I didn't suggest sex between the two candidates would be uncontroversial ...
I presume the result has long been official now but the issue seemed to be that Ammiano was making a play against gentrification. I wondered whether his solution was utopian, thoroughly reformist, or whether there were any grounds for the mistrust that he had communistic proclivities.
Of course like all other politicians he is a conscientious opportunist, especially in a personality election like that for mayor, or president. But these individuals semi-consciously represent material interests which battle things out between them, mediated by the froth of the personal electoral process.
This small case illustrates the need for a marxist analysis that stretches over the polarised positions of whether we support one bourgeois opportunist candidate against another bourgeois opportunist candidate.
How coherent, materialist and dialectical, is the campaign against gentrification in Los Angeles, to which Ammiano was making an opportunistic or communistic gesture? That is the real question?
Does it essentially demand the socialisation of the private ownership of land with social planning of neighbourhoods and a free market only in rents and leases?
Chris Burford
London