What Mamdani’s Victory Really Represents

Almost the entire left is celebrating the victory of DSA member and Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral election as a much-needed political earthquake and win for socialism. But this assessment contains an awful lot of wishful thinking. To know how best to build toward socialism under the present circumstances, we must take a sober look at what this development really represents.

While Mamdani was virtually unknown a year ago, his meteoric ascent was propelled by near-universal familiarity with the suffocating cost of living. It is no secret that the NYC housing market is out of control. In the Bronx, the poorest of the five boroughs, the average family pays over 80 percent of its income toward rent. This is clearly unsustainable. Many low-wage workers have been priced out of the city altogether. Even Brooklyn brownstone owners are having a lot of trouble maintaining their properties when the expense of groceries, transportation, childcare and everything else is far outpacing income gains.

With so many sinking under this affordability crisis—which not only runs red hot in NYC, but also blankets the entire country—Mamdani promised relief through a series of reforms, including a rent freeze, free buses and childcare and city-owned groceries. These proposals increasingly caught on, especially among younger New Yorkers with enormous debt and bleak job prospects and recent transplants to the city experiencing massive sticker shock. Despite considerable backlash from the Democratic establishment and Wall Street, Mamdani kept to the affordability message and proudly wore the “democratic socialist” label.

While not formally a part of his campaign, Mamdani’s pro-Palestinian views also made waves. This support to Palestine was considered a breath of fresh air by opponents of Israel’s genocide and worthy of contempt by mainstream Democrats. That Mamdani is both an outlier in his own party and willing to backtrack to avoid getting cast out (e.g., renouncing the “globalize the intifada” slogan) is a testament to just how thoroughly the interests of U.S. imperialism are bound up with Zionism and set the limits of acceptability. Mamdani’s open practice of his Muslim faith on the campaign trail was also a selling point among the city’s large and growing Muslim population, which has been marginalized and under siege for many years after the September 11 attacks.

The bankers and landlords erupted in hostility at the prospect of a Mamdani City Hall, and his Democratic opponents and the tabloid media engaged in open red-baiting and Islamophobic smear jobs in a failed bid to derail his campaign. This hysteria spread not because Mamdani is preparing the socialist transformation of the city or otherwise represents an existential threat to the oligarchy, but because the oligarchy never wants to accept even the slightest curbs on its profit-seeking. Rampant real-estate speculation is a tremendous source of ill-gotten wealth in NYC—and a driver of soaring housing prices. But even while stepping on the toes of the city elite, Mamdani is providing them a great service. He is saving them from the consequences of their parasitic behavior and preventing the discontent of working people from finding a political outlet that would represent a real challenge to the reign of Wall Street.

Mamdani’s economic populism generated quite a bit of enthusiasm among certain layers, especially younger Asians, Latinos and black people as well as recent graduates and young professionals, who—like most workers—are getting squeezed out of NYC. He is viewed as a savior in these quarters. The younger generations filled out an army of campaign volunteers whose door knocking helped offset the significant monetary advantage that the billionaires heaped upon Andrew Cuomo, his chief rival in both the primary and general elections. As a result, the turnout was the largest for a mayoral election in decades, although the scandal-ridden Cuomo also received more votes than most past victors.

Even while Mamdani carried low-income areas like East New York and large sections of the Bronx, the poorest city residents went in nearly equal numbers for Cuomo. Mamdani’s working-class support is a far cry from the overwhelming numbers portrayed by his campaign and the left. Most workers did not vote and even those who did are skeptical that he will ever be able to deliver or that anything could be free without trade-offs or hidden costs. That said, Mamdani managed to flip some working-class neighborhoods that Cuomo captured in the primaries.

In short, Zohran’s victory was not the product of an insurgent working class. But the left presents it as grounds to launch a working-class counteroffensive, claiming that the election outcome signals a leap in class consciousness and a willingness among working-class New Yorkers to duke it out with the billionaires. But there is no evidence of such. In NYC, movements for progressive causes, such as the defense of the Palestinians, remain as small and isolated as elsewhere in the country.

In particular, the working class is not in the streets in any kind of consistent, organized fashion and strike action against the bosses has all but dried up. The only protest of any size of late was last month’s No Kings Day march, which was directed entirely toward roping anti-Trump sentiment into a Democratic revival—a purpose at odds with the working class taking the lead. Across the country, workers are by and large either open MAGA supporters or trying to stay out of the mix, and New York City is no exception.

Instead of declaring ever onward and upward when working-class defensive struggles are at an ebb, the left should engage in the hard work required to actually get the class on its feet. The order of the day is to intervene among workers to encourage collective action in the face of the many divisions pulling them apart. The working class will be the deciding factor and winning its allegiance will be possible only if revolutionaries lay out how to defend its own class interests, based on the actual state of play. Chasing after Mamdani will just make this all the more difficult.

