Who will run New York City over the next four years? Behind Door Number One: Disgraced ex-governor Andrew Cuomo, the serial sexual abuser who killed thousands of nursing home residents in the early Covid outbreak and then distorted the data to cover it up. Door Number Two: Curtis Sliwa, the kkkop-loving Republican clown show. And Door Number Three: Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, who has inspired tens of thousands of volunteers with a platform of rent freezes, universal child care, and free bus rides. 

Mamdani is favored to win the November 4 mayoral election, though Cuomo’s coarse appeals to anti-Muslim gutter racism—and huge contributions from developers and landlords—have closed the gap. But regardless of who comes out on top, one thing is sure: It won’t be good for the working class. 

Amid a worldwide capitalist crisis, this election matters. It determines who will manage the country’s largest city and the financial capital of the U.S. bloc. With China, Russia, and the U.S. on a collision course for inter-imperialist war, the capitalist rulers have no choice but to move toward fascism. Liberal democracy—with its mythical “free and fair” elections, “freedom” of speech, and an “impartial” justice system—can no longer prop up their failing empire. To stay afloat as conditions for workers keep getting worse, the bosses need hyper-militarized fascism to squash rebellion. 

They need openly racist fascism to divide our class and scapegoat groups of workers, be they Black or Brown migrants in the U.S. and Europe, or Muslims in India, or Uyghurs in China or Palestinians in Israel. Perhaps most of all, they need fascism to build rabid nationalism for the bloody global conflict to come.

Mamdani is the Democratic Party’s latest great reformist hope, a misleader and fake leftist who is all the more dangerous for his surface charm and pie-in-the-sky promises. But even if he were totally sincere in his stated concern for workers and their families, Mamdani cannot solve the contradictions of capitalism. 

In a system drowning in debt and designed to protect the interests of billionaires, Mamdani’s job—if elected—will be to placate workers with a few crumbs of reform and buy a bit more time for the bosses’ dying liberal democracy. Behind his slogans and smiles, he will be an agent of finance capital, of the imperialist main-wing bosses who finance and control the Democratic Party. He is running for an office that is hard-wired for working-class oppression, not working-class power.

We must be clear: There are no good politicians. Liberation cannot come out of a mayor’s office.   There are only two paths: to preserve capitalism or to smash it. There is no in-between. Mamdani’s clear commitment is to preserve it.

While communists have always worked in reform fights to advance the class struggle and build our movement, we understand that reforms under capitalism are limited and short-lived. Communism doesn’t mean “progressive” policies. It means transformation: the destruction of the bosses’ state, the abolition of private property and wages. It means tearing down the material basis for racism, sexism, and all inequality, and creating a society run by and for the working class. Join Progressive Labor Party in building a communist system. 

Scrambling to the right

The following are some of Mamdani’s stance and direct quotes. It’s a low bar—the working class deserves better.

On NYPD & ICE

• June 2020: “We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer, and a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #defundtheNYPD.”
• October 15: “I apologize because of the fact that…these men and women who serve in the NYPD, they put their lives on the line every single day” (Fox News, 10/15). 
• Mamdani will retain NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch, under whom NYPD protected ICE from protestors on Canal Street. 
  When asked which Democratic leader would you want to be like, Mamdani said Michell Wu. That’s the same Wu who invoked anti-anarchist act against workers in Boston (NY Times, 10/10).

On Genocide

• June 29: Refuses to condemn the slogan “globalize the Intifada,” an expression of struggle against Israel-made genocide (Politico, 6/29). 
• July 16: “I will discourage the phrase” (CNN).

On capitalist inequality

• “I don’t think that we should have billionaires…we need equality across…And I look forward to work with everyone, including billionaires to make a city that is fairer for all of them” (NBC News, 6/29). 
• Tax the billionaires by an additional two percent
• Freeze the rent on rent-stabilized apartments. 

Of course, we must continue to fight for better living and working conditions. But, the more we accept survival as a victory, the more this profit system wins. 

Follow the money

Mamdani is at least partly financed by the very interests he claims to oppose. An advisory group of investors—including JPMorgan Chase, other Wall Street insiders, and grotesquely wealthy tech capitalists—was formed to “guide” Mamdani’s campaign and “shape policy” (Fortune, 9/23). 

They don’t seem too concerned about Mamdani’s plan to pay for his promises by taxing the rich; they know the tax would need to be okayed by the state government in Albany, where Governor Kathy Hochul has made clear that it’s a nonstarter. 

Here’s the real deal—the U.S. ruling class is a disaster of their own making. The Democratic Party is in disarray with a creaky leadership, limited options, and internal disagreements on how to best prepare for war. By contrast to the loot-and-plunder Trump forces, the main-wing bosses know the U.S. needs to make a show of reining in inequality, at least a little bit. They know they need to tax the rich—not for child care, but to fund their military and the infrastructure and industry they need to support it. They can use Mamdani as a tool to begin to discipline their own ranks. And if the winner turns out to be Cuomo, who’s been endorsed by main-wing stalwart Michael Bloomberg and has pledged to hire 5,000 more cops, the bosses will surely be able to work him, too. 

Social democracy=social fascism

The capitalist bosses have long experience in absorbing radical movements and rendering them toothless. The modern Democratic Socialists of America was founded in 1982 by Michael Harrington, who twenty years earlier had tried to inject his bitter anti-communism into Students for a Democratic Society. Harrington’s lifelong mission was to funnel working-class anger and fightback into electoral politics and the Democratic Party, where it could be controlled and pacified. He followed in the class-traitorous footsteps of the Social Democrats who ruled Germany in the early 20th century. In 1919, they sent militias to crush the Spartacist Revolt and murder over 1,000 communists, including Rosa Luxemburg. When push came to shove, they sided with capital over labor.

Mamdani follows in that same shameful lineage. Like Ras Baraka in Newark, Karen Bass in Los Angeles, Michelle Wu in Boston, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Congress, Mamdani will disarm workers into believing capitalism can serve the interests of the working class. By borrowing socialist language while preparing to knuckle under to Wall Street, he will help keep workers trapped in a cycle of false hope and betrayal. 

Reject the illusion, build the revolution

While Mamdani’s campaign is a dead end, but the workers who support him ARE part of the solution. An internationally united working class is the only hope we have to build a communist movement. 

So, who is fit to rule the world? The millions of workers on the streets could be the seeds of a powerful mass movement. They are militant, courageous, antiracist, and implicitly class-conscious. But a lasting movement to confront the bosses, even on a reform level, needs to be more than against Trump (No Kings). It needs to be for something. That’s why PLP’s task of building for communism is so critical in this moment. Join us now on this long road to revolution!