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!

Tenants unite vs. ICE

I had the privilege of holding a meeting with a dozen of my neighbors, mostly Seniors concerned about the possible appearance of ICE on our apartment building complex. We are located just off 125th Street in West Harlem, and there is a large NYC Housing Authority complex that surrounds us on two sides with a growing Latin community.

Recently there was a false alarm here when two female policewomen arrived  and someone saw the words ICE on their jackets which, worn as they were, concealed the letters POLICE. But within minutes someone posted an alarm on our co-op blog and 10 people arrived, concerned that it was an actual intrusion.

ICE has seized several NYC school students and adults, and each week a travesty occurs at 26 Federal Plaza downtown when immigrants come for hearings on their status, are given new court dates for appearance, and then unhappily are handcuffed and forcibly removed by heavily armed and masked ICE agents. Every day, there are people that come to the court to collect contact information so the families of those taken can be contacted and legal services provided. Activists in the Professional Staff Congress, the City University union, and other groups do what they can in the face of rising fascist oppression.

In my neighborhood there is great concern about ICE. Members of Indivisible on the West Side and in Harlem have visited stores and restaurants with information on the rights of workers and employers to prevent ICE kidnapping of our fellow workers.

We have started to make plans in our co-op to ensure that there is a written protocol that trains our security on the differences between administrative and judicial warrants and to restrict ICE from trying to invade our buildings. Many of us are seniors and unable and/or unwilling to physically confront ICE, but our plan is to chant, video tape, blow on whistles, and give any immigrant workers without papers time to flee.

We plan to bring the issue of ICE and community response at a large annual meeting to be held in the next week and get a commitment from our co-op board and management to inform the community so it can respond. We also hope to join the efforts of others in the neighborhood if the federal government sends the National Guard to NYC, something that has already happened in Portland, Oregon, Chicago, Illinois, and Los Angeles, California.

The increasing violence of ICE agents and the enormous budget provided for them is symptomatic of a larger problem. As benefits won in years of struggle like SNAP food stamps, Medicaid, and Social Security come under attack, while the economy is showing signs of economic crisis beyond the usual, the dangers of rising fascism must bring out increasing numbers of workers and their allies onto the streets to challenge it. 

Every week a group of us picket our busy intersection and ask drivers and passing neighbors to honk their horns in protest. Every Wednesday the cacophony of horns, drums and noise making by us demonstrates the dangers ahead. The working class needs to learn from the struggles today of the need to fight for revolutionary changes that puts the power in their hands and reorganizes humanity for a new society, a communist one. 

We think the fact that over 200 CHALLENGES distributed each issue at each of two subway lines helps. That and struggle led by comrades and friends promise increasing resistance to capitalism.
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It’s communism!

In the letter from Harlem in the 11/12/2025 CHALLENGE,  it quotes a Party member’s (partial) speech which said:  “Call it socialism,  call it communism - ... “.  I feel that this is VERY wrong and confusing!!!  One of the Party’s biggest contributions to the fight for communism is the realization that communism is NOT socialism, and that the road to communism does NOT go through socialism - whatever “socialism” is.

Especially with politicians calling themselves “Democratic Socialists” and other phony titles,  we need to be VERY clear about what communism really is as well as what communism most definitely is NOT!!!
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Cheney dies with the blood of so many workers on his hands

Al Jazeera, 11/5–And so another member of the old “war on terror” team has left the world. Dick Cheney, who served as the most powerful vice president in the history of the United States during the two-term administration of George W Bush (2001-2009), died on Monday at the age of 84…As the chief architect of the “global war on terror” – which was launched in 2001 and enabled the US to terrorise various locations worldwide under the guise of fighting “terrorists” – Cheney died with untold quantities of blood on his hands, particularly in Iraq…Until his dying day, Cheney espoused a no-regrets approach to the illegal perpetration of mass slaughter and attendant suffering...

COP 2025 convenes to a warming world…again

France24, 10/26–Each COP summit picks a primary theme for the talks to focus on…in 2023, the contentious subject was fossil fuels…the attendees…finally reached an agreement calling for “reducing” the use of oil and coal after dropping an initial pledge to “phase out” their use…Under the [2015] accord, each country pledged to submit a climate roadmap every five years detailing its strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The collective goal is to keep global warming below the critical threshold of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels…Since 2015, the curve has flattened and we are now heading for warming of between +2.6° and +2.8°C”...

World war rarely ends in anything less than vast destruction

Foreign Affairs, 11/6–In recent years, many in Washington have focused on deterring China from invading Taiwan...But rebuffing an invasion might not end the war…“There is no scenario in which China, following an unsuccessful invasion, accepts responsibility, acknowledges that military solutions are impractical, or pivots to a fundamentally different set of political objectives toward Taiwan”...“war over Taiwan likely would become protracted, as nearly all great power wars have since the Industrial Revolution.” World War II ended only when Allied forces captured Germany’s capital and the United States dropped nuclear weapons on Japan. 

Biden Supreme Court appointee Brown gives OK to cut off workers from food

Politico, 11/7–The Trump administration scored a temporary victory at the Supreme Court Friday as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed to lift a deadline for the federal government to fully fund SNAP payments that flow to millions of Americans…In an order issued after 9 p.m. Friday, Jackson granted the Trump administration’s request for relief from a lower court order that would have required officials to tap into a separate nutrition account at USDA to deliver the usual SNAP payments for November…Jackson’s move came after the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals declined to grant the administration an immediate reprieve from the district court judge’s order…

Workers slaughtered in Sudan in one of several genocides

PBS, 10/31–Sudan’s civil war has entered a new, horrific phase. The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have gone on a killing rampage after taking over the key city of El Fasher in Western Darfur after over a year-and-a-half of siege. Hundreds of thousands have fled to neighboring Tawila, escaping famine and mass executions…This week, the people of El Fasher, beaten and threatened, attacked and hunted, fled for their lives from a murderous militia that films itself unleashing ferocious violence. A fighter shows off his work. “We have burned them,” he says. “We have burned them.” They show off their horror and document their own war crimes with videos too graphic to show.

Healthcare workers strike as bosses rake in profits

10/14–More than 30,000 Kaiser Permanente nurses and health care workers across three Pacific states started a five-day strike on Tuesday, calling for better wages and more time for patient care as negotiations between union heads and Kaiser executives remain unresolved. Members of the United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals (UNAC/UHCP), along with members of the Alliance of Health Care Unions, picketed outside 22 Kaiser hospitals in California, Oregon and Hawaii….Union leaders claim recent layoffs, stagnant wages, unsafe working conditions, excessive workloads and Kaiser’s prioritization of profit over care — the company holds almost $64 billion in reserves acquired mostly during the Covid-19 pandemic…

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!