by DSA Must Fight for Independent Class Politics
Comrade Zohran Kwame Mamdani has won an electrifying victory in the New York City mayoral election, sending hated ex-governor Andrew Cuomo back to Westchester and scoring over a million votes in a campaign rooted in working-class needs. That an open democratic socialist will take the reins of executive power in the heart of world capitalism is a significant defeat for the ruling class.
Over a hundred thousand New Yorkers joined the largest volunteer operation in NYC history, knocking three million doors and making over a million phone calls in order to move the campaign from the realm of obscurity to the doors of City Hall. The existence of a mass layer of newly-organized activists holds incredible potential for the growth of the socialist and working-class movement.
Zohran’s victory in the face of an immense offensive of red-baiting and racist hysteria has sent a political shockwave across the country. The capitalist media and political class have tried to attack him on precisely the issues that shape his mass appeal, from his open identity as a socialist to his opposition to the genocide in Gaza, and are now reeling on the back foot. Zohran’s campaign has seen NYC-DSA double in size and has helped to extend the nationwide growth and renewal of DSA over the past year. NYC-DSA’s role as a powerful local force in one of the most important cities in the world is an inspiring example for those now entering our movement.
This victory is only the beginning. Incredible challenges await the socialist and working-class movement in New York and beyond. Zohran will continue to face stiff resistance from the ruling class in the battle to win the campaign’s reformist agenda, and will have to navigate the unfamiliar terrain of executive office. This resistance will create significant pressures on the administration and on NYC-DSA. To win a rent freeze, universal childcare, fast and free buses and more will require us to embark on the road not of capitulation but of class struggle. We need a mass campaigning approach rooted in independent class organization and a strong, democratic DSA.
Socialist Leadership Scores the Win
It is no secret that NYC-DSA was able to win this campaign on the basis of the army of volunteers we were able to build. The case of Zohran’s campaign seems to have the bourgeois pundits stumped. How could they explain the immense scale of enthusiasm and commitment necessary for people to show up, day in and day out, often in entirely different neighborhoods from the one in which they live? This difficult, patient spadework is completely outside their vocabulary. Some said it was social media savvy, others the need for social connection in a post-pandemic world, and in some cases slick merch and participatory games. In reality, it was class interest, patient organizing, and socialist leadership. A hundred thousand people believed in this campaign and were willing to fight for it. That’s something the analysts and consultants can’t package up and sell, and that scares them.
NYC-DSA has been at the forefront of DSA’s electoral project over the past decade, from early experiments like Jabari Brisport’s 2017 campaign on the Green Party ticket to Julia Salazar’s victory in 2018 and repeated slates of candidates for state and city office in subsequent years. This persistence, merged with increasing levels of cohesion in political identity and activity in office, has given the chapter a high level of experience running field-driven campaigns, including the sophisticated data and logistics operation necessary to make extremely targeted interventions. Through just shy of a decade of consistent organizing by a dedicated core of activists, socialists have redrawn the entire electoral landscape of New York City!
But it’s not just skill and efficiency, it’s the organization of purpose.
NYC-DSA members serving as field leads were able to seamlessly weave the why of the campaign into canvasser trainings, linking the reasons volunteers were there to the necessity of face-to-face conversations with their neighbors. In this campaign, doors were not simply a place to collect voter data, but a site to conduct organizing 1-on-1s that often recruited new volunteers, many of whom went on to become field leads themselves. Post-canvass debrief socials became a space for participatory discussion around what spurred people to become politically active, what challenges we were facing on the campaign trail and would face if we won, and why volunteers should take the next step and join DSA. On top of that, weekly canvasses were an important site of local community that’s often hard to find in NYC, with many friendships forming among weekly regulars.
It was a self-replicating, outward-facing, irrefutably human model of organization. And it worked. Fresh off the back of Zohran’s victory, NYC-DSA could make an incredible contribution to the strengthening of our movement by working with our National Electoral Committee and other bodies to convey the lessons learned on this campaign and spread best practices. Concretely, this could look like a more comprehensive set of trainings for chapter leaders across the country.
By applying both the outward-facing and backend lessons from the Zohran campaign, DSA can pursue the goal of electing a hundred more socialists from coast to coast!
The Debate in DSA
One of many incredible things about Zohran’s campaign is how it brought together NYC-DSA members across political differences into a common, transformative project. The work our comrades have put in together as a unified force with a shared goal has seen NYC-DSA double in size, something we should all be proud of.
NYC-DSA has been the subject of intense, necessary debates about the role of DSA within and beyond Zohran’s campaign. How do we navigate the constraints of executive office? When and why should we make concessions? What do we do if and when Zohran makes mistakes? These are all questions that require clear answers, and working through them together is a key part of how we consolidate our strategic orientation.
Even before the campaign was completed, this debate came to a head at an October 14 citywide meeting called by chapter leadership for the stated purpose of discussing DSA’s tasks regarding Zohran. Unfortunately, the function of this meeting was to push through two resolutions supported by NYC-DSA’s Steering Committee and sent out to membership just a week beforehand, with no room for amendments and members’ votes non-binding. The purpose of the main resolution, regarding NYC-DSA’s orientation to a Zohran administration, was to essentially sideline the role of deliberation and criticism and consolidate the chapter around winning the important, but limited demands in Zohran’s program.
Positive dissent is the lifeblood of our organization’s democracy. We in Reform & Revolution were proud to take part in a cross-caucus intervention at the meeting to encourage a No vote on the two resolutions and ask comrades in attendance to sign a petition to call a Special Meeting for a member-led discussion on these issues, an intervention which did result in changes to the text of the resolutions.