Mild Reforms That Provide No Answers

The left presents Mamdani as if he has drawn some fundamental line against the oligarchy. But the very opposite is the case. His brand of economic populism with social-democratic coloration is one route the ruling class can go to pursue its strategic objective of preparing the country for increased hostilities with its biggest rivals. State intervention to smooth over economic difficulties will inevitably transfer the burden of saving capitalism from the crises it creates onto the backs of working people.

This road, pioneered by FDR during the Great Depression and World War II, is particularly useful to an imperialist power in need of fortifying its position. This is not at all progressive. The purpose is to head off struggle by the working class and line up those angered by social ills behind the institutions of the class enemy. Only today, unlike at the time of FDR, the U.S. empire is on the decline, not the rise, so there is much less fat to go around.

The future direction of the Democratic Party remains unwritten, but Mamdani’s focus on “bread and butter” issues while putting “wokeness” in the backseat is a distinct possibility. The mayor-elect sent his main establishment rival packing not once, but twice on the major NYC stage. Even though the rest of the country does not resemble the city, if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. To win office, other Democrats who follow Mamdani’s lead might not call themselves democratic socialists. But they can offer a few mild economic promises to pull workers and the oppressed back into a party that is still widely hated. This has been the longstanding role of “progressives” like AOC and Bernie Sanders. Mamdani and the legions of volunteers that his DSA team assembled certainly have a vitality that Chuck Schumer and the walking-dead party old guard lack.

Trump himself has returned to singing the song of affordability. Last year, such rhetoric played well with voters choking on the inflation fueled by Biden’s policies. But since re-entering the White House, Trump’s own inability to corral rising prices has become increasingly obvious, and he is taking the heat for the persistence of inflation. The resulting drop in Trump’s popularity was entirely foreseeable, especially when he is subjecting the economy to trade wars and government shutdowns. Not just Mamdani, but moderate Democrats like the governor-elects of New Jersey and Virginia cashed in.

It is not inconceivable that Mamdani could deliver on at least some of his promises either. His main platform is not terribly radical or any kind of challenge to private property. The implementation of these reforms is entirely possible without reducing the standing or power of Wall Street. Even the most far-reaching of the bunch, free or heavily subsidized universal childcare, exists in many capitalist West European countries. Of course, any such program will face considerable opposition from the ruling class in NYC, where only minimal resources have been invested in this area and confronting segregation head on is necessary to provide quality services citywide.

Mamdani’s recent liberal predecessor, Bill de Blasio, froze rents for three of the eight years of his tenure, and the mayor appoints the entire rent board. While moderate Democratic governor Kathy Hochul, who oversees the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), is balking at taxing the rich to fund Mamdani’s agenda, the MTA operated free local buses for a period during the pandemic, and bus fares make up a very small share of the agency’s revenue. Drumming up some additional funds through increased taxation of the wealthy is not out of the question at a time when Trump is handing them massive tax breaks.

Of course, the bankers and landlords will kick and scream over even the smallest concessions and look to gain back whatever they lose through other means. Property owners, for example, will likely invest even less in maintenance than they already do in the event of a rent freeze, driving up the number of distressed buildings and vacancies in rent-stabilized apartments, while further gouging renters in the majority of apartments, where a rent freeze would not apply. Mamdani’s proposal is not a blueprint for quality, affordable housing on a mass scale, but rather a source of division, as a significant majority of workers do not live in rent-stabilized apartments and therefore would not receive any benefit whatsoever.

Absent greater revenue from taxes (which could well fall on working people too), the only way for Mamdani to finance his reforms would be to take the money from other areas in a cash-strapped city that Trump will undoubtedly further bleed of resources. Working people, as they fear, would then shoulder the load. In his victory speech, Mamdani talked tough against Trump, who has threatened to unleash his fury on the city. But the incoming Democratic mayor will have no better options than his counterparts in Los Angeles, Chicago and other cities to fight back.

The Democratic opposition to Trump showed itself to be as divided and feeble as ever a mere week after the elections, when the White House beat it into submission to reopen the federal government. So much for their vaunted defense of health insurance subsidies against a White House that had already taken the ax to Medicaid. Despite the electoral setbacks, Trump did not waver from his next-level bare-knuckle politics—moving to impose mass layoffs, deny food stamps to millions, cut air traffic, etc.—and the Democrats predictably folded in the end. The main takeaway from this grim episode is that the working class can only rely on its own collective power to defend itself.

