The Politics of Executive Power
Three Marxist Unity Group members ask: what does it mean for the socialist movement to win mayoral power, and what will it take?
by: The Light and Air editorial board
Max Beckmann, Departure
100 years ago, participation in municipal government was an important pillar of the socialist movement. The Socialist Party of America in its heyday elected dozens of mayors. These victories were usually in small towns, and often short-term. But in Milwaukee Socialists elected mayor Daniel Hoan who held the office from 1916 to 1940. And in 1917, the SPA ran Morris Hillquit for mayor of New York City and won nearly 25% of the vote.
Socialist municipal platforms championed city-owned utilities, reforms to the democratic process, and expansion of the welfare state while making clear the need to transform the whole of society to overcome the limitations of taking the reins of municipal government. Nowhere more than at the city-level does the difference between ‘winning elected office’ and taking power take concrete form, as the municipality is subject to constraints from capital’s domination at all levels of the state.
Today, democratic socialists are running for mayor in Democratic party primaries instead of on an independent Socialist ballot-line. Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor of New York is taking off, and he’s emerged as the clear opposition frontrunner against establishment candidate Andrew Cuomo. The race has put a sober analysis of the opportunities and limitations of taking executive power back on the order of the day.
And as our budding party movement grows and matures, the question is appearing everywhere, not just New York. In Minnesota, Twin Cities DSA just this Spring endorsed Omar Fateh for Mayor of Minneanapolis, and in upstate New York, Rochester DSA is poised to run a slate for an outright majority in their City Council alongside supporting Mary Lupiens’s bid for Mayor. And all these efforts lay in the shadow of the cratering political project of Brandon Johnson as Mayor of Chicago, whose 2023 election was once hailed as an insurgent ‘progressive’ victory.
Below are three member essays from DSA chapters in the Twin Cities, Rochester, and New York, all addressing a question posed by live political experience: what does it mean for the socialist movement to take executive municipal power?
Who’s Afraid of Power?
By: Austin B, Twin Cities DSA
Written in March 2025 in response to TCDSA’s prospective endorsement of Omar Fateh for Mayor of Minneapolis.
On May 15th, 2023 Brandon Johnson, former Chicago Teachers Union staff organizer endorsed by Our Revolution, Senator Warren (MA), and Senator Sanders (VT), ascended to the Chicago mayorship and quickly became a progressive darling the nation over. In his campaign, Mayor Johnson hammered home the need for alternatives to the police in crime prevention and reversing decades of austerity in Chicago’s schools. He also proposed a slew of new taxes to raise $1 billion in revenue for social programs. During his runoff election against Paul Vellas, Johnson’s campaign was outraised at a ratio of 2:1. Nevertheless he won with 57% of the vote.
As of the writing of this article, Johnson’s approval rating has dropped to 6.6%. In less than two years, Johnson has tarnished the legitimacy of his own progressive agenda.
When he forced a measure onto the municipal ballot to increase transfer taxes on real estate sales over $1 million and use the proceeds for homeless services,it was voted down by 58%. Last year Johnson ousted the charter school-favoring head of Chicago Public Schools Pedro Martinez, but caused an unnecessary scandal by first asking Martinez privately to resign, telling the public he had done no such thing, and then backtracking after Martinez provided evidence to the contrary. In response 41 of the 50 Chicago aldermen signed an open letter criticizing the mayor; notably including many of Johnson’s key allies on the council.
After sacking Martinez, Johnson appointed progressive Reverend Mitchell Johnson as interim head of CPS. Immediately after the Reverend’s appointment, it came to light that the good minister had defended the Palestinian resistance after October 7th and was a staunch critic of Zionist aggressions. This prompted immediate criticism from the Illinois Governor and elected officials at every level of Chicago politics. Mayor Johnson left the Reverend Johnson out to dry and asked for his resignation within days.
Time after time, Mayor Johnson tried and failed to pass a meaningfully progressive agenda in the city of Chicago. Despite taking the mayorship in a “strong” mayor town, and having the backing of many Chicago councillors, the strongest unions in the city, and the progressive movement as a whole, Johnson was unable to confront capital and win. In this failure he threatens to undo years of base and movement building in Chicago, dragging others down with him.
