For the Movement That Elected Zohran Mamdani, Now Comes the Hard Part

By electing Zohran Mamdani mayor, New York City made history. Now comes the hard part.

Holding political office is not the same thing as wielding political power—especially for the left. The CEOs of Blackrock, Vanguard, KKR, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs are not suddenly going to say, “OK, socialists, you won. Here are the keys to the city.” 

Mamdani won’t be successful on his own. The question is now: Will the nascent social movement behind Mamdani rise to meet the challenge? 

To win the bold demands that powered Mamdani’s campaign and to tap into the growing popular energy nationally, the emerging social movement must go on the offensive. The CEOs are already girding for class war over the campaign’s signature issues—taxing the rich, a rent freeze, universal childcare, fast and free buses, and public groceries. They don’t want to pay for these things, and they really don’t want to give up power and control of the city.

What we win in the end will be determined not by polling numbers or viral social media memes or a mayor friendly to socialist policies, but by the balance of forces between the social movement and our opponents. This requires mounting campaigns that go far beyond the traditional political advocacy of lobbying, petitions, and testimony. Just as unionized workers win demands by threatening to disrupt business with strikes, we will have to show our opponents that there is a cost to denying working people the campaign’s central demands. That means escalating toward large and disruptive actions, enough to shake the CEOs and the political establishment into making concessions.

For anyone who has been involved in organizing a union before, the big-business assault on Mamdani so far has been familiar: intimidation, co-optation, outright lying, and division. But the reaction now will be orders of magnitude greater than any union-busting campaign.

CEOs and billionaires—and the media beholden to them—are already stoking fear and anxiety with the specter of capital strikes and capital flight. “If Mamdani becomes the mayor of New York, you’re going to see the flight of businesses from New York,” predicted billionaire hedge fund executive Bill Ackman after Mamdani’s primary win. “Billionaire CEO warns he’ll close grocery stores if democratic socialist candidate wins NYC mayor race,” blared a post-primary Fox News headline. 

Democratic Party leaders, while temporarily stunned by the movement’s strength, will recover their footing and work tirelessly to buy off, divert, and stymie the burgeoning socialist energy. Governor Kathy Hochul, even while endorsing Mamdani, has laid down her political marker: no new taxes on the rich—in direct opposition to Mamdani’s core platform.

And then there’s Trump. In the coming months—and maybe much sooner—Trump likely will deploy the National Guard in New York City and cut off federal funding.

But if we anticipate the coming reactions, we can properly prepare, organize, and fight back.

My new book, We’re Coming for You and Your Rotten System: How Socialists Beat Amazon and Upended Big-City Politics, chronicles how movements led by Kshama Sawant, a socialist who held one seat in a nine-member city council in Seattle, won transformative victories over the course of a decade. I worked in her council office for most of that time, when we passed the first-ever tax on Amazon to build social housing (beating Amazon’s capital strike threat), became first big city to win a $15-an-hour minimum wage (going in January to $21.30 an hour), strengthened renters’ rights, increased abortion and mental health care funding, banned caste discrimination, funded LGBTQ youth services, and more. Sawant won reelection three times, defeating the combined forces of the political establishment and Amazon, Starbucks, Microsoft, Expedia, global financiers, and developers.

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 other politicians.

Our movement was led by Sawant, a Marxist, and the political organization she belonged to, Socialist Alternative. Sawant saw her political role as being a shop steward for the working class. She held herself accountable to people in the streets, not in the suites. 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. 

First, we recognized that political struggle is class struggle. The people’s interests are fundamentally in conflict with the interests of big business and billionaires. We understood that socialists and our ideas were not welcome inside the halls of power, that political office did not provide some genteel space where earnest persuasion and lobbying could win the day. Rather, the state apparatus—the executive and legislative branches of governments, the bureaucracy, the courts, and the police, along with adjacent institutions including the media and mainstream political parties—upholds and reproduces the capitalist status quo. Rules like limits on local taxing authority are the political instruments through which economic elites maintain and reinforce their domination and control. 

That’s why we recognized that to achieve anything we had to reject a traditional political role and instead use our socialist office to build mass movements strong enough to force political concessions.

Our second principle was advancing bold material demands, explicitly connected to the call for broader societal change. The demands that Mamdani has championed—a freeze on rent, taxes on the rich, fast and free buses—are good examples, though he should go even further. In Seattle, we saw how working people alienated by mainstream politics will get engaged when they see a movement that speaks to their material needs, explains the underlying problem, and provides a course of action. This helps explain why an astounding 90,000 people volunteered for Mamdani’s campaign.

