Party-Building In Times of Co-Governance: A Reply to Eric Blanc and Co.
Comrade authors Holden and Curtis critique Blanc & Co’s call for a secondary organization to help Mamdani lead New York, and argue instead that DSA, in all its democratic glory, is uniquely responsible for the Mamdani campaign and uniquely able to embody the energy of his administration.
Holden T and Curtis R
French Communist Party Headquarters
This is a remarkable moment for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Our membership now tops 80,000 for the first time in our history, beating the previous high from 2021. In the wake of our National Convention in August, a flurry of articles have been written about the organization’s program and direction, in addition to a similar volume of writing on the prospects of the increasingly inevitable victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York mayoral race. But few of these commentaries seriously examine the relationship between the two. That is to say, what does a Zohran administration mean for DSA, in particular its New York City chapter? What new responsibilities and opportunities arise for our proto-party?
Party or Movement?
A recent article published in The Nation by three members of the Bread and Roses (B&R) caucus stakes out an ambitious strategy to win Zohran’s platform. But although written by DSA members, this article defines DSA’s position more by its omissions than through its stated argument. Comrades Eric, Emily, and Wen propose the creation of a new organization, Movement for an Affordable New York (MANY), designed to provide the broad, grassroots support that a nascent Zohran administration needs in order to freeze the rent, fund fast and free buses, and tax the rich. The authors argue, “even if all of New York’s progressive organizations unite, we’re still not anywhere near influential enough to win Mamdani’s agenda.” But it remains unclear how this new organization could live up to DSA’s strengths, or overcome its weaknesses.
DSA recruited Zohran, an active member of the NYC chapter, to run for State Assembly in 2020. At the 2024 NYC-DSA Convention, Zohran presented his vision for a mayoral campaign. It was overwhelmingly approved by delegates, and later staffed and organized by DSA members in the field. DSA, through this campaign and others, has successfully reached far beyond our membership, and some 50,000 New Yorkers volunteered for the Zohran campaign. Yet the proposal for MANY dismisses the role of DSA in building the mass movement to implement Zohran’s agenda. In fact, there is no mention of DSA whatsoever.
Over a century ago, the children’s fable The Little Red Hen told the story of a humble hen finding scarce help in the tough work of making bread. “Who will help me plant and mill the wheat?” she asked, receiving no reply from her neighbors. Only when she asked “Who will help me eat the bread?” did she receive a reply. This is not a dig at the many organizations that did put in the work. But simply put, without DSA, there is no Zohran for Mayor campaign.
The authors argue that we need a bigger tent to seize upon the energy of those tens of thousands who canvassed for Zohran but who are unprepared to join a socialist organization. This strategy is not only impractical, it's condescending. Impractical because the work of building this organization would most likely fall onto the shoulders of the “Red Hen” of NYC-DSA. Condescending because, if millions of working people are willing to vote for a socialist for mayor, who are we to proactively decide that they are unwilling to support or join a socialist organization? Socialism is the fully realized self-activity of the working class; DSA, as a socialist organization, should be the home and engine of that self-activity. Acting as if we are not worthy or capable of organizing the wider working class is to forfeit our historical task.
As Democratic Socialists, we are also left to wonder exactly how democratic, and how socialist, an organization like MANY would be. How will it differ from any of the existing progressive coalitions, dominated by non-profit directors, full-time staff, and union presidents? There is no mention of how this coalition will allow for rank-and-file leadership and genuine mass democracy. Rather than a new organization (modeled after the false promise of Obama’s volunteer machine), why not seek to build a 50,000-member strong NYC-DSA, and a million-strong national party?