I don’t bring up Johnson to paint him as a singularly inept figure. Rather, his inability to overcome the entrenched status quo—despite having power in the form of city mayorship—is downstream of both the failure of the broader Left to build enough muscle in Chicago and the mundane budgetary and political constraints faced by any mayor. At the end of the day, Johnson is not a radical socialist, willing to break the rules to enact permanent and lasting change, nor does he have the movement behind him to force capital to accede to those same demands.
My worry is that our TCDSA chapter is on this same path with Senator Omar Fateh’s bid for mayorship of Minneapolis. I have no bones to pick with Senator Fateh, his policies, his person, or his historical relationship with the chapter. In this article I am not criticizing Senator Fateh, but rather the idea that now is the time to grasp executive power.
Even if Fateh is elected with a sympathetic city council, a single city cannot challenge capitalism and withstand the reaction of capital and the Democratic Party. Fateh—and socialism—will be blamed for every flaw of the status quo and the disorder caused by capital flight, capital strikes, and sabotage from both parties at every level of government. As a chapter and mayor, we will not have room to maneuver and act unconstrained, but will be bound in many of the same ways as Johnson in Chicago.
In the best case scenario we are able to be the decisive force in electing Fateh to the mayorship while at the same time keeping on all of our endorsed city councillors, and adding Stevenson into the mix. In this scenario, there is a council coalition of DSA socialists and progressive liberals which is able to reach a majority vote. In the best case scenario, Fateh, Wonsley, and Stevenson all run agitational campaigns that condemn the present order of state and private power, and in doing so are able to effectively recruit more members to our chapter, giving us some extra muscle going into 2026.
What comes next in this scenario? My analysis relies on two assumptions; the first a hypothesis, the second almost a foregone conclusion:
We have the power to prove the decisive factor in electing a candidate.
We do not have the power to back them up once in office in any meaningful way.
I trust my comrades in the electoral committee to accurately assess the first assumption.
On the second, I want to take a lay of the land of the current level of chapter organization and a brief vision of the future.
Let’s start with politics. On the federal level, we have a redux of the Trump regime, this time with a more entrenched coterie of “civic” nationalists and right-wing blood-sucking tech sector moguls making up the two wings of the inner circle. Already on the chopping block is federal aid for ailing cities, money for bootstrapping new social programs, and Justice Department investigations into corrupt police departments. There will not be increased federal funding for social programs, homeless outreach, or construction of public housing. Much more likely will be petty retaliation against the city which sparked a wave of riots that destabilized the 1st Trump administration and threw the state off balance.
The Democrats will also actively work against Mayor Fateh. Representatives Cori Bush (MO) and Jamaal Bowman (NY) were both ousted in bitter primary fights by a Democrat establishment loath to allow the left any foothold. Colorado lost both of their DSA state house representatives to establishment-backed Democrat candidates, Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib had to fight off a deep-pocketed primary opponent, and Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani in New York City is currently clawing against a Zionist-backed lobby and former Governor Cuomo in his bid for mayor.
The DFL will not be coming to help either. We’ve seen DFL candidates physically attack our own candidate, Chughtai, at the uptown caucus, and Walz already has clashed directly with Senator Fateh, vetoing his legislation targeting Uber/Lyft, and going one step further to preempt Minneapolis’ attempt to reign in the ride share companies. In the wake of a self-inflicted electoral loss on the national scale the Democratic Party is attempting to shed and shred its left wing.
On the economic front, Minneapolis will, like every other city in the country, face budget challenges due to the collapse of downtown real estate and federal funding cuts. City revenue projections are dour for the coming years—commercial property taxes are projected to fall significantly and precipitously, hurried along by the pivot towards ‘work from home,’ corporate layoffs and downsizings, and the attendant rise in commercial rental vacancies / drop in commercial property assessments. The looming commercial rent crisis is bad enough the city of Minneapolis is currently exploring significant tax breaks for building conversions from commercial to residential in an attempt to staunch the bleeding of tax revenue.
