Organizing for reform and socialism in the Mamdani era

Socialists shouldn’t force reality to fit our theory. If some new development casts doubt on an element of political analysis that served us for many years, then we should reconsider the analysis—both its continued strengths and relevance and the weaknesses that require new thinking.

The election of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani and his inauguration as New York City mayor present the left with just such a challenge: to think imaginatively about how to understand this political moment and how to better contribute to a stronger left and working class movement. This article first takes issue with Ashley Smith’s formulations and statements in a recent Tempest article about Mamdani and DSA and his subsequent response to Todd Chretien’s reply. I’ll then consider some strategic assumptions that Smith and I shared ten years ago about socialists, the Democratic Party, and organizing to win reforms under capitalism.

In his articles, Smith repeatedly labels Mamdani as a “conciliationist.” Is that accurate? I’m betting most of you reading this started paying serious attention to Mamdani (as I did) when he was smeared as an antisemite for opposing Israel’s genocide and defending Palestine. This was supposed to destroy his campaign, but Mamdani not only refused to retreat, he became a national voice defending opposition to genocide. A good stance on one issue doesn’t prove that Mamdani won’t conciliate on others. But I think it shows the actual political figure is more complicated than Smith’s repeated generalization. (I’m finishing this article just after Mamdani’s inauguration, a day of remarkable actions and statements that are the opposite of conciliatory.)

In similar fashion, Smith tells us that “most of [the 100,000 campaign 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.” This is condescending and ill-informed. Are the young activists against genocide in Gaza who worked for Zohran “new to politics”? Did their support for the campaign turn them into dupes? Should we assume the immigrant community organizers from Desis Rising Up & Moving will just “follow Mamdani’s lead,” no matter what?

And what about the initial core of the campaign: NYC-DSA, of which Mamdani has been a member for nearly a decade? It doesn’t seem fair to describe the organization as “very new to politics.” According to Smith, DSA has a “reformist strategy” (his hyperlink for that phrase, which supposedly defines DSA, goes to a 32-year-old article) that “advocates running candidates on the Democrats’ ballot line, winning elected office, using that position to transform the Democratic Party, and attempting to enact social change from within the capitalist state.” As a member of DSA, I’d take issue, to some degree, with every part of this statement. Smith has created a caricature that no one in today’s DSA would recognize.

It’s perhaps telling that the only DSA members or Mamdani supporters whom Smith quoted in his response were Todd Chretien and Bhaskar Sunkara (and their writings are, on any fair reading, at odds with Smith’s depiction of DSA politics). When I followed many of the links in Smith’s reply, I found they went to the New York Times, USA Today, Politico, and, yes, even Fox News. Fortunately, a number of left publications (see this, this, this, this, and this, for starters) can give us a better understanding of the campaign.

What I took from these articles and interviews and from discussions with comrades is that the people who volunteered for Mamdani are not a faceless army with few political ideas of their own who will just follow the leader. If you listen to the cadre of the campaign, you learn that some had disagreements with Mamdani or DSA and found ways to raise them while still working together. When they saw weaknesses in the campaign’s strategy and organizing, they took the initiative to do things differently. One of the most hopeful things for me was learning how individuals and groups were preparing for the fight after the election (see this, this, this, and this).

My point is that winning any part of the agenda Mamdani articulated depends not only on him but on these individuals and organizations, connected in the first instance by their participation in the campaign. Do these ties—to each other and to the new Mamdani administration—need to be cut for the left to fight for a reform agenda? Smith believes this is a necessary condition for exerting pressure on Mamdani through “independent” mass struggle. I disagree. I think the left will be more effective in building the movement we all agree is necessary by starting with the connections and alliances made during the campaign. There will be debates about priorities and how to organize, about whether Mamdani should be criticized or whether he took the best course he could under the circumstances. That’s to be expected in any living movement. And also like any movement, it’s better if socialists are involved organically, not setting themselves apart from it.

The origin of Smith and Chretien’s exchange was Mamdani’s White House meeting with Trump, and I wholeheartedly agree with both that it was “surreal.” I think this was one time when Zohran’s unflappable good nature didn’t serve him as well—when it would have been nice to see a little fire (which he’s certainly capable of).