The authors, through their omission of DSA, imply that our primary responsibility as socialists is nothing other than to win Zohran’s bread-and-butter platform. In this world, our fate is joined at the hip to our handsome socialist mayor-to-be. But is this actually the case? As it stands, Zohran remains publicly noncommittal to endorsing NYC-DSA picks for office. When pressed by media about DSA’s platform, Zohran neither defended the old platform nor advanced the recent Workers Deserve More program that Convention passed with supermajority support. He instead chose to distance himself from the national organization. It is increasingly necessary to outline our interests as they overlap with and diverge from a mayor responsible for, and by all accounts intent on, governing for all New Yorkers, including those expressly antagonistic to us as workers and socialists
Our goal isn’t to criticize Zohran or his platform through pointless purity tests, and we should avoid hanging onto his every word. But our primary objective is to build a nationwide, independent, mass socialist party that can win the working class to a program for democratic socialism. This is not identical to achieving a particular set of economic reforms, important as they are, in a single city. Comrades Emily, Eric, and Wen do not situate their proposal within the context of any larger political goal and by doing so, they lose sight of the forest—political freedom and socialism—for the tree of economic reform.
Our recent Convention affirmed this focus on party-building. Delegates adopted Resolution 07: “Principles for Party-Building,” which states that “DSA orients itself in opposition to all ruling class political forces. DSA’s project is to unite workers to win the battle for democracy and bring about socialism, not to seek a governing coalition with a perceived lesser evil under the current undemocratic political system.” The proposal for MANY is exactly an attempt to build such a governing coalition, and its horizon goes no further than a return to the New Deal-era welfare state. Winning Zohran’s platform is a part of our duty as socialists, but efforts to do so must be a) in-step with the struggle to build a genuine nationwide workers party and b) situated within a broader framework of democratic and socialist transformation.
Zohran’s campaign has clearly been a boon for the organization. NYC-DSA surpassed 10,000 members, and we are, every month, adding what amounts to a mid-sized DSA chapter (around 300 to 400 people) into our ranks. Chapters around the country have felt the Zohran Bump, and our organization has leapt back into the national spotlight. If nothing else, our growth can be felt in the increasingly bizarre attacks lobbed at us by our class adversaries. The campaign has shown that the people of New York are hungry for a clear platform that addresses our deteriorating economic conditions. It has also shown that the politics of Palestinian liberation are firmly electable. It has proven NYC-DSA capable, like no other organization in the city, of activating masses of politically-motivated volunteers to reach broad swaths of the electorate and transform electoral possibilities. The contrast between the Zohran faithful and Cuomo’s paid canvassers speaks to the DSA difference.
(Co-)Governing Without a Mandate
We cannot presuppose a simple continuity between campaign and administration. And DSA’s interests as an independent organization must not be subsumed uncritically into those of a Zohran mayoralty. It is inevitable, however, that a failure to achieve Zohran’s popular platform would expose a deep weakness in our movement
Comrade Sid CW warned of this explicitly in “Run Zohran?,” published in August of last year. “Victory,” he wrote, (at a time when this was regarded as a fully implausible scenario), “would thrust DSA into a governing coalition without a mandate to govern.” This runs the dire risk of discrediting socialism. DSA does not have anything near a majority on either the City Council or the State Assembly, and a neoliberal governor lives in the Executive Mansion in Albany. Though Governor Hochul’s recent endorsement might signal the previously hostile Democratic establishment warming up to Zohran, it may also merely reflect the inevitability of his election and a maneuver to shape his tenure.
And it is not only that political allies are hard to come by, but that in their place are forces actively hostile to Zohran, DSA, and socialist politics. Quoted in a recent Jacobin article, NYC-DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo rightly points out that the state legislature is full of people who “owe their power and their seats to the billionaire class.” And because of our undemocratic political system, and the fact that the municipal budget comes from either the state or (worse) from municipal bonds, dramatic political maneuvering and negotiations are objectively necessary for a Zohran administration to achieve its policy platform.
What leverage then does a Mayor Mamdani have in convincing these hostile forces to tax the rich? And how might that negotiation square with our socialist organization’s mandate to oppose all ruling-class political forces? This basic problem motivates the authors of the MANY proposal. Because of its lack of emphasis on either DSA’s role or rank-and-file democracy, it promotes an inside-track “governing coalition” strategy, which relies on compromises struck with politicians, union leaders, and non-profit executives within the Democratic Party establishment fold.
