Revolution, actually: Mamdani's Election Is a Class Victory in a Class War [KKF longread]
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Paris Commune
16 min read
The article explicitly compares Mamdani's victory to the Paris Commune as a historical precedent for grassroots revolutionary politics. Understanding this 1871 socialist government in Paris provides essential context for the author's claim that NYC 2025 represents a genuine class revolution.
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Overton window
10 min read
The article argues conservatives have successfully shifted the Overton window backwards since the 1970s while the left failed to respond. Understanding this political theory concept about the range of acceptable discourse is crucial to grasping the author's argument about left political failure.
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Working Families Party
17 min read
The article credits the Working Families Party alongside DSA as the political vanguard that organized Mamdani's victory. Understanding this progressive third party's history, strategy of fusion voting, and role in New York politics provides concrete context for the grassroots infrastructure behind the campaign.
Guest essay from Egor Kotkin. Support Egor’s work on Substack and Patreon. Follow him on Twitter and YouTube
It’s not that the left forgot how to win; we seem to not know how the win looks like because we have no idea what the fight is anymore. And the most clear evidence of that is the fact that since the neoliberal revanch has begun, the left on both sides of the Cold War divide has remained constantly on the back foot: since the 1970s the left has been continuously ceding the ground to the advancing conservatism, which over the next 50 years since then wiped out large parts of the socialist/social democratic developments so much so that with economic conditions of the 1920s also returned the politics of the 1920s, with the public voting fascists in power all over the place, including the United States.
Since the 1970s, conservatives were successfully doing revolutionary politics of pushing the Overton window (backwards), while the left was only catching up and reacting to relentless conservative initiative. Such total, all over the world except for the communist 5 (China, Cuba, DPRK, Laos, Vietnam) and consistent, over four decades, political reversal could mean only one thing: collapse of the left theory. Since at least the 1970s, the left didn’t have a working theory of change, flying essentially blind, yet remained in denial about that, because earlier that century, the left, armed with the theory, had literally changed the world.
But any idea can only be as powerful as material conditions allow. Right idea means “right for the circumstance”: not the one that sounds right or considered to be right, but the one that works. “Practice is the criterion of truth.” The theory, the bulk of which originated in the XIX century, did work in practice up until the middle of the XX century, and allowed for change to humanity on a civilizational scale. It worked to the extent it could, and by succeeding in changing the world, rendered itself inadequate to the new material conditions it brought. Such is the dialectic of change.
But because the Western left hasn’t done its XX-century history homework, it still clings to that era’s time—at least thirty years late for the political present. Any successful left political praxis in such a situation is necessarily done, to some extent, in defiance of the theory. Which creates the problem that ...
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