For a Workers Party to Fight for a Workers Government

NYC Mayoral Primary:
No Vote for Democrats, or for Any Capitalist Parties or Politicians!

Cuomo, Mamdani and the Rest Would All Do the Dirty Work for Capital

JUNE 23 – The impending Democratic Party primary election for New York City mayor, City Council and other citywide offices has awakened a great deal of interest, pitting conservative (and widely despised) former New York governor Andrew Cuomo against Queens assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America (DSA), as well as a number of other liberals. As the campaign comes down to the wire, big-business forces are running nonstop television spots including a million-dollar ad blaring that “New York Can’t Afford It” (referring to the liberal lash-up of Mamdani, Brad Lander and Scott Stringer), while the DSA candidate boasts of an army of 29,000 volunteers going door-to-door right up to Election Day.

The Democratic primary contest comes amid the offensive by the Republican administration of Donald Trump against Democratic-governed cities, with a bulls-eye on New York. This will soon come to a head with a showdown over Trump’s mobilization of federal police agencies to carry out his threatened largest-ever mass deportations of immigrants. That is directly tied to the collaboration of current NYC mayor Eric Adams with the new regime in Washington. As Adams was on trial on multiple corruption charges, he appealed to president-elect Trump to come to his rescue. The Justice Department then dropped charges so that Adams could “devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration” focus of Trump’s agenda. A classic quid pro quo.

Adams, a former New York Police Department cop, was elected in 2021 in a backlash vote against the massive protests that swept New York City and much of the country in the summer of 2020 touched off by the racist police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The cop mayor narrowly won the Democratic primary with the complicated “ranked choice” voting system, and was frequently at odds with New York City liberals. This and his flamboyant “swagger,” and being on the take from just about every lobby, led his approval ratings to plummet to a lowest-ever 20% in opinion polls, so that by March 2025 there was a mass outcry for “anybody but Adams.” He thereupon resigned from the Democratic Party, leading to the present free-for-all.

The primary has come down to a heated two-man race, with conservatives and “moderates” lining up for Cuomo while left-liberals and many radical-minded youth are going for Mamdani. But the bottom line is that both of them – and all the rest – are candidates of the capitalist Democratic Party of racist police brutality “at home” and genocidal imperialist war abroad. As such, however “progressive” (or not) their agenda may be, once in office they will govern on behalf of Wall Street. The police, as the armed fist of capital, will continue to crack protesters’ heads, landlords will continue to gouge cash-strapped tenants, while workers – 45% of the NYC labor force was born in another country – will face ruinous immigration raids and deportations.

The historic curse on struggles by the working and oppressed people in the United States is that they have been hobbled and sold out by misleaders who chain them to the Democratic Party. The exploited vote for their exploiters. What is vitally necessary is to fight for the political independence of the working class from the capitalist class, the bourgeoisie, whose obscene wealth and opulent lifestyles derive from the profits they squeeze from the labor of millions. Class-conscious militants urgently need to break from Democrats, Republicans and all parties of capital to build a workers party to fight for a workers government.

Such a party will be built not through reformist gimmickry but in the course of convulsive struggles of the multiracial working class – including the huge number of immigrant workers denied even the right to vote by this racist system. The issue is not having merely another ballot line for a slightly more left-wing party, but to forge a party based on the power and organizations of the working class in order to lead the oppressed in a class struggle against all the oppressors. This means forthrightly opposing attempts by Mamdani et al. to corral youth and workers back into the Democratic Party of U.S. imperialism.

To combat the “antisemitism” slander against anti-Zionists fighting against the U.S.-funded and -armed genocide in Gaza, to defend the right of free speech, to fight the systemic racism integral to American capitalism, to combat attacks on transgender people or simply to fight for higher wages and health care in the face of the rising cost of living, requires breaking free from the stranglehold of the bosses’ parties and politicians.

At the present time, a key task is to build committees to defend immigrants in schools and workplaces to be able to mount a labor-led, working-class mobilization against the escalating immigration raids and the mass deportations, mass layoffs and attacks on democratic rights that pose an impending catastrophe for the vast majority of the population of New York City, and for millions across the U.S. and beyond.

