Mayor-elect of New York bows to "national security." Will it last?
  • Llituro [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    48·
    3 days ago

    any analysis of mamdani and the police must include the fact that the nypd constitutes one of the largest standing armies in the world, and they genuinely don’t give a fuck what the civilians like the mayor think if they feel threatened. any attempt to dismantle this structure without violence will be fraught and prone to sudden and catastrophic failure. the nypd has not been afraid to explicitly threaten city executives in the past.

    • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      38·
      2 days ago

      This is precisely why I believe Zohran’s strategy of tackling that violent structure through the premise of “reducing police workload” is such a near-genius political move, the first known example of a successful socialist triangulation in US politics

      First it neutralizes the propaganda arm of the police state by forcing police advocates to argue in favor of overworking cops lmao

      Then it practically reduces the absolute volume of police encounters with civilians, which translates as a practical on-the-ground form of abolition in areas inhabited by vulnerable people. While simultaneously strengthening and training an entire army of social workers who can build actual community networks the cops never could

      Lastly it plays to the self-interest of those class traitors by offering them the carrot of less work and hassle, while the threat of pushing Zohran out completely would threaten to bring back their previous workload

      End of the day these pigs just want to get paid and when that’s paired with a frozen budget, their capacity over time shrinks as the city around them grows in relative terms

      Leading to the emergence of new incentives that force them to defend the new status quo despite the fact that while it would be individually beneficial for grunt pigs, it’s collectively disastrous for the department in the long term

  • PKMKII [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    32·
    3 days ago

    Do I like this move? No. I have a particular distaste for Tisch, past just “is police commissioner.”

    Do I think I know why this move is happening? Yes. Given the state of politics and the media, pretty much anyone Mamdani would bring in, regardless of how reasonable, would instantly be labeled as “weak on crime.” Keeping Tisch around neuters that as if they didn’t have an issue with her under Adams, it’ll come off as disingenuous now. Also Tisch has served as commissioner of three different agencies under soon to be three different mayors, going back to de Blasio. Fundamentally, she’s a career opportunist who cares more about ladder climbing than cop ideology shit. So she’s gonna put keeping her job above all else. A bit tangential, but she also tends to surround herself with more experienced deputies that do the thinking for her.

  • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    22·
    3 days ago

    I don’t like it, it’s a blatant concession, BUT he hasn’t changed or updated his policy of virtually stripping the police of most of their “responsibilites” when it comes to “managing” the public, nor has he walked back his roundabout budget freeze

    If we dispense with the doomerism and assume with some grounding that this concession is simply designed to temporarily get the elites off his back and create some breathing room for his crucial but vulnerable first 100 days, then Jeffries’s comment about him keeping Tisch seems to signal ‘mission accomplished’

    I’ve never been particularly put off by his walking back of “Defund the Police”, considering 5 years ago MOST OF US here also critiqued that slogan as a liberal concession in itself and at worst a cynical co-option

    We wanted abolition and while Zohran’s stated policy is not wholesale abolition, barring police from responding to mental health crises and handing the responsibility over to social workers while freezing the police budget are two of the prerequites the abolition movement has been pushing for decades

  • Evilphd666 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    15·
    2 days ago

    Caved immediately to Daughter of a “daddy’s dollars have reach” Billionaire.

    Welp it was fun eh. But now he’s elected it’s all Zohver and he’s just another security state Democrat.

  • Blakey [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    19·
    3 days ago

    Where are all the election perverts who chided me for not being positive enough about this particular liberal politician because he is personally a “socialist”?

    He is taking office as a member of a LIBERAL political party. A bourgeois party whose role is to protect the interests of the bourgeoisie. Whatever his personal beliefs, he is a liberal. I thought that here of all places we understood that idealism is a dead fucking end. And now the disappointment will start, everyone will say they’re disillusioned, right up until another talented politician - who could have been part of building a worker’s party but has been convinced by liberals that actually the defectors can change the character of the party rather than vise versa - defects to the Dems and says the right things.

    When that happens, rather than being disappointed that someone with so much potential has decided to work with our enemies yet again, they will no doubt once again convince themselves that this person will be the exception. This will be the one who can overcome the will of the bourgeois party they have subordinated themselves to. And the whole cycle will repeat, and the most prominent socialists with the most support will continue to defect to the liberals.

    Sooner or later we will have to start regarding the defectors as complicit rather than merely naive.