Bold demands also are important for us as socialists, because through the fight, we educate the broader community about capitalism’s inability to meet society’s basic needs. Demands and the campaigns for them can underscore why we must build movements not just for reform but for systemic change. We should push for a rent freeze, absolutely, but that should be a step toward kicking out big landlords to make housing a human right, not a commodity.

The third principle that we practiced was popular democracy—the ongoing engagement of community members in setting demands and deciding strategy. Sawant and Socialist Alternative invited community members into forums where they would discuss and decide what demands to place before City Council and how to wage the fights. The $15 minimum wage and the Amazon tax strategies were developed through neighborhood and citywide meetings, culminating in mass meetings of hundreds of workers. We organized popular assemblies for tenants’ rights, LGBTQ rights, and a ceasefire in Gaza. We took over City Council meetings with hundreds of people.

To put those three principles into action required an organization—and one that wasn’t the Democratic Party. During the 10 years that Sawant was in office, that organization was Socialist Alternative. The movement backing Sawant recognized that the 50-year neoliberal project is bipartisan. The federal minimum wage hasn’t budged in 16 years, even when Democrats controlled Congress and the White House. When Democrats held Congress, they failed to enshrine women’s reproductive rights or improve labor law. No matter which party is in power, military budgets soar, social benefits get cut, genocide and imperial wars carry on, and racist police killings continue. 

Today, 60 percent of Americans say that neither the Democrats nor Republicans represent them and that a new political party is needed. It’s been at that level for the last dozen years. Among adults under 50, support for a new party is even higher—70 percent. 

Many activists backing socialists and other progressives for office today want to believe that we can change the Democratic Party from within. For most of my life, I believed that, too. But we need to be clear-eyed about what the Democratic Party is. As Nancy Pelosi said in 2017, “We’re capitalist. And that’s just the way it is.” That’s why inside-the-party initiatives by democratic socialists Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—including Medicare for All and the Green New Deal—have languished in the Democrats’ legislative dungeon.

You cannot build an anti-capitalist movement within a capitalist party, which is why it is a problem that Mamdani has adopted this same insider approach.

To press the movement’s demands, like a rent freeze, universal affordable childcare, and fast and free buses, “New Yorkers will need to learn and organize independently of Mamdani, the Democratic mayor,” noted Hakan Yilmaz of the Tempest NYC Organizing Committee.

If we were a union in a workplace following an election victory, we’d be recruiting to expand our organizing committees, department by department. We’d have an escalating plan of action—steps to build worker confidence and project our power. And we’d be building toward strike action, because ultimately to move the boss, you must be prepared to disrupt and shut down the business.

Going up against today’s fusion of the billionaire class, government, and outright fascists, we must build movements along those same lines. Neighborhood committees—such as those developed during Mamdani’s campaign and those fighting ICE in Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere—should become the building blocks for citywide movements. These city movements, in turn, combine to form the foundation of a national movement. As we build capacity and demand economic justice and civil liberty for all, we must develop escalating strategies that point toward disruption: strikes that create a political crisis for the elites and that build fortifications against Trump’s war on immigrants and other marginalized communities. 

One idea from activists is a mass petition in support of public services. Good, but only a start. We should think bigger: citywide marches on Inauguration Day 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. Where we have the capacity, we should launch coordinated strikes and nonviolent civil disobedience.

If this sounds like rule-breaking, it is; the rules are designed for workers to lose. The 2018 West Virginia educators strike was an illegal strike, and it ignited a national Red for Ed movement that inspired other law-breaking walkouts. Civil rights were won by defying racist laws. The 1930s New Deal advances came not through Franklin Roosevelt’s munificence but because of massive, disruptive workplace occupations, strikes, and marches. 

For a present-day example, look to the general strike just last month of 2 million Italian workers, who, defying threats of fines and criminal penalties, shut down the country in solidarity with the Gaza aid flotilla and forced the right-wing government of Giorgia Meloni to tighten weapons exports to Israel. 

Today, social movements in the United States lack the organizational strength, political acuity, and experience to mobilize that level of disruption. Union density, for example, is three times higher in Italy than it is in the United States, and the Italians have much more experience flexing the strike muscle. But that militancy exists within our collective past: Think of the civil rights movement that broke Jim Crow laws or the mass worker uprisings of the 1930s that won us Social Security, labor rights, minimum wages, and millions of public works jobs. We must forge ahead with urgency toward this ambitious vision.

Seattle is not New York, but the principles of class struggle, bold demands, and popular democracy, backed by strong organization, are on the mark, because the underlying dynamics of political struggle are the same anywhere that capitalism rules. 

This week’s elections give left social movements tremendous momentum. But they also place us at a crossroads: If movements try once again to work within the political establishment, they will squander their energy. The movement behind Mamdani should strike out in a new, independent direction to give us a fighting chance against the billionaires and Trump.