Big Business Pushing for Cuomo

After Mayor Adams dropped out of the Democratic primary in order to court conservatives, his place was taken by disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo, who is trying to claw his way back to office after his resignation amid state and federal investigations of accusations of sexual harassment, and continuing anger over his disastrous actions in the COVID pandemic when his orders as governor escalated the death toll. What is driving his candidacy at present is a concerted effort by big money interests to ensure that neither Mamdani nor any of the liberal candidates wins the Democratic nomination.

The New York Times (1 June) ran an article on “The Business Interests Bankrolling Andrew Cuomo’s Run for Mayor.” These include Door Dash, the food delivery app, that chipped in a million dollars, Vornado Realty Trust, and “at least 16 donations [that] can be tied to individuals Forbes magazine identified as billionaires (that does not include four donations from Rockefellers).” All this money has poured into the nominally independent Fix the City political action committee. Since then, former NYC mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg gave over $8 million to the same super PAC.

Cuomo’s pitch is that in this time of crisis, the city needs “experienced leadership.” But while his ads cite his self-aggrandizing daily press conferences as governor during the COVID-19 pandemic, his “leadership” contributed to thousands of deaths by a 25 March 2020 order forcing nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients. Although he was forced to revoke the order a month and a half later, to deflect blame for this catastrophe he had his Department of Health write a report (which he persona    lly edited, and then told Congress he didn’t recall it) claiming the main cause was that “nursing home workers transmitted the virus unknowingly.”

Countering the cover-up, the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) union said the claim “did not reflect the experiences of frontline nurses,” who far from being clumsy COVID spreaders “were pointing at critical shortages of personal protective equipment and calling for widespread testing.” Meanwhile, in the early months of the pandemic when tests were nowhere to be found, Cuomo dispatched state Department of Health officials to test individuals close to his family. This included having a top DOH doctor do an at-home visit to swab Andrew’s brother and then-CNN anchor Chris Cuomo in the Hamptons.

Cuomo’s supposedly masterful management also included putting together a 1,000-bed medical hub in the Javits Center that at its high point only had 138 patients, and showing off the Navy hospital ship sent by Trump that sat virtually empty as hospitals overflowed. Meanwhile, the state attorney general found that Cuomo’s report undercounted the number of nursing home deaths by 50%. Two lawsuits by relatives of nursing home patients who died as a result of Cuomo’s policies were dismissed by courts in October 2024 and April 2025. Those relatives complained that Cuomo should have been jailed for his actions. We agree.

More recently, as raids by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) police and other agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) set off a firestorm in Los Angeles, the Cuomo for NYC, Inc. campaign committee put out a palm card headlining “L.A. IS JUST THE START,” saying that “Donald Trump is coming for NYC,” “Andrew Cuomo has battled Trump before – and won,” and “We need experienced leadership now.” However, what Cuomo said in a June 10 interview on CBS News was “they are going to send in I.C.E. in NYC, they are going to do things that are illegal and unconstitutional, but let’s not overreact.”

Concretely, in Cuomo’s “6-Point Plan in Response to Trump's Deployment of Federal Troops to Los Angeles,” point 3 is “The NYPD should be pre-deployed” and point 4 is “the Governor should have the National Guard on standby … to act in advance of President Trump.” So he signaled his acceptance of Trump’s campaign of mass deportations and his only frustration with how it went down in L.A. is that protests were not quashed before Trump sent in the National Guard and Marines. As mayor, Cuomo would be in a race against Trump to see who could send shock troops to break the ribs of protesters against I.C.E. raids first.

Mamdani Asks: “Will You Be My Democrat?”

After several years of inflation that eroded the paychecks of working people across the U.S., and 19 months of Zionist genocide in Gaza made possible by the bombs and planes sent to Israel by the Democrats, as well as Democrat Biden’s outlawing of a strike by railroad workers, the Democratic vote in New York City plummeted by more than 400,000 in 2024 compared to 2020. Amid this crisis of trust, DSA member of the NY State Assembly Zohran Mamdani rushed to the rescue of the Democratic Party. While previous polls consistently showed Cuomo in the lead, in the last days of the campaign a June 18-20 poll by Emerson College showed Mamdani winning the primary over the former governor by 52% to 48% after ranked-choice voting kicks in.

