The Meaning of Mamdani: A Democratic Socialist for NYC Mayor?
A Successful Socialist Campaign
The nomination of Zohran Mamdani as the Democratic candidate for New York City mayor has shone a spotlight of hope on the otherwise bleak and increasingly barbaric American political landscape. Mamdani still faces the general election in November, but he will be the frontrunner in that race. NYC has elected Democratic candidates since 2001, so the Democratic primary is typically the most contentious race for mayor.
Much has been made of the ‘Mamdani campaign,’ with many analyses suggesting it is the definitive path to victory for the left and many others decrying it as no more than progressive liberalism. The truth is likely somewhere in the middle–Mamdani’s campaign shows what is possible for socialist politics.
The Strategy: Good Policy
The campaign produced charming, down-to-earth campaign content, stylish graphics, and social media buzz, all of which certainly contributed to his popularity.
However, Mamdani’s success in the NYC Democratic primary is most attributable to his principled stance on many issues. His platform contains certain pro-worker reforms, some of which seem quite radical in today’s political climate. Mamdani’s housing platform commits to affordable construction, direct labour by City offices, and a rent freeze. Likewise, Mamdani’s public transit policy demands fare-free, safe, and reliable buses. Other economic policies include free childcare from 6 months to 5 years, City-run grocery stores with low prices, and raising the minimum wage to $30 by 2030.
These policies may fall short of demanding full workers’ control of the City and its means of production. However, they are radical enough to drive the City’s bourgeoisie into a panic. Several top businesspeople in New York have threatened capital flight, and Trump has suggested taking NYC into federal control.
Perhaps this can be explained by Mamdani’s proposal to fund these pro-worker reforms: raising the corporate tax rate to 11.5%, taxing millionaires (the City’s top 1%) a flat 2% rate, and enforcing fees on landlords who break tenancy laws.
With these policies, Mamdani beat Andrew Cuomo 56% to 44%. Additionally, voter turnout for this mayoral primary was the highest in the City since 1989. This campaign demonstrates definitively the popularity of socialist politics, even in America’s richest city.
Interestingly, the popularity of Mamdani’s campaign has fueled strategic debates among the Irish left. Irish leftists espousing economist ideas – analyses that provide a reductionist, economics only explanation of social phenomena – have pointed to the Mamdani campaign’s championing of ‘bread and butter’ issues as a lesson that Irish socialists should take. However, this perspective misunderstands the campaign Mamdani and his team ran; the distinction between the economist analysis of the campaign and the reality of it is important for understanding its success.
Mamdani ran on an ambitious and substantiated economic campaign. He also put the fight against oppression at the forefront. At every turn, Mamdani has been markedly more pro-Palestine than the US establishment can countenance. From rejecting the notion of visiting Israel as mayor to making a symbolic commitment to arrest Netanyahu on the ICC-issued warrant if he visits NYC under Mamdani’s mayorship, the candidate took a principled stance on this quintessential fight against imperialism.
Mamdani’s platform prioritises LGBTQIA+ issues. It also proposes far-reaching climate policies to reduce carbon emissions and decarbonise. Mamdani also ran openly as a Muslim. This is hard to do in the US in general, where only four muslims are elected to national representative bodies, and in New York, the epicenter of islamophobia in the wake of 9/11, in particular. Mamdani extolled his faith throughout his campaign, making a strong political statement in the face of the Trump administration’s xenophobia and islamophobia.
Additionally, the campaign platform proposes a radical and, perhaps more importantly, feasible change to the role of cops in NYC. Racist and militarised policing in US cities, though not a new issue, has gained relevance to voters since the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. Many ‘progressive’ democrat leaders paid lip service to the radical BLM demand to defund the police, temporarily reducing policing budgets. However, city police budgets were quickly increased once protesters had been mollified, including in NYC. The call to defund the police demanded not only less money for policing, but also allocation of resources to alternative social services. Echoing this demand, and going beyond symbolic gestures, Mamdani suggests creating a Department of Community Safety. This Department would be equipped and trained to handle problems typically left to and catastrophically mishandled by the police, such as mental health calls.
Mamdani’s campaign took a principled and class-based stance on questions of imperialism and oppression, championed pro-worker economic reforms, developed a plan to fund them, and communicated these ideas clearly and appealingly on social media. It is this strategy that won him the contentious nomination.
But what is the future of Mamdani’s campaign, and what does it mean for the fight for socialism in the US?
The Road Ahead
Mamdani will continue to face sharp opposition from the ruling class. Republicans in Congress have urged Trump to deport Mamdani under the McCarthy-era Communist Control Act. Though this sounds ridiculous on its face, in a time when Trump is using deportations as a form of political repression, the threat may be sharper. Other attempts at smearing Mamdani’s name have fallen flat, but Mamdani will continue to face sharp opposition from the ruling class, both in the United States and internationally.
People within Mamdani’s broad camp of ‘the left’ have also leveled criticism. From the right, there have been criticisms of his openly pro-Palestine rhetoric as ‘performative’ and ‘dangerous’. On the other hand, in one instance, a protester disrupted Mamdani and accused him of being a Zionist. These positions are ludicrous, unlikely to cause significant damage without further evidence to back them, and largely ignorable.
However, perhaps a more useful and substantive critique from a revolutionary socialist perspective concerns the electoral strategy behind Mamdani’s campaign.
The Democratic Socialists of America’s ‘Dirty Break’ Strategy
Mamdani is a member and spokesperson of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the largest left-wing organisation in the United States with approximately 80,000 members. DSA does not have an electoral party, but they do have a strong electoral wing. Instead of running under their own name, the DSA typically endorses candidates who run as independents or, often, under the Democratic Party.
