On Mamdani
Jonathan Rosenblum
Platypus Review 183 | February 2026
LET US PRAISE the remarkable movement that carried Zohran Mamdani into the mayor’s office in America’s largest city: 100,000 volunteers,[1] led by socialists and driven by bold, transformative demands — a grassroots force that toppled a deeply entrenched political establishment and sent reverberations not just throughout the U.S. but around the world. Mamdani was an exceptional candidate who articulated the hopes and dreams of millions of working-class people.
Taking place in the center of global capital, the electoral win was quite an accomplishment. For the broader movement, it couldn’t have been more timely. It injected hope into the ranks of millions fighting an overwhelming — and at times dispiriting — war against Trump, the billionaires, and their fascist minions.
But for the working class, winning political office is not the same as winning political power. Recognizing the crucial difference between the two is critical if we are going to figure out how to fight. Too many on the Left are understandably giddy after this significant electoral win and gloss over this. As the Mamdani administration gets underway, this distinction is becoming clearer.
The CEOs of BlackRock, Vanguard, KKR, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and other corporations that call New York home have not declared, “Okay, socialists, you won. Here are the keys to the city.” They are fighting even harder now — both publicly and behind the scenes — against Mamdani’s calls for a rent freeze, free bus service, and universal child care.
Can we win these things — and more — in the coming year? Yes — but everything is a power struggle. The outcome will be determined not by Mamdani occupying the mayor’s office, and certainly not by his aggressive courting of our political enemies, but by the balance of forces between the social movement and those enemies.
The rules of engagement in this power struggle are anything but fair. Capitalist governments are structured to block — not welcome — transformative policies. It is not an open, freewheeling arena in which the ideas that win the most votes prevail. Rather, the civil state is a construct specifically designed to uphold, reinforce, and reproduce the capitalist status quo. By “state,” I mean the full range of institutions that establish, maintain, and enforce the rules governing civil society; the executive and legislative branch of government, the bureaucracy, the courts, and the police, along with adjacent institutions, including the two main U.S. political parties and the media. More than a century ago, Lenin observed that, “the state is an organ of class domination, an organ of oppression of one class by another; its aim is the creation of ‘order’ which legalises and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the collisions between the classes.”[2]
Having lost direct control of the mayor’s seat, big business and their political servants are now working overtime to constrain Mamdani through more reliable local and state officials — such as Governor Hochul, state legislators, and the rest of the Democratic Party establishment. They will attempt to co-opt and water down his policies while protecting their billionaire benefactors. Big business will announce capital strikes to frighten the populace. They will sow misinformation through their media outlets to turn public sentiment against him. Some will even welcome — or at least not resist — a Trump decision to send ICE and the National Guard in, creating a state of terror on New York’s streets. The election does not end class war — it escalates it. Is the movement ready?
The socialists’ binary choice
November’s electoral wins — in New York, Seattle,[3] and elsewhere — gave us strategic beachheads inside the halls of capitalist power. Properly used, they can build movements, train a new generation of working-class fighters, and serve as launch points for bold, transformative demands — but this is hardly a given. If not organized around the task of revolutionary struggle, these erstwhile socialist beachheads will squander and demobilize the movement’s energy.
The first strategic choice for newly-elected socialists and their movements is deciding whether to continue as radical agitators — fighting for bold working-class demands and building popular movements so we can upend the racist, violent, corrupt, planet-destroying capitalist system — or, having attained a political office, surrounded by the sinecures of elevated status and enchanted by the trappings of influence, whether they will come to believe that the bourgeois state is a malleable entity they can enter and reform from within? Simply put, the choice is class struggle, or class snuggle.
It’s an old choice — one that has bedeviled socialists ever since they entered the political arena. Unfortunately, the vast majority have chosen class snuggle, with disastrous results. The thousands of reform-minded socialists who won legislative offices in Europe in the early 20th century did not disrupt capitalism from within. Instead, they became co-conspirators with imperialism, choosing nationalism over class solidarity and joining war cabinets in 1914 to cheer on the bloody Great War.
