Whither socialism? Mamdani and the Left
Mitchel Cohen, Melvyn Dubofsky, Daniel Lazare, and Sebastian LM
Platypus Review 181 | November 2025
On September 26, 2025, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel at New York University on socialism, New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, and the Left. The speakers were Mitchel Cohen (writer, activist, poet, former chair WBAI-FM Local Station Board, Brooklyn Greens, Red Balloon Collective), Daniel Lazare (author of The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution is Paralysing Democracy (1996), his writing appears in Permanent Revolution Blog, the Weekly Worker, and the Platypus Review), Sebastian LM (member of the Young Democratic Socialists of America at NYU, Mamdani campaign worker), and Melvyn Dubofsky (Professor Emeritus of History and Sociology at Binghamton University, author of American Labor Since the New Deal (1971) and Industrialism and the American Worker, 1865–1920 (1975)), who appeared over Zoom. Platypus member Erin Hagood moderated the panel. An edited transcript follows.1
Introduction
While Zohran Mamdani's surprise victory in the New York Democratic mayoral primary has been touted as an unprecedented achievement for the American Left, it did not fall out of the proverbial coconut tree. Mamdani has approvingly cited the “sewer socialists” of the early 20th century, who came out of the Second International Socialist Party of America (SPA) as a model. Some on the Left point to New Deal Republican mayor Fiorello LaGuardia as an aspiration for Leftist municipal politics. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has been involved in electoral politics since the 80s, and member David Dinkins was elected mayor of New York in 1990. What lessons can the Left today take from these projects, and how ought they inform our approach to Mamdani?
But perhaps it is not primarily a question of socialist municipal politics. Democratic Party strategists have followed Mamdani’s campaign closely, even as Leftists across the U.S. and abroad have heralded it as the first stirrings of a new Leftist politics. Is Mamdani’s campaign an audition for the new Democratic Party anti-Trumpism?
Ought we think of a Mamdani victory as an achievement unto itself, or rather would it pose new and potentially confounding questions for a politically constituted Left? What would it mean for the Left to remain politically activated under Mamdani under Trump? Is Mamdani the alternative to fellow New Yorker (and first President to hail from the city since Teddy Roosevelt) Donald Trump, the head of the new resistance to Trump, or an attempt — self-conscious or not — to constitute the Left wing of the new political order which Trump has inaugurated?
Opening remarks
Mitchel Cohen: In the film On the Waterfront (1954), Terry Malloy, played by Marlon Brando, fights his way through the union bureaucracies, fighting against corruption. At the end, after he’s beaten up and he wins the moral victory, he meets the capitalist in charge of the whole enterprise on the docks, and this whole thing ends with the capitalist going: “Alright! Back to work!”2 That was seen as a victory for Malloy, and all the others, and it's shocking. I wonder if that’s the same thing that’s going to happen with Zohran and other socialists, liberals, and progressives, unless we attack the system in some way.
Mamdani and DSA consider themselves part of the continuation of the Second International, which reached its height in the U.S. and Europe in the early 20th century. Its most important feature was its support for World War I. In September 1915, in Zimmerwald, Switzerland, Lenin, Trotsky, and Rosa Luxemburg broke with imperialism and the so-called socialists all over Europe, condemned the War, and said they refused to send working-class people to kill and be killed for the benefit of capital and the nation-states it controls.3 The question of war and imperialism split the Second International apart. Has the DSA broken from that history, Or was it all just in the distant past, and we can forget about it? What role does that have on municipal elections?
Mamdani’s importance is his break with the Democratic Party hierarchy, especially over the question of Palestine. The Second International always torpedoed our challenges to the fascist state of Israel, and provided the cover that liberals — in the name of socialism — present as a rationalization for furthering capitalist exploitation and expropriation. This was a complete misreading of Marx by Leszek Kołakowski and others. It’s just wrong on every level, morally and historically.
In the Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels offered assertions about the role of communists: they were to represent the interest of the revolutionary movement as a whole, as opposed to its immediate top trade, electoral, or national interests. They are to bring out the international dimension in every local struggle, and they are to establish a political organization embodying the most advanced consciousness of the working class — not one that is separated from it. Yet, there’s been something missing from the socialist movement in the United States. All these years, we’ve been trying to raise others’ consciousness, to get them to say, “yes, I’m a socialist.” Suppose we have millions who consider themselves socialists — what do we do?
Lenin was considered an anarchist by others in the Second International; it’s hard to believe today, when there’s a fight between Leninism and anarchism. And yet, most anarchists share key assumptions with Lenin about the role of revolutionary organization. Daniel Lazare might take issue with this: there’s a positive, almost utopian assertion by Lenin that people can do something to change the circumstances of their lives and their conditions. Nothing is predetermined. A great deal concerns how they organize themselves to bring about a socialist future. The Second International, for instance, moaned that conditions weren’t right for a truly popular uprising against WWI, when millions of people were being slaughtered throughout Europe. In 1968, the Communist Party in France sabotaged the wave of mass strikes and direct action across the country under the pretext that objective conditions were not ripe for socialism while people were being murdered. How are they seeing that?
