For a strategy of independence and mass struggle

I welcome Todd Chretien’s “Mamdani’s Fight is Our Fight” in response to my article, “After the Surreal Summit.” It is essential for the Left to openly debate our differences in all our publications. That way radicals can judge for themselves which arguments, strategies, and tactics are the best to advance our common struggle for reform and ultimately for winning a new socialist society.

Chretien, however, mischaracterizes my argument about Mamdani’s meeting with Trump. His objections to my categorization of Mamdani as a reformist are unconvincing. The label accurately describes Mamdani’s politics and strategy, and Chretien’s defense of them is equally unconvincing. His claim that Tempest cannot fight for Mamdani’s demands without embracing his electoralist strategy is groundless. As he knows, there is a long history of forces on the Left marching separately and striking together.

Tempest has argued for an alternative strategy of political independence from both capitalist parties and an emphasis on mass struggle. That, we contend, will be more effective in winning Mamdani’s demands, raising more radical ones, stopping Trump’s assault on workers and the oppressed, and strengthening the organizational capacity of the Left and the broader movement.

Stakes of the debate

The stakes of this debate are high. We are in the fight of our lives against the most authoritarian regime in U.S. history. Trump has launched a bigoted class war at home and threatens imperialist war abroad. In this moment of emergency, we need everyone from left wing politicians to unionists and movement activists to unite in escalating mass, disruptive protests and strikes to stop Trump and his clique of billionaires in their tracks.

This is not the time for conciliation with the monster in the White House, but implacable opposition. That’s why almost no one was happy with Zohran Mamdani’s chummy summit with Trump. Some liberals, who always counsel triangulation to the right on the grounds of pragmatism, celebrated it along with his conciliationist approach to the Democratic Party’s leadership, meetings with real estate capitalists, reappointment of New York’s billionaire police commissioner Jessica Tisch, and selection of business executives to his transition team.

Mamdani’s allies tried to justify his tactic in the meeting as a necessary defensive maneuver against Trump. It wasn’t. Other mayors have refused to meet with Trump, despite their dependence on the federal government for funds. Liberal mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu, declared “I’m not interested in a bromance with the federal regime,” contending that “flattery is not the way” to stop Trump. Chicago’s Brandon Johnson has instead called for a general strike.

Bhaskar Sunkara rightly argued against denouncing Mamdani’s meeting as “betrayal” and also against offering “uncritical defense” of it. He went on to warn of the dilemmas faced by “social democracy,” “reformism,” and “electoralism.” To see Mamdani’s meeting with Trump as a betrayal misunderstands the reformist and electoralist logic that led to the decision. The debate here is primarily strategic, not just moral. It is about how to organize to defeat the right and win reform.

Alternative strategy to reformism

In another piece in Jacobin, Sunkara called for connecting the fight against Trump and for Mamdani’s demands with the goal of socialism. On this we agree. However, Mamdani’s conciliationist approach to the Democrats, capitalists, and Trump weakens this effort. Ultimately, neither Sunkara nor Chretien offer a strategy to connect the fight for reforms to the struggle for socialism. That’s what Tempest has tried to do in a whole series of articles, including my piece “After the Surreal Summit,” and our most recent editorial, “After Mamdani.”

Mamdani’s conciliationism is the product of DSA’s reformist strategy. It advocates running candidates on the Democrat’s ballot line, winning elected office, using that position to transform the Democratic Party, and attempting to enact social change from within the capitalist state. But, once in office, their politicians find themselves not in a position of strength but weakness, boxed in by hostile Democrats and Republicans as well as the structural constraints of the capitalist state and economy.

In Mamdani’s case, he won a narrow victory against two far-right candidates, will enter a mayoral office dependent on a hostile political establishment in Albany, and will face intransigent opposition from Trump’s regime in DC. On top of that, New York City’s capitalist class, especially in today’s global economic slump, will do everything with its considerable might to neuter even the mildest reforms.

These realities have led Mamdani to curry favor with those who hold the real levers of political and economic power. That’s why he sought out the support of Democratic Party leadership like Hakeem Jeffries, who voted for the House resolution condemning the “horrors of socialism,” decided to reappoint Tisch, who is building a police state at the heart of the city’s government, and adopted a chummy approach to the meeting he set up with Trump.

However much we welcomed Mamdani’s victory, Tempest has argued that his reformist strategy is a trap that inevitably leads to conciliation with our class enemies, hampering our ability to win reforms, let alone socialism. Rosa Luxemburg laid out why in her classic book, Reform or Revolution, and her arguments have been confirmed by over 100 years of social democracy.