In our time, socialists Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Bernie Sanders won political office promising to shake things up. After her 2018 election, AOC joined 200 Sunrise Movement protesters occupying Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi’s office, demanding that the incoming House Speaker commit to passing Green New Deal legislation.[4] Her participation in civil disobedience signaled that she intended to bring the street movement into the halls of power. Alas, that hopeful moment soon faded.
Just a year later, AOC had pivoted away from the politics of disruption. She criticized other progressives as being too “conflict-based.”[5] She affectionately referred to Pelosi as “Mama Bear,” even as her signature Green New Deal bill languished in the Speaker’s legislative dungeon. AOC and the three other members of the Squad held the balance of power in the House but refused to force votes on Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, or a raise of the pathetic $7.25 federal minimum wage.[6] In the fall of 2022, with railroad workers threatening to strike over the right to paid sick leave, AOC and other self-described progressives joined the Biden administration to outlaw the railroad strike and impose contracts that had been democratically rejected by the union members.[7]
As a presidential candidate in 2016 and 2020, Sanders fulminated against the billionaires and rallied millions to the cause of Medicare for All. But when he was pushed out of those races by the Democratic Party establishment, he quickly fell in line, endorsing Hillary Clinton, then Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. He, and both AOC and Biden, shamefully became Left-flank foils for the Democrats’ 2024 electoral disaster. These are the bitter fruits of socialist reformism.
We now come to Mamdani. After this year’s primary, Mamdani made a hard pivot toward reformism. By appointing political establishment figures to his inner circle, attempting to make peace with the police, and publicly softening his line on policies — like taxing the rich — Mamdani has committed to work within the existing power structures. He has cast his campaign as one for “the soul of the Democratic Party.”[8] Any remaining blinders on the Left were ripped off in late November when Mamdani traveled to the White House for a photo op with Trump. Corporate media were agog at Mamdani’s mediagenic commitment to find common ground with Trump on affordability issues. The rest of us were nauseated, wondering why the incoming mayor didn’t use his time and political capital to build the grassroots movement in New York — to fight for the campaign’s demands and to prepare the streets for ICE and the National Guard.
In his first period in office next year, Mamdani may well make some progress as a reformer; the capitalist class is adept at granting temporary concessions to relieve political pressure. But we should also recognize that this reformist path will reach a dead-end as it crashes up against the realities of capitalism. Mamdani’s strategic choices may signal the death of any prospect that he will lead a genuinely socialist movement from within City Hall.
That is not the end of the matter. There is also an outside movement — thousands of seasoned activists, many of them socialists — organized, confident, and ready to fight for core demands. This movement, too, has a choice to make, and it need not — and should not — default to Mamdani’s strategy. It can take the road less chosen, one that continues and escalates the class struggle and advances the municipal socialist project.
What do revolutionary politics look like?
This is certainly the road less traveled. For an idea of what that could look like, activists should turn to Seattle, Washington. From 2013–23, a sole socialist on the nine-member City Council led movements that tallied breakthrough achievements and changed the region’s political landscape.
My new book chronicles how movements led by Kshama Sawant won transformative victories over the course of a decade.[9] I worked in her council office for most of that time, during which we passed the first-ever tax on Amazon to build social housing — beating Amazon’s capital strike threat.[10] Seattle became the first big city to win a $15/hour minimum wage, which in January 2026 rose to $21.30/hour.[11] We strengthened renters’ rights, increased abortion and mental healthcare funding, banned caste discrimination, funded LGBTQ youth services, and more. Sawant won re-election three times, defeating the combined forces of the political establishment and Amazon, Starbucks, Microsoft, Expedia, global financiers, and developers. After a decade in office, Sawant left undefeated. She is now running for Congress[12] against Adam Smith, a warmongering 14-term incumbent Democrat and ardent defender of the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
We did not win by trying to change mainstream political parties from within or by playing by the establishment’s rules. We formed our own independent political movements, building power outside of — and in opposition to — the political establishment. Ours was a decidedly class-struggle approach, informed by Marxist analysis. It stood in sharp counterpoint to the reformism of AOC, Sanders, and their spinoffs.
