The King, the Mayor, and the Working Class in the Fight for New York (Left Voice)

The King, the Mayor, and the Working Class in the Fight for New York

Ximena Goldman October 26, 2025

The genocide in Gaza, the crisis of the Democratic Party, and the course of Trump’s second presidency have fueled the emergence of the Mamdani phenomenon. His election poses a series of new challenges for the socialist Left.

Zohran Mamdani is set to take office in a scenario unlike any other recent experience with self-identified “democratic socialists” in the United States. His probable election — as a young, Muslim social democrat running as a member of the biggest socialist organization in the United States in the finance capital of the country — will likely add fuel to the fire of an ongoing war waged by Donald Trump against Democrat-controlled cities, social movements, and the labor movement. After all, Mamdani’s campaign represents a wide coalition of people who stand with immigrants, Palestine, and trans people — the exact targets of Trump’s attacks.

Trump has warned for months of the “dangers” of New York’s “communist” mayor, and has threatened Mamdani and New York at every turn — vowing to cut off federal funding to the city if Mamdani is elected, promising to deport Mamdani himself, and threatening to send in the National Guard. Trump has been preparing to use Mamdani’s likely victory as an opening to bring another Blue city to heel, going on the offensive against Democratic Party strongholds and, more importantly, the sites of possible resistance to his agenda. If Trump’s provocations in Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Portland, and Chicago are any indication, Mamdani and New York may face Trump’s wrath the day after the election. 

The different wings of the Democratic Party have taken different approaches when confronted with Trump’s attacks. Some Democratic governors are openly collaborating with ICE, such as in Washington, D.C., while in Chicago, social-democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson has decreed that ICE is not authorized in federal buildings and that its officers can be arrested. He also called for a general strike against Trump as a result of enormous pressure from the people of the city, who are heroically resisting the raids. 

Faced with similar threats, what stance will Zohran Mamdani take? Will he align himself with Kathy Hochul’s moderate agenda, advised by AOC to take Trump to the courts while collaborating on essential issues with the federal government, such as the repression of the pro-Palestinian movement; or will he be forced to rely on the support of New York’s working and oppressed masses? What course will the DSA, the largest socialist organization in the United States with strong influence in New York, take now that it will have a foothold in the capitalist government of one of the most important cities in the country? What course will the union bureaucracies and the bureaucracies of the social movements take when under threat from Trump? 

What is certain is that the Democratic Party will prioritize the interests of big business over those of the working class, even if they are pushed to mobilize the working class and social movements in order to both check Trump and not further alienate a social base that is showing new combativeness in the fight against Trump. We cannot rely on the Democratic Party or Mamdani to organize the working class against Trump. This new period in New York City presents opportunities for these tensions — between a self-titled King, a fresh-faced mayor, and a restless working class — to unleash the mobilization, combativeness, creativity, and self-organization of the working class; and with new possibilities of class struggle arises the renewed possibility and urgency of building a working class party with a socialist strategy, independent of the Democrats. 

The King 

The second Trump administration is increasingly taking on the features of an intense Bonapartism that challenges some of the characteristics of the bipartisan regime that prevailed during decades of neoliberalism. 

As Daniel Kovacs explains in “The American Political Regime in a Post- Neoliberal Moment”: 

It is in response to this shifting terrain, both from above by the state and its institutions, and from below in the response of the working class, that the old political order and the emerging traits of this new moment brush up against each other, coexisting in mutual tension both domestically and internationally. This creates the conditions for sharp shifts in the political situation, both to the right — in the form of deepening Bonapartism and authoritarian measures — and to the left — with a higher degree of activity of the working class and oppressed. The possibility of “de-escalation,” however costly and unpredictable, is an essential asset of the regime.

Bonapartism is a central concept in Marxism and in particular of Leon Trotsky, who saw it as a phenomenon created by increasing clashes between different interests in society in a context of political, social, and economic crises. For Trotsky, Bonapartism is an attempt by a sector of the regime, usually in the form of a charismatic leader, to rise above this clash of interests to impose a solution by coercion, avoiding or overcoming the risky scenario of “civil war” for the ruling classes. 