Adding to the pile the mayor’s forking over a sweetheart contract to the police union, the next mayor will be forced to contend with a tight budget and decide which taxes to raise or which services to cut to avoid municipal bankruptcy. In Fateh’s endorsement questionnaire, he answered that he would not seek to cut the police budget. Instead he would shunt other, less violent modes of emergency response under the cop budget. Ultimately he will be working within the bounds of the municipal budget and what the legal order says is possible to do with tax dollars, not radically break with the status quo.
Raising taxes on the wealthy and big corporations provides an easy but illusory answer. In the age of the fiber optic cable, interstate highway system, and exurban tract house, it has never been easier for capital flight to take wing. In Seattle several years ago DSA and SAlt attempted to pass a tax to target Amazon and Microsoft HQs. Who would we target in Minneapolis? General Mills and 3M headquarters in the suburbs, or Target which has offices downtown and a secondary HQ in Coon Rapids with an already scheduled expansion. Commercial vacancies are growing regionally; what’s to stop a targeted corporation from moving their office a matter of miles into Edina or St Louis Park? What about a progressive property tax or income tax to make up the shortfall? What’s to stop enough, not all, but enough of the local Minneapolis gentry from packing their bags, selling their Lake of the Isles adjacent house and moving to far flung…Minnetonka? Edina? Wayzata? The borders of the city are porous and quite small; it's very easy to imagine capital flight in response to mild reform and taxation.
In Johnson’s case, he at least has the backing of CTU, Chicago’s most powerful union. Do we have something similar in Minneapolis? MFT is admirable, but Fateh isn’t one of them in the way Johnson was one of CTU. The building trade unions are a key component of physically building a better Minneapolis, but they are already falling in line behind Frey. Unions in this town couldn’t pull their heads out of their asses enough to organize a compression strike in 2024 and don’t have the socialist inoculation to stand steadfast behind calls for a ceasefire in Gaza. The Union Working Group project of the labor branch is still in the process of tilling the soil and planting seeds, we don’t have the organization and cohesion in any union to bring it out in the streets in support of a socialist mayor facing backlash. In five years I hope this project bear’s fruit, but in the upcoming year we have no leverage there.
Imagine these factors coming to a head in 2026, under a Fateh mayorship. With tight fiscal budgets and a sluggish economy, where are we going to find money for funding a radical platform in the city without causing capital flight? Where are we going to find the resolve to withstand constant and repeated criticism? Imagine the furor caused by our statements in the wake of October 7th but every week for 4 years—directed at our chapter, mayor, and councilor over every single issue.
When MPS is unable to, once again, adequately upgrade its HVAC systems to handle heating summers, who are parents going to blame? When city workers demand justly deserved raises to deal with spikes in inflation, but the police contract has erased any gains made in revenue raising, who is going to take the fall? Do we have the power to restrain Target if they threaten to move their HQ to outside the city in response to a targeted tax? Do we have the power to restrain enough of the city council in response to Target’s threats? Moreover, when (not if) Minneapolis police kill another black person, who will people remember as the Mayor who was unable, seemingly unwilling, to restrain the police under his nominal control? Who will be held accountable for the everyday miseries of the status quo and capitalism more broadly?
What happens when we get a socialist elected to executive office, where the ability to be oppositional becomes balancing on a knife’s-edge, where everything wrong in the city is our fault and people’s lives don’t get better? I am skeptical that we as a chapter have the power or willingness to break through the status quo and create a positive legacy for a socialist mayorship.
Shawn Dunwoody, Mural in Martin Luther King park
Are we Ready?
By: Jean Allen, Rochester DSA
Written during the deliberative period before Rochester DSA voted to endorse a bid for a majority on the City Council and endorse Mary Lupien’s campaign for mayor.
We stand at the start of a very scary moment. Because the democrats are fragmenting in their response to Trump, because we’ve stuck by a strategy that’s put us at the center of the Left in Rochester, we have a very real chance to win both our City Council races and the Mayorship this year. I can picture it already. We have the energy. We have good candidates. We have the support of the mass of people who would go out to canvas. We have experience and good politics by our side. We have a platform which I am proud of and stand by. But something that’s been troubling me is this question: Is the working class of Rochester ready to govern? Are we ready to govern?
The old socialist parties of the 19th century had programs too, but the list of demands were not just things they were planning on accomplishing in the short term. They didn’t intend these demands to be aspirations, or things it would be nice to have. Their demands were answers to a simple question: What prevents the working class from ruling?
