Mamdani Says: “Be My Democrat”

No Way – You Can’t Fight
Trump with  Democrats

By Rosario and Ray

OCTOBER 1 – Zohran Mamdani’s campaign to be elected mayor of New York City on the Dem­o­cratic Party ticket has saturated every corner of the city and grabbed headlines nationwide. The primary campaign by the Democratic Queens state assemblyman, an ever-cheerful 33-year-old of South Asian descent who is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), was once dismissed as marginal. But Mamdani’s primary campaign operation used on-the-ground canvass­ing, intensive voter registration and a pervasive, youth-oriented social media presence to score what was widely described as a “stunning upset” over former governor Andrew Cuomo.

Now Democratic Party candidate Mamdani is poised to be elected mayor of NYC. While we denounce racist scaremongering and bigoted threats aimed against him, revolutionary Marxists call for no vote to any candidate of any capitalist party, including Democrat Mamdani, Republi­can Curtis Sliwa or Cuomo, who is running as an independent. Faced with decaying capitalism’s escalating dangers and attacks against workers, youth and all the oppressed, it is more urgent than ever to unchain the power of the working class, break the stranglehold of capitalist politics and build a revolutionary workers party.

For a Revolutionary Workers Party!

In the wake of the June 24 primary, political truth-telling was in short supply. Sore loser Cuomo, dog-whistling for racist backlash, called Mamdani “danger­ous,” while disgraced mayor Eric Adams claimed he’s “extremist.” Nonsense. On Instagram, the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America crowed “Socialism Wins.” Nonsense. A mainstream news service succinctly summed things up: “President Donald Trump calls him a ‘communist.’ His critics say he wants to defund the police. Zohran Mamdani insists he’s just a guy trying to make New York City more afforda­ble” (AP 20 September). A genuinely socialist fight to bring out the power of the working class in defense of our rights is what New York desperately needs. The Mamdani campaign is nothing of the kind. Supporting the Democrats means reinforcing the political obstacles that stand in the way of the fight urgently needed today.

“Affordably” Refurbishing Wall Street Rule

With every sector of the exploited and oppressed under siege by a head-on offensive of big­otry and anti-labor backlash, Mamdani’s campaign boasts of avoiding “hot-button” social issues – while going the extra mile to court the NYPD and “business community.” This recently earned him the endorsement of New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a “law-and-order” Democrat known for her zeal for McCarthyite witch-hunting and repression against pro-Palestinian stu­dents and faculty at the City University of New York. In her “Why I am Endorsing Zohran Mamdani” op-ed in the New York Times (14 September), she made a point of praising him as “a leader who is focused on making New York affordable.”

What does this mean concretely? Statistics from a slew of sources certainly show how unaffordable the city’s capitalist rulers have made it: one in four New Yorkers live in poverty; food prices have outpaced income growth, especially for lower-income households; nearly 8 in 10 Gen Z adults still live with their parents. Capitalism’s spiraling decay has brought the genocide in Gaza, Trump’s escalating onslaught on basic rights, the threat of a third world war – and all the ways the ruling class makes life unlivable for the working-class majority in NYC and around the country. To address this requires massive class struggle against the capitalist rulers and their profit system. But that is anathema to the party that is running Mamdani for mayor, the Democrats, who together with the Republicans have run this system for 170 years.

What then are the central planks that Mamdani is running on? A rent freeze here, a minimum wage hike there, five city-owned grocery stores, free buses…¹ OK (if it happens), but none of that touches the power of those who own and rule the city: Wall Street finance capital, the real-estate barons et al., or the police who enforce this social order.² For his campaign, in a basic sense, the point is to not challenge the core of capitalist power, much less fight to uproot it as genuine socialists aim to do. Revolutionary Marxists tell the truth: this requires a socialist revolution that replaces the rule of a tiny capitalist elite with a workers government here and internationally. In contrast, reformists and Democratic Party “socialists” seek to prop up capitalist society and give its discredited political system a makeover. Like his predecessors and allies Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the political and social function of Zohran Mamdani’s campaign is to corral youth and working people into the Democratic Party of U.S. imperialism.