    • queermunist she/her@lemmy.mlEnglish
      29·
      3 days ago

      The fundamental problem is that New York is occupied by one of the largest paramilitary forces on Earth. In terms of national armies they’re beat out by a few dozen countries, but as a non-national army I don’t actually know if there are any larger.

      And I fully believe they’d kill him if he didn’t play ball.

      This presents a clear limitation of any electoral strategy. Maybe it can be solved if we build up our own revolutionary armed force that can protect our electeds from the NYPD, or maybe it could be solved if we elect someone willing to become a martyr, but this is a hard problem to solve and I think it’s structurally deeper than the fact that he ran under a bourgeois party ticket.

      • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        11·
        3 days ago

        This presents a clear limitation of any electoral strategy.

        More like how the strategy is a dead end if he doesn’t have his own paramilitary to exact political costs to the NYPD should they go after him and his family. And if I’m not mistaken, the NYPD kidnapped the daughter of the then current mayor while the George Floyd uprising was happening.

        The paramilitary needs to be strong and resourceful enough that if Mamdani gets murdered by the NYPD, they can retaliate by assassinating the police chief. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Otherwise, the NYPD will just point a metaphoric (and perhaps literal) gun to his head and make Mamdani an offer he can’t refuse.

      • Blakey [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        12·
        3 days ago

        Of course there’s more going on than just running as a democrat. Running as a democrat just makes it very obvious what’s happening. And yes, running as anything to the left of the Dems would be basically suicidal at this moment. But there are any number of liberal politicians happy to work for the Dems, socialists defecting to the democratic party isn’t a good thing even if it’s the only way they become mayor. If a member of a proletarian party can’t safely take office the solution is to work on changing that, rather than naive entryism.

        • queermunist she/her@lemmy.mlEnglish
          16·
          3 days ago

          If he was independent or on the Working Families Party ticket or something he’d face the same choices - stand up to the NYPD and be martyred, organize a militant movement that can defend him from NYPD reprisal, or capitulate to the occupying NYPD.

          It’s not enough to just win the election. We need a plan for how to deal with reactionary forces that will kill our electeds.

          • Blakey [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
            10·
            3 days ago

            I never said otherwise. That again doesn’t mean it’s a good thing for socialist candidates to defect to liberal parties.

            • queermunist she/her@lemmy.mlEnglish
              11·
              3 days ago

              You’re pretty strongly implying that the reason he’s doing this is because he ran as a Democrat. I just don’t think that’s true.

              • Blakey [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
                3·
                2 days ago

                I really don’t think I am. I’m literally just saying that he is compromised and that the fact he ran as a democrat is indicative of that. I said nothing about causality. You are replying to a comment chain where I said:

                Of course there’s more going on than just running as a democrat. Running as a democrat just makes it very obvious what’s happening.

                Painting that as “pretty strongly implying that the reason he’s doing this is because he ran as a Democrat” feels borderline disingenuous tbqh.

                • queermunist she/her@lemmy.mlEnglish
                  1·
                  2 days ago

                  Interesting, I actually do think running as a Democrat is a way to become compromised. I think theParty gobbles up radicals and recuperates them into good little progressives willing to work within the system. AOC (for example) probably didn’t start out as a careerist climber piece of shit class traitor, that’s just how she’s been metabolized and shat out by the Party.

                  I just don’t think it matters either, a radical would behave the same way if they were working entirely within electoralism. He needed to train up cadres of militant supporters this whole time to defend him and his family from the NYPD, but he did not, and so now he’s going to capitulate because he did not prepare for militant struggle and he doesn’t want to die or see his family killed.

                  The specific party is less important than the political strategy; pure electoralism will produce the same result, no matter the party.

        • Maturin [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          6·
          2 days ago

          It’s more like a half a dozen posters who are obsessed with posting every article published about him even if it repeats the eight articles posted about the exact same incident when it happened months ago to try to restir the shit. He said he would retain Tisch months ago after what many posters here agreed was probably a closed room meeting with the NYPD to make concessions to them to prevent him from suffering a bad accident before the election.

      • LeninWeave [none/use name, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        15·
        3 days ago

        I liked your screed. I just didn’t have the energy to write a similar comment myself and probably get into an argument. The falling for it again and again does get tiring. I understand the hopium, and people mean well, but this is a dead end for socialism. The emoji basically expressed what I feel, it’s sad but not surprising.