It may seem like a strange move for purported socialists to run electoral candidates within a bourgeois, imperialist party. But the DSA has a strategic perspective on this: the so-called ‘dirty break’. This strategy is based on the analysis that, given the near-impossibility of running in any major US election as a third-party or independent candidate, the only feasible way to elect large numbers of socialists to representative bodies at local, state, and national levels is within the ‘left’ of the two main parties: the Democrats. That’s the ‘dirty’ part. The ‘break’ part comes when the DSA bloc of Democrats in office reaches a certain size and quits the Democratic party en masse to form a new, left-wing party of democratic socialists. On paper, this sounds reasonable. The structure of US elections, especially at the national level, ensures a two-party system through the Electoral College and other barriers to entry. However, in reality, the DSA’s strategy works better for winning elections than for bringing socialism into electoral politics.
There are three main critiques of the dirty break. The first is based on principle. As socialists, the idea of supporting a bourgeois and imperialist party, whose last president was nicknamed Genocide Joe, flies in the face of the basic tenets of socialist struggle. However, even if one were to argue that future victory takes precedence and that strategy must be favored over principles in elections, substantial problems remain.
More than pulling the Democratic Party left, DSA Democrats are pulled to the right by the powerful party machine. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (AOC) slide towards liberalism is evidence of this process. AOC was quite late in labelling the genocide in Gaza as such and recently voted against a defense spending amendment that would have reduced military aid to Israel’s Iron Dome defense system. She endorsed Biden’s bid in 2024 and has pledged not to support primary election challengers to sitting House Democrats, showing a general shift towards the establishment wing of the party. Mamdani may already be feeling the same pressure. Mere weeks after winning the primary, he issued statements that he would discourage the use of the phrase ‘globalise the Intifada’.
Facing the challenges of running as a socialist in a liberal party, there may be a tendency for DSA-supported candidates, and the DSA political project itself, to shy away from a break with the Democrats altogether. Indeed, Mamdani’s victory speech hints at an intention to reform the democratic party rather than simply use it as a vehicle, saying he would be “a model for the Democratic Party, a party where we fight for working people with no apology.” Of course, an objective assessment of the Democratic Party renders this idea laughable. There is no possibility of reforming the co-hegemon of US imperialism, and any attempt to do so can only result in absorption into the establishment status quo.
Further, this misguided strategy does not come from blind opportunism or a single mistaken analysis, but from a significant flaw in the reformist platform as a whole. Reformist forces, from the Mensheviks in Russia to the SDP in Germany, have historically believed that socialism is achievable through the vehicles of bourgeois democracy. Even if socialists could be elected en masse under the aegis of the Democratic Party, their role would be unclear.
Revolutionary socialists understand that the proper role of socialists in bourgeois representative bodies, such as the US Congress or European parliaments, is to amplify the struggle waged by the masses of working people on the ground. In this instance, the cart is being driven far before the horse. The DSA invests massive funds and effort into electoral campaigns, albeit grassroots ones (more than 40,000 people volunteered to support the Mamdani campaign). However, it does not pour the same resources into raising the level of struggle among ordinary workers. Without this, socialists in elected positions have nothing but ideas to represent.
Lessons from Mamdani and a Revolutionary Alternative
This is not to say that Mamdani’s run for NYC mayor is useless, nor necessarily doomed. All else aside, it is massively encouraging that a staunchly pro-Palestine candidate with openly socialist reforms can win a primary election for the United States’ most significant local office. Socialists should also be confident that they can be open about their ideas. However, a different kind of organisation is needed to bring revolutionary socialist ideas to the forefront of American–and global–politics. Such an organisation should separate itself from the establishment parties on principled lines. The political appetite for this kind of project exists. In Britain, the new left party formed by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana has become the largest in the country as 600,000 people signed up within days of its launch.
The United States, due to its difficult electoral structure and decades of political and economic repression of socialists, has not been able to produce an equivalent organ. However, members of various revolutionary organisations both within and outside the US are working towards a unified revolutionary socialist project that will take seriously the project of building working-class power. This project, as it is currently conceived, will doubtless begin very small and face significant challenges. One is the mainstream US consensus, backed by billions of dollars of propaganda, that places communism a few meters above Nazism on the evilness scale.
Mamdani’s campaign represents a qualitatively different kind of project. The strategy of running within establishment party vehicles gives Mamdani an automatic platform with access to the mainstream. The strength of his campaign is that, despite the pressures already present at the primary level, he uses this platform to advocate substantial reforms across many important issues. This strength, bolstered by a slick social media campaign, won Mamdani the primary election. It remains to be seen if he will secure the mayorality, but the latest polls show Mamdani maintaining a commanding lead.
Though it is far easier to reach voters with an approach aimed at reforming existing mainstream parties than with revolutionary party-building, such a strategy has significant weaknesses. The Democratic Party and its leadership have no interest in reforming themselves or the capitalist class they serve. It is hard to imagine a local Democrat representative, even one as prominent as the NYC mayor, achieving a sea change in the party’s approach to Palestine, a key issue of Mamdani’s campaign.
Nevertheless, Mamdani’s ability to use establishment channels to champion an anti-establishment platform is a clear symbolic victory. Revolutionary socialists should join forces with reformists to defend Mamdani and his campaign against attacks from the right, including those within the Democratic ranks. Revolutionary socialists should also seize this moment, when socialist ideas are popular, to lead the charge in raising the level of mass struggle outside of electoral campaigns. When Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2016, the same call was raised. Mamdani’s success is a heartening reminder that many people suffering under capitalism want something different. But only through the slow and difficult work of building a powerful independent movement can socialists meet the demands of those grasping for a better world.