Trotsky developed his analysis of Bonapartism using Germany as an example; he identified three layers or gradations of authoritarianism that he defined as “preventive Bonapartism,” “Bonapartism,” and “fascist Bonapartism.” For Trotsky, all of these forms of Bonapartism were transitional, existing in the “death throes of democracy.” In Trotsky’s conception, the consolidation of a fascist Bonapartism would be the outcome of strong clashes between the classes, civil war, and great shifts and disruptions in the international and national arena. Trump has the features of a preventive Bonapartism, as James Dennis Hoff argues:  

[W]hat’s really driving Trump 2.0’s turn toward such authoritarian tactics? The answer is that those he serves understand that capitalism is stuck in a rut. Liberalism and neoliberalism have collapsed — and the old world is dying with nothing to replace it. This is why large sectors of capital are now more willing to accept that Trump’s radical actions are perhaps the most profitable way forward for a capitalist system that, like Odysseus, has faced a series of relentless setbacks and calamities in its attempts to find a path back to the days of its former glory. And they are, in the short term at least, willing to see how Trump’s power grab plays out for them […] Instead, our current authoritarian moment is the consequence of a series of failed attempts by both parties to address, with capitalist logic, a whole host of interconnected crises and contradictions that have threatened the stability of both the state and the economic system it upholds.

The exhaustion of Neoliberalism was a process that accelerated in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis; it has produced novel trends in the global situation: the rise of China as an emerging imperialist power in competition with the United States, the emergence of war in Europe, a decline in U.S. imperialist hegemony, organic crisis and political polarization in countries all over the world, and new cycles of class struggle. As Kovacs explains, using the framework of America’s organic crisis, Trump’s second presidency marks the very beginning of a “post-neoliberal moment” from which there is no “return” to or potential “restoration” of the neoliberal status quo that shaped the bipartisan regime during the past few decades. 

Trump’s royal theatricality inflates his role and successes, but he has made progress on aspects of his Bonapartist agenda. In the first place, he has concentrated more power in the executive branch of the American state, mainly thanks to the paralysis and in some cases collaboration of the Democrats, union leaders, and social movement leaders. Trump’s Bonapartist turn can be seen in the administration’s virulent crackdown on the pro-Palestine movement; the anti-immigrant offensive with all its livestreamed racist cruelty; the aggressive attack on Blue states and Blue cities; and the historic increase in ICE’s budget, which is acting as a military force at the disposal of the executive branch. 

Nevertheless, Trump is strategically weak. He has not stopped the war in Ukraine. The Gaza ceasefire that brought him fleeting glory is crumbling. He is dealing with a government shutdown over his administration’s war on Obamacare that is even sowing divisions within the GOP. The Epstein files are haunting him, with millions of people — even amongst his MAGA base — questioning the administration for protecting pedophiles. Further, Trump faces significant — at times massive — rejection of his government and attacks; most recently he was humiliated by the sound of 7 million people taking to the streets to shout “No Kings!” on October 18.

The Soul of the Mamdani Movement 

As charismatic as Mamdani is, the soul of his movement is not Mamdani himself. The energy that surrounds his campaign is the product of vibrant and disruptive new ways of thinking among the working class, youth, and sectors of the middle classes across the world — a reaction to volatility in the domestic and international arenas. So far this phenomenon has been channelled by neo-reformist figures and organizations, such as the DSA, Die Linke in Germany, or even Your Party in the United Kingdom. But it is clear, given one look at any of the protests for Palestine or against the Right in the last year, that the outlooks and aspirations of these sectors are to the left of their political representation, including Mamdani. 

This phenomenon has the possibility of being more disruptive than the progressive energy surrounding the Bernie Sanders campaigns, which never managed to challenge its relationship to the Democratic Party. This is due to the fact that the so-called “Mamdani moment” takes place in the midst of an acute organic crisis and an authoritarian attempt to address it. The bipartisan regime is transforming and the Democratic Party faces the worst crisis in its recent history, as it is seen as the defender of neoliberalism that the masses despise. 

Recent data presented by Shane Goldmacher and Jonah Smith reveals the depth of this crisis for the Democrats’ election prospects: 

The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging voters long before they even go to the polls. Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections — and often by a lot. That four-year swing toward the Republicans adds up to 4.5 million voters, a deep political hole that could take years for Democrats to climb out from. 

According to reports on voting affiliation by party in 30 states, this dramatic drop in Democratic voters occurs in both Blue and Red states. 

