This is a preview of a longer piece we’re working on analyzing Mamdani’s mayoral campaign and its implications for our class.
The mobilization of tens of thousands in Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoralty campaign presents an opportunity to strengthen the fight for communism. In a period of rising global fascism and looming world war, it also presents big risks for the working class. Many Mamdani supporters are honest workers who are fed up with the monstrous inequality of capitalism, with its brutal racism and sexism. Progressive Labor Party needs them—and millions more like them—to build an egalitarian society. The fatal catch is that they’re channeling their anti-capitalist frustrations into the dead end of voting. Electoral politics is a shell game run by the capitalist rulers to protect their trillions in profits and stop open rebellion. Our challenge is to win these workers to move from reformism to revolution, from the bosses’ clutches to working class liberation. This process is complicated. It calls for patience as well as urgency. But our message is straightforward: Don’t vote, revolt!
Mamdani’s campaign promises of free child care, free bus rides, cheaper groceries, and less exorbitant housing are New Deal-type reforms that hold obvious appeal in a city where one of four children live in poverty. But we’ve seen this movie before, and it never ends well for the working class. Under the profit system, in even the best of times, workers’ gains are too little and short-lived. In the current period, with U.S. imperialism in sharp decline, a desperate U.S. ruling class will be forced into a military showdown with imperialist China and other rivals. Sooner than later, they’ll be compelled to discipline bosses and workers alike. No politician—be they Republican or Democrat or Democratic Socialist—will be able to resist this nationalist, racist tide. They’ll either go with the fascist flow or be thrown overboard.
Capitalism can’t be fixed to serve the needs of the working class. History proves that it can’t be voted out. As the Russian and Chinese revolutions showed before they were reversed, capitalism can be smashed only through armed struggle by masses of workers led by communist ideas. The bosses’ dictatorship must be replaced by a dictatorship of the proletariat. The great danger of the Mamdani phenomenon, like the Obama craze before it, is that it weakens workers’ class consciousness. It disarms them for the life-and-death struggle before us.
In reality, anti-capitalism has only one political home where its ambition can be realized—in the struggle for revolutionary communism under the banner of Progressive Labor Party. Join us. We have a world to win!
