Perspectives and Tasks Toward the DSA

Why American Capitalism Needs Mamdani

Zohran Mamdani’s spectacular ascent to mayor of New York City at the beginning of this year was a significant development for both the left and the debate over the future of the Democratic Party. The DSA proclaimed his win a victory for socialism and the model for how to bring about progressive change in the Trump years. Mamdani’s campaign was focused on bread-and-butter issues (not social questions) and openly advocated for a 21st-century sewer socialism or, as he calls it, pothole politics. The left went gaga for Mamdani. Having accepted his campaign’s premise—that his affordability agenda could only be realized through his election as a Democratic Party politician, the left continues to excuse one betrayal after another as necessary to achieve the bigger affordability goal.

The recent wins of the three candidates for Congress whom Mamdani backed in the Democratic primaries against establishment constituency Dems have further bolstered illusions in his course. While voter turnout was quite low (only 17 percent of Democratic voters citywide) and most working people did not bother to vote, the recent elections showed that the old ethnic, union-backed Democratic machines are dying and reflected the changing weight of the NYC electorate toward more liberal, white, petty-bourgeois transplants. The left presents Mamdani as if he has drawn some fundamental line against the oligarchy. The opposite is true. After losing the 2024 elections to Trump, the Democrats were left with a toxic brand. Most working people hated the “woke” moralism that went hand in hand with their declining living conditions. Mamdani argues that his brand of democratic-socialist politics is needed to save the Democratic Party wing of the ruling class from its worst excesses, and his tenure will provide a litmus test for that. It is still an open question whether Mamdani’s rebranding will save the Democrats, especially on the national scale, but it is the basket that the left has placed all its eggs in.

Everything Mamdani has done so far is a testament to his fundamental allegiance to Wall Street. He balanced the budget not by taxing the rich, but by deferring payments into the pension fund for over 700,000 city workers. He is privatizing public housing, which will only worsen the already bad living conditions for thousands of black and brown families. There are still massive illusions in Mamdani. But as the economic situation worsens, the ruling class will transfer the burden of saving capitalism onto the backs of working people, and Mamdani will be the one to plunge the knife in. The ensuing disappointment and anger will certainly cause a crisis in the DSA.

When Mamdani Mania Crashes,
What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted?

Mamdani has proclaimed his goal as: “We need to have a Democratic Party where working people can look at it and they can see themselves.” This effort to realign the Democratic Party has always been the DSA Right’s program. Historically, the DSA Left was opposed to this and either pushed for a clean break or for a dirty break, but all spoke of a break. It’s now abundantly clear that when the DSA Left argues to use the Dems for socialist purposes until the time is right to split and found a workers party, that time is never. The reason is that there’s no fundamental difference between trying to reform the genocidal Democratic Party and using it to advance socialism; both leave you trapped in the Dems and the same cycle of betrayal. With Mamdani’s win, the DSA Left moved right and all talk of any kind of break has gone by the wayside.

To remain useful to the Dems and move up their ranks, Mamdani will continue to sacrifice what made him popular in the first place, his “socialist” promises. We have already seen this playbook with AOC and Rashida Tlaib. AOC went from calling to abolish ICE to voting to fund ICE early on in 2019. She followed this up by helping spike a rail strike and giving a prime-time endorsement of genocidaire Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Convention. Tlaib helped funnel the pro-Palestine movement into the “uncommitted” campaign—and, through it, to Harris.

Mamdani calculated that to carry through even a small bit of his affordability agenda, he needed to pacify the NYPD and keep the Zionist billionaire heiress Jessica Tisch on as his police commissioner. He has gone from apologizing for his pre-campaign labeling of cops as racist to praising the cops who “keep our community safe” when they shoot people in mental crisis and opening new prisons in the boroughs. The main purpose of the NYC-DSA leadership has become protection of Mamdani. So, they ensure that they suppress any criticism within the DSA, e.g., any attempt to “hold him accountable.” When the criticism gets to be too much to stifle outright, they do a little damage control, as their tepid statement critical of Mamdani’s plan to hire more cops shows.

While most DSA Left caucuses claim a perspective of building a workers party, they are in denial of the huge gulf between the working class and socialists. To the extent that workers know about socialism, it’s the DSA they know, and most working people see the DSA as little better than the hated liberals. The coming betrayals of Mamdani and his new batch of “woke” DSA Democratic electeds, like Darializa Chevalier and Claire Valdez, will only further discredit socialism in the eyes of the working class and create greater obstacles to uniting workers along class lines. Unless we actively fight to sever the link between the DSA and the Dems, we won’t win the workers.

When the Marxist left portrays the victory of Mamdani and other Democratic electeds as a leap in socialist consciousness, they are not only being totally dishonest about where workers are at, but also undermining their own arguments that the Democratic Party is the graveyard of all social movements. The way to build an independent socialist party and advance class consciousness lies in splitting with the Dems and fighting them on every front—in the electoral and every other arena—for our class interests against theirs!