When asked who his favorite New York mayors are, Mamdani cites milquetoast liberal Democrat Bill de Blasio (mayor 2014-21) as the best in his lifetime and Fiorello La Guardia (mayor 1934-45) as the all-time best. As mayor during the Great Depression, La Guardia faced the tough task of taming NYC’s big, militant and largely leftist labor movement. With the aid of reformist labor leaders, and despite being a Republican, La Guardia played a big part in chaining workers to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Democratic machine. FDR’s New Deal “coalition” between capital (and its state) and labor largely secured the political subjugation of the working class for generations. Today the Mamdani campaign, with its full-court press to energize liberals and recruit new young activists to the Democratic Party, is the latest effort to renew the mechanisms of that subjugation.

So the closer he gets to election day, the more Mamdani “has shifted more to the center” (AP, 20 September), walking back rhetorical stances that helped build his “left” reputation among youth – and ostentatiously courting the city’s elite. In June, when asked his view on billionaires, he conceded that “I don’t think there should be billionaires,” since “what we need more of is equality.” But then he got down to brass tasks: “I look forward to working with everyone, including billionaires, to make a city that is fair [sic] for all of them.”

Intensifying the charm offensive, “Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist running for mayor, will meet with the who’s who of the corporate world,” reported the Times on July 15. These get-togethers with “leaders on Wall Street and across the business world” were organized with “the Partnership for New York City, a con­sortium of 350 members representing banks, law firms and corporations.” At a rally the previous day, Mamdani proclaimed: “For our city to succeed, it will take all of us,” including “those business leaders” – and he was “excited … to work with them.” Natural enough, since as we Trotskyists forthrightly point out, “democratic socialism” = class collaboration.³ Pledging to collaborate with the exploiting elite, as they fund and fuel the offensive against the city’s working class, really does mean pledging to do the dirty work for capital.

Operation “Be My Democrat”

In early 2025, it was a tough challenge for the Democratic Party’s foot soldiers to wind young NYC voters up again to vote Democrat. After Obama’s mass deportations came the crimes and fiascos of Biden/Harris, the endless horror in Gaza that was armed and financed by Genocide Joe, and so much more. For growing numbers of them, moreover, the thrill was going or gone when it came to last-ditch Biden-boosters Bernie Sanders and AOC. In New York City, the number of registered Democrats had fallen by over a quarter million since November 2020.

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, equipped with a go-getter media team and a growing bevy of insider Democrat advisors, decided to address the challenge directly – in a video beseeching young potential voters to register Democrat before the cut-off date, which was a day before Valentine’s Day. The result: a slick campaign video with a dash of Gen Z irony, giving viewers their own online meet-cute with Zohran, titled “Will You Be My Democrat?” The ad shows him carrying Valentine’s balloons and chocolates on his way to a candle-lit dinner. With a romantic soundtrack in the background, he says, “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.” With a nod to a few campaign planks, he sits down, smiles sweetly, then makes his pitch: “I know it’s not yet Valentine’s Day, but I can’t wait any longer. Will you be my Democrat?” Then comes the concrete “ask” – register Democrat right away – followed by “Will you be my Democrat?” again. Except this time he literally sings the phrase.

In an article on the primary titled “How Zohran Mamdani Brought New Voters to the Polls,” the New York Times (29 June) approvingly reported that “Mr. Mamdani … drew tens of thousands of new [Democratic] voters to the polls,” “providing a reason for the uninvolved to register,” bringing in large numbers of “disaffected voters,” youth who had not previously considered becoming Democrats, South Asian voters alienated by Biden, and many others. For their part, organizers for the NYC DSA boasted that the campaign’s “special sauce” was the role of large numbers of DSA volunteers in enrolling Democratic voters for Mamdani. Despite all years of claims by “left” DSAers that sometime soon they were going to organize some kind of “break” from the Democrats, there they were licking envelopes and “knocking doors” yet again for the party of Hiroshima, the Vietnam War and the genocidal war on Gaza.

As for things being “different” this time, that’s an old one. In the classic “Peanuts” cartoon, Lucy holds the football for Charlie Brown to kick. She smiles sweetly and vows that this time it will be different – then she pulls it away at the last second and yet again he falls with a resounding thump. “This Time It’s Different” ought to be the theme song of every reformist and liberal seeking to rope workers and youth back in for the Dems. Take 1968: the Vietnam War deeply discredited Democratic president Lyndon Johnson and his VP and would-be successor, Hubert Humphrey. But “peace” candidate Eugene McCarthy brought large numbers of young antiwar activists into his Democratic primary campaign. Rinse and repeat in ’72 with George McGovern (Bill and Hillary Clinton worked on his presidential campaign), all the way down to Bernie Sanders.

