By Hannah Lahoz W and Bill V. Mullen, Socialist Horizon U.S.
Zohran Mamdani’s election in New York City is a welcome event for everyone on the U.S. Left and for the U.S. working-class. Mamdani’s victory is a reflection well beyond New York City of the desire of millions of U. S. citizens for an alternative to capitalism and its vices. Mamdani’s broad interracial and working-class coalition responded not just to his support for reforms like free bus service, expanded health care and broadened social services, but his bold opposition to Zionism, to U.S. imperialism in the Middle East, and to Islamophobia. Mamdani’s popularity is also an index of the broadening hatred Americans feel for oligarchs, bosses, and Donald Trump, whose popularity has fallen to record level lows while Mamdani’s has ascended.
Mamdani’s victory was also a rejection by voters of the billionaire class in New York city including realtors, bankers, and business professionals who had tried to smash his candidacy. Mamdani slammed the wealth disparity in New York City as the primary enemy of his campaign. Mamdani also started on the right foot in his victory speech, quoting Eugene Debs and Jawaharlal Nehru. He doubled down on his campaign message of rejecting billionaires and oligarchs. He has since that night called for continued local organizing in working-class communities and encouraged the Democratic Socialist of America to self-organize. Mamdani is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, the organization of 100,000 members whose volunteers helped to get him elected. The DSA stands for an electoral path to reform of capitalism. At his inauguration speech Mamdani vowed to govern as a Democratic Socialist. He was sworn in by Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Senator whose 2016 presidential campaign built the DSA from a group of 5,000 to nearly 100,000. Mamdani played the old labor song “Bread and Roses” as a symbolic nod to his working-class constituents. He published his inauguration speech in Jacobin, which is the unofficial magazine of the Democratic Socialists of America New York City has one of the largest queer populations in the U.S.Mamdani has been endorsed by nearly all LGBTQIA groups and publications for his record and promises thus far. Both would suggest he is less opportunistic in his successful pursuit of LGBTQIA votes. However, time will tell what he is able to achieve even with mobilization.
In his first days in office Mamdani has undertaken several initiatives consistent with his stance as a DSA member and candidate. He revoked the previous Mayor Eric Adams’s executive order supporting the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of anti-semitism. That definition condemns criticism of Israel as anti-semitic. He revoked another Adams executive order banning any public agency from supporting the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel. He directed his new housing commissioner to address renter complaints of poor housing conditions and intervened in a tenant dispute with a company notorious for creating bad living conditions. He and volunteers for his campaign have formed NYC DSA’s Tax the Rich and invited people to join to sustain his policy initiatives. They have also created Our Time, a new campaign meant to sustain and deepen Zohran’s canvassing operation to win free childcare andaffordable housing through increased taxes. He wants to increase the city’s income tax on earnings over $1 million by 2 percentage points and raise the top corporate tax by nearly 4 percent. However, these increases would need to be approved by the Democratic governor of New York, who said she opposes such taxes.
This last point shows that Mamdani’s efforts to govern as a democratic socialist will be constrained by the Democratic Party he is a part of. “Affordability” is a slogan with which many progressive Democrats are comfortable. “Socialism” not so much. The Democratic Party is historically a pro-capitalist party and a party of war. It supported the genocide in Gaza and when Joe Biden was president put a bounty on the head of Nicolas Maduro https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/10/world/americas/biden-bounty-nicolas-maduro.html The Democratic Party and Republican Party have always been unified in their support for U.S. imperialism in Latin America and elsewhere. There are many signs already of Mamdani’s compromise and constraint within the Democratic Party.
Mamdani had already brought in a veteran from Democrat Bill DeBlasio’s administration in the role of first Deputy Mayor; he is keeping the current New York City Police Commissioner—and staunch Zionist—Jessica Tisch in her position. This comes at a moment when ICE abductions in NYC increased dramatically in 2025 to at least 3,500, spreading terror in immigrant and working class communities. Tens of thousands of new Yorkers have self-organized, at considerable personal risk, to combat ICE. The significance of Mamdani’s election will be tested also by the current uprising against ICE across the U.S. Since the murder of queer activist Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis this week hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets. Mamdani has publicly vowed that no city agency, including the New York City Police Department, will cooperate with ICE. This policy could be tested soon. However, it should be noted that Mamdani’s statement is in line with what other Democratic Party mayors in cities like Minneapolis and Portland have been saying. He has emphasized that “knowing your rights” is the best defense for migrants—a classic liberal position. He is firmly entrenched in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, not outside of it. Whether he becomes a real challenger to the Party status quo depends on whether he commits to mass mobilization as a strategy.
Mamdani’s decision to meet with Donald Trump as one of his first high profile acts as mayor-elect was also a dangerous miscalculation, especially now that Trump has invaded Venezuela and kidnapped Maduro and is defending the murder of U.S. protesters. Ttrying to find “common ground” with Trump, who Mamdani himself has decried as a fascist, presents an irreconciliable contradiction. Mamdani had positioned his campaign as a fight against all that Trump and the billionaires represent. To then seek conciliation with Trump sends the signal that either Mamdani believes he can accomplish his goals through negotiation with the Trumpian billionaires currently waging an all-out class war against the US working class, or that he isshowing a commitment to operate within the norms of an increasingly authoritarian and corrupted two-party political structure. Either way, this approach weakens and confuses the effort to mobilize the bottom-up class struggle necessary that Mamdani alluded to as a necessary next step in his victory speech.
