“Don’t believe everything you see online”, says strike-breaking NY Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul [center] about the supposed rift in the Democratic Party between the party establishment (Hochul, New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill [center-right], NYC council speaker Julie Menin [right]) and its Democratic Socialist wing led by NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
The election of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member Zohran Mamdani last year as Democratic New York City Mayor was a significant political event. At least seven DSA-supported Democratic Party candidates are likely to be elected to the U.S. Congress next month. These new DSA election victories, combined with the over 250 DSA-supported Democratic politicians across the nation, have led to a revival of the idea that working people need to elect more progressive, and better yet self-identified democratic socialist, Democrats to turn things around. Mamdani has described his quest as a “battle for the soul of the Democratic Party.” However, as enticing as this message may sound, DSA leaders and the Democratic Party present a complete dead end, and we need a new party for working people and the antiwar movement.
Mamdani’s campaign and its strong working-class demands inspired millions of working people in NYC and around the country, also garnering international attention. His victory over former New York Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo, a scion of his family’s political dynasty and a notorious champion of New York’s leading capitalists, speaks to the powerful desire among working people for a leadership willing to actually lead fights for material gains against the billionaires and the Democratic and Republican parties that exist to serve them. The working class in NYC and throughout the United States is facing many crises: the skyrocketing cost of living making rent, groceries, and other basic needs unaffordable; the brutal raids, kidnappings, and even murders ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is perpetrating in U.S. cities; and the lack of universal public healthcare along with the trillion-dollar cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and social services. The majority of Americans are also angry at the Israeli state’s genocide and occupation and the brewing threat of imperialist conflicts following the Trump-led coup in Venezuela and the bipartisan war on Iran.
The fact that the unprecedented mass anger has not translated into powerful movements is largely a product of the internal crisis of the leadership on the left and its inability to mount a serious opposition rooted in struggles against the bosses and the Democratic Party. Far too often, the approach taken by many left and labor leaders, who should really be called misleaders, is one of reconciliation with the bosses and their political servants. For instance, we consistently see union leaders who act as gatekeepers against rank-and-file attempts to organize strike action, which is what unfortunately played out in the inspiring mass protest action in the Twin Cities in January this year that has been erroneously described as a general strike. We also see it from social movement leaders, such as the leadership of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, who refused to coordinate the largest protest movement in U.S. history into any sort of challenge to the Democrats and Republicans. The 2020 George Floyd Rebellion concluded without winning any victories commensurate with the extraordinary size of the movement, instead leaving shocking betrayals by the Democratic-Party-aligned BLM misleaders in its wake.
We also see a recurring pattern of so-called “progressive” Democrats getting elected and selling out the movements that ushered them into office. High-profile NY Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), who scandalously ran cover for Kamala Harris by saying Harris was “working tirelessly” for a ceasefire to halt Israel’s genocide against the people of Gaza, is a prime example of this. While AOC is particularly prominent, the same is true of all officials who take office as Democrats or as adjuncts of the Democratic Party, including the nominally “independent” Bernie Sanders.
Many of the million-plus working New Yorkers who voted for Mamdani no doubt expected he would be different from all these cautionary tales. With the momentum from his campaign and platform as Mayor of the world’s billionaire capital and home to America’s largest working class, Mamdani has had incredible opportunities to build mass movements to win the demands he ran on. He could have provided historic impetus to the antiwar and pro-Palestinian movement. But none of this has happened, and what we have seen is that Mamdani started distancing himself from his campaign promises at a faster pace (within a month and a half into his term) than even AOC. In truth, Mamdani’s shift, or “AOCification”, had been underway for several months during the election, accelerating after his Democratic primary victory in June last year, when he increasingly came to be viewed as the inevitable victor of the NYC mayoral race.
It’s abundantly clear that Zohran Mamdani is just another Democrat who sweet-talks working people to get elected and then does the bidding of the capitalists and their ever-loyal Democratic Party. He has been sharply remolding himself to suit the needs of the deeply unpopular, crisis-ridden Democrats and the capitalist state in NYC. This is a terrible tragedy for the working class in New York, but it is also an important lesson on the regressive role of “progressive” Democrats.