Was the working class organized to dramatically change its situation? Almost always not. Workers are left with the option to lobby the state, and through their unions lobby their employers for reforms within the overall capitalist structure, which will sabotage even those efforts, as we’re seeing now with Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, minimum wage, etc. In the case of WWI, the parties comprising the Second International, hoping to share in the booty should their country win, endorsed the militarist action of their ruling class, while denouncing the carnage of others and providing cannon-fodder for the War, just as they do in every war from within the ranks of the workers. They stake their hopes for trade-union victories for their workers and their unions on the defeat of other workers and other unions, at home and abroad. How to get out of that capitalist trap? This is not a rhetorical question: how does electing a DSA member, an explicit continuator of the Second International, as he himself has said, move us towards socialism, especially since capitalism will do everything possible to set worker against worker and defund and destroy Mamdani’s efforts?
What differentiates Mamdani’s program? What worker can disagree with the few things he’s proposed, as far as they go, which is not far at all? What’s different from former mayors Bill de Blasio, David Dinkins, or other liberals? Let’s not forget that de Blasio was, 30 years ago, campaign coordinator for Hillary Clinton, who was portrayed as a Leftist — we can all laugh together. How does the election of an avowed socialist make socialism happen? We’re limited to only bread-and-butter demands, wage demands, and working-condition demands. We’re not making demands on the capitalists that we work for. We’re not calling for the shut down of the pollution of the Hudson River. That’s a job for workers. We must break with all existing capitalist contracts, including the social contract that allows for unions. Instead of shutting down production, which we do on strikes, open it up to workers’ control. Every issue must convey the organizational capacity to make it happen, and not just appeal to those in power to do it on our behalf. This would be a fundamental rewrite of the rules of trade unionism that the Second International always upheld. They will try to bust up Mamdani and any sincere socialist efforts.
Can we use state power to fund and expand communes and collectives? This was Hugo Chavez’s great contribution as written about in last month’s Monthly Reviewas part of the socialist structure and the transition to socialism.4 These differ from Nicaragua’s and Cuba’s committees, because those were mostly for distribution of goods, not for production. That system is already pitting workers in gardens against workers needing housing. Workers don’t want to be poisoned, but they’re willing to allow a certain amount of poison, and so forth. Can these communes be instituted in New York City? A mayor can do good things by being a socialist. The point is to organize the working class beyond where it is now, into communities as the basis for democratic control of the society. When the pharmaceutical industry, for instance, mandates that workers be inoculated with an experimental drug or lose their jobs, what will be the position of the new socialist mayor? The mayor will try to make decisions facing huge capitalist and market pressures; can this even be done electorally without uprooting the entire capitalist system, and if so, how?
Those are some unanswered questions; they will move to crush socialism if Mamdani and the city apparatus are not building those structural forms now. Even deeper, fascism will come and take us over. There’s my charge to Mamdani’s regime. I like him and the things he’s putting forth. Who doesn’t want to ride for free on the bus? But it has to go a lot deeper than that, and structures have to be built that will defend socialist policies and programs against the capitalists who will try to tear it down.
Daniel Lazare: I'm glad you brought up the beginning of WWI. I agree that it was an incredible betrayal of the working-class movement. These questions are never simple. For example, a leader of the French Socialist Party said that if they hadn’t voted for war credits, their own members would have lynched them in the streets because the war fever was running so high and Germany was attacking France. What I take from that is that there come times when you’ve got to do the unpopular thing; you’ve got to break with popular opinion, party opinion, the prevalent political opinion on the Left, and you’ve got to stand athwart and challenge it.
That brings me to Mamdani. There's been enthusiasm over his primary victory; people are excited, and everybody is hailing it as the dawn of a new era. Finally, Trump is getting his socialist resistance. I’m skeptical because I’ve seen this all before. Just cast your mind back a decade and a half. What have we been through? 2011: Occupy Wall Street. 2016: Bernie Sanders. 2017: the pussy-hat protests, and then the #MeToo movement. 2018: the rise of “The Squad”: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayana Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib. And 2020: the rise of BLM. At each moment, there was this popular outpouring: “Isn't it great! The revolution has arrived; let’s just plunge into this latest struggle!” What has been the result? We are in the middle of the Trump era, the entire world — as far away as Nepal — is rushing to the Right. People have lost faith in the very idea of democratic self-government, and they are looking to strong-men like Trump to do their thinking for them.
Abroad, 2012–15 saw the rise of SYRIZA in Greece,5 a coalition of Left-wing parties that ended up collapsing when they authorized a referendum on the latest EU debt bailout package. The vote was 61–39 “No,” and the SYRIZA government still approved the package. 2015 saw the rise of Podemos in Spain. They were the third-largest party in the Spanish Parliament, and they wound up collapsing. 2015 saw the rise of Jeremy Corbyn. In 2019, the Labour Party suffered its worst defeat since the 1930s, and Corbyn was forced to resign.
