Frank Merrit, Committee for a Workers’ International
Zohran Mamdani, a self-described socialist, running as the official Democratic Party candidate, has won the New York Mayoral election. He is the first candidate since 1969 to win over one million votes in the city, often seen as the epitome of capitalism. Reflecting the scale of interest and polarisation in the contest, the overall turnout was the highest since the mid-twentieth century.
The support for Mamdani’s programme represented a positive hunger for change. It is to be welcomed that workers and youth in capitalism’s flagship city came out to vote for and campaign for policies such as rent control, a raised minimum wage, opposition to the Gaza genocide, more public housing, and municipal grocery stores.
The New York Post, Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid, that still has a wide circulation in New York, emblazoned its front page with the headline, “On your Marx, get set, Zo!” This echoes the attacks of the right-wing capitalist media and President Trump, who term Mamdani and his reform programme for New York as “Communist”. Mamdani ran and gained support on the issue of “affordability” in one of the world’s most unequal cities during a historic cost-of-living crisis in the US, promising social and progressive reform, through taxation of the wealthy.
Trump, on the eve of in-person voting, fanned the flames in the polarised atmosphere, saying, if Mamdani won, “It’s gonna be hard for me as the president to give a lot of money to New York. Because if you have a communist running New York, all you’re doing is wasting the money you’re sending there”. After the result his confrontational Truth Social post stated: “AND SO IT BEGINS”.
Mamdani, who had spent the latter stage of his campaign moderating his message to appease Democratic Party leaders and big business, then returned to playing to his base and activists in his victory speech, addressing Trump directly saying “turn the volume up!!!!! to get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us”.
Mamdani’s words will influence layers of youth and workers in the city and across the US looking for a lead in the fight against Trump. He said, “If any city could show the nation how to defeat Trump, it was the city that gave rise to him”.
He went on: “For as long as we can remember, the working people of New York have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected that power does not belong in their hands.
“Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery bike handlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns: these are not hands that have been allowed to hold power. And yet, over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater.
“So, if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power. This is not only how we stop Trump, it’s how we stop the next one”.
This combative rhetoric, which is a continuation of the sharp election debates, has generated understandable excitement, particularly from youth in the US and beyond. Socialists must take account of this, while having an all-sided analysis, including highlighting potential and real dangers rooted in the limitations of Mamdani and his campaign. These limits were seen in a matter of hours with the appointment of Mamdani’s transition team which, while including someone who works for a non-profit that campaigns for the poor, also includes President Biden’s Federal Trade Commission chair.
Interest in socialist ideas
Mamdani is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an organisation which has grown among youth in the last decade around the campaigns of figures like Bernie Sanders, but also because of the general interest in socialist ideas, including in the more educated college layer.
When the DSA was formed in 1982, it included ex-members of the defunct Socialist Party of America. They successfully argued against continuing to try and build a workers’ party and argued instead that the DSA should be active around and within the Democrats, despite it being a corporate, pro-capitalist party.
In recent years, this has been debated in DSA but still the majority reject the idea of clearly separating from the Democratic Party. This was the political course Mamdani followed, which will now be tested on the national stage by his win. Democratic Party leaders will push ‘compromise’ in an attempt to prevent him challenging capitalism.
The US ruling class is also absorbing this result and debating how to respond. The Financial Times highlights how, “in the final weeks before the election, Mamdani intensified his courtship of New York’s business class, attending a series of meetings with chief executives as he sprinted towards what appeared to be an inevitable victory.”
Mamdani is working with aides who previously worked with Barak Obama and other corporate Democrats. He made an intensified pitch after his primary win to reassure corporate New York, rather than preparing the ground to build a mass movement to struggle for his reforms and more. A section of corporate America is willing to make concessions on issues like taxation, no doubt to avoid an escalation of polarisation feeding class struggle and radicalisation.
The New York Times Editorial Board, in its post-election editorial says: “This board did not support his primary campaign, owing to our concerns about his policy proposals and his inexperience. But we are rooting for his success. New York – the world’s most dynamic city, but one where many residents feel priced out of a good life – needs him to succeed.” It went on to say: “Mr. Mamdani cannot solve economic inequality, the problem that fuelled his campaign”.
The majority of Mamdani’s reforms, let alone socialism, will not be implemented by the “broad coalition” the New York Times editors want. Youth and workers seeking progressive change would be ensnared by the corporate Democrats and behind them Wall Street and the wider liberal section of the capitalist class if they follow Mamdani’s approach after the primary of trying to appease the capitalist elites.
As the Financial Times pointed out, “Robert Steel, the longtime Wall Street executive who had served in the mayoral administration of corporate Mike Bloomberg, said what mattered most now was the few dozen agency heads at City Hall selected by Mamdani – ‘There are 30 to 50 people who really run the city’.”
Rather than appointing a handful of officials, the task of a socialist administration should be to build and strengthen mass working-class power to struggle for Mamdani’s reforms, and to broaden them.