Our movement was led by Sawant and the political organization she belonged to, Socialist Alternative. As in New York City and other major metropolitan areas, Seattle has been monopolized for decades by Democratic Party politicians. Many claim progressive bona fides, but their role always has been to keep a steady hand at the till of capitalism — enacting liberal social policies while ensuring things never get too far out of hand. This was the political establishment firmly in charge when Sawant entered office.
Sawant announced that her political role was to serve as a shop steward for the working class — accountable to people in the streets, not in the suites. Taking a cue from the Paris Commune, Sawant declared that she would only accept an average worker’s paycheck.[13] The remainder of her $117,000/year City Council salary was directed to solidarity funds supporting worker and community struggles. Tracing Sawant’s 10 years on the Seattle City Council, my book details the theory and practice of what I call three pillars of Marxist insurgent struggle.
These are, in brief: a fighting approach based on class struggle; bold, transformative demands to propel the movement; and ongoing grassroots democracy. My book looks at these three pillars in the context of Sawant’s leadership in office, but the principles apply to socialist movement work generally, whether or not the movement holds political office. Today, they provide a timely framework for socialist-led movements in New York and elsewhere.
First, the campaign strategies developed by Sawant and the movement recognized the state’s hostility to socialist ideas. State and local governments, the courts, and their bureaucratic adjutants, are hostile to working-class interests, organized to reinforce the existing power relationships by “protecting the economy.” As such, these institutions restrict policy choices to those acceptable to capitalism. To overcome that, Sawant and the socialists knew they had to break rules and disrupt state power.
We did this in big and small ways: we used the ballot initiative as a cudgel to force City Council action on minimum wages and the Amazon tax; convened meetings of the City Council’s Renters’ Rights Committee — which Sawant chaired — on weekends so working renters could attend; openly challenged the Democratic Party establishment in press conferences; organized demonstrations inside and outside City Hall; flooded City Council meetings with placard-wielding community members; and organized direct actions on gentrifying developers and union-busting bosses.
Sawant boldly advertised her Socialist Alternative affiliation in campaign literature and speeches, and refused alliances and back-room dealings with the Democratic Party. Instead, she built forums of workers and community members to bolster and steer her work inside City Hall. She treated the council office as a beachhead for the movement, opening up the office to activists and speaking from the City Council rostrum — not to persuade the other councilmembers, but to organize community members, amplify movement demands, and expose the hypocrisy of the Democrats.
Contrast that with contemporary progressives and most reform-minded socialists who enter office. They slide into the habits and customs of political respectability, overvaluing persuasion and personal relationships. They become immersed in the legislative process and downplay movement-building work. They quietly accept the salary and perks of office, fail to analyze class interests, and reproduce the capitalist-state functions in their role. Some build campaigns that issue bold rhetorical demands but keep tactics within the boundaries established by state power, as AOC did in the months following her sit-in in Pelosi’s office. Many may run as outside agitators, but once in office, they trade organizing for legislating. This is a recipe for failure.
Choosing class allegiance — whether to align with state institutions and state power or with the working class — happens very early on in the formation of any movement. Marx observed, “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”[14] That remains true today, in New York and elsewhere. No matter how much they declare Left-wing bona fides, Left political leaders will default to joining the political establishment “committee” — destined to reinforce, not oppose, state power — unless they consciously distinguish themselves from the get-go.