That seems like an abstract question, but it, like so many other things, is about to become very real for us. The petty bourgeoisie—shop owners and professionals—skilled as they are and possessing more free time, remain the main group involved in Rochester politics. The capitalists are able to turn out their money to buy labor or media exposure, and use that to further dominate Rochester politics. The working class neither has much free time nor the money to delegate its tasks to others. Workers can only rely on themselves. So the working class, to govern, needs organization. Furthermore, state policy divides our class—into migrants and residents, prisoners and ‘law-abiding’ citizens—while its policies help cohere the capitalist class into a united political agent. These are real problems, and will continue to be problems in Rochester under the leadership of our comrades if we win.
Then there are the organizational issues, which raise the question—can we rule? The working class, to govern, needs an organization which speaks to the unity of working class interests, just as the state and state institutions help build the unity of the capitalist class. We are not there yet. We are currently the center of a broad coalition of abolitionists, Palestinian liberationists, environmentalists, students, labor organizers. We have a newsletter which rocks and is amazing but which, charitably, 100 people read. We have aspirations to build a new labor movement and we are organizing towards that goal. At the same time, our connections are mainly with labor staffers and not with the rank-and-file of the labor movement as a whole.
We have, through various advocacy campaigns, become a known force to a large portion of the few thousand people involved in activism in Rochester. For a decade, we have argued about whether we should be a party, or a network, or a movement. The idea that we could replace the Democrats as the governing body of this city only becomes a live question because of a decade of collective organizing experience. Partyism—the idea that we could be at the center of the organized political expression of the working class—is still just one tendency in DSA, because the question felt abstract. It’s about to get a whole lot less abstract.
That we could govern Rochester might make a kind of sense if we talk about it in other activist spaces. But the experience of shared struggle, of the necessity for democratic organization, of the need for deeper solidarity, just isn’t there yet in either the labor movement or in people’s day to day lives. If we went to a picket line saying we are ROCDSA, the group that wants to replace the Democratic party in Rochester, many union members would still not know who we are, and would find the idea preposterous. What’s more, on a visceral level most people don’t understand why such an institution might be necessary.
Understanding the need to connect all of our struggles requires quite a bit of time doing political work and seeing the faults in parochial strategies. Many comrades within the movement would be hostile to us saying we want to take government in Rochester, and for good reason! They’ve seen the ways that groups who claim to be the tribunes of the working class compromise on their beliefs, or turn into sectarian cults. We need to show the masses that we are correct, not by lecturing at them, but through practical political leadership. That also hasn’t happened yet.
It’s good for us to have aspirations, it’s even good for us to be bold and move decisively in a moment where the Democratic Party seems to be in disarray. But if the Democrats disappeared tomorrow, that would not change any of these facts, and it would not make ROCDSA, or the working class of Rochester ready to govern without seriously depending on the middle or upper class. Are we ready to deal with a police strike? With real capital flight? Are we ready to almost immediately be at war with the state and federal government because we are pushing something controversial? And are we ready to do that, knowing that if we elect a socialist majority in city council and in the mayorship—and are immediately beset by crisis or worse—and govern in the same way as we did in the past, that we will have caused a generational disillusionment in this city?
My intention is not to be negative. If we vote for this campaign I’ll be there on the doors alongside everyone else. But if we vote for this we need to be dead serious about the question of our readiness. Because we’re simply not, and we will have to very quickly resolve that if we want to solidify our victory. So if we are going to do this, we need to get tremendously serious about what we need to do to allow the working class to govern in this city.
We need to unite the activist layer on increasingly formal grounds. We need a press which actually reports on the goings on of the city. We need a large and militant workers movement with a rank-and-file that understands the need for unity. We need a working class which understands the divisions imposed on it by the state and works to undo them.
We are stepping into uncharted territory. I salute that boldness. But we must step carefully.
Jose Clemente Orozco, The Table of Universal Brotherhood
He Can Actually Win
By: Joseph P, New York City DSA
Written in April 2025, in response to NYC-DSA candidate for Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s rise to second place in the polls.
Our biggest dreams are near—but could they actually be a nightmare?