Just now, at the same time that Leftists are waxing enthusiastic over Mamdani, Corbyn and Zarah Sultana are forming a new party which is provisionally called Your Party. When they announced the plans, they got 800,000 subscribers in a matter of days; it shows a mass outpouring of enthusiasm and support like we've seen repeatedly over the last 15 years. Now, Your Party is falling apart because Corbyn and Sultana are at loggerheads. Two weeks ago in London, Tommy Robinson, the head of the English Defence League,6 organized a protest. The term fascist is overused, especially with regard to Israel, by the way, but Tommy Robinson looks like he is becoming the true article. His protest may have drawn as many as 300,000 people. There were 10,000 counterprotestors organized by Say No to Racism, a Socialist Workers Party (UK) creation. They had to be protected by the police! They were outnumbered 30 to 1! So, Your Party, the new Left-wing party, is dying unborn, dissolving in petty bickering, because their politics are totally fractured. Meanwhile, the radical Right is putting together the biggest far-Right demonstration in Britain since the 1930s.7 It just goes to show the true picture out there.
Mamdani’s primary-election results are really fascinating. Among college-educated voters, Mamdani won 62–38. Among those without college education, Andrew Cuomo won 61–39! That closely mirrors what happened in 2024 between Trump and Kamala Harris: Trump won the vote of those who had less than four years of college education and Harris won those who were more educated. That’s why Trump is seen as a stand-in for the working and middle class. Mamdani is replicating the same pattern we saw in 2024, which led to Trump and disaster! This kind of middle-class socialism winds up alienating the working class and driving it into the arms of the Right. Now, Cuomo is not a Rightist like Trump, but he’s still somewhat to the Right. What’s happening with Mamdani is much less impressive than what people are letting on. We see that, rather than breaking up the old patterns, he is in some ways reinforcing them. He’s advancing a kind of middle-class, semi-liberal, semi-quasi-socialism and he’s not winning over the workers.
What should Mamdani do? I presume he's going to win. As Mamdani takes office, Trump will bulldoze through. He will love it. He will be able to just punish New York and punish Mamdani. Is Mamdani mobilizing the working class against that? He’s not; he’s meeting with Governor Kathy Hochul. It’s completely underwhelming. It's a continuation of the impotent Left-liberal politics that we have seen since the financial crisis in 2008. It’s going to lead to more disappointment. Just as the French Socialist Party made a bad mistake in 1914, that liberals, Leftists, and socialists are making a bad mistake if they suspend their judgment and flock uncritically to the Mamdani banner.
Sebastian LM: I became an organizer when I was 14, before I became a socialist. I’m from Harlem, and I became a socialist because of the material conditions. We’re talking about the working class here abstractly, but we see that what is appealing to voters is this rhetoric of affordability. We assume two things about the people we want to contact. One is that, especially if they’re from the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, when it comes to the Left or vaguely progressive spaces in general, voting is all people know. And two, the working class is struggling. Those are two realities. I agree broadly with what was said before: capitalism is going to try to sabotage both reformist reforms and non-reformist reforms. But more importantly, we’re seeing the complete collapse of basic quality of life in New York. Private equity owns everything. A Palantir executive is the CEO of Partiful. They’re stealing your information. Don’t use Partiful. My friend made an alternative app. What is important and ideological, especially when it comes to the DSA is what it means to actually activate somebody or build class consciousness.
The fact is that accelerationism doesn’t work. Dan listed the 10 pivotal crises in the last 50 years, all of which were capitalized on by people who were often accelerationists, who said COVID is going to make some kind of ground-swelling movement, and that the BLM movement is going to be a ground-swelling movement where we see large amounts of resistance and direct action. That didn’t work because people, especially under the pandemic, were struggling. They couldn’t get organized.
It’s a disorganizing space in general. When conditions are poor in the heart of empire, we can’t get organized and build powerful resistance, whether that is a party or a proto-party formation, or organizing around identity-based issues and issue-based campaigns.
Zohran Mamdani is not bringing about the revolution. Zohran is not actually a socialist. When we talk about making sure that the subway is clean, it’s to improve the quality of life so people can start thinking about what is beyond their exploitation, and what is beyond this weird form of ever-devolving capitalism.