Missing the forest for the trees

In his response, Chretien largely downplays this strategic argument and makes a number of criticisms of my argument. First, he contends that I “painted a caricature” of Mamdani and mischaracterized his meeting with Trump. In fact, I did not focus on Mamdani as a politician but rather his strategy and how that led him to flatter Trump and promise they would work “together for the affordability agenda.” Chretien may not like my characterization of the meeting as “chummy” and “glad-handing,” but even the mainstream media used such words to describe their meeting. Clearly, Mamdani’s strategy was to charm Trump, not confront him.

Chretien also contends that Mamdani’s tactic for the meeting was smart and that it is comparable to the Bolshevik’s decision amidst the Russian Revolution to agree to the Brest Litovsk peace treaty with Germany to give the soviet government breathing room. Both claims are on shaky grounds, to say the least.

First, does anyone actually believe Chretien’s claim that Trump will be swayed by Mamdani and spare New York “even a couple of months of respite for his new administration to get down to work”? In reality, Trump is already attacking the city, staging ICE raids, subjecting its universities to a McCarthyite purge, stripping its federal workers of union rights, and imposing deep social spending cuts on its poor. And does anybody really think that Trump will not escalate these assaults if, in his view, Mamdani “goes too far” in enacting reforms?

Second, the analogy between Mamdani’s meeting with Trump and the Bolsheviks’ agreement to German terms in the Treaty of Brest Litovsk makes little sense. Mamdani is not faced with an imminent invasion to topple a revolutionary government from power. And he has certainly not followed the example set by the Bolsheviks during the peace negotiations when they repeatedly called for German troops and workers to overthrow the Kaiser’s state and replace it with a workers’ government.

Finally, Chretien claims that Mamdani did stand up to Trump in their meeting, saying, among other things, that Trump was a fascist. Here, Chretien misses the forest for the trees. The overwhelming character of the meeting was the striking congeniality between two politicians who everyone expected to be at each other’s throats.

Mamdani only called Trump a fascist in response to a reporter’s question, and did so after hesitating before proceeding with the wannabe dictator’s permission. Trump quipped, “Go ahead, I’ve been called far worse.” After the meeting, Mamdani reiterated that he thought Trump was a fascist but still promised to work with him on their shared affordability agenda. We need militant opposition, especially from left-wing politicians, not pledges of collaboration.

Reformist strategy, however rhetorically radical, is reformism

Chretien also challenges my characterization of Mamdani as a reformist and contends that DSA’s brand of democratic socialism is more fluid than that label allows. Unfortunately, here too, his arguments are unconvincing.

In reality, however radical Mamdani’s rhetoric has been, including at one point saying that he supported seizure of the means of production, his strategy is reformist in nature. His heroes are Fiorella La Guardia (not a socialist), Franklin Delano Roosevelt (an American aristocrat who boasted that he was the best friend the profit system ever had), and most importantly Bernie Sanders (who points to Scandinavian social democracy as his model of socialism). Like them, Mamdani’s strategy is winning office and using that position to enact social reform from above.

Such reformists and reformist parties can take radical-sounding positions. The British Labour Party—always a pale imitation of European social democracy and now a social liberal party—promised for decades to nationalize the commanding heights of the economy.

And most reformists express solidarity with class and social struggles (Biden even walked a picket line!). But they mainly focus on running for office and governing while triangulating to gain support from sections of the capitalist class, not organizing mass protests and strikes, and certainly not revolutions.

As for DSA, Tempest has always argued that there are many tendencies in the organization from revolutionaries, including our own members who are active in various chapters, to reformists and liberals. And we collaborate in joint work with these different strands all the time.

Nevertheless, DSA’s predominant strategy is running candidates in the Democratic Party and “building power” by winning elections to manage the capitalist state. Initially, there was a sharp debate over whether its goal was realignment of the Democratic Party (Michael Harrington’s old position), a dirty break after the accumulation of a sufficient number of electeds, or a surrogate party operating as a ginger group inside a capitalist party. That debate has been long forgotten.

Of course, DSA does more than run candidates; its chapters and members do all sorts of important work in unions and local movements. But its primary focus is on electoral efforts, which it uses to recruit new members, deepening the commitment to running candidates in a capitalist party as the organization’s top priority.

The high price of the reformist strategy

DSA’s reformist strategy can compromise class and social struggle in two key ways. First, Mamdani and other electeds incorporate union militants and activists into their transition teams and government bureaucracy. That leads activists away from struggle to provide advice, draft policy, and vainly try to implement it against the intransigent opposition of the two parties and behind them the capitalist class.

