New York City’s newly elected mayor, Zohran Mamdani, rode into office on a wave of promise: with over 100,000 campaign volunteers and unprecedented youth energy. Mamdani’s platform of free buses, universal childcare, rent freezes, and city-owned groceries are good things to fight for. For many workers worn thin by rising rents, hunger, and transit cuts, this feels like a turning point. The first Muslim mayor of New York, backed by elements of an anticapitalist, antiracist, antigenocide coalition signals growing class consciousness.
It is becoming increasingly clear as economic conditions deteriorate that housing, food, and transportation should belong to those who create and sustain them. BlackRock, not the tenant, should bear the cost of housing. Transit should serve the worker, not the market. The thousands of young people who knocked on doors for Mamdani, many for the first time, experienced the thrill of collective action. Their energy must be honored.
But we must also confront the limits of this moment and refuse the illusion that electoral reformism can ever break the chains of capitalism. Hope cannot rest on any single leader, even if they may have good intentions. It must be led by the working class itself, toward a militant, revolutionary horizon. Now more than ever, we need you to join a party that refuses compromise with Wall Street, the landlords, and the NYPD. We need you to join Progressive Labor Party!
The melancholy of hope
Mamdani’s victory feels historic—but it isn’t revolutionary. It repeats the oldest rhythm of capitalist politics: crisis, reform, betrayal, repeat. Take
Mamdani’s promise to make housing affordable for ordinary New Yorkers. It’s doomed from the start. Why? Because truly affordable housing for all would require tackling the root of the problem: capitalism itself.
Capitalism runs on profit, and racist inequality is built into its foundation. No politician—no matter how genuine—can change that, especially as capitalism sinks deeper into crisis. In New York City, more than 100,000 students are unhoused (Advocates for Children of New York, 2024).
Across the city, 350,000 people live without stable housing, (Coalition for the Homeless, 2024), 1.2 million face food insecurity, and 2 million live below the poverty line—including one in four children (Robin Hood Foundation & Columbia University, 2023). Meanwhile, labor participation continues to fall just 58 percent for Black men, 55 percent for Black women, 63 percent for Latin men, and 54 percent for Latin women—compared with 72 percent for white men and 64 percent for white women (NYC Mayor’s Management Report, 2025). These numbers reflect not only economic decay but also racist deportation raids and anti-worker policies that deepen inequality (Center for New York City Affairs, 2025)
Reform can help...only somewhat
These crises expose the deep, racist inequalities at the heart of the profit system—inequalities that have only worsened amid the global capitalist meltdown. No reform, however well-intentioned, can fix this. Mamdani’s Band-Aid reforms can’t heal the open wounds or slow the decay of a dying system. Even if every promise were fulfilled, capitalism would grind those gains down.
Still, his proposed reforms would bring some relief to working people. We salute the thousands of Mamdani supporters fighting for a better world.
But reformism has hard limits—especially now. Even if every promise were fulfilled, the victories would be brief and fragile because if capitalism remains intact, so too will inequality, exploitation, and racism. Only a revolutionary communist movement to destroy capitalism can end that cycle once and for all.
Already, Mamdani is taking contradictory positions: praising workers while pledging to “work with billionaires to build a fairer city.” We’ve already seen him retreat—denouncing “globalize the intifada,” apologizing to the NYPD, and backtracking on his earlier call to “defund the police.” These reversals undermine the very struggles he claims to support. It’s already clear he will not disarm the cops; instead, he promises to fund them “responsibly.” By defending police budgets and promoting “community partnerships” rather than dismantling the NYPD’s racist machinery, he aligns himself with those who brutalized George Floyd protesters and assaulted pro-Palestine students alike.
Mamdani once denounced the high school admissions test as racist, but he has since softened his stance, avoiding a direct confrontation with the city’s deeply racist education system (Chalkbeat, 10/2). His cautious education plan leaves New York’s entrenched school segregation intact and caters to those who promote eugenic myths about intelligence and merit. These compromises reveal Mamdani not as a champion of the working class, but as another ruling class operative. His willingness to make concessions suggests that what he truly seeks is a seat at the table—and the price capitalists will ultimately demand for that seat at their crumbling table is political support for fascism, even if it is not Trump’s version. The global crisis of capitalism—with its internal conflicts, the decline of U.S. power, and the rise of China—suggests that the trajectory toward fascism is inevitable, regardless of who holds power.
We do not doubt the sincerity of Mamdani’s volunteers — their solidarity is genuine and even moving. But sincerity is no shield against fascism. As before under de Blasio and Obama, many of those caught up in elections will be faced with defending the very administration that betrays them. That’s why it is so important to bring to the forefront the limits of any fight for reform now, even while we are in the middle of it.
Join Progressive Labor Party!
We live in an era of deepening fascism, climate catastrophe, endless wars, and mass displacement. The capitalist class, cornered by crisis, prepares once again for world war to preserve its profits. Against this, only the organized, international working class can stand.
Join Progressive Labor Party in building a revolutionary communist movement: one that rejects reformist illusions and prepares for militant struggle against imperialism, fascism, and the destruction of our planet. We fight not for a gentler capitalism, but for the end of capitalism itself: a world run by workers, for workers, without bosses or borders. History shows that only the working class—armed with communist ideas and led by a Communist Party—has the power to stop fascism and build a new paradigm in which ordinary people, not polished politicians pleading with billionaires to “pay their fair share,” are truly in control.The ballot gave us another capitalist mayor. Revolution will give us the egalitarian world we deserve. Join us and fight for communism!