One thing that was missing, however, was a clear strategic vision. Opposition comrades spoke clearly and passionately about the need for member-led constructive criticism regarding our electeds, the need for more spaces for meaningful participation in decision-making generally, and their frustrations with public concessions Zohran’s campaign has made on Palestine and policing. But organizational questions are political questions, and vice-versa. In our view, the discussion would’ve benefitted from a clearer systematic critique of the strategy pursued by our current leadership, which the limitations to NYC-DSA’s internal democracy are a reflection of. If we are to win NYC-DSA’s mass membership, let alone the wider working class, to a different course then we have to lay out that alternative in an effective and actionable way.
A Road Forward
Zohran’s victory has activated thousands and inspired millions. This political moment is a key opportunity that cannot be abdicated by retreating into class-collaborationism on the one hand or sectarianism on the other. Instead, in New York City we need to consolidate DSA and the wider movement around a mass campaign to win the Affordability Agenda and a push to expand the independent working-class organization necessary to consolidate and defend the social gains and political space the campaign has opened up.
It will be crucial to keep the 100,000+ volunteers organized by the campaign engaged through key opportunities like NYC-DSA’s Tax The Rich (TTR) campaign, vital to raise the necessary funds for our core demands, and campaigns for State Assembly which will expand the bloc of socialist legislators in Albany who can reliably support Zohran. Efforts should also be made to recruit as many of these volunteers and field leads as possible into DSA and to expand spaces for participation in branches and working groups.
A new development is the launch of Our Time, a “new organization building on the grassroots momentum of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign to deliver on the promise of a more affordable New York City.” Explicitly not a membership organization and including NYC-DSA members in its leadership, Our Time appears similar in character to the “Movement for an Affordable New York” recently proposed by Eric Blanc and others as a permanent mass campaigning body parallel to (but not replacing) DSA. It will be important for NYC-DSA members to have a visible role in supporting Our Time, especially if it assumes the role of a primary space by which Zohran’s wider base of volunteers and supporters stay engaged. Socialists must act as bold and unapologetic mass leaders, foregrounding our politics not as a philosophical commitment but as the means by which victories are won.
The demands raised by this campaign are effective instruments not just for policy victories but to carry into other struggles. With Eric Adams considering packing the Rent Guidelines Board on his way out, the fight to win a rent freeze can be an important starting point for organizing conversations with fellow tenants, and winning Zohran’s plan for tenant protections will be a key terrain of struggle and provide tenant organizers with much more leverage over landlords if won. Crucially, taking housing out of the hands of slumlords and into public hands will be an opportunity to fight for greater tenant control of expropriated buildings, and the tenant movement should also keep productive pressure on the new administration to ensure new development is not just affordable but social housing.
In the labor movement, Zohran’s win provides an important opening for a push to organize delivery workers to win campaign planks around safety, pay, and job security. Plans to increase the minimum wage can be a springboard to reach other precarious and under-organized sections of the working class, such as fast food workers, part-timers, and more. Labor organizers should also fight to ensure Zohran challenges and refuses to enforce New York’s anti-union Taylor Law which acts as a muzzle on powerful unions such as the UFT teachers, AFSCME DC 37 civil servants, PSC-CUNY, and TWU Local 100. The social power of the organized working class is the number one weapon available to win Zohran’s agenda and to defend New York City against Trump’s threats and ICE raids. Many union tops backed Cuomo in the primary, some kept doing so into the general. Should the bureaucrats try to line workers up to support any attempts to sabotage the fight for key demands, socialists and labor militants must fight to throw them out and put the rank-and-file in the driver’s seat!
In Gracie Mansion more than ever, there are going to be limits on what Zohran can say and do. Therefore it’s imperative that NYC-DSA be unwavering in our abolitionist and internationalist commitments. We will need to fight to build mass support to disband the hated Strategic Response Group, establish the Department of Community Safety, divest from Israeli occupation, and end arms shipments. To retreat from the fight against police terror and imperialist war won’t help Zohran, just discredit the name of socialism and DSA.
Similarly, it will be crucial to ensure there are transparent mechanisms for communication between the administration and DSA and spaces for members to have constructive discussions about how things are going. To be effective leaders themselves, NYC-DSA members must hold political agency. A lack of transparency and avenues for feedback will allow for any justifiable frustration which may develop in response to compromises or mistakes to boil over into unproductive and disorganizing convulsions.
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This political earthquake is an immense opening for DSA and the movement as a whole. What began as an attempt to force conversation around the affordability crisis and raise DSA’s public profile has become a historic moment. Our adversaries in the fight for working-class material gains include the NYPD, Wall Street, and the White House. More than likely the administration will face internal sabotage as well. There are powerful forces arrayed against us, but they are not unstoppable. We proved that on November 4th. Our ability to win rests on whether we continue to empower working-class people to become organizers—to join with their neighbors and coworkers in becoming a political and social force which acts in its own name and doesn’t ask for permission. The socialist electoral project must join with and reflect that force. Zohran is only the beginning. We have a world to win.
April Miller is a member of North Brooklyn DSA and Reform & Revolution and a field lead for the Zohran Mamdani campaign. She previously worked as chair of the Olympia DSA Labor Working Group and Field Director for the Robert Vanderpool and Caleb Gieger campaigns for Olympia City Council.
Alex Rivera
Alex Rivera is a Peruvian immigrant and NYC-DSA member serving a second term on the Central Brooklyn Organizing Committee and the Electoral Working Group. He is also a member of Reform & Revolution Caucus.