Once inside, they will be reluctant to criticize their elected leader and now boss. They will balk at raising more radical demands, let alone building struggle from below to win them. Even worse, they will justify compromises and even outright betrayals, fend off criticisms of them, and try to discipline the Left, unions, and social movements into accepting them.

This logic of allegiance to electeds has even led DSA to violate its own principles. For instance, it censured and shut down the BDS Working Group over its criticisms of former Congressman Jamaal Bowman for traveling to Israel, attacking BDS, and voting for Iron Dome. In that case, DSA put a politician before solidarity with Palestine.

Second, the electoralist strategy puts pressure on key militants to run for office, taking them out of movement organizing. In office, their time is gobbled up by largely fruitless parliamentary battles. We can ill afford to sacrifice such talent when we have only just begun rebuilding socialist organization, unions, and class struggle after decades of defeat. They are far more important on the ground, organizing protests and strikes. Their use of their elected position to express symbolic support for other comrades’ activism cannot make up for their absence from that organizing.

Against this argument, Chretien contends that the fight for elected office in a capitalist party is one with the struggle and can expand it. He claims that Mamdani has assembled “an army of 100,000 campaign volunteers … who are looking forward to a fight to” win his demands. Now, of course, this is an impressive number, but there is a big difference between an electoral canvassing operation and organized class and social struggle. Most of these volunteers are very new to politics, follow Mamdani’s lead, and in the absence of an alternative, will accept the compromises he has already made and, given his unfavorable balance of class power in the city, the many more he will be forced to make.

Contrary to the propaganda of the right-wing media, Mamdani’s call for supporters to join a new NGO, Our Time, instead of joining DSA, is a sign that his administration does not see transforming this “army” into one of socialist activists. More likely, it is an effort by the Democratic Party operatives around Mamdani to distance itself from the DSA, which many see as an electoral burden. However genuine, these campaign volunteers are not an insurgent movement.

The ominous precedent of Chicago’s Brandon Johnson

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s brief tenure is a cautionary tale. Unlike Mamdani, Johnson came to power based on the organized power of the Chicago Teachers Union, a union that has repeatedly struck and is at the forefront of organizing May Day Strong, the national coalition of labor unions building working class resistance to Trump.

But Johnson has been forced to compromise, even before the reelection of Trump, and failed to deliver on much of his program. As a result, he has seen his popularity collapse to the single digits, only to recover to 26 percent after he positioned himself against Trump. But even that high-water mark is incredibly low.

And far from pushing Johnson, the leaderships of CTU and most of the unions and social movements in the city view him as their leader and have doubled down on their support of his administration. Only some have become critical of it. The disorganization and demoralization of the city’s Left, unions, social movements, and the working class electorate risks opening the door for the Democratic Party establishment to dethrone Johnson and return to power, threatening to deepen the cycle of disorganization and demoralization.

This illustrates the impasse and traps of the reformist strategy. Its focus on elections in a capitalist party and incorporation of militants into electoral campaigns and government does, contrary to Chretien’s protestations, risk defanging the Left.

Setting us for cooptation and lesser evilism

Even worse, in the run-up to the 2026 midterms, Mamdani’s strategy makes the resistance vulnerable to co-optation by the Democratic Party establishment. It, along with its adjuncts in the trade union and NGO bureaucracy, are already arguing for activists to turn toward campaigning for their candidates in the midterm elections. Adept at outright trickery, the establishment will dress itself up in radical language. Even the arch-neoliberal, James Carville, now argues for the party to run on an affordability agenda, minus any commitment to social justice, and use it to retake the House and Senate in 2026 and the presidency in 2028.

As they have before, Sanders and AOC will endorse and campaign for Democrats, no matter how centrist and right-wing, contending that that is the only way to defeat the GOP and block Trump. Mamdani will likely join them. He has already opposed a primary challenge to Hakeem Jeffries and announced his support of Jeffries as House Majority Leader if the Democrats win back control of the chamber in the midterms. So, they will argue to hold our noses and vote for what we don’t want, the lesser evil, a collection of center-right national security moms and dads. We thus face an imminent danger of the Democrats hijacking the Left’s reformist electoral strategy for their own capitalist purposes.

If the Left falls for their trickery yet again, activists will end up diverting time, money, and energy away from building the resistance against Trump and into supporting a party whose capitalist policies have and will fail to address people’s real grievances. The Democrats’ failures and the Left’s refusal to build a radical alternative enabled Trump and the GOP to pose as the only opposition and sweep into power in 2024.