While most of the Marxist left is doing work in the DSA, no caucus other than Just Break Already (JBA) is fighting for this split. This leaves a vacuum of leadership in the DSA Left for those who are disappointed and upset about the betrayals that are the necessary accompaniment of liberal electoralism. Instead of just listing betrayal after betrayal, it’s important to lay out the role Mamdani plays for the ruling class and why he does what he does. Revolutionaries must show why it is impossible for Zohran or any other elected official within the Democratic Party to be held accountable to socialist principles.

For Socialism to Go Forward, Split DSA Along Class Lines

The left has completely failed to maintain the minimum standards necessary to actually advance the struggles of the working class as a force for itself and all the oppressed. The DSA Left’s advocacy of a dirty break is an expression of the DSA’s “big tent” politics, which puts a premium on unity between the Democratic Party’s open agents (the DSA Right) and those who see themselves as revolutionaries of some variety or another (the DSA Left). The DSA Left’s fawning over and campaigning for the DSA Dem electeds shows how the big tent binds these elements together, entirely to the benefit of the Democrats and the capitalist ruling class. The big tent allows the Right, with its Democratic Party connections, to dominate the organization and gives the Left a cover whereby it can talk about socialism in the sweet bye-and-bye and criticize the more egregious policies pushed by the Right. All this does is obscure the fact that, at the end of the day, the Left’s differences with the Right are not fundamentally principled, but tactical in nature. The dirty break is a disaster on repeat for the socialist movement and an expression of the liberal-reformist program widely prevalent in the DSA.

The current tension between what the DSA proclaims it stands for and what it actually does in practice will only increase in the next period as the crisis for the American ruling class intensifies. The dual tasks of revolutionaries in the DSA are: 1) cohere left-wing elements around the fight to break up the popular-front “big tent” along class lines and 2) act as a revolutionary, anti-imperialist pole against reformism.

We must insist on the role of the revolutionary party because breaking with the Democratic Party in and of itself would not make the DSA revolutionary. But this would further the process of political clarification and provide a real avenue for revolutionaries in the DSA to expose the bankruptcy of liberal-reformism and fight to win the best elements of the Left over to a revolutionary perspective.

It is useful to note that communist work in the DSA is fundamentally different from the work of revolutionaries in Communist Unity (CU) in Australia or our work in the now-defunct Your Party in Britain. Although there is a need to do real work and be an active factor in all these organizations, on principle we won’t engage in the Democratic Party electoral campaigns that make up the bulk of the DSA’s activity. This campaigning reflects the fact that the DSA is a part of that imperialist party. While we are intervening to regroup the left, we do so on the basis of a split between socialists and liberals.

The DSA, CU and Your Party share the social-democratic “big tent” conception, which is inherently capitulatory to the right wing and liberalism. But the DSA’s big tent includes one of the twin parties of the most reactionary power on the planet. Any socialist worth their salt must stand for severing this tie. That doesn’t mean we must be shrill and go in guns blazing—shouting “Break with the Democrats!”—in every intervention or arena of DSA work. But this is the primary struggle for socialists in the DSA, and we use every opportunity to exacerbate the DSA’s contradictions and show why what we are putting forward is the only way to advance socialism.

The following are concrete priorities and tasks for advancing our political perspectives in the DSA:

1. We will pursue united-front work with other groups, like Labor Militant and International Socialist Alternative (Revolutionary), that want to fight for a clean break. The joint announcement of a clean-break united front will be an important start. We should also seek opportunities to do joint work on the ground to help build the united front and broaden its forces in the lead-up to the 2027 DSA National Convention, to which we want to send a clean-break bloc.

2. JBA’s “Gimme a Break” podcast is a key way to get our ideas and polemics out to a broader audience, build the united front for a clean break and hopefully get other caucuses to debate us about the way forward for the socialist movement.

3. Our caucus must be known for fighting against U.S. imperialism and taking on international questions, such as the resolution submitted in Chicago urging DSA to defend Iran against the U.S. and Israel and the statement defending Cuba and opposing counterrevolution on the island. We must also be known as the caucus that champions the fight for black liberation by bringing the “open police archives” struggle against police terror and the fight to defend public housing into the DSA.

4. We will continue to find ways to intervene in the DSA’s labor work and concrete struggles in areas where we do work, such as our “No More 24” petition and defense of public housing, as a means to push forward our perspectives and show in practice how the alliance with the Dems is the source of betrayals and an obstacle to improving the conditions of working people and oppressed communities.

5. In the lead-up to the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential elections, we must use every opportunity we can to propagate our ideas and advance the struggle to build a Marxist pole against both the DSA defenders of Democratic Party liberalism and liberalism’s reactionary MAGA opponents. Concretely, this means critically supporting working-class alternatives, like Kshama Sawant in Seattle, Andre Easton in NYC, Ed Hershey in Chicago and Brittany Kubicek in Rhode Island, as well as supporting efforts to get the Socialist Party of Indiana off the ground as a working-class alternative to the Dems. Against bourgeois electoralist illusions, we seek to use these campaigns to build wider confidence among workers and the oppressed to struggle under their own independent banner.

6. We will set up a proper JBA website and look for opportunities to hold events (on Zoom and in-person if feasible or warranted) where we can directly engage others in the DSA in discussion and debate.