On 4 November Zohran Mamdani (34) was elected Mayor of New York. In his acceptance speech he said ‘I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older. I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologise for any of this.’ In addition, he has supported the protest movement against the Gaza genocide.
With the highest voter turnout since 1969, he won by 1,036,051 votes (50.4 %) over ‘Independent’ Democrat Andrew Cuomo, with 854,995 votes (41.6%) Cuomo had the backing of most of the Big Apple’s 123 billionaires and one of them in particular, Donald J Trump.
Trump in a red-baiting comment, typical of his ongoing McCarthyite campaign, claimed ‘Mamdani’s not a socialist, he’s a communist,’ and threatened to slash $10bn from New York’s federal funding, to send in the ICE squads and national Guards on the lying pretext that disorder has broken out and even deport Mamdani himself, who has lived in New York since the age of seven and been a US citizen since 2018. Against this of course must be set Trump’s warm welcome of Mamdani to the Oval office and his remark that it was OK for the Mayor to call him a fascist.
Not to be outdone, the day after the result was announced Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post displayed a full front page photomontage of Mamdani, brandishing a hammer and sickle, with the blaring headline ‘The Red Apple’ (with the R reversed).
The billionaires’ dyspepsia is understandable. The Big Apple, the largest city in the continent-wide country with 8,478,000 residents, deploys a budget of $115.9 billion for the fiscal year 2026, and hosts the site of Wall Street and all it represents.
Mamdani’s first plan is to raise taxes on the city’s highest earners with incomes above $1 million by 2%. He points out that New Yorkers pay the same tax rate whether they earn $50,000 a year or $5 million and that corporation tax is lower than in the seven surrounding states. He has proposed raising the tax on companies from 7.5% to 11.5%.
So how did he mange to win? His victory is due in large measure to his head-on focus on the horrendous cost of living crisis for the great majority of New Yorkers. A report published this year noted that half of all working-age New Yorkers cannot afford to cover basic costs like housing, food, and healthcare, and that 14 % are living below the federal poverty line.
Zohran’s acceptance speech was aimed at these working class New Yorkers.
‘The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said, “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.” 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. Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it. The future is in our hands.’
Great words! If only they were true!
What sort of socialist is Mamdani?
As witnessed by his reference to EV Debbs (1855-1926), leader of the American Railway Union and the famous Pullman Strike of 1894, a founder of the IWW and the Socialist Party, who ran for President on its ticket five times between 1900 and 1920, Mamdani has been a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), since 2017.
But unlike Debbs, the DSA does not stand for an independent party of the working class in the here and now but hews to a strategy of supporting DSA members standing as Democratic Party candidates. They claim this will build the forces to eventually form an independent socialist party – when the time is ripe.
Claiming upwards of 80,000 members the DSA’s overall conception of socialism is vaguer even than the British Labour Party’s old Clause Four that Blair abolished (gaining for workers ‘the full fruits of their labour upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’). Their website defines their goal thus:
‘Capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit. We must replace it with democratic socialism, a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighbourhoods, and society’.
DSA members like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Congressional Representative for New York’s 14th District, and Representatives Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Mamdani himself, embody this policy, known historically as the ‘dirty break’.
Though at the August 2025 biennial DSA Convention a ‘left’ majority was elected to its National Political Committee (NPC) it is unlikely that this will change the strategy. The Convention did adopt a statement which demanded DSA-endorsed candidates make a ‘commitment to building a socialist slate and political independence’ and ‘openly and proudly identify with DSA and Socialism’.
However, though a ‘proud’ member of the DSA’s NY chapter, Mamdani made it perfectly clear that he was not standing on its programme: ‘The platform, that I am running on, the one that I want to be held accountable to by New Yorkers is the one that is on my website.’ This has a laser like focus ‘to lower the cost of living for working class voters’.
His key campaign pledges are –
- A temporary, citywide freeze on rent increases for tenants in nearly two million rent stabilised apartments and to prevent evictions
- Building affordable housing and prosecuting bad landlords
- Free and fast buses
- Measures to address the mental health and social service crisis
- Free childcare
- City owned grocery stores
- Taxing the big corporations to pay for this by raising taxes by $9 billion on billionaires and raising the corporate tax rate on huge businesses.
Obviously, these measures will face powerful resistance and not just from those they directly hit. Market forces will hem in such measures as rent controls and affordable housebuilding, because in the end you can’t control what you don’t own. In Britain the Thatcher revolution which slashed the proportion of municipal housing from 37% in 1979 to around 6% today, has made a pipe dream out of repeated Labour calls for more socially affordable housing.
Kathy Hochul, the Democrat Governor of New York State has publicly declared her opposition to raising these levels of taxes and proposals could face a major legislative hurdle from New York State lawmakers in Albany. Donald Trump’s withholding of federal funds would also create huge budget shortfalls. So Mamdani, and even more the workers who voted for him will find that they have not in fact ‘grasped power’ in their calloused hands.
But as well as upfront opposition, there is the policy of incorporating Mamdani. After trying their utmost to block him, a number of prominent Establishment Democrats are now love bombing him. Recently Barack Obama, has praised his campaign and offered to be a ‘sounding board’ in carrying out his programme. Wealthy three times Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who funded Cuomo’s primary run to stop Mamdani, has met with him and offered his ‘assistance’.
And it goes beyond the Dems. Fortune Magazine quotes Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, as saying:
‘If he becomes Mayor, so be it. You know, he was part of that socialist democratic thing, which literally is more Marxist than socialist… but I don’t know what he believes in that… [Mamdani is] talking to a lot of people; he’s convinced a lot of people [that] he’s going to change, [and] he wants to learn.’