Do we really want to risk this yet again? It is high time to break this disastrous cycle. Regardless of what people do at the ballot box next year, we should strengthen the foundations for such an alternative and build mass disruptive resistance against Trump and, in New York, for Mamdani’s program

Compromises and compromises

Against my critique of the dead-end of reformism in a capitalist party, Chretien argues that Mamdani can fulfill his promises of free buses, free childcare, and rent freezes by pitting rival factions of the ruling class and establishment against one another. But Mamdani’s conciliationist approach to the Democrats, the capitalist class, and Trump illustrate not his room to maneuver but his entrapment even before he enters office.

Without mass struggle from below, the ruling class and its politicians will force Mamdani into ever more compromises. Chretien tries to justify the ones Mamdani has already made, like his chummy meeting with Trump, by pointing to compromises made by socialists in the past. He contends that Tempest’s critique of Mamdani’s compromises is a purist position. This really should not be the basis of the debate. All of us have read or should read Lenin’s Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder.

Of course, socialists need to make compromises, such as agreeing to union contracts with capitalists and participating in the electoral process. But there are compromises, and there are compromises. Some should be supported, and others rejected, based both on socialist principles and a concrete judgement about the particularities of each compromise. How, and in what way, do they help us strengthen our organizations and achieve our aims?

Chretien’s historical analogies don’t help us sort this out today. For instance, he points to Marx burying The Communist Manifesto in 1848 during that year’s revolutionary uprising in Germany. But Chretien’s example actually contradicts his whole argument. Marx later said that burial was their biggest mistake. He argued that socialists were wrong to surrender working-class independence, support the bourgeois parties, and refrain from pushing for more radical demands. He went on to contend that they should have fought to turn the bourgeois revolution into a proletarian one, to raise, in his words, the battle cry of “permanent revolution.”

I won’t belabor going through the other historical examples, which are either distorted accounts or simply not analogous to Mamdani’s compromises. And none of them help us to figure out how we, as revolutionaries, should approach reformist politicians inside a capitalist party elected into the capitalist state.

An alternative strategy for reform and revolution

Nevertheless, Chretien uses these historical precedents to contend that socialists should have endorsed, joined the Mamdani experiment, and campaigned for it. According to him, being inside this effort was and is the only way to defend the incoming mayor against Trump and fight for his demands. Further, he claims that Tempest’s critique of Mamdani’s strategy will lead us to abstain from that struggle.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Tempest embraced the enthusiasm of layers of working people for Mamdani’s campaign like we did for Sanders’ campaigns. We saw Mamdani’s victory as an expression of the underlying radicalization and waves of struggles that have swept the country since the Great Recession, from Occupy to the Red State Teachers Revolt, Me Too, Black Lives Matter, trans rights, the movement in solidarity with Palestine, and today’s resistance. Indeed, this radicalization and these movements are the precondition for all the Left’s electoral efforts.

It should be obvious that Tempest can recognize this, express sympathy, and at the same time reject the reformist strategy of electoral campaigns in a capitalist party. That is a compromise of class independence that Marx argued was a mistake in 1848 and would be so today; it not only fails to win reform, but it also reduces workers and the oppressed to an appendage of a party that enforces U.S. capitalism and imperialism. Remember, Biden committed genocide.

Making this argument does not lead Tempest to abstain from the struggle to win Mamdani’s demands. And contrary to Chretien’s claim, it does not place restrictions on how we participate that relegate us to the sidelines. In fact, our argument for a strategy of political independence and mass class and social struggle is the best way to push Mamdani to deliver, win his demands, raise more radical ones, and strengthen our collective organizations.

It also does not entail abstention from electoral politics. We support running socialist candidates on our own ballot lines. But we argue that such campaigns must not be viewed as the vehicle to win social reform, but as a means to raise mass consciousness, increase the combativity of workers and the oppressed, strengthen existing mass organizations, and forge new ones.

Those formations and the level of their militancy are the source of our power to win reform. That is the signal lesson of the 1930s and the 1960s. The working class’s mass, disruptive, illegal strikes built unions and won workers’ rights during the Depression and the Black Liberation Struggle’s mass, illegal protests smashed Jim Crow segregation, uncorking a whole wave of radicalization that culminated in mass working class struggle in the 1970s.

We must make organizing such struggles our strategic priority today. We need to organize mass direct actions against ICE like those in LA, Chicago, and New York, as well as strike schools to prepare for political strikes against Trump. To defeat his regime, we must not charm and conciliate him but make this country ungovernable.

Our strategy of political independence and mass struggle is also the best way to defend Mamdani, win his program, and prevent the co-optation of the Left by the Democrats, a capitalist party utterly committed to shoring up the status quo, not changing it. With such a strategy, we have the chance to unite forces to break from the Democratic Party and build a new workers’ party to fight for immediate demands on the road to political and social revolution.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”