Many contemporary reform-minded socialists have tried to straddle the line between outside agitator and inside player — but this quickly becomes an impossible position. Even while running on third-party lines, they seek dual endorsements with the Democratic Party, quietly accept the full financial benefits of political office, and focus on inside-the-legislature cajoling and relationship-building instead of movement-building outside. Crucially, they see themselves and their office as distinct from the movement — not as a political arm of the movement and not directly accountable to rank-and-file community members. They set re-election as their paramount goal, foregoing the purpose of a revolutionary holding office in the first place.
One doesn’t need to be a full-throated defender of the ruling class, or accept direct funding from the Chamber of Commerce, to fit snugly into the folds of the capitalist political establishment. Simply shedding the politics and tactics of class struggle once in office renders a formerly radical leader part of the establishment, and it strips them of any effective leadership role in an independent, anti-capitalist movement. Reformists, as Rosa Luxemburg observed more than a century ago, “do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface modifications of the old society.”[15]
Today, progressives serve as useful foils for the political establishment, advancing “surface modifications” and providing tangible evidence to the Democratic Party’s Left-leaning supporters that the party accepts dissenting perspectives. Rather than undermining the system, reformism with no greater objective in mind actually strengthens capitalism — lending legitimacy to bourgeois hegemony and maintaining the core of the exploitative system while relieving pressure to overthrow it.
This brings us to the second pillar of Marxist insurgent politics: movement-building around immediate material struggles that connect to a broader call for socialism. This was the central argument in Leon Trotsky’s Transitional Program (1938), which called for fights to build “the bridge between present demands and the socialist program of the revolution.”[16] In the 2014 battle for a $15 minimum wage, Sawant called for democratic, public ownership of major corporations, pointing to their insatiable exploitation of workers. In the fight for the Amazon tax, she pushed to bring housing under public control, given the failure of the private housing market to supply quality homes. She called for a democratically elected renter-oversight board, arguing that neither bureaucracy nor private business could be trusted to properly manage social housing. Economic destitution, racism, and homelessness are features — not bugs — of capitalism. It would not be sufficient, Sawant underscored, to reduce human misery by winning the material issue at hand without pointing to the root cause of the problem. In advancing the movement’s immediate demands, Sawant’s tenure in City Hall exposed the systemic inability of big business and capitalism to meet people’s needs. It was a political master class in contemporary Transitional Program strategy.
Today’s reform-minded socialists and progressives, on the other hand, may advocate for working-class demands but fail to extend broader societal change. In doing so, they detach the immediate demand from the source of the problem. A common example: demanding more affordable housing but failing to lay blame on the corporate developers and landlords who control the private housing market. In this manner, reformers move from one campaign to another, taking aim at the maladies of capitalism without analyzing why these problems persist. You can’t properly treat a cancer without first having a correct diagnosis. A policy demand without root-cause analysis will not solve the problem it targets. Instead, it trains activists to become reform advocates instead of promoters of revolutionary change. The results are campaigns that begin with lofty slogans and ideals — “Housing for All!” — but degenerate into appeals for liberal reforms that fail to inspire and mobilize working people, let alone build politically independent, democratically accountable movements.
The reformists’ failure to demand broader change springs, in part, from a lack of confidence in working people. Today’s reform-minded socialists and progressives — just like their reformist progenitors of more than a century ago — worry that they could lose votes or alienate parts of the movement if they raise bold demands. They argue that people “aren’t ready” for socialist-oriented demands. Or they start off with a bold program but make compromises because they believe people are unprepared to fight for a radical program. They count votes and give up rather than develop a fighting program to win. They think that by making compromises they can tame the opposition, but in the absence of a powerful movement, reformists’ tactical compromises only reveal a movement’s weakness and embolden opponents to escalate demands for yet more concessions.
The Sawant experience demonstrates what happens when movement leaders trust workers to think big and act boldly. Working people alienated by mainstream politics become engaged because they see a movement that speaks to their material needs, explains the underlying systemic problem, and provides a course of action for newly energized community members.