The election prospects of DSA’s Zohran Mamdani, running for Mayor of NYC in the upcoming Democratic primary, look better than ever. Zohran has recently been polling in 2nd place behind disgraced former Gov. of NY state, Andrew Cuomo, breaking campaign fundraising records from small donations. By all accounts, his campaign has gone from being considered a long shot to ‘quite possible’ territory, and he has been given the dubious honor of becoming the fixation of the right-wing tabloid press in the city.
So what’s the issue?
The issue is precisely that he can win, and as the winner of the Democratic primary has an excellent chance of becoming the next mayor of NYC. Zohran’s campaign has emerged at a time when the political class in NYC is experiencing a particularly acute crisis of legitimacy. Eric Adams, the current Mayor, has been scandalized by federal corruption charges and a quid pro quo deal with the Trump Administration. The only other contender, Andrew Cuomo, resigned from the Governorship in 2021 following several scandals and accusations of sexual violence, making his lead much more precarious than it seems. It’s far from a done deal, but this context warrants a discussion of the practical problems of governance.
The position of NYC Mayor is an incredible opportunity for DSA to build consciousness and organization around DSA and its platform on one of the largest political stages in the country. Just think of Claudia Sheinbaum, the left-wing Morena politician who catapulted from head of government of Mexico City to the presidency of Mexico. However, with great opportunity comes great risk. Think of Brandon Johnson in Chicago, a progressive darling who took the mayorship as the next great hope of the left, only to end up politically crushed when his agenda met the resistance of various sectional interests. There is a very real danger that taking executive office in a strategically important city to US capitalism could provoke a wave of reaction and resistance from “the establishment” that could expose the weakness of our movement, like Johnson’s mayoralty exposed weaknesses of the left in Chicago.
Taking power without ensuring a majority for the sort of policies we aim to implement risks setting us back when political and social resistance creates dislocation (e.g., a capital strike from real estate, or an NYPD strike) that then puts blame on the administrative ineptitude of the “socialists”. We can see that the widely read tabloid press, like the New York Post, is already lining up this angle of attack. Just look at the recent editorial accusing Zohran’s proposal to convert empty retail spaces in the MTA system into service-provision facilities of hypothetically increasing the presence of homeless people in New York’s subways. This is alongside traditional attacks on the left’s approach to “law and order” politics that always loom large in NYC politics.
With Zohran’s campaign standing on the precipice of success, we must seriously analyze the risks, challenges and opportunities associated with the possibility of a socialist Mayor of New York.
The Dangers of Executive Office
Dangers abound when taking office as a ‘radical’, and very often they have little to do with co-optation or betrayal. They stem, rather, from the vacillations inherent in juggling a number of competing constituencies and their contradictory interests. Without a legislative majority and/or the social base necessary to coerce the intransigent opponents of reform, most attempts to pass policy will invite active sabotage and passive resistance. Whether it’s finance capital crashing bond markets and bankrupting the city government in the 1970s, or the NYPD conducting low-intensity warfare against the mass movement during the 2021 George Floyd uprisings, these are the kind of dangers that we can expect to see if Zohran becomes mayor.
An instructive lesson could be the administration of David Dinkins, elected mayor in 1990. The press made an extraordinary amount of hay out of the “crime wave” gripping the city, which became the central issue of the election. Dinkins, a member of DSA, ran a progressive campaign—an incarnation of the Rainbow Coalition—that promised to tackle racial conflict and police brutality.
Dinkins took power with the intention of reeling in the NYPD after several high profile cases of violence. He moved to make the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), an NYPD oversight agency, an independent all-civilian body. What followed was a revolt from the NYPD against the mayor’s office and the entire city. The cops mobilized to defeat any kind of reform, no matter how tepid. In September 1992, a Police Benevolent Association (PBA) rally at City Hall transformed into a police riot. Thousands of city cops rampaged through the streets drunk, hurling racial slurs and physically attacking bystanders. They even managed to block traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. The violent defiance of the police against the people of the city caused a wave of support for the CCRB reform, which went on to pass.
Even so, “law and order” politics remained dominant, and Dinkins was pushed to the right on crime by the onslaught of the NYPD and a resurgent right wing. Despite that rightward turn, he was still defeated in the next election cycle by a stronger right-wing candidate: Republican darling Rudy Giuliani.