Socialism requires class consciousness, and thus requires organization. When it comes to what Zohran’s policies can mean for this, I disagree with certain things, especially on the stance around policing. I actually helped write the original platform about the Office of Community Safety. I wrote some of the policy around incarceration and solitary confinement, especially regarding trans folks and people with mental illnesses. Some of that is no longer being talked aboutin the mainstream, and some isn’t being fully implemented. When we talk about alternatives to policing, we’re now shifting away from whatever Zohran might say about staffing the police and apologizing because he wants to abolish the Strategic Response Group.8 We are talking about an alternative to the current understanding of policing. You went from broken-window policing of Rudy Giuliani to a continuation of that under Mike Bloomberg, then to de Blasio. You should look up The NYPD Files.9
What would it mean to have alternatives to policing? When it comes to what Zohran is trying to do regarding policing or housing, these aren’t necessarily revolutionary ideas. A rent freeze, for example, has been done under de Blasio. The point of these reforms is to prevent the continued acceleration of black displacement, like in Brooklyn and the Bronx, and to ensure that we have viable organizing fronts where we are free from continued repression. “Isn’t that the same rhetoric that we used for Kamala Harris?” Yes, but it’s actually applicable this time.
I want to push back on this question of an audition for a new Democratic Party. I have a few criticisms of how Zohran and the transition team want to approach the Democratic Party, especially on accepting endorsements and saying he’s willing to work with Hochul going forward. That aside, the point is not revolution. Ultimately a revolution is necessary in the U.S., but the DSA and its electoral project are not revolutionary. If somebody is willing to accept that, we can get into the meat of the discussion. If the project is not revolutionary, what is the point? The point is to have better conditions in the short-term for the working class. The DSA project also allows for other proto-party coalitions to build. The point is to be able to build enough solidarity within labor unions and local community groups, help support mutual-aid resistance, or even just direct action that can be expanded upon in the future.
What should we normalize? I'll talk a little bit about Lenin here. I love the snippet of something regarding assassination that circulated a week or two ago,10 in which Lenin questioned direct action and individualistic opportunism.11To build up solidarity, you must engage with your neighbors. But there needs to be a space in which we're able to have better platforms and better grounding to build up a tenants association, a union in your workplace, etc. And that often requires, and is often just easier, with some non-reformist reforms.
I’m not here to launch a defense of Zohran, and, concerning what was raised about the Second International, I will never decry purity tests. I want to hold Zohran accountable. I worked to get him elected because it’s probably the best option available to lay the groundwork for future organizing. It’s not necessarily a question of whether Zohran is going to lead the revolution. In fact, he’s a little egotistical; all politiciansare a little weird. But if the work is being done to be able to defend some organizing capacity, it’s something to commit to.Do I think that the cult of personality that's been created around Zohran is good? No; it’s a natural byproduct of the current Democratic Party that we have, which should be pushed back on in future elections.
Has DSA rejected this history of pro-war sentiments? We’re not asking the Republican Party if they're still abolitionists, right? Parties change, or proto-parties change. The Democratic Party is still racist, but they’re not pro-Southern pride racists. This goes back to the question of what the necessity of the party backing Zohran is. For DSA, it was just the ground movement. It was the ability to mobilize people who only know electoralism, and at least introduce them to other forms of organizing. These conditions for organizing show that when we don’t have a strong enough groundwork, we’re not able to build it up into a mass scale that is actionable.
We're talking about Zohran in a big vacuum here. We’re talking about Zohran against the world or as an actor who is going to be highlighted as the focal point of what the Left can be in the U.S. That’s true in a media sense. We forget that, for example, a lot of the agenda has to come through the State House. A lot of the State Assembly members are for Zohran’s agenda now: they’ve agreed to tax the rich, which isn’t socialism. I have to repeat it. The point is that with each movement, whether we see with the Squad or BLM, a popular uprising happens that has to be capitalized upon. We can still capitalize upon this moment, whether that’s mobilizing Zohran’s volunteers, radicalizing them to become socialists or communists, or creating revolutionary sentiments that don't dismiss voices.
Finally, on the results: the Bronx is the one spot that was a Democratic holdout that Zohran lost. But I want to clarify something: Zohran won white, Asian, and Hispanic voters. In Harlem, he won by 10 points. In East Queens, East Brooklyn, majority black, majority Indo-Caribbean districts that were re-canvassed — and where the actual idea of a rent freeze and free buses were espoused — Zohran won. We didn’t canvas much in the Bronx because we didn’t have volunteers there. But in the areas that we did canvas, we won. We won among young black voters, many of whom are from New York. The Democratic Party is asking for holdouts from its base of supporters. Zohran was able to not only win some people from those demographics, but then everyone else in the Democratic Party. I will accept this criticism if Zohran loses all working class black voters, but that’s not going to happen.
The way that the “the party,” the coalition — whether DSA or the progressive movement behind Zohran — can actually work is a matter of mobilizing the people who didn’t vote or even those who did but are still skeptical of Zohran. Zohran’s isn’t going to be a socialist project, but it builds the capacity to have one in the future on a mass scale; it could lead to a strike, hopefully a general strike, in 2028 across the country,12 or an actual revolution. That will probably take decades to complete because we haven’t fully radicalized the people who are either not on board with Zohran, or who are on board with him, but are just liberals.