Mamdani’s reforms on wages and housing are limited to being phased in over a period of years when there is no reason that they could not be implemented with New York’s considerable mayoral and municipal budgetary powers, immediately after he takes office. Mamdani says he will implement a rent freeze on the two million rent-controlled apartments and homes that exist in the city. This should be expanded to a call for rent freezes on all rental properties, for example.
Clearly this would open immediate conflict with the Trump administration. Trump is already trying to cut federal grants to Democrat-run cities. New York City received $7.4 billion in federal funding this fiscal year.
Rather than a coalition with the liberals in the Democratic Party and trying to find friends on Wall Street, a fighting coalition that struggles independently for the working class and youth should be assembled. A glimpse of this has been seen in the mass protests around the ‘No Kings’ slogan, and most importantly the upturn in labor strikes across the country in the last few years.
Part of building such a force could include calling mass neighbourhood, workplace and college assemblies to draw-up an emergency socialist budget for New York demanding the funding the city needs. Mass organisation of workers, labor unions, tenants’ organisations, students and all who want to fight is now urgent, preparing a programme for struggle not just with the Trump administration but the capitalist Democratic Party at city and state level.
‘Expectations are high’
As Mamdani said himself, “expectations are high”. He also said “we will deliver”. But how to deliver is the question. The NYT editorial points to previous “progressive” mayors like De Blasio (who endorsed Mamdani) who, while trying to get funding on a state level for childcare, did not take on the wealthy, retreated even from a more limited programme than Mamdani’s and oversaw social decline in New York. Dinkins, a DSA member, was mayor in the early 1990s and failed to deliver.
This is why workers, and youth cannot just rely on Mamdani. The city’s labor unions should convene mass meetings now and begin to make demands over wages, the democratic right to strike and working conditions, along with plans for action, campaigns and strikes to win such demands. This should be linked to the fight for a $30 minimum wage, and the struggle of tenants’ unions and for the mass building of public housing using union labour. Renters must organise quickly on a mass basis with occupations of empty properties, rent strikes and protests to force the issue of rent freezes and more public housing immediately.
The idea of a mayor or city council fighting will seem new to the layers enthused by Mamdani. Socialists have raised the example of the socialist-led Liverpool City Council which, in the mid-1980s, led a campaign with 50,000 strong mass protests and citywide strikes that fought against the Thatcher government in Britain. Those fighting councillors did not operate as individuals but were subject to the accountability and direction of a ‘workers’ parliament’ in the form of the District Labour Party, a body of hundreds of delegates representing tens of thousands of workers.
Unlike the struggle in Liverpool, or even the campaigning record of Kshama Sawant a decade ago in Seattle, a consistent struggle on an issue like wages or rent has not been fought by Mamdani. In his victory speech, although he made clear this was a victory for all his supporters, he did not spell out clearly how they and the wider working class could play a role in a campaigning administration.
Such a fighting approach must also appeal to the wider working class across the US to join the struggle to prevent a Mamdani administration being isolated. This would include encouraging the building of movements across the country to force city councils to fight and, if the councils don’t, work to replace those councillors with labor-backed councillors who will, independent of both Democrats and Republicans.
In the past, Mamdani has attacked the New York Police Department (NYPD) for its record of racism and authoritarianism, but during the campaign he apologised and committed to keeping the current police commissioner in post. This can be one issue where opposition to his office could be built. Mamdani has not raised a socialist policy, which would link mass public investment to improve social conditions in the city to working-class democratic control of the police.
This can however be a issue which youth, including those involved in the Gaza and anti-ICE protests, can organise independently around, demanding that Mamdani, with his powers over the NYPD, refuse to attack and dismantle their protests and defend democratic rights.
In the short term, Mamdani’s victory will boost the idea that running on the Democratic Party ballot line is a viable option for socialists in the electoral field. There can be a sharp reaction against this on the basis of the experience of Mamdani’s administration, with a layer emerging that looks for independent working-class politics.
As well as colossal pressures from the corporate elites, Mamdani will also come under pressure from his radicalised base and the scale of the cost-of-living crisis and the polarisation around him. Any attempt by Mamdani to radically reform the city in a socialist direction will inevitably bring him up against a vicious, corrupt Democratic Party machine. If Mamdani seriously wants to oppose the corporate Democrats then he needs to prepare for confrontation and a break with them.
Mamdani’s campaign has set up a ‘run for something’ initiative to find candidates to run for offices locally and campaign that 10,000 people have signed up to. We say this should mean running independent socialist candidates against the Democratic Party machine at city council and state levels to stop radical reform being blocked and strengthen the opposition to capitalist rule.
Mamdani’s victory positively raises awareness of the term ‘socialism’ and discussion of it as an idea, not just in New York and the US, but globally. Mamdani currently expresses ‘socialism’ as being “a better distribution of wealth for all of God’s children”, referencing Martin Luther King. This is more of a critique of capitalism today than advocating an end to the economic system.
Given current conditions in the US, a section of his supporters, or at least those whom he has caught the attention of, can be won over to a position of fighting for socialism as a systemic alternative, with the working class decisively removing capitalism and taking over the key and major parts of the economy and democratically running and planning for society’s needs.