Mamdani’s base, composed of a social coalition of organized and unorganized workers, immigrants, students, unemployed youth, small business owners, and even sectors of the upper middle class, has embraced the “left-wing populist agenda” that Mamdani represents — a reaction to the rising cost of living in New York. But their enthusiasm for Mamdani goes beyond this, questioning not only the GOP and corporate greed, but the Democratic Party itself. A core sector of Mamdani’s campaign and supporters considers the party to be subordinate to the super-rich and “soft” on Trump; then there is a radicalized sector of young people that is utterly outraged by the genocide of the Palestinian people and considers AOC and other so-called “socialist” politicians to have sold out. 

Contrary to what many writers in Jacobin magazine have argued for years, the discontent with the Democratic Party did not grow because the working class found the Democrats “too focused” on identity politics. Mamdani has been outspoken on the question of defending trans rights and immigrants rights — far from alienating his base, this is a strength of his campaign.

Furthermore, Mamdani’s momentum and outreach among young people and working class New Yorkers is anchored in the cause of Palestine, one expression of a historic rupture with Zionism that increasingly challenges the unquestioned idea that the State of Israel has the right to exist based on the displacement and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people — a legitimacy guaranteed by imperialist powers since the Nakba. 

According to a poll released in July, from Data for Progress (before images of Israel’s forced starvation made major headlines): 

not only did the vast majority of voters in New York City’s Democratic primary for mayor agree with Mamdani’s platform supporting Palestinian rights but his pro Palestinian platform may have also activated new voters and can serve as a blueprint for the Democratic Party going forward.

The poll found that 78 percent of New Yorkers think Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, 79 percent support restricting weapons to Israel, and 63 percent support arresting Netanyahu if he visits New York. According to a Critical Issues Poll, for the first time, a slight majority of people in the United States are now more sympathetic towards Palestine than Israel. 

Here we see the real soul of the Mamdani movement, which sits very uneasily in the Democratic fold. Though the Democrats may shift rhetorically to appease voters, the Zionist party of imperialism will never fight to end the occupation. We’ve already seen that reflected in how Mamdani has softened his stance on Israel, reaffirming its “right to exist and defend itself.” This creates significant tension in Mamdani’s attempts to usher this burgeoning anti-imperialist sentiment back into the Democratic Party.

The Mayor 

Mayor Mamdani will face many challenges, but it is possible that his first task as mayor will be to confront increased provocations from Trump, including the threat of the National Guard and ramped-up ICE raids.

Looking at how Trump’s attacks against other cities have unfolded, until now there have been paths for de-escalation from these threats in the face of resistance from below. And the Democratic Party is trying to step into the middle of these tensions to profit politically. Trump and his advisers understand that the more they attack Mamdani, the stronger he could grow, not only as a local figure but as a fresh face of the Democratic Party. 

Added to this is the space opened by the crisis of the Democratic Party for new figures to emerge from within its ranks; this is an expression of the deep crisis of representation of the working class that is disillusioned with the Democrats, as well as a response to the Bonapartist shift in the regime. New leaders of the party could rise to the top, becoming national “anti-Trump” figures, such as Brandon Johnson from the left or Gavin Newsom from the establishment. In other words, in a context where the Democratic Party hasn’t had the political offensive in a while — other than the shutdown of the government, which may not immediately resolve in its favor — new sectors are taking the political initiative. 

Cornered as they are by Trump’s attacks on the institutions of the Democratic Party and its strongholds, these figures may have to reorient their relationship to class struggle. As Madeleine Freeman writes, polemicizing with Jacobin writers Meyer and Abbot: 

[I]n the current scenario where it is hamstrung by its own defense of the frayed institutions of neoliberalism, the Democratic Party could very well be forced to change tack in the way that thinkers like Meyer and Abbott advise, orienting more toward the working class and its institutions; they may lean more heavily on the party’s allies outside the party, such as union leaders who veer between the Democratic Party and Trump in order to mobilize its base to take advantage of anti-Trump sentiment. But this possible path — going from the party’s historic role of demobilizing class struggle to in part ensuring its mobilization — risks fanning the flames of class struggle. And while the Democrats may very well find a way to tame that energy back into policies that offer limited relief in a troubled economic scenario, those flames could also catch and spread beyond their control.

We’ve seen this begin to play out in Chicago, with Johnson openly calling on the working class to mobilize against the deployment of the National Guard. Trump’s attacks against Blue states are forcing a non-negligible sector of the Democratic Party to adopt a relationship with the masses with the strategic goal of containing class struggle: one that seeks to mobilize in order to channel that energy towards the midterms while avoiding independent actions of class struggle that could challenge not only Trump but the regime. 

