beyond rhetoric alone. Obviously Mamdani is scared of the NYPD, and reasonably so. I do not doubt for a second that elements in NYPD would enable an assassination against him. This does not mean Mamdani is a revolutionary of any sort — it just means he is not fascist enough to appease the fascists, no matter how much he tries. JFK and RFK got assassinated because they were not fascist or imperialist enough for the deep state, but that does not make them even remotely worthy of being lauded as anti-imperialists.

The most common excuse that I saw from people who normally reject electoralism was that we should “let people celebrate” Mamdani’s victory purely because it made zionists angry. Okay, everything makes zionists angry. In that sense, we should support Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Azealia Banks. This is an unserious and desperately reactive political barometer.

I tweeted earlier, “Ziohran’s victory is objectively good not because working people’s lives will change but because it heightens the contradictions within the ruling class, and his inevitable betrayals will hopefully disillusion his base with working within the Democrats,” but I have been questioning this sentiment all day and I am not sure if I even fully agree with it. Mamdani’s betrayals are not really inevitable, they have already been made, nor are they really betrayals as much they are fulfillments of his own class interests. Mamdani’s victory certainly will heighten contradictions, but does it do more to expose or obscure them? I worry it actually does more to obfuscate, and to feed people false hope in a system that will inevitably eat them alive. I worry it makes people think fascism is far down the line and not already here. Long here.

And as for the potential of eventually disillusioning and shifting Mamdani’s base, the most revolutionary potential in the US lies in the people who do not or cannot vote at all. Historically and now, revolution in the US will never be executed via a national socialist party like DSA, or via integrating ourselves into the genocidal settler empire’s state apparatus.

Revolution in the US will come through the national liberation struggles of the internal colonies, and the conscious who decide to fight alongside them, in unity with anti-imperialist forces across the world — opening as many possible fronts. Much of this history has been erased via the counterinsurgency, but our reference points for revolution, and those that historically posed the greatest threat to the empire, are groups engaged in guerrilla warfare like the Black Liberation Army, May 19 Communist Organization, George Jackson Brigade, and Las Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional — not the CPUSA in the 1930s, or the PSL or DSA today.

Mamdani’s supporters hit it on the nose when they described their strategy as “Socialism with American characteristics”: renters’ protections and free public buses, slightly improving life for those of us in the core by sucking off the sweat, blood, and corpses of the global majority. A mayor who, above all, makes us feel good.

The online victory laps make clearer than ever that there is no coherent “movement” in the US, and two very different phenomena are happening at once. On the one hand, there are opportunists who want to live off City Hall or NGO salaries, who join organizations as social clubs, and who see resistance as something that happens far away in the colonial hinterlands, not our responsibility to take up in the core or even put on the table for discussion. On the other hand, there are ideologically diverse but relatively politically isolated and small in number anti-imperialist militants, who have attempted real offensives against the empire and suffered state repression as a result. And there are the dormant masses who may rise up when conditions get worse enough, like in 2020, but are disconnected from most political formations. There are those eager to join the Mamdani administration, and there are those of us who will continue to be hunted by the state no matter which face is at the helm of power.

I have no doubt in my mind that the DSA wing of the Democratic Party will throw us under the bus like the Social Democratic Party in Germany did to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. I have no doubt in my mind that Mamdani believes political prisoners of the NYC Palestine movement like Tarek Bazrouk and Jakhi McCray should rot in federal prison, and that DSA would pat him on the back and refuse to critique him for any of his upcoming repressive policies.

It is not that voters are simply getting duped by Mamdani, it is that we are looking for shortcuts and easy answers — anything but confronting the necessity and inevitability of a higher, more violent form of struggle. For a lot of people, it is easier to look to a figure like Mamdani as a means to an end and keep on gobbling up our imperial superprofits than it is to confront the fact that only we can save ourselves.

“We are faced with two choices: to continue as we have done for forty years fanning our pamphlets against the hurricane, or starting to build a new revolutionary culture that we will be able to turn on the old culture,” said George Jackson in 1971. Forty years is now 94 years.

Meanwhile, throughout this entire charade, political prisoners in the UK and US have been starving to death on hunger strike. A fraction of this energy could be put into fighting for these prisoners’ freedom, or literally anything but voting in the Rhodesian elections for Socialism with Rhodesian Characteristics and rehabilitating the party committing a Holocaust before our eyes.

Follow @Prisoners4Palestine on Twitter and Instagram for ongoing updates and calls-to-action about the hunger strike.

[1] The title is a reference to Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean revolutionary Amílcar Cabral’s quote, “Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories…”