Still, I don’t agree with Smith’s characterization that the Oval Office visit was aimed at “conciliating” Trump. Mamdani didn’t reverse any position that I’m aware of. As Chretien wrote, “If sidestepping verbal fireworks in the Oval Office wins a couple months’ respite for his new administration to get down to work, it’s a reasonable gambit.” On balance, this seems to have worked so far. More importantly, when the war on New York City does escalate, Trump’s bizarre admiration for Mamdani a few months earlier will help undercut whatever unhinged hate he spews.

But let’s consider what Smith thinks Mamdani should have done. He approvingly quotes liberal Boston Mayor Michelle Lu rejecting a “bromance” with Trump and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson calling for a “general strike.” Smith’s preferred script for the meeting shows the limitations of what he thinks could be accomplished. For him, electoral campaigns are predominantly propagandistic, useful in raising socialist politics in a hostile arena and contributing to further class organization. As he puts it, “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.”

First, does Smith’s use of “we” mean he is speaking for the Tempest Collective? I was under the impression that Tempest members were debating some of these questions—in the case of Brandon Johnson’s CTU-backed campaign, for example. Also, is Tempest currently committed to any campaigns run on independent ballot lines? Or is this an aspiration?

I think Mamdani, DSA, and others on the left have a different approach that deserves to be understood as more than “conciliationism.” In sum, running socialist candidates can do other things Smith advocates and be a vehicle to win social reform—not the vehicle, not even the most important vehicle (depending on the individual), but a vehicle nonetheless.

If running for an elected office and holding one can be more than a platform for propaganda and party-building, then questions of strategy need to come into play. To start with, someone like Mamdani has to think about how to win over a wider audience. That means articulating an agenda in ways that engage and activate people who may be attracted to some socialist ideas but not the full program. As Ramsin Canon wrote in the Socialist Call, “The worst mistake you can make when you’re facing down the forces standing in the way of your agenda is to misunderstand the nature and strength of the forces backing you up.…[D]o not make the mistake of confusing people who voted against your opponent for the people who voted for your vision. The latter group you should be able to rely on; the former group you still need to win over.”

Despite being elected to the most powerful office any US socialist has ever held, the constraints on Mamdani are massive: the hostility of the capitalists; an inevitable conflict with a slumping-toward-fascism federal government; a Democratic Party establishment, in control of the state government, hoping to undercut him; and, above all, a working class that may have elected Mamdani but isn’t yet prepared and mobilized for the fight that it will take to win his program. Accomplishing something in these circumstances requires not just good politics but strategy: deciding when to make a compromise; when and on what issues to advance and when to retreat; when to pick a fight and when to avoid one until your side is strong enough to win it, etc.

On this latter point, Mamdani’s decision to reappoint Eric Adams’ police commissioner, the billionaire Jessica Tisch, may come back to haunt him. But is it really just “curry[ing] favor with those who hold the real levers of political and economic power” as part of a strategy “that inevitably leads to conciliation with our class enemies”? Or can it be understood as a strategic decision not to pick a difficult fight for now (one not likely to do more in the near term than install a different figurehead without changing anything about the NYPD)? Maybe Mamdani should have fired Tisch anyway. But the debate about that should acknowledge that Mamdani is facing many battles at once, and his other actions—his first-day executive orders, his cabinet appointees, his inauguration speech—point in a different direction than “conciliation.”

It is now ten years since Bernie Sanders’ first campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, followed by the election of AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and many more socialists and leftists at the local, state, and federal level—running mostly, but not always, on a Democratic Party ballot line. Meanwhile, DSA has become the largest socialist organization in the US in many years. Smith is at pains to insist that they are merely beneficiaries of an “underlying radicalization and waves of struggle” since the Great Recession. But after ten years, I think it’s fair to say that the electeds and DSA have contributed to that radicalization—especially some of its organizational form and the socialist and class language it wouldn’t have otherwise.

My question is this: Is it now necessary to reconsider any part of the analysis that Smith and I shared a decade ago? In 2016, that analysis would have warned that campaigns within the Democratic Party would fail; that left candidates and their supporters would be co-opted into a subservient relationship to the party apparatus; and that DSA would be drawn to the right by the Democrats’ “gravitational pull,” becoming a tame junior partner.

Smith’s articles about Mamdani contain all these same warnings in nearly unchanged form. But do they provide an accurate assessment upon which to build a strategy? I don’t think so.

First, left campaigns using the Democratic ballot line haven’t all failed. They haven’t all won either, but the win-loss percentage isn’t bad, and Mamdani’s victory is the most impressive yet. This doesn’t mean the end of the Democrats or the two-party system, but it does mean there are fissures at the top on a different scale from ten years ago.