It would be a complete disservice to working people in NY and elsewhere not to explain what Mamdani is perpetrating, warn of what is likely to come in the absence of a working-class movement to challenge his betrayals and the Democrats and billionaires he’s cozying up to, and provide next steps for working people to actually advance the fight for the demands Mamdani ran on and much more. The job of socialists is not just to provide robust analysis, but, more importantly, to offer concrete leadership and next steps based on that analysis. Mamdani, regrettably, is failing on both fronts: offering mistaken analysis and misleadership of the movement that got him into office.
“A Mayor for All New Yorkers”
After Mamdani won the Democratic primary, he repeatedly described his intention to be “a mayor for all New Yorkers”. On the surface, this sort of language appears innocent, but it betrays his political instincts and trajectory.
Under capitalism, the ruling capitalists constantly extract as much wealth and labor as possible from working people to consolidate their own dominance and control. Working and poor people everywhere are consequently forced into a nonstop scramble just to survive. Fundamentally, these are crises borne from capitalism itself. In truth, the history of any class society is a history of class warfare.
For this reason, it is a complete contradiction for Mamdani to say he will represent working people and, at the same time, claim that he can represent everyone, both the bosses and ultra-wealthy of New York AND the city’s millions of workers. Inevitably, trying to keep a false peace between the two classes will result in the would-be peacemaker selling out working people.
If you claim to represent working people, there is only one option: side with them and fight with them. Siding with working people will necessarily provoke a confrontation with the bosses, which can only be overcome by educating and directing working people into mass movements against them. It is only through class struggle methods, such as those exemplified by Workers Strike Back (WSB) co-founder Kshama Sawant’s 2014-2023 decade on the Seattle City Council, that historic victories for working people and breakthroughs for socialist ideas are possible. None of this is easy, but if one claims to be a principled working-class leader who wants to win anything of substance, such an approach is necessary.
We Need to Overthrow Capitalism, Not “Govern” It
Since he took office, Mamdani has been explicit about the political tradition he wants to revive. In June this year, when asked about democratic socialism and how it relates to the Democratic Party, Mamdani said, “We’re not running away from the Democratic Party; we’re going back to what the party used to be. You think about FDR [President Franklin Delano Roosevelt] and La Guardia, you think about the New Deal. That’s what the Democratic Party once was. That’s what it could be again.”
Mamdani compared his affordability agenda to the New Deal as an illustration that government under capitalism can be used to improve working people’s lives. But this framing is completely misleading about how the New Deal was won in the first place and obscures the actual role of the Democratic Party and leaders like President Roosevelt.
President Roosevelt and national Democrats did not simply decide one morning to give working people a better deal. The concessions of the 1930s were extracted from the ruling class by earth-shattering working-class struggles. The Great Depression thrust millions of working people into deeply precarious circumstances. Working-class anger at the capitalist class over this crisis fueled militant labor organizing, provoking massive class conflict and the threat of revolutionary movements if the crisis was not addressed quickly.
A critical instance of this organizing occurred in Minneapolis in 1934, when Teamsters Local 574 led a citywide general strike. The strike was led by Marxist revolutionary rank-and-file Teamster leaders who set the defining example of class struggle unionism in the United States. The Minneapolis general strike helped change the course of American labor history and opened the door to further labor breakthroughs and socialist organizing. The strikes in San Francisco in 1934 and the Flint Sit-Down Strikes in 1936 and 1937 are a testament to this. The American revolutionary leadership in the labor movement was directly inspired by the 1917 Russian Revolution, which gave working-class people internationally a shining example of what was possible if they shook off capitalism entirely, and revolutionary movements were palpable across Europe and the United States.
