Zohran Mamdani is a DSA member running as a Democrat for mayor of New York City. He’s currently polling second in the primary behind Andrew Cuomo, the ex-governor of New York.

Not only is Zohran running as a Democrat, but he is also consciously trying to strengthen that flailing party. As he said in a New York Times interview, “If we want to bring these New Yorkers back to the Democratic Party, then we have to show them that we’re serious about making their life more affordable.”

Class independence is essential

To wage an effective struggle against the class enemy, workers need a political party of our own. The Democratic and Republican parties are capitalist institutions which exist to advance the interests of their class—not neutral vessels to be filled with whatever class content we want.

The Democrats are less popular than ever. There is huge discontent with both capitalist parties and palpable hunger for an alternative. Now is precisely the time to attack the Democrats and provide a class-independent alternative to channel this discontent.

Imagine the political energy that would be unleashed nationwide by a successful independent socialist campaign in the nation’s largest and most economically significant city. Instead, Zohran and the liberal-socialists are wasting this opportunity, trying instead to direct class anger back into a capitalist party.

A genuine socialist campaign would run on a class-independent basis. The goal would not be to win the election at any cost, but above all, to use it as a platform for attacking both parties as enemies of the working class, advocating for the creation of a working-class alternative, and explaining the need to organize to overthrow the entire capitalist system. This message would get a huge echo in the current political turmoil.

Zohran’s program

Despite running as a Democrat, Zohran is generating buzz due to his campaign promises. He pledges to freeze rents on rent-stabilized apartments, make public buses free, and open a handful of city-owned grocery stores with lower prices. His left-liberal supporters claim that implementing this program would improve workers’ conditions and make socialism more popular.

In one campaign video, Zohran says,

New Yorkers are being crushed by rent and childcare. The slowest buses in the world are robbing us of our time and our sanity. Working people are being pushed out of the city they built. A mayor could change this, and that’s why I’m running … We can afford to bring down the rent, have world class public transit, and make it easier to raise a family. We can do all of that, and so much more. Because this is New York. We can afford to dream.

While all of these aims are laudable and understandably popular, the reality is that no mayor can singlehandedly end the cost of living crisis New Yorkers face. It’s rooted in the crisis of American and world capitalism. Due to massive unpayable public debt, governments around the world are seeking, not to expand public services, but on the contrary, to implement vicious austerity.

Under these conditions, any “reforms” that Zohran manages to deliver for one section of the working class will have to be paid for by taxing another section of our class. This is clear in Zohran’s support for congestion pricing, which taxes those who commute to Manhattan by car, ostensibly to fund improvements in public transit. Far from making socialism more popular, “reforms” like these divide the working class against one another.

Does that mean a socialist mayor couldn’t accomplish anything? Far from it. A workers’ representative in City Hall could be the focus of a nationwide struggle against austerity. There is historical precedent for such a fight. In the 1980s, our comrades controlled the city council in Liverpool, England and used their position to launch a militant campaign against Margaret Thatcher’s vicious attacks on the working class.

It is true that, as a society, we can “afford” better housing, transit, and childcare. But this will not happen through “dreaming.” A class-independent candidate would run on a socialist program and make it clear that this program could only be implemented through the collective struggle of the working class to make the bosses, and not the workers, pay for the crisis.

Capitalism is the problem

For Zohran and the DSA, the problem isn’t with the capitalist system itself, but with individual politicians and their policy choices. This attitude is reflected in his statements about Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo:

Life in this city doesn’t need to be this hard. But politicians like Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo want it to be this way. They care about their donors. They care about themselves. They don’t care about you. The working class who keep this city running. This campaign is for everybody who believes in the dignity of their neighbors.

But it is not simply a question of “bad” choices or lack of caring by individual politicians like Adams and Cuomo. The root cause is a system that enriches the wealthy few at the expense of those who actually make society run.

Despite his nice-sounding words, Zohran is ultimately a reformist seeking to make minor tweaks to the New York City budget. In the process, he is deceiving the working class about the role of the Democratic Party and about the possibility of achieving meaningful improvements under capitalism. Rather than building the influence of socialism, he is tainting that word through false promises and associating himself with the rotten and discredited Democratic Party.

A genuine working-class campaign, independent of both parties and putting forward a socialist program and class struggle methods, could win massive support and serve as an example for the whole country. It could channel the anger and discontent in society into building the communist party necessary to lead our class in a fight to the finish against the capitalists. This is the type of campaign that the RCA will run in the future as our forces grow.