Second, left candidates and their supporters haven’t become universally co-opted and subservient within the Democratic Party. AOC may have gone the furthest down this road, although her importance as an oppositional figure in national politics can’t be dismissed. But it’s hard to see why “co-opted” should be applied to other electeds like Rashida Tlaib.

I think Smith is on pretty weak ground in trying to show Mamdani’s co-optation in the making. Was “[opposing] a primary challenge to Hakeem Jeffries” a show of deference to the party establishment? Mamdani attended an NYC-DSA forum in mid-November to oppose the chapter endorsing a primary campaign against Jeffries by City Council member Chi Ossé. This intervention was part of an intense debate in the chapter, and while the final vote went against endorsement, the margin was close. I know of comrades on both sides. I think I probably would have voted “yes” if I was in the chapter, but I also think Mamdani and his supporters made a case I can defend: that NYC-DSA shouldn’t devote a significant part of its limited resources to an unlikely campaign by someone who had just joined DSA, when it could work on other efforts that were strategically more likely to help win the reforms he campaigned on.

As for the supporters of these candidates, from Bernie to Zohran, I don’t see the evidence that they have been, on the whole, co-opted and made more subservient to the Democratic Party. On the contrary, I think the people drawn to these campaigns are more likely, not less so, to see themselves as opposed to the Democratic Party and in favor of an alternative. That alternative isn’t universally understood as an independent working class party, though it is for more people than Smith would acknowledge. But to put the immediate question starkly: Does anyone seriously believe that Mamdani supporters have become more susceptible to Chuck Schumer as a result of the campaign?

Lastly, I likewise don’t believe that DSA has been pulled to the right, at least in general terms. It’s telling that Smith has to reach back to the Jamaal Bowman controversy—specifically the disbanding of a national working group four years ago—as evidence of the organization’s “allegiance to electeds” over socialist principles. Whatever you think about that conflict, it doesn’t, by itself, define DSA four years later. To consider a more prominent question of “allegiance to electeds”: both Sanders and AOC urged a vote for Biden in 2020 and Harris in 2024. DSA notably did not. I certainly have disagreements with my DSA comrades, but Smith’s one-sided generalizations don’t do justice to the organization.

None of us would have expected questions like these ten years ago. I must have written a hundred times over the years about how the “gravitational pull” of the Democratic Party inevitably sucks in leftists who get too close. That may have been true in the past, but I think the force at work now and since 2016 is centrifugal, not gravitational. The socialist and left campaigns using the Democratic ballot line have had a polarizing effect, drawing a wide layer of what could be considered the Democratic base further to the left. And not just temporarily. Whatever criticisms you have of it, the 90,000-strong DSA is evidence that participation in or sympathy with left electoral campaigns—not only those, of course, but electoral questions are the focus of this discussion—has won significant numbers of people to an organization explicitly opposed to the Democrats and committed to the goal of an independent working class party.

I agree with Chretien that Smith’s case for “independence and mass struggle” puts too many restrictions on how to build a movement to fight for the Mamdani agenda. “Restrictions” aren’t the same thing as “prohibitions.” I’m confident that comrades in New York City Tempest and around the country will engage, individually and as a collective, with all the struggles for change they can. But as a small organization, Tempest’s profile is mainly defined by the politics expressed on its website. In my opinion, the website’s articles on Mamdani and DSA seek primarily to set apart and differentiate, rather than to engage, with common struggle as the aim. The unfortunate result of articles like Ashley’s is that the organization as a whole has gotten a reputation for being one-sided critics on these questions.

I agree in general terms with a lot of what Smith writes about the Democratic Party, the state under capitalism, the pressures on elected officials, the threat of the far right today, etc. That is common ground for us—and also, to a greater extent than Smith acknowledges, for most members of DSA and many supporters of the Mamdani campaign (even Mamdani himself to a great extent). I think Smith and other Tempest comrades have a lot to offer in the fights to come, including socialist electoral campaigns—all the more so if they are able to see themselves as organic participants in the movement, and not set apart from it. But I will also say, based on my own experiences and conclusions, that the last ten years of left electoral work and the rise of DSA have offered me something in return: the opportunity to reconsider the strengths and weaknesses of previous ideas and approaches by learning from a living movement.