The left wing of the Democratic Party, particularly in Chicago, is developing stronger politics of class collaboration with the goal of building a social coalition led by the capitalist government that relies on the organizations and the activity of the working class to respond to the threat that Trump and the Far Right pose. 

These embryonic trends developing in Chicago are potentially disruptive due to the combination of, on the one hand, the willingness of the masses to fight Trump, and on the other, the city government loosening the leash of the working class in order to control it. Despite the will of Democrat officials, a window is opening for the working class and the oppressed to take the fight against Trump into their own hands, kicking out ICE from the city and developing class struggle in a way that the Democratic Party would not want and cannot control. But this window can only open wider if the rank and file of the unions and social movements force their leaders to build resistance against Trump and unite with other sectors. 

In New York, we will see whether Trump opts to retaliate aggressively to Mamdani’s election in the short term; the situation is open. Nevertheless, the challenge and the threat remains the same: the socialist Left cannot intervene by hiding in the shadow of the left wing of the Democratic Party. Any reform that may somehow adversely affect big business interests, even in the limited way that Mamdani proposes to do, will face the consternation and defiance not only of Trump, but of members within his own party like Governor Kathy Hochul who represents the real leaders of New York: Wall Street, insurance companies, real estate developers, landlords, the Zionist lobby, the Church, and the police.

As Shamus Cooke from Tempest writes: 

The New York oligarchy sustained a blow, but it’s likely the election has merely awakened them to the real danger. Though they spent millions of dollars against him in the primary, the capitalist oligarchy will not quietly allow Mamdani to enact his program at their expense. Assuming Mamdani survives the frenzied slander to win the general election, the survival of his campaign platform will remain questionable — freezing rents, raising wages, free transit, free childcare, city-run grocery stores, taxing the rich, etc. Attempts to implement this platform will further radicalize the New York elite against him and unleash a barrage of serious obstacles to destroy his mayorship.

Socialists must defend Mamdani from any anti-democratic attack from the Far Right, Trump, or the establishment — including the recent slew of racist remarks thrown at him by Cuomo. We must defend the fight for any progressive demand benefitting the working class that Mamdani may put forward. Doing so however, requires anchoring that defense in class struggle while putting up an open struggle for our own anti-capitalist program, tactics, and independent organizations. 

The Working Class and the Struggle for Unity 

On October 18, “No Kings” brought together 200,000 people in New York City, according to organizers. The tense calm of the previous months, marked by Trump’s Bonapartist attacks and the repression of the pro Palestinian student movement, was broken with a massive, festive demonstration rejecting authoritarianism and expressing deep solidarity with immigrants and Palestine. 

It is undeniable that these mass demonstrations undermine Trump’s authority and show that the Far Right is far from having political, ideological, or cultural hegemony; it won’t be easy to win that space, nor will it be easy to win Trump’s economic war against the working class and the oppressed. There is mass rejection of the dystopian future Trump and MAGA are creating, one where greedy tech billionaires control what we watch; children are handcuffed by ICE officials in the middle of the day; women don’t have reproductive rights; trans people have to hide; workers don’t have healthcare or unions; and hate speech against the most oppresed is “free speech,” while protesting genocide is “antisemitic.” 

That said, while the massive “No Kings” demonstrations could be enough to defeat Trump in the midterms, these protests alone cannot defeat the Bonapartist shift and the Far Right’s agenda. That would require the working class and organized labor to take the lead and organize the fights ahead, the seeds of which are being planted in various calls for a national strike across sectors. Such an action would require the mobilization of wide swaths of the diverse and multi-racial working class in New York City, from the warehouses of Canarsie and the distribution centers of Maspeth to subway and bus workers of the MTA. 

“No Kings” in New York showed the limits of the burgeoning resistance to Trump and the role that labor plays in enforcing those limits. The organized labor movement, including its left wing, has been in a ten-month-long tacit pact with Trump, allowing layoffs of public employees, anti-trans laws in red states, and, in some cases, defending Trump’s protectionist agenda.

The right wing of the labor movement in New York, represented by Teamsters national leadership, has been working with Trump before the presidential election. The Teamsters leadership, which is currently seeking to unionize Amazon, has failed to defend immigrant workers at the warehouses, whose visas were revoked by Trump and who were summarily fired by the company. 

