Zohran Won’t Fix New York

Trump is just getting started. He has declared naked war on the working class in Los Angeles, and New York is already feeling the squeeze. The NYC Democratic mayoral primary is quickly approaching, and the central debate is over who is best equipped to stand up to Trump and offer some crumbs to New Yorkers along the way. The race has come down to machine politician Andrew Cuomo versus newcomer Zohran Mamdani.

After the Democrats’ spectacular defeat in the presidential elections, they have been desperately trying to figure out the way forward for their party—which has fallen out of favor with both the bosses they serve and the workers whose votes they need to get elected. This primary may well determine the general direction the Democrats take to tie workers back to their party in order to restrain working-class anger. Workers have absolutely no interest in voting on which Democrat will swindle them.

Cuomo is Wall Street’s favored hardline candidate. He is well-connected to the oligarchy and has much of the union bureaucracy in his corner to help line up workers behind him. He cynically promises to undo all the devastation of workers that he engineered as governor—from leaving workers to die during the pandemic to cutting pensions and healthcare (see article). His relentless attacks against the working class threw open the door to Trump 2.0.

Then we have the new “progressive” darling Zohran Mamdani. His promises to lower the cost of living have captured the hearts of young people alienated by the DNC establishment. Unlike Cuomo, he isn’t in the pocket of Wall Street and can blame his inability to deliver on its resistance. But this only makes him more effective at shoring up support for his party and heading off a social explosion on behalf of the oligarchy. This is why he offers only the most minimal measures to keep the heads of the working class barely above water. Like AOC and former NYC mayor Bill de Blasio, he will fall in line with the Democratic machine because he is firmly committed to reviving this party of bankers and landlords.

Zohran has already given a taste of how fast he will roll over. While he gives lip service to freeing pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, Zohran has ditched his anti-Zionism as soon as he was reminded of the party line. He wants to run U.S. imperialism’s financial center as a representative of the party of genocide in Gaza—the very party that paved the way for Trump’s repression of pro-Palestinian protesters and smearing of them as anti-Semitic.

The pressure is only going to rise from here. Trump’s repression of pro-Palestinian protesters was a test run for mass immigrant round-ups. For all the noise coming from “progressive” Democratic L.A. mayor Karen Bass about refusing to collude with the Feds, her cops have done just that. Zohran talks the same talk, while proposing a Department of Community Safety to relieve the cops of social-work duties that are “preventing them from doing their actual jobs.” But what are their actual jobs? To attack the pickets of striking workers, enforce evictions, terrorize black people—and collude in ICE raids.

Zohran’s real role isn’t to mount a serious challenge to the Establishment, but to make a flailing capitalist party appear as if it can be a party of the people. The truth is that neither Cuomo nor Zohran will put up a real fight against Trump. Only the working class can defend NYC. It is urgently necessary to channel the widespread anger at the decaying status quo into a movement independent of the Democrats that organizes immigrants, workers, the poor and the struggling middle class against the capitalist onslaught.

How to Defend Ourselves

Trump’s real goal is and has always been to force the working class into submission. A million federal workers lost their collective bargaining rights at the stroke of a pen and now any union could be outlawed at a moment’s notice. Like L.A., NYC runs on immigrant labor—mass deportations are a threat to the whole labor movement! How can workers build a solid picket line and fight to improve their conditions if their coworkers are worried that causing trouble will get them a one-way flight to a prison colony? Trump knows deporting every immigrant would crash the economy, but he wants to be able to pick off the working class through fear and division.

New York is still a union town, but the unions have barely played any role in defending the class from the cost-of-living crisis, let alone protecting immigrant workers against ICE raids. Unions like 32BJ SEIU, UAW and PSC-CUNY have demonstrated against ICE. Good. But their leaderships have limited these protests to expressions of moral outrage, rather than displays of collective strength that can disrupt business as usual. This is because these misleaders are in bed with the Democratic Party that has ruined this city and loves immigrants only so long as they remain a cheap pool of labor to exploit. The union bureaucrats keep labor on its knees, bound with no-strike clauses and divided by competition over limited resources.

For the working class to protect itself, it must defend its most vulnerable layers. The bosses target immigrants and pro-Palestinian activists first to divide and weaken the workers movement. Workers must consolidate immigrants behind the union movement by organizing them into its ranks. ICE would think twice if every time they snatched someone, their union brothers and sisters shut down the workplace until they are returned!

Such efforts would go a long way toward building the solidarity and organization needed to compel the Wall Street vultures and real estate barons to make NYC affordable. Whether it’s taking on parasitic slumlords or opposing military mobilizations against immigrants, New York’s working class and poor need a plan of action independent of and in opposition to the Democrats.