Melvyn Dubofsky: I should throw a little historical cold water on this discussion. The era in which municipal socialism actually existed and worked was a very different age. Before World War I there were over 1,000 cities in the U.S. that had fully or partially socialist municipal administrations, the most famous case being Milwaukee. New York City had a powerful socialist movement. But all this was linked to what amounted to a rising labor movement. Milwaukee socialism was based on Milwaukee unions. In New York, socialism largely derived from the garment-workers unions, which were openly and declaredly socialist. And in the pre-WWI period, socialism seemed to be on the rise.
Was it seven decades ago now? I was doing research at the old Tamiment Library, which was not at NYU, it was at the Rand School of Social Science, 7 East 15th Street.13 When you walked in, there was a bust of Karl Marx, Morris Hillquit, who ran for the mayor of New York on the Socialist Party ticket, and Meyer London, socialist congressman from New York. And we found hidden in the masonry the records of Branch 1 of the New York City Socialist Party. I was a young graduate student then. I was amazed when I saw the membership record of the Branch. It included almost every prominent artist and literary figure — the intellectual elite. And then, in a very strange circumstance, I found three letters of resignation from the Party clipped together. I don’t know who had this particular sense of history, but the three resignations clipped together were Walter Lippmann, later a famous journalist, W. E. B. Du Bois, the most prominent African American intellectual leader of his era, and Francis Perkins, who later became Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor.
The Socialist Party before WWI was really an integral part of U.S. politics. In the Socialist Party papers, I found letters from prominent Republicans and Democrats crediting the Socialists with making major improvements. World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution ripped that apart. Socialism in the U.S. never recovered from the impact of the War and the Bolshevik Revolution, which in effect split the Left.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Reading, Pennsylvania; and Bridgeport, Connecticut all remained socialist cities in the 1920s–50s. Milwaukee, from the time the socialists took over the city into the 50s, built a reputation as the healthiest city in the country. Going back to before WWI, it provided medical care and services for its poorest citizens, inoculations and milk for its children, and it built a marvelous park system. Socialism could offer particular benefits. But socialism in a single city could not change the larger environment. New York City from the 1930s through the 50s in a way repeated what Milwaukee did. Fiorello LaGuardia, the mayor in the 30s and 40s, came out of the New York City labor and socialist milieu of the Pre-WWI period. He took advantage of the money that the Roosevelt administration poured into the city. He could only do it because New Deal Democrats were in power in Washington. And with Robert Moses, his master builder, they put beautiful parks throughout the city in working-class neighborhoods. I grew up in that city. Two of the municipal colleges were direct beneficiaries of the New Deal and LaGuardia: Brooklyn College and Queens College; both built with New Deal money. New York built municipal housing that worked. The projects originally had a majority-white residential population, mostly fully employed workers. There was great improvement in their living conditions.
During and after World War II, we had what economic historians call the great contraction, when inequality reached what could be called its lowest point. It was a period in which one third of the labor force was unionized. And that unionized third enabled enormous numbers of non-union workers to receive the same betterments. It was a remarkable period. It seems inconceivable today. When I grew up, you could walk to a municipal park that had beautiful baseball fields, basketball courts, softball fields, an enormous swimming pool, diving pool, in a working-class neighborhood. For five cents you could ride the subway. For 25 cents with your high school card you could walk into Madison Square Garden — it was on 8th Avenue between 49th and 50th Street back then — and see a professional basketball or hockey game. Or you could turn up the same day at the old polo grounds — no luxury boxes in those days — and see the New York Giants play football. It was a different city than today. As the historian of that city, Josh Freeman, has noted, it was basically a form of municipal socialism. Nothing like today.
I suspect that Mamdani will win the election. But he will not be a LaGuardia. LaGuardia would not have been who he was without the New Deal in power in Washington. I really don’t know what Mamdani can accomplish when there will be no support from Trump’s Washington. It is going to be extremely difficult. Just 30 or 40 years ago, unions were stronger; they had money. Look at some of the great housing in the city. The Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the Bronx; Stuyvesant Town on the Lower East Side; the huge development in Brighton Beach in Brooklyn: all built largely with union money. It’s not available today. It’s just a different world.
Look elsewhere and it seems equally bleak. Back in the 80s I was involved in a joint U.S.-Soviet academic exchange program. The Soviets came here three times, and we went there three times. The first two times we went there, in 81 and 85, it was bleak. We met nothing but apparatchiks. The last time in 87, it was post-Gorbachev. It was literally a new world. And the amazing thing is that what the Gorbachev people wanted to do in the Soviet Union was to recreate what the French called the glorious 30 years: 1945–75. They wanted to build a form of Soviet — how else to put it? — social democracy. The failure of Gorbachev was a great tragedy.