So we’ve seen this film before – and we know how it ends. A small but fitting symbol of this endless cycle is how the Young Democratic Socialists of America at Hunter College recently repurposed their much-used cutout picture of Bernie Sanders in his grey mittens: sticking a photo of Zohran’s face over Bernie’s, they put the cardboard cutout back up for the latest electoral cycle. “Cute” mitten pix can’t obscure the facts: Sanders’ campaigns were the prelude to rounding up votes for war-mongering Wall Street nominees Clinton, then Biden – and the DSA’s cardboard-cutout “leftism” fronts for the Democrats.

With regard to DSA member AOC, let’s not forget that her “historic” victory in the 2018 Democratic primary and subsequent election to Congress were heralded as a “turning point,” proof that the party could be remade from within. What followed? Having entered Congress as a supposed firebrand, on her first day in office AOC (having called to “abolish ICE”) voted to maintain funding for the Department of Homeland Security and ICE during a government shutdown. She then voted for war budgets, voted to stop a $500 million cut in funding to Israel’s Iron Dome missile system, voted for tens of billions of dollars in military and “security” funding for the U.S./NATO war in Ukraine (which threatens to unleash World War III), etc.

“Ocasio-Cortez Became One of Joe Biden’s Most Valuable Boosters” in 2024, as Time magazine headlined (16 February 2024). After she and Sanders were among the last hold-outs for “Genocide Joe” before he finally withdrew from the race, she soldiered on for self-proclaimed “Top Cop” Kamala Harris.⁴ Today we are living with the consequences of the reformist “left” joining the liberals, leaders of unions, social movements, etc. in endlessly saddling the working class, women, oppressed communities and youth with the Democratic Party.

Class, Power and Politics

Some readers will say: “OK we get it, so Mamdani’s not the most revolutionary candidate to ever exist. Would it really be that bad to vote for him, especially with all the awful things the Trump administration is doing?” Marxists, however, see politics not as a sliding scale of badness but most fundamentally as a question of class and power. In the face of Trump’s onslaught, freeing the power of the multiracial working class from the grip of bourgeois politics is vital to the very survival of the workers movement and left today.

It’s high time to draw the lessons of this basic fact of U.S. politics (which you don’t have to be a Marxist to see): the Democrats paved the way for Trump – twice! The images from Gaza are a horrifying example. The Biden/Harris administration’s arming of the genocidal war against the Palestinian people led to ever more extensive parts of Gaza being turned into rubble, literally paving the way for Trump’s blood-chilling plan turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East” through completely emptying Gaza of its Palestinian population.

Support for the Democrats has been marketed for generations as “practical” politics. Now we are told that the only “realistic” alternative to Trump is a party that exists to serve the interests, profits, state and geopolitical/military power of U.S. imperialism’s ruling elite. Meanwhile, despite the hopes and pleas of would-be advisors on the reformist left, the Democratic Party – described as “in crisis,” “inert,” “prostrate,” etc. since November 2024 – has been “incapable of mounting a real opposition to Donald Trump,” in the words of the DSA-aligned journal Jacobin (23 August).

In the face of the very real authoritarian threats and attacks from the White House (backed by a range of major players in the top ranks of the capitalist class), support for the Democratic Party – which was key in getting us into this situation – is the central obstacle to building an effective mass response in defense of basic rights. You can’t fight Trump with the Democrats! As our comrades of the Internationalist Group stated in their article on the primary in June:

“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.”

A key task today, the article emphasizes, “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.”⁵

“Reaching Out to the Police”

This brings us back to the question of capitalist state and the police and other repressive forces that are central to it. This topic, always key to differences between reformism and revolutionary politics, becomes even more important in times of heightened danger to the workers and oppressed. Like now.

“Zohran Mamdani is reaching out to the police” was the headline of an in-depth piece in CNN.com (30 August) reporting on the DSA Democrat’s intensifying efforts to court the NYPD. We’re talking about the largest police force in the country, which Wall Street needs – to protect its power and profits in this union town, which runs on the labor of NYC’s huge, multiracial and historically militant working class. So Mamdani had some work to do to prove his bona fides to the city’s rulers. Back in 2020, Democrats seeking to woo youth outraged by the murder of George Floyd raised illusory calls to “defund the police,” and Mamdani joined in. But now, preparing to join the list of big-city Democratic mayors who are the bosses of the racist cops, he kept facing demands to disavow his old “defund” rhetoric. At a major debate before the primary in June, after reiterating that “I will not defund the police,” he declared: “I will work with the police because I believe the police have a critical role in creating public safety.”