With the labor bureaucracy unanimous on continuing to tie working people to the Democrats, it is divided on which specific ones to endorse in NYC this time around. Cuomo got the nod from health workers’ SEIU Local 1199, building workers’ Local 32BJ and others. Mamdani won the backing of UAW Region 9A, Teamsters Local 804 and DC37 (municipal workers), the latter possibly explaining why he has not denounced the scheme to force retirees into the Medicare Advantage scam.¹ The City University of New York faculty/staff union (PSC-CUNY) ranked City Council speaker Adrienne Adams, Mamdani and NYC comptroller Brad Lander as its top three choices, while the mammoth United Federation of Teachers decided to sit this one out.

Mamdani has picked up a lot of support, especially from younger people, from videos on TikTok, Instagram and other social media. In an appeal pointing to the February 13 deadline for party registration, he put out a Valentine’s Day-themed video in which he is carrying pink balloons and a heart-shaped box of chocolates, acting the part of a spurned ex-lover, saying, “I know you’ve been let down so many times, the whole working class has been let down. This time I want it to be different.” He lists some of his reformist campaign demands and finally pops the question: “Will you be my Democrat?” This is not just some cringe-worthy shtick – the video captures the essence of the politics and social function of Mamdani and the DSA.

Any class-conscious worker or defender of democratic rights should answer: “Hell no! We will not be wooed with promises of a few piecemeal reforms into the party of Gaza genocide, imperialist war and racist police repression.” As the I.C.E. raids escalate and the cost of living skyrockets, now under Republican Trump as before under Democrat Biden, to defeat these attacks will require class-struggle leadership. This is directly counterposed to Mamdani’s effort to sweep people back into the Democratic Party that built the immigrant detention centers, sent Israel the bombs that leveled Gaza, launched the imperialist proxy war in Ukraine and paved the way for Donald Trump, again!

Case in point: the response to the feds’ invasion of Los Angeles. Mamdani took the clip of Cuomo telling New Yorkers not to “overreact” as an opportunity to pose as an alternative, vaguely declaring that New York deserves a mayor with a plan to “stand up and fight back.” But fight back how? Echoing Cuomo, Mamdani calls for New Yorkers to “peacefully protest,” and to build on “sanctuary city” laws and “ensure 100% compliance with them.” Where Cuomo calls for “a standing interagency team … to track federal overreach,” Mamdani calls to “increase funding for immigration legal services,” and to “muscle up the NYC Law Department.”

Certainly, legal assistance to immigrants is important and should be expanded, and local laws (often violated) restricting cooperation with federal immigration police can provide some limited protections. But Los Angeles also has “sanctuary city” laws and that hasn’t stopped I.C.E. from prowling the streets of L.A., or the LAPD from suppressing protests against la migra. As masked DHS and I.C.E. agents have been nabbing immigrants when they step out of courtrooms across the country, a couple extra lawyers in the room won’t cramp their style. What’s urgently needed is to “muscle up” the organized working class to bring its tremendous power into play.

A recent (June 12) resolution by the Delegate Assembly of the United Federation of Teachers, representing 100,000 education workers in the city, encourages local chapters to initiate school-based committees to defend immigrants, and calls on “all of labor to initiate such defense committees and to mobilize its power in defense of immigrants.” Of course, the union bureaucracies, intimately tied to the Democratic Party (American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten is a longtime member of the Democratic National Committee), will do nothing to implement such calls. But we can and must. It will take class-struggle militants to turn calls for “I.C.E. out of New York” into reality and make the city a no-go zone for la migra.

Capitalism’s Cops Can’t Be “Reformed”
(And Mamdani Vows to “Work with” Them)

To put a little distance between himself and Cuomo, Mamdani conjures up illusions in “reforming” the capitalist state. When asked on TV, “should I.C.E. be abolished?” he answered “I believe it should,” and went on to praise Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for endorsing that illusory call. As we pointed out during AOC’s 2018 Congressional campaign,² she contrasted I.C.E. to its predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). So “abolishing I.C.E.” would just mean masked federal agents with different letters on their backs snatching people off the street. She later added, “We need to make sure that people are, in fact, documented.”