We counterpose this with a strategy of political independence, which relies on working-class organizations pushing forward a democratically determined program. Building DSA into a party with its own program is at the center of this strategy. But outside of DSA, this necessary work includes organizing the rank-and-file in the trade union and tenant movements. It means transforming groups like City Workers for Zohran, and the nascent Tenant Assemblies organized under DSA auspices into permanent, deliberative, rank-and-file organizations. This work is necessary to produce a bottom-up mandate for Zohran’s platform. It is also an organic means of keeping him in check, productively channeling discontent with the administration’s inevitable compromises, and preventing a drift to the right.
The strategy of political independence also comes with principled united front work; New York City is home to a rich ecosystem of militant independent working-class organizations—anti-imperialists, communists, socialists; worker centers, street vendor organizations, deliveristas. It should be a chapter priority to work within this milieu to convene popular assemblies that can serve to delegitimize the capitalist state while infusing working-class self-activity with the direction of socialism, and constantly creating pathways for the merger of the two. Rather than tack to our right and tail professional staffers and union presidents, our aim must be to consolidate the active and fighting worker movement of the city, without liquidating into the Democratic Party coalition. Our project to actualize Zohran’s agenda should be, at the same time, an argument for the working-class movements of New York City to join DSA.
We recognize the likely outcome will be a combination of both strategies, with both chapter leadership and the Zohran administration opting for the insider Democratic Party coalition approach. We view our role as building up the capacity of independent working-class organizations to develop and win their demands, to pose an alternative to the bourgeois municipal state, while fighting to democratize the “governing coalition” and make it more responsive to the demands of the rank-and-file in the workers’ movement. Alongside these tasks, we view our principle responsibility to build NYC-DSA into a fighting party organization, accountable to its members and unified around a democratically-decided program.
Advancing a political program apart from Zohran’s platform is particularly important because it is the responsibility of socialists, and socialist politicians specifically, to delegitimize the capitalist state; and by all appearances, Zohran’s administration is set to do precisely the opposite through its single-minded pursuit of economic reforms. The state under capitalism is not merely a terrain of struggle like any other, but the mediating architecture for our lack of political freedom and the reproduction of our exploitation and misery.
Vietnamese Communist Party Headquarters
Special Bodies of Armed Men
The road ahead is perilous, and there is no guarantee of success. “Zohran Mamdani,” comrade Sid continues in his 2024 essay, “would more than likely go down as one of the ‘least effective’ (to use bourgeois political terms) mayors in city history as the forces of capital muster against him. At best, he would be able to govern as a progressive while critics punch left and accuse us of attempting to sabotage his administration if our democratic processes put us into disagreement with his actions.” While we hold out hope for, and are committed to the possibility of, an unprecedented upswell of popular support that might transcend such dreary constrictions, we are wary of the compromises inherent to executive office—already forecasted in Zohran’s rapid retreat from his defund the police positions of just a few years ago.
The more explicit contradictions of municipal executive governance are similarly ignored by comrades Eric, Emily, and Wen. Nowhere do the authors address the looming fact that Mayor Mamdani will be the functional boss of the largest police force in the country, one infamous for its brutality, its brazen lack of accountability, and its proactive hostility to mayors deemed ‘unfriendly.’ In this context, Zohran’s signal that he would apologize to the NYPD for previously calling the agency “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety,” reflects these structural challenges. DSA-member Michael Lange writes convincingly that the question of whether Zohran retains NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, daughter of billionaire Loews Hotel CEO James Tisch, constitutes “the most consequential appointment of Mamdani’s early administration,” as well as his “most fraught.” Yet, nowhere in this analysis does he consider what any of this means for our purportedly abolitionist socialist organization.
