I was glad to see CHALLENGE publish a letter about Mamdani (see 7/2/25). The Mamdani mayoral campaign in New York City has national and international implications. I hope the pages of our paper fill with our experiences struggling with our base and in the mass movement over Mamdani’s candidacy. It’s a tremendous opportunity to show the contrast between capitalist reformers like Mamdani, who doom us to propping up a murderous, fatally-flawed capitalist system, and the revolutionary communism of PLP. But only if we fight hard for our line!
The letter writer made a plea for us to be “respectful” when we discuss Mamdani and the limits of capitalist politicians. I do understand that sometimes we can be strident and dismissive when we discuss the contradiction of reform and revolution with our base. This often happens when we don’t know people well. For sure, it’s not dialectical (and thus not true) to just say, “Reform is bad, revolution is good.” We have to understand that tendencies toward both reform and revolution coexist inside the class struggle; like all contradictions, they are inextricably bound together. Indeed, I would argue that there is no such thing as a “reform struggle” per se, only the CLASS STRUGGLE that can have both reformist and revolutionary tendencies.
For that very reason, it is not enough to say, “We are with you in the struggle, but in the long run we believe in revolution.” In this period of rising fascism—indeed, of fascism breaking out into the open—the question of reform and revolution has become more and more one of life and death, and our work in the mass movement has to take on a more urgent character. Instead of worrying about being respectful, we need to be worrying about how we struggle harder to win our fellow workers toward our revolutionary line.
How do we do that? Not by yelling at our fellow workers, to be sure, or by dismissing their opinions, even when we disagree. We do it by building deep ties with them. We need to build bonds of trust and solidarity with large numbers of workers, a major reason why we are actively involved in mass organizations for the long-term. We need to be immersed in the lives of the working class—in the thick of their everyday struggles to survive under capitalism and to fight for the society we all need. When we are close to people, we can struggle with them harder.
The fact is, the liberal ruling class remains the greatest danger to the working class, and democratic socialist candidates in particular are uniquely able to energize young people about a rebranded capitalism that is just as murderous, racist, and sexist as always. You can’t vote out fascism! Hundreds of thousands of workers that ultimately must be won to communism are now mobilizing for yet another one of the bosses’ elections. Mamdani is extremely dangerous to the working class and will help usher in fascism. Unless we win workers away, they will be disarmed.
If Mamdani is to remain a viable candidate for the bosses, he will necessarily need to make accommodations with them. The fact that he has been making nice with Wall Street billionaire CEOs and not ruling out keeping billionaire heiress KKKop Commissioner Jessica Tisch shows his willingness to “play the capitalist game,” just like any other capitalist politician. And while it’s true that because of splits in the ruling class, certain sections are gunning for Mamdani, other sections of the still dominant liberal wing have already moved to endorse him, like former mayor Bill DeBlasio and Congressmen Chuck Schumer, Jerry Nadler, and Adriano Espaillat. More will likely follow.
The bottom line is we must always be respectful with our fellow workers. But in this period, what we really need is a sharper struggle with them.
When Obama was in his honeymoon phase, I was struggling hard with my fellow workers, many of whom I knew well and had deep bonds of trust with. I am self-critical now that when they criticized me for being “pessimistic” because I warned of his allegiance to capitalism and his inevitable coming sellout, I backed off, out of what I thought was “respect” for my friends.
It wasn’t really respect for them that stopped me: it was cowardice and fear. I didn’t want them to be mad at me. But I was wrong. Within a year after his inauguration, the honeymoon was over and many of my friends could see that their hopes were hollow. Obama went on to manage five simultaneous wars for U.S. imperialism, deport over three million of our fellow workers, among countless other betrayals. Like Mamdani today, the allure of the Obama presidency disarmed the working class and set the stage for the more open fascism of Trump. And I missed the opportunity to engage them more fiercely on the need for them to take a leading role in changing our world instead of waiting for the next savior.
I will not make that mistake again, and today as the decline of U.S. imperialism accelerates, the stakes are that much greater.
Let’s not insult our fellow workers by being too “nice.” Let’s take them seriously and engage them in a struggle over what we urgently need to survive.