All of this terrified the ruling class, and yet none of it comes up in Mamdani’s analysis. FDR himself was a pro-capitalist politician whose administration sought to save American capitalism from the Great Depression crisis and revolutionary upheaval. FDR said of himself: “I am the best friend the profit system ever had.” His New Deal was not the result of a socialist strategy for “building power,” as the DSA leadership likes to call its own work; it was fundamentally a concession by representatives of the capitalist class to avert more militant, even revolutionary, upheaval. The crucial lessons of this turbulent period are, in fact, the opposite of what Mamdani is posing. So why does Mamdani credit capitalists and their political representatives with the achievements of working-class movements?
The only logical explanation is that Mamdani wants working people to lower their expectations around what’s possible and to NOT get organized independently of and in combat against the Democratic Party. Mamdani instead wants working people to see the Democratic Party itself as a vehicle for change and to trust that such a party, a party which has betrayed working people since its founding as a party of indigenous genocide and slave-holding landowners, is a party of working people. At its core, his argument is that the best we can hope for is to elect Democrats who govern capitalism with the goal of negotiating and appealing for a better deal for working people. This will neither win a better deal for working people nor advance the fight for socialism. This idea by Mamdani is ahistorical, toxic to the fight for socialism, deeply pessimistic, and a one-way ticket to selling out working people, which is what Mamdani is doing.
Betrayals and Compromises at Lightning Speed
In the past eight months, Mamdani’s desire to be a peacekeeper and be popular with everyone has led him to execute a startling number of betrayals against working NYers and the movement that got him elected.
“Partnerships” with the Political Establishment
Only a month after his inauguration, Mayor Mamdani wrote a deeply misleading op-ed for The Nation, announcing and justifying his endorsement of New York State Governor Kathy Hochul, leader of the dominant NY Democratic Party and arch-champion of the billionaire class and of the Israeli state’s occupation, for re-election. By praising her and emphasizing the strength of their “partnership” as the key to delivering his affordability agenda, Mamdani is rehabilitating Kathy Hochul AND whitewashing her awful record, allowing her to coast to re-election.
Mamdani’s endorsement came as Kathy Hochul signed executive orders allowing NYC hospital bosses to bring in scabs to break the then-ongoing nurses’ strike. NYC nurses had been braving harsh winter weather and sacrificing paychecks and healthcare during their strike, and Mamdani has absolutely nothing to say other than glowing support for Hochul’s job as governor and their work together. The endorsement also came after Hochul sent in the National Guard and State Police to militarize the NYC subway, undermined renters’ rights legislation, and refused to build public renewables in accordance with a law she herself signed (under which only 4% of the 70% of the renewable energy transition by 2030 has been built).
This is not the first time Mamdani has directly enabled and defended an enemy of working people. He previously announced support for AIPAC darling Hakeem Jeffries to remain Democratic Party leader in the US House, thereby endorsing his re-election. This last point matters even more because Mamdani personally intervened at an NYC-DSA gathering, using his newfound authority to argue against DSA running a primary challenger to Jeffries from within its ranks. He has since reaffirmed this position in August, amid scandalous New York Times reporting that Jeffries held a private meeting with Trump’s son-in-law and political envoy, Jared Kushner, to see “how Democrats and the [Trump] administration could work together.”
Even more startling, when Mamdani won in November, he met with Trump and sowed the illusion that Trump is some kind of “partner” in their “shared affordability agenda”. Socialists and working-class leaders should never endorse or carry water for the political representatives of the ruling class, yet Mamdani has ignored this basic principle with the most exposed, anti-worker Democratic Party leaders AND Donald Trump.
Bending the Knee to the Police and the Elite the Police Serve
Police departments under capitalism have little to do with keeping ordinary people safe. They mainly exist in order to protect the interests of the ruling class and maintain stability on their behalf as a force of repression against working and poor people. Socialist leaders should explain the actual role of the police to working-class audiences and use it as an example of why capitalism cannot be governed or reformed but instead needs to be overthrown. We should use our elected socialist positions to organize mass movements to fight for democratically elected working people’s committees with full control over the police, including hiring and firing, policies, and procedures. We should build movements that will fight to cut the police budget, which is bloated in every city, and tax the billionaire class to fully fund affordable housing, jobs, and social services.