In this context, when workers and their organizations are in Trump’s crosshairs, the presence of organized labor at the No Kings March was weak. Nevertheless, a contingent of around 2000 unionists organized by  PSC-CUNY, UAW, SEIU, UFT, and inter-union organizations like Labor for Palestine marched in a contingent that centered the genocide in Palestine, imperialism, and attacks on labor and immigrants. 

In other words, while a large contingent of organized workers was absent, a labor vanguard was there, a sector that is representative of the most advanced phenomena that the labor struggle has produced in recent years in a city known as a “union town.” There were teachers from UFT organizing for immigrant students, as well as contingents of the higher education unions organized with the UAW that are uniting demands against exploitation in the workplace and the genocide. Also present was the PSC that is fighting against McCarthyist attacks to reinstate the four professors fired for protesting against the genocide in Gaza, alongside teachers organizing against ICE’s presence in their schools. 

These tendencies within the labor movement can be the starting point of a platform that unifies the struggle against Trump and prepares New York’s working class and the oppressed to fight against ICE’s invasion of the city and mass deportations with our own methods such as pickets, mass demonstrations, and strikes, adding to the civil disobedience already developing in cities like Portland or Chicago. Imagine if New York’s unions took up this fight, with the thousands of workers organized in the UFT or UAW locals, for example, launching ambitious campaigns to fight back against any threat to the city and its workers. Rank-and-file workers must demand that their unions put all their energies toward organizing the fight against Trump in their workplaces and the streets. This cannot come, however, without a fight within the unions themselves. The leaders of the unions are not going to unify the movement on their own — as we have seen, they will instead divide the demands of different sectors or abstain from mobilizing the membership. If they are forced to mobilize, they will try to keep those actions in the framework of “business as usual.”  

The left wing of the labor movement — for example those within Labor Notes and those who are part of other combative unions and organizations — alongside the socialist Left connected to labor, must be at the forefront of organizing the rank and file against this offensive.

We must bring our unions into the fight, challenging the passivity of union leaders, so that we can use the most powerful weapons we have, like the strike. The urgent task of socialists on the ground, in other words, is to demand publicly that union leaders organize the resistance to Trump by building a united front with the social movements, uniting behind a program of action in the here and now, not in 2028. 

Putting up the fight for the united front — to defend against Trump and the working class’s fight for better living conditions — necessarily entails confronting the predominant strategy of the reformist Left, which ties itself to the Democratic Party and locates the power of class struggle and the fight for reforms in the possibility of pressuring government officials. The leaders of DSA’s Bread and Roses caucus are aware that imposing Mamdani’s agenda requires massive, organized support that goes way beyond what the DSA can organize itself. In an article published in August in The Nation that opened an important debate within the DSA, Eric Blanc, Emily Lemmerman, and Wen Zhuang pose the question in their own terms: 

So what will it take to turn Mamdani’s agenda for an affordable New York into a reality? In our view, what’s needed is a mass campaign that seizes high-attention moments—like a November election night victory—to onboard large numbers of volunteers, that sustains widespread organizing after election day, and that trains working-class leaders to analyze the power of their opponents and to develop a targeted strategy to push recalcitrant elected officials to fund Mamdani’s proposals. Mamdani has already shown his ability to build a mass movement. Over 50,000 people have already volunteered to help get him elected. By expanding and deepening this grassroots machine after November, Mamdani can forge an organized people’s fightback powerful enough to oblige Hochul and Albany to fund his core agenda.

The instinct behind this proposal is correct. We do need to organize a movement that stays active after the election. We do need to unify unions, grassroots organizations, and the Left behind a centralized effort to fight for working people in New York City, as Blanc, Lemmerman, and Zhuang suggest: 

[R]ather than disbanding his massive volunteer machine after November 4 — as is the norm in electoral operations — Mamdani’s team could transition it into a broader organizing apparatus to help secure his agenda under the banner of a broad new campaign, something like a Movement for an Affordable New York (MANY). Workplace and neighborhood MANY hubs could coordinate petitioning efforts, hold potluck socials, and develop creative ways to reach peers.

What we don’t agree on, however, is the logic underpinning this proposal or its deeper implications. On the authors’ understanding of the problem, class struggle plays a secondary role as part of the equation and is based on the fallacy that our unity can be built through the Democratic Party. The Bread and Roses caucus of the DSA is proposing a movement to organize Mamdani’s supporters as a base of maneuver to put pressure on government officials to fund Mamdani’s agenda. 