There is an “Abolish ICE dad hat” available for purchase on AOC’s online store for $28. It’s a fitting use for the slogan, which peddles cheap illusions to convince people outraged over the threat of mass deportations to buy into the Democratic Party that for years waived the bait of a “path to citizenship” even as Democratic presidents deported far more people than Trump did in his first term. The Internationalist Group fights for full citizenship rights for all immigrants. This elementary democratic demand was put into practice in the 1871 Paris Commune and the 1917 October Revolution in Russia – and it will take a workers government to win it here today.

A new member of the DSA family of illusory slogans, similar to the call to “abolish I.C.E.” is Mamdani’s vow that “as mayor, I will disband the SRG” – referring to the infamous Strategic Response Group of the NYPD. This outfit brutally beat demonstrators in the 2020 protests against racist police terror and Gaza solidarity demonstrators in 2024. This past May, the SRG staged a cop riot against pro-Palestinian protesters at Brooklyn College. And Mamdani’s tweet about disbanding this “anti-terrorism” squad came in response to its arrest of Teamsters at a strike by Amazon drivers in December.

If the SRG were dissolved, its role would just be taken up by some new unit like the increasingly violent “Community Response Team.”³ The result would be the same as when the NYPD’s Street Crimes Unit that murdered Amadou Diallo on his doorstep with 44 bullets in 1999 was disbanded three years later over its blatant racial profiling, then reinstated in 2015 only to be disbanded again in 2020. Or the “repurposing” of the Club Enforcement Unit after it gunned down Sean Bell on his wedding night in 2006. The names of the units may change but the essential function of the police as the enforcers of capitalist “law and order” stays the same.

This brings us to the call to “defund the police,” a staple of the DSA since 2020 when they pushed it heavily … in order to corral votes for liberal Democrats who cynically raised the slogan, only to drop it like a hot potato after the elections that year. All the candidates in the Democratic primary oppose cuts to the NYPD, and almost all want to expand the nation’s largest police force. On stage at the June 12 mayoral debate Mamdani said “I will not defund the police; I will work with the police because I believe the police have a critical role to play in making public safety.” In a Breakfast Club radio interview the day before he was even more explicit:

“I want to be very clear we are not defunding the police. What we are talking about is sustaining the number of police that we have within the Police Department.”

That one must’ve been awkward at the DSA watch-parties. Of course, Mamdani is following the (Democratic) party line on this – all across the country, Dems have ostentatiously reversed the claims and pledges they made at the height of the George Floyd protests. As for the DSA, even as its Democratic Party “socialist electeds” have disavowed the slogan, the DSA still includes “Defund the police,” and “Disarm law enforcement officers, including the police and private security” in the “political platform” on their website. When rabid Zionist Democratic mayoral candidate Whitney Tilson asked Mamdani in the debate if he supports the DSA’s program, he responded: “I am a member of the organization [DSA] and the organization's platform is not the platform of this campaign. The platform of this campaign is the one you can find on the website at zohranfornyc.com.”

This question goes to the heart of why revolutionary Marxists do not support Zohran Mamdani or any other Democrat, Republican or any candidate of smaller capitalist parties such as the Greens. It concerns the core of the capitalist state, which as Vladimir Lenin underlined in The State and Revolution (1917) – referring back to Friedrich Engels, the co-author with Karl Marx of the Communist Manifesto (1848) – consists of “special bodies of armed men,” like the military and police, along with courts and prisons, whose purpose and function is to defend the power, property and interests of the capitalist ruling class. That apparatus of repression cannot be reformed, it must be smashed by a proletarian revolution overthrowing capitalist rule.