Mamdani has done the exact opposite. In a futile effort to placate hostilities from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and Zionist lobby, Mamdani reappointed arch-Zionist and billionaire heiress Jessica Tisch as NYPD commissioner. Tisch has been nothing short of a disaster for working people and the anti-war movement. Any NYPD commissioner will end up being an enemy of working people because of the violent role of the police under capitalism, but rewarding a blatant class enemy like Tisch with more time in office is absolutely treacherous.
Tied to this, Mamdani’s first budget maintained roughly the existing level of the NYPD’s massively inflated $6.4 billion budget, which does not account for indirect operating expenses that often add up to over $10 billion annually. Hundreds of millions are being directed to fill holes in the NYPD budget, including funding of surveillance technology like the infamous NYPD Domain Awareness System (DAS). Mamdani has allocated $94 million to upgrade the system to DAS 2.0, facilitating an expansion of the elaborate and grotesque NYC surveillance state.
There is no doubt that this will enable greater collaboration with Trump and the bipartisan-funded deportation machine as a result of DAS’s enhanced abilities to racially profile and target pro-Palestinian and antiwar activists, Muslims, immigrants, and people of color. Meanwhile, Mamdani’s central campaign promise to create a Department of Community Safety staffed by mental health professionals has been substantially scaled back in the budget.
Balancing the Budget on Whose Backs?
But Mamdani’s preliminary budget for his first year was even more horrific. To “balance the budget,” a legal requirement in NYC, Mamdani presented a false choice that was as foolish as it was foul. Mamdani warned that to keep NYC afloat, either Kathy Hochul needed to agree to tax the rich to provide more state funds to NYC, or Mamdani would have been “forced” to institute a regressive 9.5% citywide increase in property taxes as a “last resort.” Raising property taxes would have been nothing short of a full-scale attack on the city’s working class and would have harmed working-class homeowners FAR more than it would have harmed wealthy ones.
Mamdani’s allies in the NYC-DSA leadership effectively cosigned this strategy, arguing that Hochul would somehow be blamed for raising property taxes rather than the mayor, who would have actually imposed the increase. This made zero sense and betrays a serious lack of political wherewithal. They thought it was savvy to effectively threaten Hochul with a good time: the prospect of him torching his own credibility with working people unless she agrees to come to his rescue by going against the wealthy. In what world would Hochul be pressured to tax the rich as a result of Mamdani’s political self-immolation? Compare this to what socialist elected officials should actually do: build a mass movement to win historic taxes on the billionaires and multimillionaires.
In true neoliberal fashion, Mamdani also initially threatened cuts to public services and considered “raiding” the city’s rainy day reserves and the retiree health benefits fund if Hochul refuses to tax the rich. Specifically, he proposed $33.7 million in funding cuts to parks and $30 million to libraries, which is an even lower budget for libraries than his thoroughly discredited predecessor, Democratic Mayor Eric Adams, promised for 2026. While these cuts did not make it into the final budget after major working-class backlash, the fact that Mamdani needs to be pressured to NOT enact austerity is very revealing of how eager he and the other NYC-DSA leaders are to make deals with the capitalist establishment rather than organize a class fightback against them.
Weaponizing the Courts Against Working People
In addition, Mamdani has demonstrated a disturbing tendency to weaponize the courts, an institution of capitalism, to block needed relief for working people. In February 2026, Mamdani repeated Eric Adams’s playbook, using legal challenges to block CityFHEPS, a key rental assistance program. Adams lost this fight when even the capitalist courts and the Democrat-run City Council went against him. Despite being fully aware of this, Mamdani’s commitment to “balancing the budget” proved stronger than his willingness to fight for programs renters need to survive. It was again the righteous outrage of working people and renters, who organized public protests outside City Hall and Gracie Mansion, Mamdani’s mayoral residence, that forced Mamdani to reach an agreement with the Council to allow CityFHEPS through.