Nowhere in their vision do the authors suggest that the movement should be organized independently from the apparatus of the city government to defend New York against Trump’s offensive and the Far Right. And despite their harsh words for the establishment of the Democratic Party, they do not advocate confronting and breaking from it to organize a vibrant organization of workers, tenants, and students that is independent of the government. This is because they underestimate the necessity to build new institutions of the working class that are not controlled by the state or the Democratic Party that could intervene to develop class consciousness and class struggle.

The Democratic Party is not an ally in the construction of a united front against Trump and the Far Right; in fact, it actively intervenes against such unity, instead aiming to channel class struggle and the energies of the working class back into support for a party that represents the interests of imperialism and the bosses. It aims to strip all the tenants rights organizations, neighborhood ICE watches, and workers organizations of their actual fighting and organizing power, redirecting them to the ballot box. But for those of us who understand that the most effective way to fight the Far Right is with the unity of the labor movement and the social movements, we have to be clear that fostering this unity means a confrontation with the Democratic Party which organizes much of our class. We have to contest that power to actually impose our unity. And we would be in a better position to do so if we had a socialist party — even a small one made up of thousands of socialists fighting in every warehouse, factory, school, neighborhood — that encourages and participates in the creation of new bodies of self-organization made up by workers, tenants, and community members organized around their own interests.  

This is the kind of independent, fighting movement, that can actually achieve its demands —  a movement made up of autonomous bodies of the working class and the oppressed that can defend the interests of the city’s working masses and not be subordinated to the top-down negotiations that will take place within the city’s government and between the city government and Albany. This movement could build its own program, its own agenda, constructed by the real experience of the masses — debating the way forward in assemblies, meetings, committees, or any other expression of self-organization in every warehouse, factory, school, university, and neighborhood from the Bronx to Staten Island. And in this context, the socialist Left can bring its own program to the table.

A Fighting Program

Our demands already unify us in the streets, in the mass demonstrations and civil disobedience that is unfolding from Los Angeles to Chicago and Portland. They are chanted by workers in union contingents, by ordinary people in “No Kings” marches, by the pro-Palestine movement, by immigrant organizations, and by tenants and neighbors. Signs reading “Stop U.S. Aid to Israel and Genocide” and “ICE out of NYC” can be seen in every demonstration, alongside calls to end the repression of the pro-Palestine movement and to reinstate those fired or persecuted from CUNY and other city universities for exercising their freedom of speech.

The left of the labor movement in New York, the left wing of the DSA, and the rest of the socialist Left and grassroots organizations already organizing against landlords, repression, and ICE must demand a united front and help build it from below with a common platform and a common call to action no matter what happens on November 4.

Central to this platform of unity is the defense of immigrants, who are integral to our communities and responsible for the functioning of the city. People are calling for full rights for the nearly one million undocumented workers in New York, including housing, healthcare, education, and jobs. Detention centers in the city must be shut down and their facilities can be transformed into community centers run by the communities themselves. 

Feminists and LGTBQ+ organizations have been tenaciously fighting for free abortion on demand for everyone in New York and full rights for trans people. Activists working on the streets and tenant unions understand that all unhoused or housing insecure people must be housed immediately and we need an emergency public housing and jobs plan controlled by workers and tenants to guarantee safe housing and employment for all residents of New York City, regardless of immigration status, ethnicity, or gender. 

Workers from the five boroughs have been demanding a $30 minimum wage for years to respond to increases in the cost of living. Healthcare workers, social workers, and patients have been raising the demand for free, universal public healthcare for everyone residing in New York. The immediate cancellation of student loans will alleviate the struggle of students who can’t afford to keep up with their education. Public, free, and universal childcare in New York City is a demand that working families need urgently. Free, universal, scientific, secular, and critical public education at all levels from pre-K to higher education has been the concern of teachers and parents defending public education. The labor movement has to put forward the necessity to revoke the Taylor Law so public workers can recuperate their right to strike and we must fight to abolish union busting practices and the immediate right for every New York worker to have a union. 

The working class and oppressed people of New York know and understand that we must demand that the rich pay progressive taxes on the fortunes they have amassed through the exploitation of our labor and the million-dollar tax breaks that both Democrats and Republicans guarantee them. 

A program of unity can only be built democratically by the rank and file of the labor movement and social movements. 