Watch out Zohran, with such teachers!
Indeed, Mamdani has already had to ‘learn’ the lessons of all ‘democratic’, i.e. reformist socialists seeking office within the straitjacket of the capitalist state and economy, reinforced by media-manufactured public opinion. He has promised to discourage people from using the phrase ‘global intifada’.
He has also reversed his 2020 call to ‘defund the police’. In the wake of the George Floyd killing he referred to them as ‘racist. wicked and corrupt’. Now he has apologised for these words and promised to respond positively to the views of rank and file cops who are ‘putting their lives on the line daily.’ It should be said that people of colour are having their lives put on the line daily by racist thugs in blue.
He is even promising to keep NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch in office, a strong Zionist and supporter of Israel who has endorsed the slurs against the Gaza campaigners as antisemites. Her family members gave Cuomo’s anti-Mamdani political action committee (PAC) $1.2 million. She is hardly likely to follow Mamdani’s pledge arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he comes to New York.
However, none of such trimming or doublespeak will surprise Europeans, used to the ‘triangulating’ policies, the pandering to the ‘middle ground’ to win elections, regularly pursued by of their Socialist, Labour and ‘Communist’ parties. The difference however is that Mamdani represents, as he makes clear, not the Democratic Socialists of America but the Democrats, the second party of US capitalism and imperialism, often called the graveyard of progressive causes.
Should revolutionary socialists have voted for Zohran?
So, was it right to support him at the ballot box? OK, he is no revolutionary but historically revolutionaries have not refused to vote for reformist parties where they are organisationally rooted in the workers movement and represent a minimal step to their class independence from the bourgeoise and its parties. Experience in office will reveal their pro-capitalist policies far more than propaganda by small groups will, providing there is a real mass fighting alternative or one can be built.
Following the tactical advice of Lenin in the 1920s and Trotsky in the 1930s, where revolutionaries can stand candidates on their own programmes they should always do so. But where they cannot hope to win seats or seriously challenge them, they have also called for a vote for what they called ‘bourgeois workers’ parties’ in order to put them to the test of office in front of their mass electorates.
By putting demands on them for the vital necessities of their voters if they come to power, communists can help win more workers for a revolutionary strategy. At the same time, Lenin and Trotsky advocated unsparing criticism of these parties’ programmes and even more of their leaders’ betrayals when in office.
But a necessary condition was that the reformist parties broke with the bourgeoise in the most basic form of fielding a party, independent of all the parties of the capitalist class – liberal as well as conservative – and also that they do not from a governmental coalition with bourgeois parties.
Above all, in the USA, the Democrats, despite their ‘Friends of Labor’ wing, and for all their liberal rhetoric on civil rights and social reforms, remain a party of the imperialist bourgeoise – and what a bourgeoisie! The USA remains the most powerful military and economic power in the world. As one of its alternating parties of government, they have initiated or waged imperialist wars under Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton and Obama. Biden of course fuelled and perpetuated the genocide in Gaza.
In this sense Mamdani, like Bernie Sanders and AOC before him, has been seduced by the ‘practical politics’ of winning office, by standing for election under the Democrat banner. Therefore, neither he nor they have taken the first step to freeing the US workers and the racially oppressed from the influence of the Democrats.
A united front with Mamdani supporters
Even though revolutionaries should not have called for a vote for Mamdani and others like him, his campaign has attracted an army of young volunteers, which estimates vary as between 70,000 and 90,000, to knock on doors, phone electors, and pick up on the needs of ordinary New Yorkers. This has created a network of activists that, if – a big IF – it is not demobilised as a purely electoral vehicle, could become a real political force.
If Mamdani seriously tries to implement measures in the interests of New York’s workers, and Trump sends in ICE snatch squads or the National Guard, cuts federal funds, or the bankers and ‘markets’ sabotage his programme… then revolutionary socialists, trade unionists and the oppressed communities should mobilise support for these measures.
Indeed they should propose further, more decisive inroads into the wealth and power of their opponents. They should organise in the high schools and campuses, on the streets and in the workplaces to defend themselves against the hired thugs of capital. They should call for mass solidarity – including strike action – indeed action nationwide. They should help build democratic organs of a united front of resistance to Trump’s attacks.
But they should still argue amongst Mandani supporters for the need to build a socialist working class party in the course of the struggle and not hide the fact that this will mean a clean not a dirty break with the Democratic party, in short, the founding of an independent working class party.
In this way Zohran’s hundreds of thousands of young supporters and many voters – alongside the grassroots organisations of organisers and militants in the major unions – could help make this historic step a reality. Within such a party revolutionaries would still fight for a transitional programme, a democratic centralist party structure and a planned economy based on expropriating the big bourgeoisie.
However, the ‘dirty break’ strategy which dominates the New York chapter of the DSA remains a major obstacle to this, since it converts DSA members into precisely a stage army of canvassers, rather than class fighters. Rank and file DSA members and grassroots trade unionists need to come together on the basis of promoting militant resistance to Trump, to the right wing of the Democrats, and to any backsliding or betrayal by Mamdani himself.
Leftists in DSA chapters across the country, who sincerely believe in an independent workers’ party, need to join forces with revolutionary groups outside the DSA to formulate a strategy and rally the forces to attain these goals. The regrouping of revolutionaries already underway in the US between members of Socialist Horizon and the International Socialist League can help bring programmatic clarity and purpose to this development.