By August 2026, Mamdani sued the City again, this time to block $10,000 bonuses for public-sector teaching assistants. The bonuses were passed unanimously by the NY City Council, which includes FOUR elected DSA members. This reveals the approach of movement gatekeepers and misleaders like the DSA electeds. By having some DSA electeds support the bonuses that Mamdani rejects, they use the “rotating villain” idea that has long been used by the Democratic Party. By opposing the bonuses, Mamdani is defending, on behalf of the city’s capitalist class, the horribly anti-union Taylor Law.
Public school teaching assistants are some of the most grossly underpaid and overexploited workers. Instead of using his position to build a movement of rank-and-file public education workers to force the City Council to pass much stronger demands, Mamdani is working hard to deny them this relief. Working people will again need to build a robust movement to force Mamdani to back down from this legal attack. Unfortunately, as Kshama Sawant has pointed out recently on CounterPunch, such a movement is not being initiated by the NYC public-sector union leadership. Most of the labor leadership today is business unionist, meaning that, like Mamdani and the DSA leadership, they have made peace with the capitalist class and prefer to negotiate crumbs for the rank and file rather than engage in battle for the working class.
Sweeping the Unhoused and Demolishing Public Housing
Mamdani’s attacks on public housing and unhoused people are perhaps the most shocking of all. Mamdani broke his campaign pledge to end the cruel and draconian policy of homeless encampment sweeps. Encampment sweeps do nothing to house the unhoused, a point Mamdani claimed he agreed with while running for office. Under pressure from big business, the Democrats, and the right wing, Mamdani opted to rehabilitate the image of what is, at its core, a cruel, humiliating, anti-worker practice.
The DSA mayor claimed that his sweeps will be “far different” from those used by the mayors he once criticized because he is having the City’s Department of Homeless Services do outreach beforehand. But how does such “outreach,” which involves getting people into very restrictive, underfunded, and overwhelmed shelters under the implied threat of a coercive removal, actually address the housing crisis? It doesn’t, and the sweeps should not have been restarted in any form. Some months later, in July, Mamdani callously said that after those seven days, the encampments “will be cleaned up,” putting a fine point on the fact that the outreach is akin to window dressing rather than anything else. Like with the budget, NYC-DSA leaders have chosen to support and tail Mamdani’s decision to restart the sweeps.
Most stunningly, Zohran Mamdani is also continuing with one of the largest privatization and dismantling schemes in the history of American public housing. While legal battles are ongoing, Mamdani and his housing “czar” are scandalously defending a plan that will demolish and replace 24 New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) buildings (holding roughly 2,050 affordable rent-controlled apartment homes) in Manhattan with “mixed-income” apartment buildings. Only a minority of units in the new buildings will be set aside for “affordable housing,” with the overwhelming majority of affordable homes sacrificed to generate profits for real estate tycoons, companies like Related Companies, Wall Street banks, and the elite who own asset conglomerates like BlackRock.
Mamdani would like working people to believe that the new public-private partnership on NYCHA is in their interest. However, privatization and profit extraction are almost always the true goal behind so-called public-private partnerships (in this case, between NYCHA and developers Related Companies and Essence Development).
The Fight to Tax the Rich
None of this is necessary or inevitable. Mamdani could be using his office to build a mass movement to tax the rich. Instead, he is choosing to rely solely on back-room political maneuvers, a hallmark of Democratic Party establishment politics, on one hand, while engaging in flagrant betrayals on the other. Whenever he has had the opportunity to show what it means to be a fighting leader of the working class, Mamdani has completely rejected it.
In late February, a sizable crowd of 1,500 people mobilized for a tax-the-rich rally in Albany, the state capital, to pressure Kathy Hochul, but Mayor Mamdani was conspicuously absent. One can only imagine how many more people would have attended if Mamdani had been actively building toward this rally and similar actions. According to the New York Times, Mamdani skipped the rally to avoid alienating Hochul and undermining their “partnership,” which he knew would happen immediately if he used his authority with working people to challenge her.
