The victory of Zohran Mamdani over the candidate of the rich and the powerful of New York, for whom the entire city is the backyard of Wall Street, the epicentre of world capitalism, has been greeted by an explosion of joy on the part of the left, not only in the United States but all around the world.
This joy is of course meaningful, firstly, because it is a slap in the face of Trump the proto-fascist, who, on the day before the elections, spoke out, and, calling Mamdani a “communist”, blackmailed New Yorkers by threatening to cut off all federal funds to the city, except funds that are mandatorily the city’s share. More than one New Yorker in two (50.4 per cent) responded to Trump by voting for Mamdani.
It is also significant to the utmost because Mamdani’s platform in this election was, above all, one of class struggle. Mamdani did include other issues in his election campaign and we will touch upon some of these in subsequent articles, but his major plank was composed of bread-and-butter issues, under the catchword of making New York an “affordable” city: cheaper or free transport, rent freeze, municipal grocery stores to control the cost of living, day-care centres for working families—you name it. So, New Yorkers voted for Mamdani crushingly because a majority of them are working-class and these are the real issues in a city and a country that has for decades seen inequality and misery grow by leaps and bounds. This is the most important aspect of what happened in the mayoral election in New York: the working class showed the entire society, including the half-asleep US left, that they are prepared to fight a class struggle, for the moment through the ballot box.
We have been insisting ever since Trump ran for office for the first time in 2016 that it was, first and foremost, the US working class that turned away from the Democratic Party, long become the party of Wall Street, towards proto-fascism that was the main source of Trump’s popularity. The New York mayoral election has shown that the solution to the Trump problem is going back to class struggle. Do not forget that 50.4 per cent of the backyard of Wall Street has voted for a candidate who has owned up “socialism” loud and clear. This is class struggle at work.
If that is the case, then this also shows the limitation of Zohran Mamdani as a leader. Although he is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, this is a socialist organisation of the reformist kind nestled resolutely within the Democratic Party. Therein lies the fundamental contradiction of the entire process. The very fact that Mamdani ran as the candidate of the Democratic Party imposes insurmountable obstacles in the way of his delivering his promises.
Mamdani beat his major rival, Andrew Cuomo, former Democratic governor of New York State, home to New York City, and thus a powerful figure within the party, twice, one in the primaries of the Democratic Party, and once again now, when Cuomo ran as an independent despite the 12-point defeat he suffered in the primary election. What gave him the courage to do so? The support received from the moneybags of New York City, most of whom are major donors of funds to the Democratic Party. This crowd rose up in anger and disgust against the class struggle agenda proposed by Mamdani to the ordinary people of New York, the garbage collectors and the janitors, the nurses and the teachers, the doormen and the waiters and waitresses who make life such a pleasure for the upper classes of New York, after their busy days in downtown Manhattan, skimming the rest of the world’s money.
So Mamdani has run against the party structure in the name of which he was supposedly running. And the effort of the Wall Street crowd plus the landlords and ordinary capitalists of this rich city has paid, but not quite. The 12-point difference between Mamdani and Cuomo in the primaries came down to 9 percentage points (41.6 per cent against Mamdani’s 50.4 per cent) despite the fact that Mamdani scored so handsomely and also despite the presence of a third candidate, a Republican. This third candidate was disowned even by Trump, but did not withdraw. Imagine what would have happened had he pulled out early in the race (as the previous Democratic mayor Eric Adams did). With the 7.1 per cent he received added to Cuomo’s 41. 6, one can see that the overall prospective tally of close to 49 per cent could possibly have made a difference.
The contradiction is palpable. We are talking about a party whose rich crust of donors worked against the party’s candidate. And, mind you, this in spite of the fact that Mamdani tried to curry their favour and offered concession after concession in order to appease them. (We will write about the many instances of Mamdani’s negotiations and concessions to the capitalist class of New York City in a subsequent article.)
So, those who, on the left, are rejoicing in self-congratulatory mood in the glow of the election results should beware: it is impossible to fight the rich and the powerful using as your weapon the instrument which has been shaped and refined over decades and centuries to serve the rule of that very same class! Only a break from the Party of Wall Street (a.k.a. the Democratic Party) can make it possible for Mamdani to deliver to the working class of New York City even a modicum of his promises, let alone socialism. We should not deceive the working people of the “Big Apple” into thinking that what comes next will be a great deal of improvement in their lives. Remember Tsipras of Greece and remember Gabriel Boric of Chile. Remember how many on the left dreamt of a better future and then was swept by disillusionment. Remember how badly a disillusioned working population falls back in their struggle for a better life.
What, then, is to be done? Do not lay your confidence in Mamdani. Organise. That is the only solution. But go to the working people. No amount of organising within the circles of the intelligentsia and the student body, the artists’ circles (of which New York is fortunately full) and designers of all types will bring anything serious to the struggles ahead. Form workplace committees and neighbourhood councils to follow up and monitor the delivery of all the promises. If you have voted for Mamdani and then retire to the privacy of your home in your pristine middle-class neighbourhood, that means you have done nothing of which to be smugly proud.
The beautiful and courageous people of New York City, the blacks and the Latinos/as, the Muslims and the Asian-Americans, the “Wasps” and the anti-Zionist Jews, have done what they could possibly have done at this juncture: they voted for a candidate who openly calls himself a “socialist” in a city where the heartbeats of world capitalism are regulated! It is now incumbent on the American left to organise those people, in committees, in councils, in the neighbourhoods and in workplaces, as ICE-breakers and landlord-crushers, as labour unions and self-defence committees, so that an alternative to the proto-fascism of Trump rises on the horizon.
Do not forget that Mamdani has now, objectively speaking, opened the way for a fellow Democratic Socialist to pose his or her (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for instance?) candidacy for the primaries of the Democratic Party for the presidential elections of 2028 to run against the third term of Donald Trump or the first term of his successor, whether that may be J. D. Vance or Jared Kushner or Donald J. Trump Jr. That is how high the stakes are. Do not let your vote be the stairway to the career of a new Tsipras or Boric. (Mamdani himself cannot run for president since he was not born a US citizen and was naturalised later in life).
Only well-organised class struggle will save America and the world from the pest of the new century.