Gross doesn’t begin to describe this, and of course that is the opposite of a socialist definition of the police, whose actual “critical role” in bourgeois society is to be armed enforcers of capitalist rule. That is why the question of the cops is so fundamental, both for those seeking to uproot capitalist oppression – and for those vetting the likely next mayor, to make sure he will obey the dictates of capital. NYC’s “business leaders” aren’t dummies. While unhappy with campaign planks for even a (piddling) 2% income tax on residents with an annual income over $1 million, nor for a four-year rent freeze on rent-stabilized apartments, they know Mamdani is no socialist, no Marxist radical. In fact, his ostentatiously moderate program is not even a pale reflection of the (thoroughly capitalist) reforms of FDR’s New Deal. Some mega-rich moguls are funding scare ads about Mamdani’s campaign, but savvy representatives of Wall Street see that he’s ready, willing and able to play ball.

Mamdani, though, is taking no chances on this score and as election day draws near, he’s kept stacking up the “policy shifts” and sound bites. Bernie Sanders got a cameo role in this show, with a live-streamed “Bernie and Zohran conversation” titled “Mayor to Mayor” (6 September). Mamdani kicked it off by noting that Sanders’ electoral career began with his election as mayor of Burlington, Vermont in 1981, when Ronald Reagan had just been elected president. “And yet there you were as a democratic socialist deciding to run for mayor. What made you make that decision?”

Sanders responded that “basically, it was an attempt to involve people in the political process to revitalize American democracy.” After reminiscing about chats with regular folks on snow removal, an after-school program, etc., “Uncle Bernie” gave Zohran some tips on relating to blue-uniformed guardians of capitalist rule and their so-called union:⁶ “A week before the election, we talked to the Burlington Patrolmen’s Association. The police union. And we said, ‘Look, you guys are workers [sic], it’s a difficult job being a cop. How can the city play a better role?’ And we talked about it.”

“Socialist” senator Sanders’ homey encomium to the capitalist cops didn’t come out of the blue. A few days later, Mamdani made new headlines with his promise to apologize for having called the NYPD racist, homophobic and “a major threat to public safety” back in 2020. Knowing that the NYPD is racist is like knowing that 2 + 2 = 4. But if you’re signing up for defending the interests of capital and its “law and order,” you can’t even acknowledge that basic fact.

Three days after Mamdani’s pledge, Governor Hochul published her op-ed endorsing him (New York Times, 14 September), which also noted that she has “urged [Mamdani] to ensure that there is strong leadership at the helm of the N.Y.P.D. – and he agreed.” It’s not yet known if that means he will retain the current police commissioner, billionaire heiress and mass-surveillance expert Jessica Tisch. However, “Mamdani has praised Tisch’s leadership of the NYPD,” noted the extensive report by CNN (30 August). The same article highlights that Tisch has made it a point “to rail against criminal justice reforms,” while “emphasiz[ing] technology-focused surveillance and traditional policing tactics,” and calling for “expanding policing teams focused on quality-of-life enforcement, a policing strategy focused on low-level offenses” such as panhandling and fare jumping.⁷ The incredible pervasiveness of the NYPD’s sinister “Domain Awareness System” (DAS) was recently analyzed in depth in the Times (“What You Need to Know About Police Surveillance,” 15 September). Tisch has been in charge of DAS since its inception in 2008.

What is the blue-uniformed force that will “do their job” of upholding capitalist “law and order” in NYC if mass protests break out against ICE raids, mass layoffs, Trump’s deployments of federal troops – or for that matter his brazenly anti-democratic threats to stop federal funds to the city if Mamdani wins the election? We all know the answer: the NYPD. This is the same repressive force that beats down students protesting the U.S./Israel genocide in Gaza, that operates the “technology-focused surveillance” help­­­ing pave the way for a police state, and whose record of racist brutality is infamous worldwide. To spread illusions in the cops – for example: claiming they’re “workers,” calling for oppressed communities to “partner” with them, or denying that the NYPD is racist – is dangerous enough even in “normal” times and doubly so today.

We often make the point that Democrats are the bosses of the racist cops in innumerable cities across the U.S. Over the past months we’ve seen how this plays out as the Trump administration sent troops to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. In June, it sent the National Guard to Los Angeles in response to protests against immigration raids. Over 1,000 people were arrested by the LAPD, with Democratic mayor Karen Bass unleashing mounted police, clouds of gas and hard munitions against protesters, to show that the local cops (and the state authorities under Democratic governor Gavin Newsom) had things “under control.”

