electoral poloticts will never save us stop worshiping them

No matter how seemingly radical someone running for office is (Zohran Mamdani), they are, by nature of their position in the bourgeois 2 party dictatorship, going to betray the working people in the international proletarian and anti-imperialist struggle. We have seen this time and time again, from the New Deal in the 30's, when all the social gains were slowly stripped back as the masses became less militant and the threat of uprising subsided. To the way AOC and Burnie, who were heralded as the saving grace to American democracy, also backslide on key issues such as support for unions and their rights to strike, continually backing Israel, and giving support to Kamala Harris after a vice presidency of complete and utter complacency in genocide. With AOC even siding with republicans on a bill to prevent a railroad strike, the agreement in this bill "notably did not include provisions for paid sick leave"(https://www.newsweek.com/aoc-among-democrats-vote-against-avoiding-railway-strike-1763645), and these are just a few examples.

Despite the hype, it is clear that Zohran is in line to be the next AOC. He has already started backsliding on his promise to defund the NYPD (https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/30/mamdani-backs-away-from-out-of-step-defund-the-police-posts-00485172)

 , and has decided to keep on Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, despite her being complicit at best and assistive at worst in the activities of ice. she also oversaw the violent crackdowns on both pro-Palestine and anti-ICE protesters, including delivering the sealed record of a woman arrested at a pro-Palestine protest to homeland security inorder to try and support her detention and possible deportation(https://tableofsuccess.hellgatenyc.com/jessica-tisch/). 

Why does this keep happening? In short, they don't actually have revolutionary politics; these darlings of American democracy are not socialists(despite the right loving to call them that), they do not believe in truly transferring power to the working people and ending capitalism. The furthest left the US 2-party system will allow is democratic socialist or "the Nordic model", which, despite having the word socialism in it, is nothing but capitalism with a social safety net; it does nothing to change the economic base of society. Democratic socialism relies on reforms of capitalism in order to give its population a more comfortable life and limit dissent and social upheaval against the exploitative nature of capitalism. There are 2 big issues with this: 1) as we saw with the New Deal, reforms are not permanent and do not actually hand any of the power over to the working class, making them easy to repeal when they are no longer serving the interests of the ruling class. 2nd, this system of reform cannot change the fact that capitalism is an inherently exploitative system that requires constant growth in profits. If a country's capitalists cannot exploit their own population enough to make these profits, they will export that exploitation to the global south through violent colonialism and unequal exchange (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X). The Nordic countries do not have clean hands because they have good healthcare and education. 

The style of "socialism" we are sold is a red herring. It sounds good, but in reality, it misdirects the working class's energy into voting for the next letdown rather than fighting for real power. In order to end the exploitative system that is responsible for our climate disaster, wars, colonialism, and poverty, the proletariat must not fall into the trap of electoralism; we must build our own independent organisation, uniute with the international proletariat and fight against falling into the revisionism that got us to the point where zhoran can be considered a socialist despite not supporting the proletariat taking power. I beg of you to please stop putting your energy into bourgeois politicians who will fail you. Go ahead and vote for them if you want, but don't expect them to change the world, and don't put your energy into them.

thx for reading let me know if you want any recs on things to read on this topic :)