The tensions between the mayor’s office and the police department persist through every administration and periodically boil over into flashpoints. Since Dinkins, every mayor has had to deal with the cops and their attack dogs in the PBA. De Blasio, for example, was publicly embarrassed when city cops turned their backs to him at a press conference concerning two NYPD cops who were killed in 2014. Bloomberg faced the ire of the PBA in 2004 over contract negotiations. Even Giuliani, who came to power in part due to his public support of the 1992 police riots, drew the wrath of the police union when he attempted to stiff them on wage increases and benefits.
Upon taking office Zohran would be facing a permanent fifth column: a semi-autonomous rogue criminal organization that would wage a protracted low-intensity war against the administration’s reform agenda. The right-wing tabloid press is already priming their readers to associate a Mamdani administration with a catastrophic increase in crime by producing a steady stream of scurrilous headlines attacking him for being ‘soft on crime.’ More than capital flight or even disinvestment, the real danger comes from the collapse in confidence in the administration which will be facilitated by NYPD’s presence in the streets and their allies in the right wing media.
The potential consequences are clear: polarization of the electorate, low approval ratings, and backlash against “socialism” and any political force associated with it. To effectively combat this resistance, a Mamdani administration will need support from a popular mass movement that supports the socialist program and is willing to fight back in the streets, the press, the workplace, and the halls of electoral power.
Socialism in One City?
What can we expect from a Zohran administration? Given the overall weakness of the Left in the US and NYC, a Zohran win for mayor would be more suggestive of the weakness of the liberal political class in the City than any overwhelming strength of the socialists. We would not expect the inauguration of the Commune-on-the-Hudson, but a liberal-progressive administration dependent on a coalition of “progressive” forces inside City Council and out. DSA has very little presence on the Council to leverage, so Zohran would essentially be leaning on liberal politicians substantially to his Right.
This puts the DSA in an awkward position: we’re objectively not in a dominant position within Zohran’s governing coalition. This reality leads to an overwhelming pressure to liquidate into the broad progressive ecosystem.
We can already see the reluctance and politicking taking place over endorsements of the ranked choice list, with ostensible DSA electeds like Emily Gallagher and Julia Salazar making no particular case for Zohran and endorsing up to 4 progressives for mayor. The fact that even our “closest” elected officials can still miss the forest for the trees, and attempt to hedge their bets on the race, suggests that despite how well Zohran is doing, it is still politically safer for them to take their cues from their fellow North Brooklyn Democrats than to stand ten toes down for their org-mate and comrade.
What would be the degree of freedom available to a Mamdani administration? Could he freeze rents in NYC, for example? The office of Mayor is nominally afforded this responsibility. But since we can expect DSA to be a relatively isolated player in a Mamdani administration, any influence our organization may have on his policies would be mediated through our connection to his broader coalition. In a showdown over rent freezes, Mamdani and DSA will have to contend with his allies who are heavily funded by real estate lobby money. Under these circumstances, the pressure from Democrats to squash confrontation and preserve the fragile progressive coalition would be heavy. The result is a watering down of NYC-DSA’s political message, demands, and brand. The organization is absorbed into the liberal-progressive “blob,” meaning New Yorkers have no clear way to understand who NYC-DSA is, and how we’re different from the city’s Democratic Party establishment.
This coalitional dynamic is already present among NYC-DSA’s current Socialists in Office (SIOs). The trend there has been to preserve the progressive coalition and the structure that facilitates it, even if that means compromising on socialist political program and messaging. Of course, there are critics who advocate for a politically independent course, which pursues a coalition but maintains its distinct politics and attempts to carry them out. However, this stance is much harder to adopt in an executive role like Mayor compared to a legislative role like Assemblymember. This is because executive politicians are by definition responsible for administering the existing state, a role which structurally requires compromise and coalition to a greater extent than the legislative. These critics will be able to make their case, but I \doubt we will see a course correction to our SIO’s coalitional strategy in time to face the challenges of a Mamdani administration.
