This article is written by a Left Voice member in a response to the guest piece “Rank Zohran Mamdani — Not Because He’s Perfect, but Because We’re Strategic.” Left Voice encourages more submissions of guest posts to use our pages as a place of debate for the broader Left. 

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Zohran Mamdani, New York City mayoral prospect and democratic socialist, regularly attends pro-Palestine actions and supports the BDS movement. His politics towards Palestine are far more progressive than his electoral opponents and most of the Democratic Party — and for this, he has been maligned as an antisemite. He also faces Islamophobic attacks, including death threats, for his religion and his political stances. We as the movement for Palestine and as leftists must wholly denounce these disgusting attacks and stand at his defense against them. At the same time, it is important that we dialogue with his politics to strengthen an independent left and movements of the working class and oppressed. 

Recently, when asked if Israel had a right to exist during the debates, he answered yes and added, “As a state with equal rights,” when asked if it should exist as a Jewish state. This is a leading question, with a Zionist intent, to shift attention away from the brutal genocide perpetrated by the Israeli state against the Palestinian people. This question and the answers from the other candidates only highlights the strength of Zionism within the Democratic Party. 

Andrew Cuomo, who is the mayoral frontrunner, is a Zionist Democrat who was forced to resign for being accused of sexually harassing 13 women. His redemption campaign for mayor is heavily funded by billionaires, including staunch Zionists like Bill Ackman, and landlords, so he is clearly positioned against the movement for Palestine and working-class New Yorkers. Cuomo has even gone as far as to join the legal defense team for Benjamin Netanyahu over his war crimes in Gaza, while Mamdani discusses equal rights for Palestinians and rent freezes for New Yorkers. The contrast between the two is striking.

With that said, many in the Palestine movement are questioning Mamdani’s support for the state of Israel. Here is one pro-Palestine activist questioning him on his stance on Israel:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJ9U66tRHtK/?igsh=M3YwOTdza2ZlN2dj

Some arguments in defense of Mamdani’s statement suggest he made it to get elected but does not genuinely believe it. The article “Rank Zohran Mamdani — Not Because He’s Perfect, but Because We’re Strategic” criticizes disillusioned sectors of Mamdani’s pro-Palestine base as political purists who prefer principle over leverage. But it is not purist to be against politics that contradict the desire of our movement; dampening our message in hopes of greater leverage in the Democratic Party is the party’s playbook to co-opt movements. 

Mamdani Is Saving the Face of the Democratic Party

Mamdani’s candidacy represents a shifting consciousness of the masses to the left. Like the campaigns of Bernie Sanders or the Squad, it illustrates the Democratic Party being used as a vehicle for change by progressives this shift, stemming from a massive rejection of the status quo and a demand for more progressive politics. Sanders was the response to the movement emerging from Occupy; Mamdani is the response to the movement emerging from the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, the growing labor movement, and the pro-Palestine movement. As leftists, we welcome this leftward shift and the opportunity to discuss, debate, and take the streets with all those voting for Mamdani.

But as was the case with the Sanders phenomenon, Mamdani, as a Democratic politician, serves as the progressive face that draws the masses back into a party that has funded and supported the genocide in Gaza, while offering nothing to working-class people. Mamdani’s canvassers are registering people for the Democratic Party just as it is in the midst of a major crisis and has faced harsh criticism over support for Israel and its failure to improve living conditions. 

This is  the party of Cuomo, and Mamdani is building up hope that the Democrats can be a party of the working class and oppressed. This isn’t because Mamdani is some scheming villain aiming to deceive us all. Rather, his strategy, representing the strategy of some sectors of DSA, attempts to build power within the Democratic Party apparatus instead of building an independent mass movement, making him more accountable to the will of the capitalists than to the fighting masses.

The 2020 Sanders campaign is instructive. Although Sanders was a Democrat, the coalition of wealthy donors and interest groups that make up the DNC fought him tooth and nail, and rallied behind Clinton as a means of maintaining the status quo and countering the progressive phenomenon embodied by Sanders’s campaign.

A similar situation occurred in the 2020 primaries, in which Sanders’s revamped campaign, which initially appeared to have a chance of winning, was undermined when the Democratic Party had all other candidates drop out and endorse Biden to counter the progressive momentum. Through this maneuvering by the party, Sanders transitioned from an expression of the social movements and leftward moving youth to Biden’s assistant — someone who declared he was willing to “work with” Trump and to ignore the calls for ceasefire in Gaza for months after the genocide began.

What does this tell us about the Zohran campaign? The Democratic Party, run by capital, will operate in the interest of capital; that is why it aggressively disciplines progressive candidates — even if their program is already conciliatory. After seeing this twice with Sanders on a much larger stage, we have already witnessed it with Mamdani attesting to the occupation’s “right to exist” for votes — a concession to U.S. imperialism and settler colonialism — and modifying his previous stance on police to seem less radical.

In the first primary debate, Mamdani was clear on maintaining the headcount of NYPD officers. He also stated in the second debate and on Subway Takes that he would not defund the police, asserting that “police have a vital role to play” as they are currently cracking down on the movements for immigrant rights and against the genocide in Gaza. The “vital” role police play for capital is to protect it by repressing working-class movements. This is not a strategic adaptation but a concession of the movement’s combative politics for the sake of an electoral seat and political survival within the Democratic Party.

Build a Movement, Build a Party

The role that electoral politics must play in fighting for socialism is to put forward candidates with the purpose of building current movements in the schools, streets, and workplaces, using the electoral stage to elevate its demands and rally more support around the movement under a class-independent program that fights for socialism. Short of this, we are engaging in a gradient of lesser evilism, which leads to capital co-opting our movements, as we saw with Sanders, who has affirmed repeatedly that Israel has a “right to defend itself” as it carried out countless atrocities and who still fails to call the situation in Gaza by its true name, a genocide. 

The Democratic Party will never break from its support of Israel, because this ironclad relationship is in its imperialist interest. This is why, as socialists and internationalists, we do not vote for those aligned with capital, based on the repeatedly exposed illusion that this creates more optimal conditions for our struggle. Instead, we dedicate our time, energy, and socialist optimism to building an independent working-class party whose candidates do not waver from the position of the masses. We want to discuss such a project with Zohran Mamdani’s voters, and that’s why this debate on our pages is so important. 

Let’s consider real-life phenomena we are witnessing and enrich our vision with revolutionary imagination. We saw Los Angeles communities explode in direct confrontation with the state to defend their members from ICE, forcing Trump to back down from brazen attacks on workplaces composed of migrants. We are also witnessing both small and massive mobilizations across the country, the likes of which freed Kilmar Armando Abrego García and Mahmoud Khalil. We are watching these mobilizations continue in small towns and big cities, denouncing the various attacks by Trump on the working class, both domestically and abroad. 

These points of struggle form the foundation of not only a powerful movement that can fight for concessions but also a revolutionary party that can coordinate those struggles into a broader one. By learning from these experiences — through the trial and error of successes and failures — we can develop a fighting program to end capitalism and imperialism. But if we acquiesce to electoral pressures, sacrificing the goals our movement fights for, we relinquish the hope of winning a world we aspire to for the sake of an electoral seat.

This is how we will combat the growing Right; it is how we will win housing for all; it is how we will free Palestine; it is the driving force behind our fight to end exploitation and oppression. 

We, as socialists and fighters within the movement for our planet and our lives, must not sacrifice the struggle for co-optation and the convenience of an electoral seat. Rather, let us use these seats as a means to grow our powerful movement into an unstoppable force that can win a world that is justly and collectively ours.