In August, when Trump sent the Guard to Washington, D.C. and federalized the city’s police, Democratic mayor Muriel Bowser issued an executive order for cooperation with the feds. ICE then “sharply increased its arrests in the city,” to around 1,200 arrests from early August to mid-September (in comparison to about 85 arrests in Washington from January 20 to the end of July). How? By “working alongside the local police and other federal agencies to identify immigrants during stops for minor traffic violations,” turning D.C. into “a test case for Immigration and Customs Enforcement as it expands its efforts in major urban centers” (“How Washington Became a Testing Ground for ICE,” New York Times, 1 October). All this shows yet again that exposing illusions in the Democrats, and the police and courts they preach reliance on, is crucial to the struggle against Trump’s repressive onslaught.

Workers and Students: If the Feds Invade, Shut the City Down!

Now Trump has announced more troop deployments – to Memphis, Tennessee and Portland, Oregon – and threatened to send the National Guard, supposedly to “clean up crime,” into additional cities, including Baltimore, Chicago, Oakland – and New York. (Let’s not forget that last year Democratic governor Hochul, hyping “fear city” propaganda against NYC, promoted her “tough-on-crime” image by sending the National Guard to “patrol” the subways.) If the White House sends troops to go after NYC, workers and students should shut the city down! To be politically prepared for the coming struggles, labor unionists, student activists and immigrant-rights defenders need to free themselves from illusions in and political domination by the parties of Wall Street.

What is being said by the powers that be? Governor Hochul told Trump there is “no need” to send the National Guard to New York and then tried to outdo him on “homeland security,” saying his budget-cut offensive “defunds police” in NYC. “We got this,” said outgoing mayor Eric Adams, chiming in on the “no need” theme. For her part, NYC’s top cop “Jessica Tisch told the U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi, that New York … does not need the presence of the National Guard,” while also “tout[ing] the department’s use of drone technology” and “quality-of-life teams” (New York Times, 25 August).

And Zohran Mamdani? The Times (24 September) recently asked him, “If President Trump sends the National Guard to New York City, what are three specific steps you would take in response?” First, Mamdani said, is to hire 200 lawyers so that “NYC returns to its prepandemic staffing levels within the [city’s] Law Department.” Second, he went on, “is to echo … my colleagues already in govern­ment that have made clear that this is not something that New York City needs. We recently heard Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch speak about the fact that we do not need the National Guard here.” And third: “to follow the example that we’ve seen elsewhere of the importance of partnership. In California, we saw the mayor of Los Angeles with the attorney general and the governor come together to respond to the deployment of the National Guard, filing a lawsuit….”

So in response to the threat of federal forces being sent to NYC to flagrantly trample the rights of all the city’s working people, the Democratic “socialist” candidate for mayor echoes and preaches confidence in capitalism’s law-and-order hierarchy, from the witch-hunting Demo­cratic governor to the NYPD with its billionaire top cop and architect of mass-surveillance repression. Telling the truth – that the bourgeois politicians and police “serve and protect” the racist capitalist system against the workers and oppressed – is a crucial part of helping build for the mass mobilization of working-class power in defense of the basic rights of us all. What Mamdani’s campaign says and does is naturally the opposite of that, since it seeks to keep workers chained to the Democrats. Every brand of reformist politics serves in fact to subordinate the exploited to the capitalist system and the capitalist state.

“How did we get to the situation we’re in today?” asked a speaker from Class Struggle Education Workers at a September 4 rally in defense of immigrant rights outside Hunter College. “It’s been a bipartisan road of repression, imperialism and war,” led by “both the Democratic and Republican heads of the beast called capitalism in this society. To put an end to that, we need a socialist revolution,” he stated. Workers’ labor makes New York run, he said, adding:

“We need to make it so the people who make society run are the people who run society. We’re are facing a situation where the power of labor could be part of making it so ICE has to get out of this city, but that power is kept in chains. Every generation, that chain keeps getting made and remade. When people get tired of the old version of that chain of the Democratic Party and other capitalist politicians, the chain is remade, and they want you to believe that by going for that new chain, things are going to be different. So the question is: are you going to help remake that chain or are you going to help break that chain?”

Join us in fighting to break the chain.  ■

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

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