We now turn to the third and final pillar of Marxist insurgent politics, movement democracy. On an individual level, democracy means having a voice in determining the economic, social, and ecological conditions in which you live. On a collective level, it means having agency — that is, power — to use that voice to effectively challenge oppressive systems, advocate for material changes, and construct a new social order. “Democracy” as it’s talked about today in mainstream U.S. society is narrowly defined. It is typically cast in reductionist examples, like quadrennial elections or the roll calls that conclude legislative battles. Democracy, in this construct, is something that you’re only marginally involved in. Elections offer limited choices. Racist voter-suppression laws ban millions from participating. Arcane rules govern legislative debates. Unelected courts roll back popular gains. Government bodies meet during times that preclude most people from taking part. It’s no wonder that increasing numbers of Americans see “democracy” as not an expression of their own social agency but rather as something alienating, outside their control and manipulated by the political establishment to meet the desired ends of the elites. It is something that is done to them. That narrow, contorted manifestation is not true democracy.
Democracy can’t be divorced from the question of collective power. For today’s political establishment, democratic practices, like elections, are mechanisms for legitimizing their own hold on society — serving to tame radical currents and channel popular energy into activities that reinforce the state and the vice grip of the political duopoly. If you have electoral rights, yet no real ability to challenge the status quo and effect social change, then you don’t have true democracy. This façade of democracy is dominant under capitalism. It serves to reinforce and reproduce the status quo: the hegemony of the ruling class over the rest of us.
In contrast, movement democracy involves ongoing collective engagement and action by community members to fight for the things they need without institutional gatekeeping. Movement democracy means scheduling meetings accessible to ordinary community members to actively solicit ideas from workers and tenants, create organizing spaces and resources for activists, formulate concrete demands, mobilize people around those demands, and ensure that campaign leaders are accountable to the community.
In early 2014, Seattle’s $15-minimum-wage movement committed to a ballot initiative if the City Council failed to act. The initiative strategy was debated and adopted democratically in a weekend assembly of hundreds of workers. The decision issued from that mass meeting proved decisive in forcing the political establishment to concede on $15.
Later, as chair of the City Council’s Renters Rights Committee, Sawant often scheduled evening meetings in working-class neighborhood community centers or in local churches so that more people could participate. By converting the council office into an organizing center, Sawant also ensured community activists had a place to meet and access resources like lists of allies, research materials, and printing and rally supplies. The movement’s “Tax Amazon” action conferences were attended by hundreds of people each with one vote, no matter their day job, union affiliation, or expertise. The democratic process instilled participants with a strong sense of ownership over the campaign. It showed the political establishment that Sawant was speaking not just as an individual elected official but for a broad, committed constituency.
This practice of working-class movement democracy is essential to revolutionary political struggle because only by building a mass base of support can workers wield the power they need to advance demands, win, and then enforce those victories.
True movement democracy also requires leadership accountability to rank-and-file activists. When Sawant first took office, many figures in the political establishment thought it was odd that she spoke typically in the first-person plural. She introduced bills as “our legislation” or “our movement’s demands” and referred frequently to “our council office.” For Sawant and the socialists, the council position was not a personal office, even though her name appeared on the ballot and on the office door frame. The office was an integral part of the working-class movement. It was the insurgency’s unwelcome presence inside enemy territory; she just happened to occupy it. Sawant was accountable to the movement, acting always as a representative of the organization that had led the insurgent election, Socialist Alternative, and more broadly, the working-class members who had elected her and who came together to make decisions on how to do battle.
When resistance seems futile, reformism becomes the easy way out
Activists might reasonably ask why Sawant’s Marxist insurgent politics haven’t been more widely adopted on the U.S. political Left. Challenging capitalism in the 21st century is certainly an intimidating task. Consider the systemic obstacles: the ruling class has a consolidated hold on power, much more so than in earlier days of capitalism’s development. Especially after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC decision opened the corporate cash spigots, the electoral arena is an extraordinarily challenging field of contest for political insurgencies. Bourgeois forms of governance are more mature — their architects having learned over the last century to hone the instruments of limited democracy while tightening the grip that elites hold on the actual levers of power. They have become more skilled than their predecessors at co-opting sections of the working class and dividing and sabotaging emerging movements.