Mamdani’s approach on this question has yielded limited gains, far less than what an actual fightback could achieve. Specifically, Hochul granted Mamdani a pied-à-terre tax (the rollout of which has been blocked in the capitalist courts) and partially-funded childcare expansions. If he actually fought, his demands would be far more likely to be met because big business and the Democrats who control NYC and Albany fear the movement his campaign built. However, it’s quite obvious they aren’t afraid of Mamdani as an individual leader, which makes it extremely unlikely that he will fulfill the demands of the “affordability agenda” that most threaten them during his four years in office (e.g., free mass busing, raising taxes on the rich, and a $30/hour minimum wage by 2030.) The working class in NY and nationally needs leadership that fights for and with us, and we should look to successful examples of what that means, like Kshama Sawant’s 10 years on the Seattle City Council.
Lessons from Kshama Sawant’s Decade in Seattle City Council
Kshama Sawant, Seattle’s revolutionary socialist City Councilmember from 2014 to 2024, understood her role as an elected, working-class leader very clearly. She declared war on big business and the Democrats who control Seattle to win historic victories for working people. Kshama was elected FOUR times in 2013, 2015, 2019, and 2021 as an independent socialist, despite the consistent opposition and smear campaigns by the Democrats, big business, and the right-wing. Unlike Zohran Mamdani and virtually all of the 250+ DSA-elected officials who run as Democrats, Kshama Sawant maintained her class independence in both name and practice. This is not rhetorical; class independence enabled her and her fellow revolutionary socialists to clearly define the lines of struggle between Seattle’s capitalists and working people.
The Democratic Party politicians would always stand against Kshama’s demands, such as the first major-city $15/hour minimum wage, which is now up to the nation’s highest at $21.30, or the Amazon Tax, which taxes Amazon and other big businesses in the city to fund affordable housing projects, because that is their role as a party of capitalism. By distinguishing herself from the Democrats, including the so-called “progressive” Democrats on the city council, and never giving them an inch, Kshama secured the support of Seattle’s working people and won both the Amazon Tax and the nation’s highest minimum wage, in addition to scores of other first-in-the-nation victories.
Kshama won a series of renters’ rights victories, including the first-in-the-nation ban on winter evictions and the nation’s strongest ban on evictions of schoolchildren, their families, and public education workers. She won a law requiring landlords to give six months’ notice for all rent increases, a law mandating landlords pay three months’ worth of rent if tenants are evicted due to rent increases of 10% or more, the right to a lawyer for all tenants facing eviction, and a $10 cap on late fees. Such a track record is unheard of in our times. Kshama also won a law making Seattle an abortion sanctuary city after the Dobbs decision, the first ban on caste-based discrimination outside of South Asia, and a ban on the use of chokeholds or crowd-control weapons by city police.
Working people were not fooled by the Democrats filling her election races with a menagerie of placid “progressive” Democrats to confuse working people or by the endless smears on Kshama’s character and leadership. Seattle’s working people knew Kshama was THEIR representative, and she proved it every time. She took home only the average worker’s wage from her six-figure council salary and donated the rest to union struggles and social movements. She brought working people into the city council chambers to disrupt business as usual and threatened city Democrats with losing their political careers and with greater social unrest, making it nearly impossible for them to manage the capitalist state in the city without caving to working people’s immediate demands. She educated working people about the nature of capitalism and its defenders, like the Democrats and Republicans, but also the courts, the police, the state bureaucracy, and most importantly, the multitude of gatekeepers (e.g., labor leaders, social movement leaders, and leaders of left and socialist organizations) who held back struggle and tried to limit what was possible.