It is also worrying that Mamdani is already accommodating himself into the beltway of the rightwing Democratic Party establishment in New York. After receiving an eleventh hour endorsement from holdout Hakeem Jeffries, ostensibly to get Mamdani’s support in quashing a primary challenge from Democratic Socialist (be consistent in capitalizing or not) challenger Chi Ossé, Mamdani helped block Ossé’s effort from within the DSA. Jeffries is a mouthpiece for Zionism, a staunch anti-socialist, and neoliberal capitalist Democrat who militantly opposes Mamdani’s politics. Chuck Schumer, the standard-bearer of the Democratic Party’s hard right, Zionist, and neoliberal capitalist majority, refused to endorse Mamdani altogether. Jeffries, Schumer, and much of the Democratic Party establishment will work alongside the Republican Party and capitalist class in New York to block and undermine Zohran Mamdani’s efforts to fulfill any of his campaign promises.
Socialist Horizon therefore agrees with our Left comrades across the spectrum calling for pressure campaigns and widescale mass organizing to make the Mamdani administration accountable to the multiracial working-class that elected him. For example, citizen committees can be established in New York City to keep up public demand for free public transportation. Workers councils can be formed to pressure the Mamdani administration to increase taxes on the wealthy and encourage unionization campaigns. Mamdani’s administration should advance anti-capitalist policies that are environment friendly and make public utilities that keep the city operating like gas and electric: Muslim organizations should pressure Mamdani to continue to criticize and oppose U.S. support for Israel and broaden his critique to include U.S. saber-rattling against Venezuela. Immigrant rights groups should ramp up demands that the city government oppose all cooperation with Homeland Security and ICE. Reproductive rights groups should organize to be sure abortion access is increased across the city and is free to all. Abolitionist groups should demand that Mamdani replace the New York City police department with public safety committees organized by the people of New York.
Revolutionary socialists should participate in all of these activities. The diverse activist movment that surrounds Mamdani offers an important opportunity to work in a united front with large numbers of people who have a growing anti-capitalist orientation. Many of them are also committed anti-imperialists, anti-racists, and anti-Zionists.
At the same time, socialists must be actively building a new revolutionary party. These tasks are not counterposed but complementary. Revolutionary socialists do not aspire to govern a capitalist society, they endeavor to replace it. The advancing of reforms that improve the lives of workers and the elimination of capitalism altogether are always on a continuum for revolutionary socialists. However, where the former can be achieved without the creation of a revolutionary party, the latter cannot.
Here we agree with our Tempest comrades, who have written about the Mamdani campaign, “socialists need to help build the political independence of the working class and oppressed communities. Socialism can only be won as a movement of self emancipation, and for this, the development of political independence is essential”. We also agree with Jonathan Rosenbaum, who has argued. “You cannot build an anti-capitalist movement within a capitalist party”.
Mamdani’s participation in the rabidly pro-capitalist Democratic Party is not only a block on the ability of socialists to challenge the system, but to the imagination of working-class people to create their own future. People cannot imagine eating fresh fruit when all they are offered is fast food. Only a revolutionary party openly dedicated to the elimination of capitalism and the development of socialism can truly show people the world they wish to build. Indeed, polls show that capitalism is a failing idea in America, and that young people in particular are more and more attracted to socialism.
The formation of a revolutionary socialist party fulfills that imaginary. It invites people into the planning, building and realization of a future that is made with human hands. As Socialist Horizon wrote earlier this year:
We need to begin building a revolutionary organization today. In other words, we need an organization whose central strategy, the guiding star of its entire activity, is advancing the construction of a mass working-class revolutionary party, and one that acts in international solidarity with socialists across the globe striving for the same goals…
…This organization must be grounded in firm principles of revolutionary strategy, class independence and internationalism. It must be structured with dedicated and independent-thinking political cadres, an internal method of democratic discussion and united intervention, and a collective, principled and accountable leadership. It must have the tactical flexibility to build political and social movements of the working class and the oppressed without sectarianism, and with the strategic and political firmness to push the class struggle forward at all points.
The relative weakness of the U.S. left in this period demands that building a revolutionary organization also requires cooperation and strategic orientation and revolutionaries. That is why Socialist Horizon is committed to a regroupment of revolutionary forces in the U.S. towards a new revolutionary party. The revolutionary regroupment we propose is something different but not contradictory to efforts to support united front organizing around figures like Mamdani. Our revolutionary regroupment aims to unify those who agree on the more strategic task of building a revolutionary party organization of dedicated members and cadre while we intervene in the class struggle, whenever possible in unity with broader forces. To that end, we seek to work with all revolutionary socialist organizations and individuals who share our commitment to regroupment and building a new revolutionary socialist organization.
Socialist Horizon’s own regroupment strategy includes its participation in the United Left Platform. This Platform of five U.S. socialist organizations initially came together in the summer of 2025 as a mutual defense network to defend Left groups from repressive attacks. In September, the Platform created the “Committee to Defend Tom Alter” which Alter, a Socialist Horizon member, was fired from his university position for speaking as a socialist:
Since that time the Platform has released a statement condemning the U.S. aggression against Venezuela: This month it will hold a national meeting with speakers from Venezuela, Socialist Horizon and Tempest to mobilize people against the U.S. invasion of Venezuela.
The Mamdani victory is a massive opening for the opportunity for the revolutionary left to build and grow. His victory indicates that now more than ever people are moving in the direction of massive social change and want a world that puts people before profit.
We invite people who want to build that world with us to contact us at https://socialisthorizon.org/member-organizations-and-locations/