The aura of political invincibility also reinforces today’s capitalist hegemony. The 1990–91 dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc removed a political counterweight and emboldened elites to insist that “there is no alternative” to capitalism, as the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once declared. Under today’s ascendant neoliberal ideology — and its latest iteration, Trump’s neofascism: the brazen fusing of big capital and government into a single hegemonic force — the ruling class has freed restraints on capital, slashed social spending, broken unions, and adeptly disciplined the working class through the manipulation of markets, public debt, trade policy, and interest rates. Racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia remain potent tools to divide workers. The mainstream media — increasingly corporate-controlled, and cowed by the new Trump era — is a reliable channel for reinforcing ruling class will and capitalist ideology.
Those obstacles explain why resistance to capitalism can seem futile — why so many political activists on the Left, like Mamdani, can give up on revolutionary politics, even as they acknowledge the mounting economic and climate crises. Indeed, reformism exerts a powerful gravitational pull precisely because of the severity of the global crises. By immersing themselves in campaigns that seek only incremental policy change, or by supporting DSA-endorsed Democrats, activists feel that they are at least doing something. This understandable impulse explains the meteoric rise of Left reformist politics in the last 10 years.
But this is precisely the same mistake that European socialist reform advocates made more than a century ago in the runup to World War I. Those forerunners insisted that they could successfully resist the imperial war drive while navigating within state parliaments. The reformers’ decision to work within the political confines of a system marching relentlessly toward global conflict had tragic consequences. Today, we face similar circumstances. By downplaying the central role of class conflict, Mamdani, AOC, Sanders, and other reformers are repeating this historic mistake.
Moreover, attempting to convince fellow working-class members that our best shot lies within the Democratic Party breeds discouragement and cynicism as transformational ideas get crushed time and again by Party leaders — or worse: Democratic leaders meekly protest while Trump attacks marginalized communities and worker rights. The Democratic political establishment is crystal clear about which side of the class struggle they take. “We’re capitalist. And that’s just the way it is,” Party leader Nancy Pelosi has declared.[17]
That is why inside-the-party initiatives by democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal — have gone nowhere, and why the bold ideas of aspiring progressives, like Chicago Mayor Bandon Johnson, wither and die. You simply cannot build an anti-capitalist movement within a capitalist party.
A century and a half ago, Marx and Engels observed that the Paris Commune failed to survive because, “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.”[18] Likewise, today’s reformist socialists are badly mistaken in thinking that somehow they can wrest control of the Democratic Party and wield it as a weapon for transformational change. They should take Pelosi’s statement at face value.
The way forward
To avoid that trap in New York and elsewhere, social movements must organize independently, guided by the three pillars of Marxist insurgent struggle. That means working in solidarity with reformist officeholders only when there is agreement on the demand and method of struggle, but being prepared to work apart from — and even in opposition to — those officeholders.
The movement-building work of the last year gives us a foundation. Neighborhood committees — such as those developed during Mamdani’s campaign and those fighting ICE in Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and elsewhere — can become the building blocks for citywide movements.[19] These city movements, in turn, combine to form the foundation of a national movement. One post-election suggestion from New York activists is a mass petition in support of public services.[20] Good idea, but this is only the start. We must think bigger: citywide marches that flood the streets with hundreds of thousands of workers taking the day off, occupations of state capitals — like Albany — until the politicians yield on local taxing authority, shutdowns of cities when Trump tries to send in his ICE thugs. Over time, escalating, disruptive strategies must create a political crisis for the elites and build fortifications against Trump’s war on immigrants and other marginalized communities. Such a program is not going to be developed inside the offices of reform socialists who have pivoted to work inside the political establishment. It must be built from the outside.