I don’t know where we go from Mamdani’s likely victory in November into the future. And I do not really believe that workers without a college education were necessarily conservative voters. The problem is that few of them are in unions today. New York has more proportionately union members than most places, but it is still a relatively small minority and it is basically public employees. Take away the teachers, the municipal employees, and how many union members still exist in the city of New York? And without unions to have educational and political programs, workers drift politically and are isolated. Organize them, and things change. But it’s difficult to organize today, because fundamentally the law, as it exists and as it functions, undermines unions. I don’t know where you go from one social democrat in power in one city. As Trotsky used to argue: you could not have socialism or communism in one country; you had to have a global revolution. Socialism can’t survive in one city. Even so, I hate to throw all this cold water on it. But then, I’ve lived too long, so I don’t have much of a future.
Responses
MC: We have to start building now. We have to start raising all different kinds of issues, like environmental issues: no pesticides, no GMOs, no gain-of-function research, no corporate pollution and dumping. How do such organizing efforts happen under attack from, yes, fascists and yes, Trump, and yes, others in Israel? How can we build that core now that can resist the coming attacks? Who can focus on the corporate, capitalist structure? Who can go after the banks? Can Zohran, or any one individual, help facilitate that now? It’s needed now, not tomorrow. There is no tomorrow. There is only now.
DL: No gain-of-function research?
MC: Absolutely.
DL: So you’re joining the anti-science bandwagon of the Trump administration? And you want to build a socialist movement?
MC: Absolutely, the Trump administration are not the only ones who criticize this.
DL: I’m the only optimist on this table. There is a great revolutionary potential in America. America has a 238 year-old constitution, which is in absolute ruins. What little is left of it is being overturned. It is completely dysfunctional. That’s why Trump is in power, because we have had 30 years of gridlock. We have a Senate which is grossly imbalanced, a gerrymandered House, a Supreme Court which is both super reactionary and absolutely unchangeable, and we have an Electoral College which is geared heavily to white, rural states. That has got to change. The system is falling apart. A certain point will come when America will have to reconstitute itself and throw out this 18th–century constitution. That will be a revolutionary act. America will be where France was in 1789 or where Russia was in 1917 when they convened a constituents’ assembly.
America is facing a period of fundamental change: either dictatorship under Trump or revolutionary reconstitution by the working class. When the global hegemon reaches this kind of point, the options are wide open. Things look grim and options seem limited, but that can change dramatically: 1789, 1917, and the 2020s. America is a country at an absolute impasse and impasses don’t last forever. They can be shattered, and when they are shattered, extraordinary things can happen.
SLM: Optimism is different from understanding that our organizing base is wholly unprepared for any type of monumental change. We see that in LA, where there was resistance, but the national guard still came in, the governor and the mayor didn’t do anything, and there was nothing productive to come out of it. There was no long-term or even short-term base-building that came out of it, apart from actual direct-action resistance, which I think was good and necessary, but is better done in LA than in DC, for example. It shows that — as socialists or even in the broad progressive movement that we hope are allied with us — we are unprepared.
When conditions are a bit better, it’s easier to organize and politicize people. I hear revolutionary optimism that something will happen and that we’ll be prepared, and then a broader question of how will Zohran impact it away from the organizers, and how we are going to build up power. I also agree this is true, but I don’t see any tangible alternatives, which is telling about our organizing at this juncture.
MD: Things are bad, and it’s hard to see the promise of something better on the horizon. To say “the worse, the better” — I don’t think that’s ever worked for the better. The biggest impetus for change in the last two centuries has been war. I don’t think we want war in the future. Things have simply gotten much worse. 50 years ago, I spent a year in Israel teaching. The kind of reality that exists there today was not there back then. Netanyahu comes from what 50 years ago was the minority sector of Likud. To put it as bluntly as possible, he comes out of a fascist tradition. That was a small minority in Israel fifty years ago. Today, in some respects, it is dominant. We can all see the results. I’ve just lived too long, and I’m not ready to end my days with a Trumpian nation.
Q&A
I’m a reader of Worker’s Vanguard and Spartacist. There’s a caucus in the DSA right now called “Just Break Already” (JBA) that is calling for a clean break now. You say Mamdani is not a socialist, so why don’t you throw him out of the DSA? It’s still like August 4, 1914 for the DSA.14 At the last DSA conference there was a motion to censure Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez because she was not hard enough on Zionism. We need Leninism and Trotskyism. The JBA is entering the DSA the way that the Trotskyists in the U.S. entered the Socialist Party. If Mamdani wants to stay in the DSA, he should refuse all funding and break with the Democratic Party.
SLM: I hate DSA internal politics; I hate internal politics in general; I am not a partisan person. I do a lot of hard-skills training, and work on the ground with tenants’ associations and unions. JBA and internal DSA politics are separate from what the Zohran campaign is, for better or worse. The DSA has passed an anti-Zionist resolution, DSA national has un-endorsed Ocasio-Cortez along with Jamaal Bowman, and there are internal resolutions seeking how to hold Zohran accountable through party mechanisms. Why run Zohran at all if he is not a socialist? Because you can’t govern as a socialist right now.
Can Zohran use state power to build the kind of movement and organizations we need? Can you use the state to create a socialist base or does it happen the other way around?