We Can’t Afford to Live Here

Trump is the reactionary landlord class of NYC personified. Taking him on means taking on Wall Street and all the capitalists who make this city hell. Take a look at housing, one of the central drivers of the cost-of-living crisis. The lowest number of available apartments in over a half century has rents skyrocketing, while millions of square feet in Manhattan stay empty. High rents and low wages have been driving out growing numbers of New Yorkers since the pandemic. Typical of Democrats overseeing “sanctuary cities,” Eric Adams capitalized on the miserable housing conditions of working-class and poor New Yorkers to deepen the polarization between mostly Hispanic immigrants and black people by housing immigrants in the ghettos and barrios. This only inflames racial divisions and forces these groups to fight over who gets the barely livable, dilapidated, roach-infested apartments. All the while, landlords are making a killing.

Improving housing means taking a sledgehammer to segregation. By keeping black people squarely at the bottom of society, big landlords get away with degrading conditions across the board and avoid any responsibility by pitting working people against one another. This is what makes the ghettos and barrios a fertile breeding ground for anti-immigrant reaction. The only way to unite the class is to wage a struggle for quality, integrated housing throughout the five boroughs entirely at the expense of the slumlords and their financial backers. Instead, Zohran, who has made tackling the cost-of-living crisis the centerpiece of his campaign, proposes the half measure of a rent freeze on rent-stabilized apartments that are already insanely expensive. This would do nothing to fix the wretched conditions that the majority of workers live in or to address racial segregation.

But Zohran cannot possibly deliver even on this half measure. Is the housing lobby that rakes in billions in rents going to willingly stop raking in cash, much less pay for affordable housing, because the mayor wags his finger? No! It would take a real mobilization of working-class power threatening the property rights of the real estate magnates to secure a meaningful long-term citywide rent freeze. It would take massive public works projects and the seizure of unoccupied high-end apartments and commercial offices to get quality, integrated housing at a time when Trump is slashing every restraint on big landlords.

Zohran’s plan to fund his proposals is to “tax the rich,” but he knows the rich have endless loopholes—it’s how they got their money. Plus, playing with the tax rate lets the rich pass the bill onto the working class. One example of how this would play out is congestion pricing, a direct tax on working-class commuters which Zohran supports. It is impossible to improve housing while tied to the very capitalist forces that thrive off the parasitic real estate industry!

The unions should use the housing crisis as a starting point to organize tenants and those facing evictions. The fight for housing for all can start to bridge the divide between segregated neighborhoods and show people that union muscle is the best way to defend themselves. Public services are only as strong as the working class that needs and uses them!

Left Must Choose: Another Bill de Blasio or the Working Class?

The petty-bourgeois left, not the working class, has embraced Zohran’s campaign and swoon over his “progressive” credentials. Meanwhile, workers are stranded without any working-class alternative in the general election for mayor! The left—stuck debating the relative merits of building socialism “inside” the system through Zohran or “outside” through a movement to pressure him to the left—remains a non-factor among workers.

On the “inside,” we have the left-wing DSA caucuses: Marxist Unity Group and Reform and Revolution. They preach socialism on the one hand, while clinging to the Democrats on the other. Their support to Zohran is part of their “dirty break” strategy of trying to vote in socialism through the imperialist Democratic Party. The only thing this has ever accomplished is to corral socialist-minded youth into the Democratic Party and to turn off workers from socialism through association with the hated Democrats! Instead of trying to get a bunch of genocidal imperialists to wave the red flag, there must be a clean break with the Democrats—including all electeds like Zohran—to advance the fight for socialism (see above article).

On the “outside,” we have the likes of Socialist Alternative (SA), which offers the friendly advice that “Mamdani should run as an independent socialist” and Left Voice, which claims that the movement around Zohran is anti-capitalist—if only he wasn’t a Democrat. These “socialists” have clearly learned nothing from Bernie and every other “progressive” capitalist politician that they have drooled over.

Zohran has made it perfectly clear that he wants to revive the Democratic Party, and to think that he can be reasoned with to do anything else is delusional. Zohran has not given the smallest pretense of wanting to build anything close to a workers party, much less overthrow the capitalist class. Zohran running on the same liberal program outside the Democratic Party would not be a step forward, but would only make it easier for him to scam the working class and create yet another obstacle to actually building a workers party. In proposing this course, SA and Left Voice reveal they have nothing to offer workers.

The choice stands before the left: build illusions in Zohran or build working-class unity and power. Leftists should fight to build the independent socialist campaign that they claim to stand for. But instead, they are trying to put lipstick on a pig. Only by exposing “progressive” swindlers like Zohran can socialists rebuild the working-class movement into a force that can really transform this city.