These outside movements also need to recalibrate the demands made during electoral campaigns. “Rent freeze!” was an important slogan, but it is hardly radical. Previous City Hall administrations enacted rent freezes in 2015,[21] 2016,[22] and 2020,[23] and rent controls apply only to four of every ten rental units in the city.[24] New York City renters need more than a freeze in the exorbitant cost of living — they need a rollback.
A socialist-led movement could demand a tax of billionaires to build social housing, or even public expropriation of major private residential landlords, especially those who control non-rent-stabilized homes. These profiteers are disproportionately responsible for New York’s soaring housing costs. If we believe that housing is a social right, then our demands must match that slogan.
During the mayoral campaign, the establishment press characterized Mamdani’s call for public groceries as radical. That is not true. Millions of members of the military and their families are intimately familiar with the idea, since they shop daily at on-base public commissaries that offer goods at prices 16–21% lower than Walmart, Albertson’s, and other private for-profit groceries.[25] Mamdani called for just one public grocery in each of the five boroughs — a drop in the bucket compared to the need for affordable food. A socialist-led movement must significantly up the demand.
Mamdani also has called for a $30 minimum wage in the city — but not until 2030. Los Angeles just approved a $30 minimum wage for tourism workers by 2028. Santa Fe, New Mexico just adopted a law tying minimum wages to local rental rates. Why not build a movement to demand $30 a lot sooner? To tie it to housing costs? At present, a $30 wage isn’t even enough for a single full-time worker to pay for an average New York City apartment today.
November’s elections gave Left social movements tremendous momentum. But Mamdani’s election was not a coronation. It was an expression of the deep and wide sentiment for big change. Radical grassroots movements must resist the gravitational pull of insider strategies. They must fight against the attraction of reformism, which will squander this new energy. The movement that made history in the 2025 elections must strike out in an independent direction — informed by the 10-year Seattle experience — to give us a fighting chance against the billionaires and Trump, and to build a truly democratic socialist movement in the U.S. |P
Jonathan Rosenblum is a member of the National Writers Union and author of We’re Coming For You And Your Rotten System: How Socialists Beat Amazon and Upended Big-City Politics (2025). He is a union organizer and a part-time Amazon delivery driver. Find out more about him at <jonathanrosenblum.org/>.
[1] New York City Democratic Socialists of America, “‘Socialism Wins’ – NYC Democratic Socialists Celebrate Historic Mamdani Victory” (November 4, 2025), <https://socialists.nyc/press-releases/socialism-wins-nyc-democratic-socialists-celebrate-historic-mamdani-victory/>.
[2] V. I. Lenin, “The State: A Product of the Irreconcilability of Class Antagonisms,” in The State and Revolution (1917), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch01.htm>.
[3] Katie Wilson, a self-described democratic socialist, was elected mayor of Seattle.
[4] Miranda Green “Ocasio-Cortez Joins Climate Change Sit-in at Pelosi’s Office,” The Hill (November 13, 2018), <https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/416411-youth-protestors-fill-nancy-pelosis-office-demanding-climate-change/>.
[5] Alex Thompson and Holly Otterbein, “The ‘new’ AOC divides the left,” Politico (March 30, 2020), <https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/city-hall/story/2020/03/30/the-new-aoc-divides-the-left-1269548>.
[6] Eliza Relman, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rejects left-wing calls to force Pelosi to hold a ‘Medicare for All’ vote in exchange for her vote for the speaker,” Business Insider (December 15, 2020), <https://www.businessinsider.com/aoc-rejects-left-wing-calls-to-force-pelosi-to-hold-medicare-for-all-vote-2020-12>.
[7] Zoe Strozewski, “AOC Votes to Avoid Railroad Strike After Telling Workers to ‘Stay Strong,’” Newsweek (November 30, 2022), <https://www.newsweek.com/aoc-among-democrats-vote-against-avoiding-railway-strike-1763645>.