How DSA Can Lead
With great challenges come great opportunities. The stakes of executive office in New York City are the highest NYC-DSA has ever faced. How can the Mamdani administration and NYC-DSA avoid right-wing reaction and liquidation into the liberal-progressive blob? How can we maximize our time in executive office—growing DSA and associated mass movements as much as possible, winning as many of our political demands as possible, and spreading the word far and wide about DSA and our political platform?
The role of DSA in a Mamdani administration would come down to two broad missions: 1) cohere a mass community-based movement of the working class in support of the administration, and 2) use the administration as a foothold to establish a permanent base of power within the city government and its institutions. A Mamdani administration will likely find it difficult to enact radical changes under the current balance of forces in the city. The role of DSA, then, must be to actively construct a movement that can serve as a vital link between everyday people and the administration.
On the first count, we will need a political sphere to combat and counter the right-wing media onslaught. This requires political coherence around a new citywide program for a democratic socialist NYC. The pervasive “common sense” notions of law and order are hard to kill, but they can be checked by an organized force capable of building a counter-narrative around NYC-DSA’s program. In response to a hostile media constantly churning out negative stories about Zohran and his “socialistic” policies, DSA needs to go directly to the communities and talk to the people there about what it means to implement pro-worker policies. We should take a page out of the books of other mass party movements, like The Workers’ Party in Brazil or MORENA in Mexico, which serve as institutional linkages to rank-and-file mass movements organized outside of the electoral arena.
In the NYC case, a concrete example could be using the Mamdani administration as a vehicle for organizing the mass tenants’ movement. Zohran has promised to use the Rent Guideline Board to freeze rents, but he could go much further than that. The current NY City Council composition is possibly the most politically progressive in living memory, with very few Republicans present and many (at least rhetorically) pro-tenant Democratic Councilpeople. A Mamdani administration could back up an organized city-wide tenants’ movement by putting out the call for neighborhood-level tenants’ committees, teaming up with left City Council members to provide a direct link between an organized tenant movement in a building or city block and the administration. This would not require new legislation or clearing other insurmountable hurdles, and would be both organizing and coalition-building.
I envision something close to what Bernie Sanders referred to as the ‘organizer in chief:’ how can we take atomised individuals and facilitate their coming together into larger, more powerful groups backed by institutional power to fight for NYC-DSA’s transformative citywide program?
The secret of the support for bourgeois politics in NYC lies in the marginalization of the majority of working people from the political process, where the progressive Democratic blob is presented as the only viable choice because There Is No Alternative. But the Democratic blob is not appealing to working New Yorkers, and the worst aspects are actively repellent. The power of DSA lies precisely in its ability to present a political alternative, a process which could broadly revitalize DSA as a political force capable of directing genuine challenges to capitalist power.
Building an alternative means not only taking the idea of governing seriously, but naming our enemies, and building the movement through organizing campaigns that target these enemies using the podium of the political offices we manage to win. The dominant mode of electoral organizing within DSA today continues to encourage the passivity of working people by conceding the fight to build a democratic socialist alternative in favor of marching behind the dominant factions of progressive Democrats, in the hopes that the crumbs of power that fall to us will accumulate into a loaf of bread.
DSA can build our own hegemony by daring to differentiate itself from the blob, naming our enemies and the undemocratic capitalist system that stands in the way, presenting our own vision for a working class NYC—in short, putting forward a political program. Only a clear program can gather together the disparate elements of working class militancy, and form a unified movement capable of directing genuine challenges to capitalist power. Daring to separate ourselves does not mean spurning potential allies or counterproductive sectarianism; it means clarifying the basis of any alliance or coalition with forces that may not share all of our goals. If there is one thing that politicians are bound to do, it's to go whichever way the wind blows. The socialists need to act as the weathervane that mass politics will follow.
Mamdani’s mayoral campaign is already demonstrating that this is possible. As the leading non-Cuomo candidate, he has already pushed what's left of the progressive field to conform to his messaging and tempo. Even Cuomo has adopted Zohran’s call for fare-free buses! Time will tell how this plays out, but even if Zohran loses, he has managed to demonstrate that there is an opening available for socialism in NYC. Whether we absorb the lessons about the challenges of executive governance is unclear. What remains certain is the necessity of a mass movement unified around a program for revolutionary democratic socialism, determined by our organization’s internal democratic process and our willingness to act.
