The Mamdani moment

“Improbable” doesn’t quite capture the political significance of Zohran Mamdani becoming mayor-elect of New York City. The left is not supposed to win capitalist elections, at least not big ones like this. And not in America, where corporate power’s grip on politics is more vice-like than anywhere else on Earth.

Yet, while his victories this year might appear to be something out of the blue—and at odds with the triumphant moment the right is having, which is reshaping the US and much of Europe—this moment has been building for some time. A decade ago, we wrote in these pages of the insurgent US presidential primary campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who, like Mamdani, was running on a democratic socialist platform:

“Something is happening in the United States. The political landscape is being transformed, though just how widely, deeply or permanently is still unclear ... It seems improbable that [Sanders] will defeat the machine of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ... But even if he ultimately fails, you get the sense that a genie has been let out of a bottle. The genie is not Sanders himself ... but the sentiment that he has tapped ...

“Anger with the economic and political system has found a left-wing electoral expression, which is unlike anything seen in the US in generations. Whether it can be cohered into a movement to rebuild the left is another question. But there definitely is hope that it might.”

Ultimately, the Sanders insurgency was unsuccessful. In the following years, the senator went on to betray the aspirations that he stoked, and the revolutionary left imploded just as it might have seized the moment to build something independent of the Democratic Party. These are cautionary tales for the Mamdani moment.

Nevertheless, the broad shift in consciousness has continued. It was evident at the end of 2015 and became clearer as the presidential primaries unfolded the following year. The political establishments of both the Democrats and the Republicans were facing significant blowback from their left and right bases, respectively.

Since then, the political polarisation in the United States and elsewhere has intensified, although it has been expressed somewhat asymmetrically; at least in the electoral sphere, the far right has made most of the running. That’s reflected in its leaders’ surnames gaining worldwide recognition: Trump, Meloni, Modi, Farage, Le Pen, Wilders, Milei.

Everywhere, far-right organisations have been bankrolled by billionaires and masses of smaller capitalists while receiving free and positive publicity from sections of the reactionary corporate media. They have built a base among the personnel of the repressive arms of the state, such as the police and the military, and more broadly among the population by dishonestly selling their reactionary pro-capitalist programs as some form of “people power”.

New York has now kicked back. Young working-class people have reacted to the consolidation of Trumpism, to ongoing economic hardship, to the new holocaust in Gaza, to the victimisation of undocumented migrants and the Gestapo-like raids being carried out across the country, and to the capitalist establishment’s complicity in it all.

A member of the Democratic Socialists is about to take the reins of global finance’s most important city. A Palestine solidarity activist who rejects the idea of a Jewish state has succeeded in the heart of liberal Zionism. A 34-year-old who said that billionaires shouldn’t exist has won the metropolis that is home to the most billionaires on the planet.

However, the main thing is that Mamdani’s victory came on the back of more than 100,000 volunteers and the city’s largest voter turnout in over half a century. This astonishing mobilisation reflects a very positive shift in political consciousness.

Most of the mainstream commentary, naturally, focuses on Mamdani himself—his political talents, his campaigning acumen and his identity. From the left, numerous criticisms can and should be made of his increasing embrace of the establishment that he purports to oppose. Some of these were foreshadowed in the Red Flag editorial following his victory in the primaries. Lance Selfa, writing from Chicago, outlines the subsequent developments.

Nevertheless, this is a moment to grasp—New York has electrified people across the globe because they can see an alternative to the status quo in a world that is totally stacked against us. Increasingly over the last decade or so, that alternative has been given a name: “socialism”. This sea change in sensibilities is astounding. From a ridiculed word, it has again become the menace of the political right and the hope of millions.

That is something to be built on.