[8] Edward-Isaac Dovere, “At raucous rally, Mamdani argues he’s leading a movement beyond the NYC mayor’s race,” CNN (October 15, 2025), <https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/13/politics/zohran-mamdani-rally-nyc-mayor-race>.
[9] Jonathan Rosenblum, We’re Coming for You and Your Rotten System: How Socialists Beat Amazon and Upended Big-City Politics (New York: OR Books, 2025), <https://orbooks.com/catalog/we-re-coming-for-you-and-your-rotten-system/>.
[10] Richard Lachmann, “Amazon Is Waging Class War,” Jacobin (February 20, 2019), <https://jacobin.com/2019/02/amazon-hq2-nyc-capital-strike-investment>.
[11] Seattle Office of Labor Standards, “Minimum Wage” <https://www.seattle.gov/laborstandards/ordinances/minimum-wage>.
[12] “Kshama Sawant for Congress,” <https://www.kshamasawant.org/>.
[13] Goldy, “Kshama Sawant to Take Home $40,000 in Pay out of her $117,000 City Council Salary,” The Stranger (January 27, 2014), <https://www.thestranger.com/blogs/2014/01/27/18772697/kshama-sawant-to-take-home-40000-in-pay-out-of-her-117000-city-council-salary>.
[14] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Bourgeois and Proletarians,” in The Communist Manifesto (1848), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm>.
[15] Rosa Luxemburg, “Conquest of Political Power,” in Reform or Revolution? (1900),<https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/ch08.htm>.
[16] Leon Trotsky, “The Objective Prerequisites for a Socialist Revolution,” in The Transitional Program, also known as The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International: The Mobilization of the Masses around Transitional Demands to Prepare the Conquest of Power (1938), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/>.
[17] Daniel Marans, “Why Nancy Pelosi’s Comments About Capitalism Disappointed Progressives,” HuffPost (February 1, 2017), <https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nancy-pelosi-town-hall-capitalism_n_58925a53e4b070cf8b807e28>.
[18] Karl Marx, “The Paris Commune,” in The Civil War in France (1871), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm>.
[19] Heather Schlitz, “‘We’re Not a Violent City’: Chicago’s Locals Take on ICE Block‑by‑Block,” HuffPost (November 2, 2025), <https://www.huffpost.com/entry/chicago-locals-take-on-ice-block_n_6907de1ae4b00afef15f36bb>.
[20] Eric Blanc, Emily Lemmerman, and Wen Zhuang, “Zohran Mamdani Is Winning the Battle. Here’s How He Can Win the War,” The Nation (August 28, 2025), <https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/zohran-mamdani-organizing-plan/>.
[21] “Rent Guidelines Board passes rent freeze on one‑year leases,” The Real Deal (June 30, 2015), <https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2015/06/30/rent-guidelines-board-passes-rent-freeze-on-one-year-leases/>.
[22] Brian Kaszuba, “Rent Guidelines Board Freezes One‑Year Leases for 2nd-Year in a Row,” CityLandNYC (June 29, 2016), <https://www.citylandnyc.org/rent-guidelines-board-freezes-one-year-leases-2nd-year-row/>.
[23] Angi Gonzalez, “Rent Guidelines Board Passes Rent Freeze,” NY1 (June 18, 2020), <https://ny1.com/housing/2020/06/18/rent-guidelines-board-passes-rent-freeze>.
[24] U.S. Census Bureau, “2023 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey: Selected Initial Findings” (February 4, 2024), <https://www.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdfs/about/2023-nychvs-selected-initial-findings.pdf>.
[25] Roddrick Johnson, “Study: 30 Percent Savings at Commissary? Um, No,” Military.com (September 21, 2015), <https://www.military.com/spousebuzz/blog/2015/09/study-30-percent-savings-at-commissary-um-no.html>.