A Way Forward for the Socialist Left 

A program of action can help forge the unity we need in the struggle, but it is not a socialist program, nor is it Mamdani’s program. A socialist program is not a set of ideas that will be embraced by the masses outside the vital processes of class struggle that precipitate swift shifts of consciousness. 

The auspicious shift to the left of broad sectors of increasingly anti-capitalist youth and workers in New York City expressed in the Mamdani campaign has, however, opened up an enormous opportunity for the Left to talk about socialism on its own terms. Of course, there is no such thing as socialism in a municipality, a city, or a country. Socialism is a project whose possibility of existing, developing, and expanding is based on the struggle of the working class and the oppressed to put an end to a society based on profit and exploitation and to expand working-class power internationally. Mamdani’s government, even if it manages to pass some of its reforms, will be an administration within the framework of a capitalist government. 

What is most disruptive about having a self-styled “socialist” mayor then, is not the content of Mamdani’s government itself, but the great opportunity for the socialist Left to talk about socialism and fight for our perspective in the ensuing struggles. Our task is to establish a bridge between the demands that have nourished Mamdani’s campaign — which are not Mamdani’s demands alone but are rooted in the aspirations of the working-class masses of New York — with demands, slogans, and proposals that increasingly challenge the domination of Capital over the city. We have the task of putting forward a positive vision of a New York City actually run by workers; not a progressive capitalist government like Mamdani’s, but a government where the leaders are the workers themselves. Such a government can be nothing less than the outcome of a revolutionary uprising, but the combination of potential class struggle and openness to socialist ideas in the experience with Mamdani’s government will create better conditions for our ideas and program to reach broader sectors. 

So far there hasn’t been an organized, intentional, and serious challenge to DSA’s strategy of working within the Democratic Party and rebuilding it. We already know the arguments, since the right wing of the DSA has been trotting them out again following Mamdani’s victory. In a recent interview with Jacobin’s Melissa Naschek, Vivek Chibber responded to the question of whether the Democratic Party could “get back” to its supposed “pro working class” orientation during the New Deal. Chibber answered:

In principle, yes. There are two options right now available to us. One is, you just scrap the whole thing, and you build new parties, and you start over again. That’s been the calling card of the far left for a long time, which is to say “the whole system sucks: we need a new party”. But it is really really hard to start up new parties. If it were easy, it would have been done hundreds of times by now. It is very hard.

No one is saying it is easy to build a party. But there is nothing more difficult than transforming the Democratic Party into a vehicle of the working class. It is not only difficult, it is impossible. We could always have a more progressive Democratic Party that is more friendly to the working class, especially when the system has the capacity to give some concessions or when its imperialist ambitions require new levels of production from workers as was the case during the New Deal. But in a context of a rising Far Right, economic crisis, and hegemonic decline, what the capitalists offer for the working class is austerity, repression, union-busting, and anti-immigration policies. We already know that building a party is hard, but we also know that is our best chance to fight against the capitalists’ attempts to resolve their crises on our backs; so we should start building it now.

The left wing of the DSA, socialist organizations that say they want to fight for class independence — such as Tempest and Socialist Alternative — and many others throughout New York must challenge the politics of the right wing of the DSA with a broad and vocal call to organize a vibrant debate for the way forward for a working-class party that fights for socialism. We cannot be content to have this conversation among ourselves but must be active in reaching out to Zohran Mamdani’s base, radical elements of the labor movement, students and faculty fighting for Palestine and against repression, grassroots organizations like Labor for Palestine, and many others. It is undeniable that socialist organizations are still weak, but we are operating in a moment when socialist ideas have traction and people are eager for organization. Avoiding the organization of these broader sectors going through a process of radicalization will only delay our capacity to pose an alternative to the “inside forever” strategy. 

We need a party whose center of gravity is class struggle but which sees elections as a way to further uplift those struggles on a national (and international) platform, and which is proudly anti-imperialist to its core. The task for such an organization in New York, along with helping to organize the united front and the defense of the city, is to fight to overturn all state and local laws that prevent the electoral participation of the working class and oppressed and independent parties. Just as German socialists fought against the anti-socialist laws passed in 1878 by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck that banned the working class from elections, or as the FIT-U in Argentina is currently fighting back against Javier Milei’s attempts to curtail the Left’s electoral participation, our movement must break with conservatism and challenge each and every one of the laws that prevent us from building a workers’ party with a socialist perspective. A new socialist organization will only emerge from hard battles in class struggle and from the ability of the Left and the vanguard to find creative forms of independent participation.