Zohran Mamdani and the NYC Mayor's Race: Here We Go Again

The president rulers of NY City. See others here

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

HEO/GED

10-30-25 *

 

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for Mayor of New York City is creating a lot of excitement and seen by many as a refreshing alternative to the right-wing hatemongering and divisive politics of the Trump era. 

 

Mamdani, a Democrat, is without doubt a very personable and smart individual. And, as earlier posts on this blog point out, he has been the recipient of the most vicious racism and xenophobic attacks from other candidates, Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent, and Curtis Silwa, a Republican. 

When, the big business media blames workers, particularly white workers, as the source of the racist malady, watching the last debate reveals where the racist methodology originates from-----representatives of the ruling class. Racism, along with sexism, is a strategy aimed to undermine workers’ unity and it’s been very successful here in the US. 

 

Alongside of the racist personal attacks are all the usual responses to a mild reform program like Mamdani’s. It’s not realistic, it’s “pie in the sky”, the rich and the billionaires will flee the city and it will be a dystopian nightmare. This too is an age old strategy of the employers.  The papers of the ruling class waged a propaganda war against the 8-hour day movement in the 1880’s that led to the founding of Mayday, “Newspapers------labeled the workers ‘anarchists’ and ‘socialists’ who sought to plunge the country into disarray. Labor leaders were arrested and union halls were raided.”  If workers’ got more time off, universal laziness would be the outcome was a common argument.

 

Despite the scaremongering and the millions of dollars the capitalist class in NYC and nationally are spending to convince workers that electing Mamdani would be harmful to workers’ interests, it looks very likely that an immigrant Muslim may be New York City’s next mayor.

 

Here We Go Again

After all the above, the likelihood is that the Mamdani experience will be a repeat of the Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez show. It’s certainly looking that way, not because Mamdani is a dishonest politician, he is surprisingly forthright about his intentions and that he would need to have support from the legislature for aspects of his platform and he won’t get it. This does not mean he shouldn’t have raised the issues he has. In both the political arena and in the union struggles, workers should start by demanding what we need, not what the bosses, the Democratic Party or their allies atop organized labor say is realistic. But Mamdani's mild reform platform can only be realized through a mass movement from below, not by electing a political savior, even an honest, decent one. 

For Zohran Mamdani or any other politician intent on reversing the disastrous course that has brought us this far to be successful, their energy has to be spent building the mass movement necessary to win  and being honest with working people. We can win, but we can’t win at the ballot box, we have won very little in that way. The legislative gains that were made in the 1930’s through the New Deal and the 1950-60’s through the Civil Rights movement was the politicians of the capitalist parties simply codifying what had already been won in the streets, communities and work places of America.

 

Mamdani has said that he wants to work with New York City’s wealthy, the real estate barons, Wall Street and so on. He met with them behind closed doors to discuss working together. This is the crux of the matter and why he will end up like AOC who excited us all by defeating the entrenched Democratic Party machine candidate in 2018. She has gone from what could have been an agent of change to being a rising star in one of the major capitalist parties in the world. She has chosen the other side, and we must not lose sight of the fact that there are only two real sides in this game and that is the working class and the representatives of capital. The only force that will move them at all is a united working class mass movement. 

 

In order to fund his proposed programs, Mamdani would have to raise taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals -- especially on the Wall Street bankers and the real estate interests that have run New York forever. They're clearly telling him that if he wants to govern the city, he will have to cut a deal with them. That's what their meetings that he has had with them behind closed doors are all about.

 

Understanding this and having a program and strategy for building and strengthening a real mass movement is the only way forward and protection against class collaboration and betrayal. It is appropriate to quote the great American socialist Eugene Debs who rejected the notion that he alone could produce the results when he said: "I would not be a Moses to lead you into the Promised Land, because if I could lead you into it, someone else could lead you out of it”.

 

Regardless of the outcome of the New York City election, as the capitalist offensive against the US working class and the working class internationally continues, we will see major battles up ahead, we are in fact seeing increased responses to the Trump offensive now. Working people learn through the struggle for what we need to raise our families, education our children and live in security and peace with our neighbors, at home and abroad. We draw the conclusion that capitalism cannot provide these basic human needs and we cannot continue in the old way.

 

Millions of working class youth today understand that we have to build a new society that a democratic socialist world is not a fantasy but a reality, a necessity if we are to survive.

 

Young people are not the problem in society; they are the solution

 

*  I incorporated a couple of Suggestions from Jack Gerson.