Kshama was one independent socialist surrounded at all times by eight Democrats and a Democratic mayor, all of them backed up by the might of the city’s wealthy elite. Being a minority in the chamber did not get in Kshama’s way, which is something “progressive” Democrats and DSA elected officials constantly bemoan as being this unforgiving obstacle. If you build a strong enough movement, the balance of class forces between the working class and the ruling class shifts, and no sheer numerical balance in a chamber can change the fact that if ANY Democrats vote against a working-class agenda, ALL Democrats are responsible. The Democratic Party’s magic trick of finding just enough Democrats to sink a proposal doesn’t work so well when people like Kshama Sawant expose each sleight of hand.
The fact that Kshama’s example is so singular is a genuine tragedy for working people in the United States and around the world. It’s also part of the reason why Kshama cofounded the nationwide organization Workers Strike Back and why she ran for the U.S. Congress against warmongering Democrat Adam Smith in this year’s midterm primary elections. The fact is, no other leader or organization offers anything close to what Kshama’s campaign for Congress did. We see, over and over again, self-described “working-class champions,” including the DSA electeds, who don’t share this understanding of capitalism, the role of the Democrats, or Kshama’s fighting approach. The end result has been their refusal and/or failure to live up to what socialists should actually do, either through becoming marginalized or co-opted. In Mamdani’s case, co-optation is happening to the extreme.
In response to ICE abducting an employee of the NYC council on January 12th, Mamdani did not use his office to organize escalating mass protests to embolden and spread the anti-ICE movement following Renee Good’s murder in Minneapolis days earlier. Using his authority to provide leadership in that moment could have helped to deliver a pivotal defeat to Trump and ICE that could be used to escalate the immigrant rights struggle nationally. Instead, Mamdani simply issued a formal denouncement on X (formerly Twitter) and an impotent pledge to “monitor the situation.” His approach to ICE is no different from that of other Democrats, like Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, an open stooge for big business.
This stands in stark contrast to how Kshama Sawant used her office. During Trump’s first term, Kshama used her office to organize working people to fully shut down SeaTac International Airport to fight back against Trump’s first Muslim travel ban. Kshama led thousands of protesters in blocking all security checkpoints at SeaTac, effectively shutting down the airport and air travel. The Democrats were absolutely infuriated by this move and contacted Kshama during the action, furiously attempting to get her to stop the action. She refused.
Because of this action, detainees at the airport were able to receive legal action, and the movement declared victory. Multiple airports being shut down, like SeaTac, forced Trump to retract his Muslim travel ban. In the midst of ICE terror under Trump 2.0, Kshama used her campaign for Congress to help union and non-union workers push for strike actions to shut down ICE, bringing maximum pressure to bear against union leaders who refuse to organize strike action.
When Trump brazenly kidnapped Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro to be detained in NYC, the best Mamdani could muster was a private phone call with Trump to “register his opposition.” He “made it clear and [they] left it at that.” Mamdani followed up his irrelevant Trump phone call with a post on X saying he’s focused on the “safety of every New Yorker,” as if working New Yorkers were at risk, and then added another empty reference to “monitoring the situation.” What he should have done was use his office to organize a mass, anti-war demonstration as a prelude to mass strike actions, demanding Maduro’s release and the end of the crippling sanctions that have destroyed the living standards of Venezuela’s working people. Kshama’s statement condemning Trump and the Democrats for their bipartisan warmongering towards Venezuela, while providing an analysis and calling for mass strike action, is a far better example of what is needed from a working-class leader.
Maduro’s abduction was a prelude to the imperial hubris that emboldened Trump to assassinate Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, triggering the current escalating war in the Middle East. The reason these escalations keep happening is both the growing crisis of global capitalism and the lack of leadership in the socialist and labor movements. It is the responsibility of every socialist and working-class leader and organization to fight back against imperialism and the growing conflict between the US and China-led blocs. Instead, Mamdani refused to fulfill his promise to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, all the while overseeing the NYPD in cracking down on the anti-genocide protests against Netanyahu’s presence at a United Nations conference and detaining over a hundred demonstrators. These betrayals lie squarely on the DSA leadership and their mayor.
New York City DSA’s Decade in Office
Mamdani and the DSA leaders in New York could build a powerful pole of attraction for genuine working-class politics and expose the Democratic Party to the point of rupture.