A working-class resistance must be cohered to give NYC a fighting chance to repel Trump. The left heaps praise on Mamdani for supposedly opening the door to this possibility (see Left Voice: Zohran’s victory “is a mandate to fight the cost of living crisis, defend immigrants, and stop genocide”). But his campaign pushed to the back the particular concerns of immigrants, black people and other specially oppressed groups in the name of a false unity around economic issues alone. This is downright counterproductive when these groups are the main targets of attacks that drive down the conditions of the entire working class.

Quality, low-cost housing for all cannot possibly be achieved as long as the miserable conditions of segregated black communities persist. The same goes for decent childcare when any such infrastructure is utterly lacking in minority neighborhoods. The liberals and their left tails have driven a wedge between the working class and the specially oppressed by equating sacrifice by the former with defense of the latter. The way forward is to link the defense of the specially oppressed to the defense of the working class against the common enemy in both the Republican and Democratic parties.

The Marxist left needs to snap out of its Mamdani mania. What is on display is not a rising revolutionary tide, but the failure of the left to maintain any kind of minimum standards necessary to actually advance the struggles of the working class as a force for itself and all the oppressed. Openly embracing Zohran like the Party for Socialism and Liberation does or even giving him a pass like Left Voice will only backfire. Mamdani is about to take his place alongside the “powers that be.” The left’s enthusiasm for the next NYC mayor and his economic populism promises only to further discredit socialism in the eyes of the working class and create greater obstacles to uniting workers along class lines.

Let’s See to Whom Zohran Is Accountable

The Mamdani campaign has swelled the ranks of NYC-DSA. But it also has brought forth fully the bureaucratism of the chapter leadership, which has closed ranks to fend off any potential internal criticism of Mamdani. Egregiously, the rights of the membership were stomped on at an October meeting in order to quash efforts by some on the DSA left to declare Mamdani accountable to the organization and its broader program. This is not simply some unfortunate turn of events, but an outgrowth of operating inside the capitalist Democratic Party.

The NYC-DSA leadership, drawn from the DSA right, views its purpose as simply getting more “progressive” Democrats elected. These Democratic Party operatives have direct experience in boosting a long line of politicians who talk big, only to betray once in office. In contrast, the DSA left claims to be for, at least someday, cutting ties with the Democrats and founding an independent workers party. Today, though, the vast majority of the DSA left support Mamdani and consider his campaign a model of how to build up socialist forces within the party of the class enemy. Well aware that Mamdani has limitations, they want to keep him accountable to socialist principles in order to ensure this project remains on track.

Since the primaries, Mamdani’s trajectory has been consistently toward conciliation of the bankers and landlords, racist cops and Democratic establishment. He has pledged to work with the billionaires, apologized to the NYPD for having called it racist and anti-queer and appointed a transition team mostly made up of veterans of past Democratic city administrations. In turn, establishment icons like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have embraced Mamdani, and Wall Street is giving its cautious backing to the mayor-elect.

Although most on the DSA left view the two things very differently, the NYC-DSA leadership’s bureaucratism and Mamdani’s trajectory come from the same place: it is the price to pay to be a power broker among the Democrats. To get to where Mamdani is now and stay there, he has to be truly accountable only to the city rulers who call the shots in the party. But for those on the DSA left who remain unconvinced, we propose to test the waters to clarify where Mamdani truly stands.

An obvious place to start is to lay down some basic accountability criteria in the area that many on the DSA left consider his biggest mistake thus far: his choice for police commissioner. Despite her own apparent reluctance to stay on, Mamdani insists on courting Jessica Tisch for the job. The billionaire heiress, Zionist pig and ICE collaborator Tisch wants to flood the streets with more racist cops while keeping City Hall at arm’s length. Nothing good can come from her continued running of the NYPD.

Any socialist mayor worth his salt would be looking to completely curtail the power of the police thugs loyal to Wall Street and build up separate bodies of working-class self-defense to replace them. Mamdani clearly is going in the other direction. The DSA left should move now before it is too late to get motions passed in every possible body of the organization instructing the mayor-elect to dump Tisch and install in her place a police commissioner who will immediately open all police archives to expose their crimes, jail the killer cops and declare the non-enforcement of the anti-strike Taylor Law. The installation of a commissioner meeting these criteria would cross multiple red lines for the ruling class and encourage workers to stand up to fight collectively in their own name.

When these and similar motions fail to achieve their purpose, one conclusion should emerge: an immediate split from all Democratic Party elements is the only way to maintain the integrity of the socialist cause. Attempting to refurbish the image of the Democratic Party at a time when this party of Palestinian genocide and economic ruin is generally disliked among workers is not the job of socialists. Rather, we must lead workers and the oppressed to break from the stranglehold of the two-party system and cohere an independent organization so that they can successfully fight for their interests against the ruling class.