The “defund the police” slogan was used to court voters amid the mass protests against police terror in 2020, but after Joe Biden was elected, the Democrats decided it had done its job and they didn’t want to play around with it anymore. In New York City, Chicago and other big cities, police budgets expanded in the last three years. At the time when it was all the rage among liberals and reformist pseudo-socialists, in July 2020, the Internationalist Group told the truth about this slogan, saying “the idea that a central pillar maintaining capitalist rule would disappear as a result of a referendum, legislative act or charter amendment is liberal/reformist illusion-peddling of the highest order, no matter how much ‘mass pressure’ is thrown in.”⁴

To divert attention from his stance on the NYPD (which is not mentioned in his Platform on zohranfornyc.com), Mamdani has an elaborate plan for a new “Department of Community Safety” with a billion-dollar budget. In the Breakfast Club interview, he said that this “DCS” would deal with mental health calls so “the police can just focus on their job,” to “make it easier to do that job.” He also decried “forced overtime” affecting police decision-making. But cops feed off the overtime pay, and the issue is not long hours causing lapses in judgement. Rather, the job of the police is to enforce racist capitalism and beat down strikers and protesters. 

Build a Class-Struggle Workers Party!

Speaking over a century and a half ago, at the London Conference of the International Workingmen's Association, the first international revolutionary workers party, Karl Marx said, “our politics must be working-class politics. The workers’ party must never be the tag tail of any bourgeois party; it must be independent and have its goal and its own policy” (“Apropos of Working-Class Political Action,” 21 September 1871). The Democratic Socialists of America is precisely “the tag tail” of the capitalist Democratic Party, registering new members for the Democrats, directly campaigning as Democrats.

Revolutionary Marxists denounce the vile anti-Muslim rhetoric, death threats and lying claims of antisemitism against Zohran Mamdani for his moderate criticisms of Israel. At the same time, it is the elementary duty of those who fight for working-class politics to tell the truth that he is not a socialist in any real sense of the term, but a bourgeois politician, elected to the state assembly as a Democrat in 2019 and running to be the Democratic mayor of NYC today. And if Mamdani wins, he won’t be the first DSA Democrat to run the city for finance capital. That was DSAer David Dinkins, NYC’s mayor in 1990-93. When Wall Street worried that workers and black people would oppose massive budget cuts, Dinkins – who had large-scale labor support and was the city’s first black mayor – famously declared: “Don’t worry, they’ll take it from me.” Sure enough, Dinkins slashed the budget and axed thousands of jobs.  

Months ago, the New York Times announced that for the first time ever, it would not endorse candidates in local elections. But as Election Day approached, speaking as the voice of the bourgeois establishment, the Times (16 June) editorialized that Mamdani does not “deserve” a “spot on New Yorkers’ ballots,” and while it had objections to Cuomo’s “ethics and conduct,” the ex-governor “would be better for New York’s future than Mr. Mamdani.” Naturally, AOC and Bernie Sanders back Mamdani, but other “mainstream” Democrats such as former mayor Bill de Blasio have gone to bat for him as well, mainly out of hatred for Cuomo.

In the home stretch of the primary campaign, Mamdani formed an alliance with liberal Democrat Brad Lander, in which each urges his supporters to list the other as their second choice, with no vote for Cuomo. Lander, who gained national fame last week when he was roughly manhandled by masked federal agents as was escorting a Guatemalan asylum seeker from an immigration court hearing, is a regular Democratic Party liberal of the old school. But one can hardly fault DSAer Mamdani for making this political alliance, as at bottom he is one of those “progressive” capitalist candidates himself.

On June 24, there is no candidate that defends the genuine interests of workers and the oppressed against the capitalist class and its state. Those who really want to defend the Palestinians, stop I.C.E. raids and deportations, put an end to the U.S. imperialist proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and Israel/U.S. genocide in Gaza, and fight against racist repression and strikebreaking in the U.S. must break with the capitalist Democrats and all the bosses’ parties. They should take inspiration from the action of Portland, Oregon IUPAT (Painters) Local 10, which in 2016 called for “the labor movement to break from the Democratic Party, and build a class-struggle workers party.”

The Internationalist Group seeks to forge such a party that can act as a vanguard in the struggles of the exploited and oppressed for their liberation from the putrefying capitalist system through socialist revolution.  ■

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

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