Mamdani Treads an All Too Familiar Path

Richard Mellor

Zohran Mamdani's election as Mayor of New York City inspired thousands of working class people, giving many of them hope that their living standards were about to improve. It showed that a candidate that kept the issues to the needs and aspirations of working class people could get elected even in the face of vicious racist and xenophobic attacks from the Wall Street criminals, land speculators and real estate pimps that control the city's finances. Beyond that, as a Muslim, he won in a city with a large Jewish population as he spoke in support of Palestinian rights.

The propaganda machine was relentless.  Never ending fear mongering, threats from the billionaires that they would take their money and leave the city never toppled the Mamdani train from the tracks. How can that not be exciting?

The problem is, we have seen these campaigns before. Myself and others like me, particularly those of us that have been around for a while, have lived through many of them. So, exiting as his victory was, it was an electoral victory, in the face of many firsts---he's a Muslim, he is an immigrant born in Uganda, a child of Indian parents. There is one unfortunate similarity with other victories like his; he is a candidate of the other Wall Street Party-------the Democrats.

I went back to look at Jesse Jackson's platform in 1988 and it was similar to Bernie Sanders platform 30 years later. Jackson made class appeals, talked of "us and them" ""fishes and sharks" "haves and have nots" and so on. But the Democratic Party machine put a stop to all that nonsense and Jackson shifted to the right, to the, "we are all in this together" mode. Class war must not be mentioned even in its mildest form which is what Mamdani’s platform was.

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's victory was exciting too. Any time the big guys get taken down a peg it gives people hope that things will change for the better. But that hope gets dashed pretty quickly because the Democratic Party is a capitalist party and as much a billionaire’s party as the Republicans are. 

Those three billionaires we saw in the front seats at Trump's inauguration would be sitting in the same spot were a Democrat elected president. The billionaires own both parties and we could see that during the 2020 election when even the hated Dick Cheney, who was often referred to as Satan by many Democratic Party faithful’s, switched sides and was Satan no more. In the face of Trump, the imbecile George W Bush, the guy who slaughtered a million Iraqi's and destroyed their country, one of Michelle Obama's close friends, became cuddly. These people know only too well how important class solidarity is.

The Democratic Party is known as the black hole of all social movements. After the Battle in Seattle in 1999 that shook US capitalism, the trade union hierarchy that is an arm of the Democratic Party in the workers' movement, sent its staffers in to temper the movement, direct it away from any independent path politically and it to the safe confines of the Democratic Party. 

 

The base Mamdani built was purely for electoral reasons. But that base should have and can be, a starting point for an independent direct action movement based in our communities and organisations, and as Mayor of a major city like New York the resources are there to spread that movement beyond the Big Apple. He had the support of major unions in the city.

 

But unless, there is some secret strategy that I don't know about, it looks like Mamdani is in there with AOC as a rising star in a party that represents big capital. They will join Bernie Sanders as yet another disappointment that will tend to drive people in two ways, one is to abandon the electoral process altogether and the other to seek a way out through right wing or nationalist policies. The complete failure of the Democratic Party to offer a way out is a major reason we have the sexual deviant racist in the Oval Office.