The U.S. Left and Mamdani’s Victory
by Jeff Mackler
New York City’s mayor-elect Democrat Zohran Mamdani is today crisis-ridden capitalism’s most recent maneuver to channel rising working class militancy back into the imperialist, racist, sexist, homophobic genocidal, warmongering and climate catastrophe engineering Democratic Party.
Tragically, both before and after Tuesday’s, Nov. 4 election, less than a handful of the “left” took a principled position rejecting support to Democrat Mamdani. Most were wooed to his radical-sounding but ruling class camp by Mamdani’s broad range of pseudo-socialist “affordability” rhetoric, populist promises, accompanied by his dynamic speaking style. The fact that his opponents in the race, the current mayor Eric Adams and former governor Andrew Cuomo, were corrupt and discredited old school politicians was undoubtedly also a factor. The official ruling rich had no credible candidate in the race.
Mamdani’s November 4 acceptance speech, delivered some 30 minutes after he was officially declared the winner, with a 50.4 percent majority of all votes cast, was literally interrupted with thunderous ovations after every sentence. The more than one million votes cast for Mamdani was a record for city elections.
Mamdani began his speech by quoting early twentieth century Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs. My estimate is that Debs, who five times ran for the US presidency on the Socialist Party ticket, would have rejected Mamdani’s support to the capitalist Democrats.
Debs’ last campaign was from prison where he was incarcerated during WWI under the infamous 1917 Espionage Act and 1918 Sedition Act for criticizing the US government as he opposed its imperialist policy during WWI.
From my youth more than a half-century ago, to this day, I have rejected any and all support to U.S. capitalism’s twin parties, no matter the candidate. They are now and have always been predatory capitalism’s chief political, social and economic vehicles to rule society in the interests of the elite ruling class minority, the 1 percent who own and control the nation’s banks and leading financial institutions, its military and literally every other institution that determines basic policy.
If Lenin Ran as a Democrat
“If Lenin ran as a Democrat,” I and many other revolutionary socialists insisted, and today too,”we wouldn’t support him.” For newcomers to revolutionary socialist politics, Vladimir Lenin was the central leader of the 1917 Great Russian Revolution that ended Czarist and capitalist rule in Russia, the largest nation on earth. Lenin’s party, the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party Majority [Editor: The Russian word for “Majority” is Bolshevik. The later word, Bolshevik, became shorthand for the RSDWPM]. The Bolsheviks quickly proceeded to withdraw Russia from the imperialist WWI that had slaughtered millions. The Bolsheviks nationalized capitalist property and established a government of the working class and its allies based on a planned economy aimed at production to meet human needs not capitalist profits. The new revolutionary government was based on councils/soviets at the local, regional and national levels elected directly by workers, peasants and soldiers. They ruled society in their own name. At the national level, and all others, the Soviets were based on society’s oppressed and exploited. In October/November 1917 it granted freedom and self-determination to Russia’s oppressed and conquered nationalities; it established equal rights for women and LBGTQI people and set about building a new society and world free from capitalist-imperialist war and exploitation. For the first time in human history a government was established that truly represented the vast majority. I might add that this dynamic society elected its representatives at every level who were subject to immediate recall if they failed to carry out the decisions of their constituencies.
Mamdani’s capitalist government
Those who were critical of the racist imperialist Democrats, yet supported Mamdani, often qualified their praise with statements insisting that his victory was a repudiation of the Democratic Party!
Mamdani himself rejected this view. The November 7 NYT Business Section front page headline, “Mamdani Picks for Top Posts Are No Strangers to City Hall” lists Mamdani’s selections to head the world’s richest city. The list included central Democratic Party capitalist politicians from the administrations of Joseph Biden, mayor Eric Adams, former mayor Bill de Blasio and former billionaire NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg, not to mention a host of billionaires and top Democrats who Mamdani brought on board in the course of his campaign.
That Mamdani’s campaign eventually won the support of much of the Democratic Party local, state and national establishment, that his campaign staff was retrofitted with key former leaders of his corrupt opponents’ [Cuomo and Adams] top staffers along with touted billionaire business leaders and the city’s “tough on crime” Police Commissioner and billionaire Lowe’s fortune inheritor, Jessica Tisch, went largely unmentioned, or better, publicly touted.
But the essence of the matter is Mamdani’s proposition that his affordability propositions and every other aspect of his “program” will be implemented by the ruling class figures he has integrated into his leadership team rather than the independent action of the working class masses. Why else would he put a host of leading experienced capitalist politicians in positions of power and influence?
Equivocation on Palestine
Mamdani’s verbal support for Palestinian freedom notwithstanding, is contradicted in all fundamentals by his stated view that the Zionist, colonial apartheid, genocidal state of Israel has the right to exist! The same with Mamdani’s previous support to the presidential campaign of Democrat Killer Kamala Harris and his support to the Bernie Sander–Alexandia Ocasio-Cortez duo’s support of the U.S. military budget!
In point of historic fact, no social movement in U.S. history that is not independent of and fundamentally against ruling class domination and control has ever brought about significant social change. The Black Lives Matter movement mobilized some 14 million people against racist violence one day and the next, literally, weeks later, was collapsed into the Democratic Party presidential campaign of Joseph Biden, historically – for half a century – the Northern Democrat’s liaison to the racist, segregationist Southern Democrats. Biden’s presidency was his personal reward for his lifetime of service to capitalism, where like all others before him, he presided over U.S. policies that granted trillion dollar tax breaks to the ruling rich and funded imperialist wars everywhere, including his genocide in Gaza. Biden’s genocide was accompanied by his reactionary anti-immigrant legislation that matched and exceeded Trump’s.
The “lesser evil”
Mamdani is yet another “lesser evil” capitalist politician, selected and supported by the super rich at a time when crisis-ridden Democrats and U.S. capitalism itself are torn between the more overt fascist-type repression advocated by Trump and a more mild version of the same policies meekly suggested by Democrats.
At the bottom of the present ruling class crisis is a U.S. capitalism that is increasingly losing its domination and control of the world economy, a capitalism whose average profit rates are in constant decline, a capitalism that chose a solution based on the deindustrialization of the U.S. economy, that is, transferring millions of U.S. jobs to low wage nations. Democrat Obama, now a Mamdani supporter, and Bill Clinton before him, pioneered this policy.
Mamdani’s essentially “nickel-dime solutions” that is, “freezing” rents rather than qualitatively reducing them in the world’s most expensive city, providing ONE lower cost grocery store in each of New York’s five boroughs, and vague proposals to tax the rich, the specifics of which are to be implemented by the rich themselves, can never mitigate the horrific social and economic conditions that a capitalism in crisis has been increasingly compelled to impose on working class people. Serious socialists, and Mamdani is not one of them, have never based their programmatic ideas on convincing Democrats or any other capitalist-reformist party, to be nice to the very people they depend on to keep their industries profitable. Challenging the capitalist status quo requires a massive, independent revolutionary socialist alternative, that is, a deeply rooted party aimed at winning the vast majority to the cause of human freedom and dignity.
“Progressive Democrat” is an Oxymoron
Zohran Mamdani is a “progressive Democrat” – indeed, an oxymoron if there ever was one. Join us in building the kind of massive, independent fighting movements that are indispensable for winning real social change and ushering in the socialist future.
Reprinted from Socialist Action USA.