There are four DSA members currently elected to the NY City Council and nine in the NYS legislature. After the 2026 primaries, that number jumps to SIXTEEN in the state legislature (four in the state senate and twelve in the assembly). Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier will also add to the total number of NY-DSA federal congressmembers, bringing it to three.
With scores of elected positions like these, and with over 15,000 members now in NYC-DSA, the DSA electeds and their fellow DSA leaders could organize mass movements for free healthcare for all NYers by taxing the rich and a $30-hour minimum wage statewide. They could “commandeer the agenda” of the city and the state, forcing Kathy Hochul and Democratic Party leadership to concede even greater demands than Mamdani ran on, at the risk of reputational and political harm to the Democratic Party. Such developments would pose an immediate, serious threat to the stability and credibility of the capitalist state and would give movements an opportunity to escalate. Yet none of this is happening, and most likely, none of it will.
The DSA leaders in New York and nationally, elected or otherwise, are thoroughly committed to the Democratic Party and, by extension, to capitalism. They will make whatever tactical or political concessions necessary to preserve their careers and their relationships with the ruling class. Not only is this approach unsustainable for DSA and will throw them into a political crisis worse than after Biden won office, but it is deeply damaging to the broader socialist movement in the US and internationally. Working people are looking at the DSA’s ascendancy, and Mamdani’s example, in particular, with renewed interest, and the lessons it offers are a dead end.
Workers Strike Back
At the same time, working people have also seen the likes of Mamdani and other DSA electeds sell them out time and again. Working people are more readily able to see through the misleaders and gatekeepers, and it is the job of genuine socialists and Marxists in the movement to provide those people with an alternative to grow politically and to build the working-class struggles we need to not only win victories, but to show working people what is possible when we fight.
That is why Kshama and her fellow revolutionary socialists launched Workers Strike Back (WSB), a working-class fighting organization to carry forward the lessons of her historic work on the Seattle City Council. Workers Strike Back is calling for a new, multiracial, mass, working-class party that organizes movements and fights unambiguously for the needs of working and oppressed people.
Around the country, WSB has already been instrumental in setting forward a clear example of working-class politics. Kshama’s 2026 congressional campaign, which was endorsed and fought for by Workers Strike Back members, won a historic 17.3% of the vote in the August primary against the backdrop of invisibilization from the corporate AND “progressive” media and sectarianism from the leaders of organizations like DSA, along with the establishment arranging the primary field to block Kshama from advancing to the November election against warmongering Democrat Adam Smith. Kshama received the highest vote total of any openly Marxist, revolutionary socialist campaign in US history.
Workers Strike Back was also critical in defeating $4.7 billion in budget cuts to essential public programs by Washington state Democratic Governor Bob Ferguson and the Democratic-controlled state legislature. This also included defeating their planned cuts to union rights for public-sector employees’ healthcare and the imposition of unpaid furlough days. Workers Strike Back did this by organizing rank-and-file members of the Washington Federation of State Employees (WFSE) to pressure WFSE leadership to organize a major protest at the state capitol, which forced the Democrats to back down under intense public pressure and the threat of a statewide public-sector strike.
Workers Strike Back members have mobilized to city hall public comment in cities from NYC to Seattle against attacks on renters’ rights, collaboration with ICE, AI data centers, and more. We defeated attempts by Seattle Democrats to attack the nation’s highest minimum wage in Seattle in 2023, and their later effort to change council ethics rules to let landlords on the council roll back the renters’ rights Kshama also won. We were instrumental in giving a fighting character to the movements in towns like Pekin, Illinois, and Pine Island, Minnesota, to defeat data center projects that would have ravaged those communities.
We’re just getting started. Workers deserve more than the endless stream of sellouts and the lack of fightback from the DSA leaders and so-called “socialists” like Mamdani. If you agree with the demands of Workers Strike Back and want to build the fighting movements required to win them, join Workers Strike Back. We have a world to win.