SLM: Supporting a socialist base isn’t different from the ground swell needed to create it. A socialist or communist movement wouldn’t require that there is a first a socialist or communist president. On the policy side, New York is a weak home-rule state, which means most of the power belongs to the state government, not the city governments, which means the only person with real power in New York City is the mayor; he controls the budgeting, which is why Zohran wanted to run for mayor.
At the theoretical level, we can see the mayor and Tammany Hall almost a century ago were able to prop up the ethnic enclaves of New York City. It is not a politicization of working-class communities, but it does demonstrate how the coalitions that back someone in power in New York City can help push working-class folks towards unions, stronger community associations, tenants’ associations, etc.
DL: But, Sebastian, you’re contradicting yourself; you said that Mamdani is not a socialist. So how will electing a non-socialist build socialism?
SLM: Mamdani is a socialist personally, but he is not able to govern as a socialist. But I think one can use mayoral power to have these reforms to create better conditions for organizing, or even just not cracking down on protests, and actually helping radicalize folks. There isn’t a substantive difference between how socialists and non-socialists interact at the ground level.
DL: It seems to me that Mamdani, if he were a socialist, would be mobilizing the working-class against the impending Trump assault, because if Mamdani gets elected Trump is gonna come down on New York like a ton of bricks. And he’d be mobilizing the working-class to fight that off, and he’s not; he is conferring with Kathy Hochul, seeking her support.
MD: You can’t create socialism from the top down. It’s reciprocal. You need a base below too. The base and — call it the superstructure if you want — have to build each other up. In the early 20th century, it was local socialist groupings and trade unions that built up the strength of socialism. It didn’t arise from officials being elected here or there and building a following. It came, mostly, from below. When the forces below brought leaders into power, those leaders had to work to try to enlarge the mass below. We’re in a different situation today. Mamdani can make improvements in the city, but that's not going to have much of an impact for socialism in the larger regional or national sphere.
The DSA is absolutely not a continuation of the Second International. What Mamdani’s already achieved by winning the primary is that he swept aside the last surviving rickety scaffolding of the pre-Vietnam Democratic Party, of the world of Melvyn’s youth that he spoke of so eloquently, and I don’t want to go back to that world. There is something entirely new that can’t be built. Sewer socialism in the 21st century would look different from sewer socialism in the 20th century.
I am surprised that the pro-Palestinian protests have not come up. Many who partook in these protests have now liquidated themselves into the Mamdani campaign. From the beginning, there was the question of whether it’s a Leftist protest or not. Many attendees thought that the protests didn’t have anything to do with Leftism, but it was an opportunity to engage people to have an interest in socialism. Now, a year or two later, no one is really talking about the Palestinian question anymore, and people are backing Mamdani. Now we hear Mamdani doesn’t really have anything to do with socialism, but will maybe be beneficial to the working class. If the goal is just to improve material conditions for the working class, why shouldn’t Mamdani align with Trump? Why shouldn’t we encourage Mamdani to align with Trump and use the 2025 New Deal money to build or rebuild New York?
MC: I have been involved for a long time with social movements that raised the question of Palestine for 40 years, and they were always ignored, or shot down, or refused by liberals, social democrats, and also other Marxist parties. I agree that Mamdani raising this issue in New York City is important. But, can that translate into ongoing activity and ongoing structures?
DL: The Palestinian movement has died, but the war has not stopped. The devastation in Gaza is intensifying, and Netanyahu is moving to the final stage, where he is leveling Gaza City, herding the entire population far to the south where they will be in concentration-camp-like conditions at best, if they are not expelled en masse. It’s heading for the climax. Trump, much to Netanyahu’s delight, talks freely about a massive ethnic cleansing of the population in Gaza. Yet the movement has died. I have written about this for the Platypus Review,15 and I made myself fairly unpopular by saying that the problem with the movement is that it didn’t grapple with the Hamas problem; Hamas is a far-Right movement which the pro-Palestinian movement tried to pretend didn’t exist. The consequences for the movement were disastrous, and they’re disastrous for the Palestinian people. I know you are being provocative with the question of aligning with Trump.
Why not?
DL: Because Trump is not going to create wealth. Trump is leading to the accelerating impoverishment of American society. It’ll be to the benefit of a tiny elite, but for the working class there is nothing but regression under Trump: democratically, economically, culturally, medically. Trump is a disaster for the workers, so we can’t align with Trump. We clearly have to oppose Trumpism, but we have to oppose the system that gave rise to Trump. That is the important thing, because if you elect Democrats in 2026 or 28, we’ll just be back to where we were under Biden, and things will fall apart again, and there will be another Trump waiting in the wings.
We have discussed sewer socialism and its relation to the Socialist Party in Milwaukee. The question of the police is crucial in thinking through both Zohran’s working with and tacit support of the police, and the Milwaukee socialist’s relationship with the police — establishing a new police chieftain — and the ways that created real problems for that moment. Sebastian treats the police as one amongst a plurality of issues, when the question of the police undergirds the whole struggle; the whole struggle for social reforms will be a struggle against the police.
