By Dave Stockton
Excitement is rising at the prospect of ‘a socialist as Mayor of New York’. As the election approached, New York State Assembly member Zohran Mamdani, standing on the Democratic ticket, was still 6.8 per cent ahead of ‘independent’ Andrew Cuomo in the polls, the establishment figure he beat in the party’s primaries.
Multi-millionaire Cuomo is the candidate of the right wing in the Democrats, of its billionaire backers and also of the pro-Zionist element of the city’s Jewish voters, though many younger Jews have switched to Mamdani because of his unflinching sup-port of the movement against the
Gaza genocide. Mamdani is a long time member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), whose majority faction operate the so-called ‘dirty break strategy’ of running as Democratic Party candidates. They claim this will build capacity for an eventual break to form an independent socialist party.
Unsurprisingly Mamdani has had the full support Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But as his likely victory approaches, he has also been embraced by Barack Obama among others, keen to absorb and blunt his programme. Nevertheless, his campaign web-site prominently identifies him as a democratic socialist deter-mined ‘to lower the cost of living for working class voters’. His key pledges are a rent freeze, free buses, community social services, free childcare, city owned grocery stores, affordable housing and prosecuting bad landlords, and taxing the big corporations and the wealthy to pay for this.
Yet since his poll lead made it clear he could win, figures like wealthy three times Mayor Michael Bloomberg have rallied to him. Barack Obama has offered to be his adviser. Mamdani has also actively courted the NYPD.
Europeans have long experience of socialists, Labour and ‘Communists’ in office, where similar compromises and crossing of class lines were made. Lenin’s and Trotsky’s tactical advice in the 1920s in the 30s was clear: where revolutionaries cannot mount candidates that could win enough seats to seriously challenge for government, they have called for a vote for such ‘bourgeois workers parties’ to put them to the test of office, putting demands on them that are vital for their voters if they come to power.
At the same time they advocated unsparing criticism of their programmes and, even more, of their actions in office. But a necessary condition was that these parties and candidates broke with the bourgeoisie in the most basic organised form of fielding a party independent of all the parties of the capitalist class, liberal as well as conservative. The Democrats are a party of the imperialist bourgeoise—and what a bourgeoisie!
The USA remains the most powerful state and economy in the world. And the Democrats one of its two parties of government.
In this sense Mamdani, like Sanders and AOC, seduced by the practical attraction of winning elections, have not taken the first step to freeing the US workers and the racially oppressed from the influence of the Democrats. Of course if Mamdani tries to take measures in the interest of New York’s workers and meets, as he will, sabotage from the super-rich and both national parties of the establishment, revolutionary socialists should mobilise support for his measures—but with the call, ‘Break with the Democrats and help us found a workers’ party!’