An NYPD overseen by Zohran Mamdani will almost certainly murder not just one but many New Yorkers. It will brutalize protestors and quell dissent, harass homeless people, enforce evictions, lock up black and brown teenagers, and act as an occupying force in impoverished neighborhoods across the city—all while juicing crime stats to suit its political needs. It will even threaten Mamdani’s personal safety. Zohran’s compulsion to court the cops is less a mark on his character than it is a reflection of the political constitution of the city. Whether or not Zohran flies an ACAB flag is not important. What matters is that Zohran has signalled he will not wield his bully pulpit to educate New Yorkers on why the cops are so powerful, how they stand in the way of working-class democracy, and what we can do to work together to change this reality. Unfortunately, the win-at-all-costs approach, an approach the campaign shares with NYC-DSA leadership, obscures the fundamental antagonisms that define this city and capitalism writ large.
Our responsibility as NYC-DSA, and more broadly as a socialist party, is a vexing one. We should denounce loudly and plainly the carceral state and its punitive, reactionary violence, articulating an alternative positive vision for a democratic city. This also means defending our Mayor from the very institution that he is ostensibly in charge of. But we will have to recognize that Zohran, as mayor, will be Mayor before he is DSA cadre; that there will be an increasingly wide distance between the positions of our organization and those held by our elected official; and that we will have to include Zohran’s administration in our critiques of the carceral state and the city’s lack of democracy. Just as Zohran makes clear the distinctions between himself and DSA, we must make clear those distinctions between ourselves and his administration, even as we defend it against forces of reaction.
Conclusion: DSA for the MANY
As a result of all these difficulties, the key task of the partyist wing of NYC-DSA for the duration of Zohran’s administration is to bridge the divide between national DSA and the local chapter, and advance the project of nationwide party-building. We recognize that our chapter leadership, representing a minority in DSA at large, is using Zohran’s success to drive a wedge between the NYC chapter and the national organization.
Partyists in NYC-DSA must fight for formal structures of accountability and communication between the chapter and the administration. It is less important that we have a particular ‘mechanism’ to communicate with Zohran than it is that we have open, democratic, collective deliberation over the positions staked out by our organization. These conversations have largely happened behind closed doors, and that must end. We can democratize our chapter through fighting for reforms like proportional representation, deliberative member meetings, a chapter-wide communications platform, and a chapter Democracy Commission, so that our orientation to Zohran, and any other political issue, is fully directed by the rank-and-file membership and not steered by cliques.
We must organize to place our chapter at the center of a militant working-class opposition within the city. This means to prioritize working with fighting organizations and with our comrades across the socialist left. It means building rank-and-file working-class organizations that can simultaneously produce democratic mandates and present alternatives to the bourgeois municipal state.
Zohran’s economic platform must be complemented by political struggle. We must stake out an alternative vision for governance, fighting for reforms like city charter revision and genuine municipal democratization. A rent freeze should be paired with a transformation of the Rent Guidelines Board into an unambiguous class instrument of tenants against their landlords, instead of merely mediating tensions between them. Socialists should campaign for a dramatic overhaul of city government, devolving the concentrated powers of the Mayor to the City Council, and reintroducing proportional representation. All the while, we should be honest about the challenges we face, and rail against barriers to enacting our program in the state and national government.
Finally, we must fight alongside Zohran against the inevitable reaction by the capitalist and landlord classes to even modest reform, against the propaganda of the police and the reactionary press, and resist whatever violence Trump’s government imposes on the City. This requires the growth and development of the chapter as a whole, and its ability to inspire creative organizing to build bastions of local, militant self-activity. To take advantage of the deep resonance of Zohran’s campaign with communities previously disconnected from DSA, we must develop deep roots in these communities, creating intentional pathways to bring them into the socialist movement through active membership in our party. Through chapter democratization, deep community organizing, and a growing capacity to organize New York’s multiracial and multinational working class, DSA can become a party for the MANY.