DL: About the cops, I disagree with you; the cops are an end-of-the-pipeline problem. The structures of America are so profoundly un-democratic and racist, and that is what generates police brutality; not the reverse.
MD: I want to leave you with an Antonio Gramsci aphorism: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”
Mitchel you made an argument that we need to go beyond the forms of the Second International, and that the Second International is in part responsible for the DSA we have today. But, Melvyn seemed to make almost the reverse argument, that there were greater, broader forms of working-class organization during the Second International than there have ever been since it split around WWI and the 1917 revolution.
DL: The Second International had a spotty-at-best record on racism; one of the best-selling SPA pamphlets in the U.S. came out in 1914, and it was a blast against workplace integration. The pamphlet said it was horrible that bosses were making white and black workers drink from the same ladle, and demanded working-class action to stop it. Unions were widely segregated. Eugene V. Debs was personally a very humane individual who wrote very eloquently on the race question, but Debs, as you know, was a passivist; he did not believe that there was any special role for the SPA in combatting racism.16 So we can’t romanticize the SPA, and it’s the failure to deal with that problem that eventually led to the destruction of the Left, and so you can’t look back to that golden age.
MC: The Second International was challenged on the question of war, and all these socialist party leadership honchos were supporting WWI. Dan said they were doing that partly because their own membership would have lynched them. Things change over a matter of weeks, and they did in August of 1914.
What is the role of the state? Should socialists be able to criticize the state? Dan, is a certain criticism of the state excluded because Trump is also making that criticism? What would a Leftist critique of the state be? How does this relate to Mamdani, who is straight-forwardly saying, “you need the state” and “the whole point is to have a bigger state.” What do socialists make of that?
DL: Obviously we want to overthrow the capitalist state. We want to replace it with a socialist state, a powerful democratic socialist state which will mobilize the working class to rebuild their society. I just read Trotsky’s Communism and Terrorism, and he discusses with remarkable frankness the creation of a socialist superstate — the state reaching its crescendo. Certainly, that is the kind of state we have to build, but it has got to be as democratic as it is sovereign and powerful.
MC: I just don’t agree on that. It’s the workers ourselves who create the new society, and we need the state under socialists to help facilitate that process, bolster it, and create the communication links where needed. It’s the workers ourselves, who, through our direct action, accomplish the creation of socialism, not the state. We fight against the capitalist state, and the state itself as the embodiment of the capitalist class. |P
Transcribed by Benjamin Kay, Erin Hagood, and Athene McQueen
1 Available online at <https://youtu.be/8lrl-7qua70>.
2 See the scene in On the Waterfront, <https://youtu.be/IYBAPVjJykY>.
3 See V. I. Lenin, “The Draft Resolution of the Left Wing at Zimmerwald” (1915), in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 21 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 345–48, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/aug/20.htm>
4 Chris Gilbert and Cira Pascual Marquina, “A Special Issue on Communes in Socialist Construction,” Monthly Review 77, no. 3 (July–August 2025), <https://monthlyreview.org/articles/a-special-issue-on-communes-in-socialist-construction>.
5 See, for example, former SYRIZA economic advisor John Milios’s article “The Greek Left tradition and the SYRIZA phenomenon,” Platypus Review 86 (May 2016), <https://platypus1917.org/2016/05/03/greek-left-tradition-syriza-phenomenon>.
6 The English Defense League was founded in 2009 and was active until the late 2010s. It opposed radical Islamism in England.
7 Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists mounted mass demonstrations during the 1930s.
8 The Strategic Response Group is a unit of the New York City Police Department formed in 2015, responsible for counter-terrorism, riot control, and other operations.
9 See The NYPD Files, ProPublica, <https://www.propublica.org/series/the-nypd-files>.
10 The topic of assassination was being widely discussed because Charlie Kirk had been assassinated on September 10, 2025.
11 See V.I. Lenin, “Revolutionary Adventurism” (1902), in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 6 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 186–207, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1902/sep/01.htm>.
12 See Sarah Lazare, “The Call is Out for Mass, Simultaneous Strikes in 4 Years,” The Nation (October 14, 2024), <https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/general-strike-2028-unions-labor-movement>.
13 The Rand School of Social Science, later renamed the Tamiment Institute and Library, was founded in 1906 by the Socialist Party of America to educate the working class.
14 The German Social Democratic Party of the Second International voted for the German government’s request for war credits on August 4, 1914.
15 Daniel Lazare, “1914 redux: Why the Left gets Hamas wrong . . . and U.S. imperialism too,” Platypus Review 171 (November 2024), <https://platypus1917.org/2024/11/01/1914-redux-why-the-left-gets-hamas-wrong-and-u-s-imperialism-too/>.
16 See Eugene V. Debs, “The Negro in the Class Struggle,” International Socialist Review 4, no. 5 (November 1903), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1903/negro.htm>: “We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races.”
