SWP candidate Paul Mailhot in New York: ‘All political questions are class questions’
NEW YORK — World media attention has been focused on the Democratic Party’s bourgeois socialist candidate for New York City mayor, 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani, since he won the party’s primary June 24. He’s considered a sure bet to win the general election Nov. 4.
Some in ruling-class circles are expressing trepidation about Mamdani becoming mayor. “NYC Developers Gripped by Hysteria After Mamdani’s Sudden Rise,” was a Wall Street Journal headline two days after the primary.
Mamdani “is running to be a reformer and better manager of capitalism. He offers little more than empty promises to fix an unfixable system,” Paul Mailhot, the Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor, told the Militant in a June 30 interview. “Mamdani’s campaign seeks to rebuild confidence in the Democratic Party, a bosses’ party and dead end for working people.
“My campaign builds solidarity with working-class struggles, wherever working people are acting in their own interests, which are the interests of the vast majority of humanity,” Mailhot said. What’s decisive is “recognizing that only the working class is capable of effectively fighting to end the source of the degrading economic and social conditions we face — the capitalist profit system. To do that the working class has to act independently of the capitalist politicians and parties workers and our unions are currently tied to, and struggle to take political power into our own hands.”
Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and an elected New York State Assemblyman, defeated disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary. He’ll face current Democratic Party Mayor Eric Adams, who is running as an independent, and Republican Curtis Sliwa, head of the Guardian Angels, in the November election for mayor of the city that’s both the financial capital of the world and home to millions of workers.
“The working class does have a socialist voice in this election. It’s the Socialist Workers Party campaign,” Mailhot said.
Among the proposals touted by Mamdani are a rent freeze, free bus rides and child care, and city-run grocery stores he says will ease the growing burdens working people face. He says a 2% tax hike on the wealthy will cover this.
“His campaign appears to address problems working people face,” Mailhot said, pointing out that the median cost of a one-bedroom apartment in the city is now $4,500 a month. Overall food costs have soared by more than 56% over the last decade. Drug addiction and homelessness are at crisis levels. “But his liberal promises of relief are a band-aid and siphon the energy and attention of those interested in resolving these problems.”
“The SWP campaign is not centered on a ‘better’ set of proposals for how to reform capitalism,” Mailhot said, “it is to change which class rules.
“Real politics isn’t a battle of ideas, but a class struggle. The working class needs to develop class consciousness. By that I mean recognizing ourselves as an international class whose interests are diametrically opposed to the bosses and their government.
“My campaign points to the need for our unions to back amnesty for immigrant workers without papers in order to unify working people to better be able to organize. For a public works program to provide jobs at union-scale wages. Cost-of-living adjustments in all wage, pensions and benefit contracts so that workers are protected from rising prices.”
Politicians like Mamdani represent an upper-middle-class meritocratic layer that attempts to divide working people along racial lines. His program calls for taxing “homes in richer and whiter neighborhoods.”
New York City has a sizable African American population, Mailhot pointed out, who have suffered a disproportionate share of the setbacks all workers have faced in recent decades. “The potential for the working class to overcome racist divisions and fight together has been shown many times over past decades, a lasting legacy of the Black-led movement that tore down Jim Crow segregation and other struggles. What Mamdani advances is a direct attack on that fighting potential.
“His politics demobilize and divide working people, fostering resentment against so-called better-off whites. Working people can’t advance our struggle based on resentment. Our power is in our ability to win solidarity and build the unity of our class.”
High rents and housing shortages are no accident under capitalism. “Landlords put a premium on building luxury apartments — which rake in more profits — rather than affordable decent housing that workers need,” Mailhot said. Only through the struggle to end the profit system can that be changed.
Fight against Jew-hatred
“Mamdani’s justifications for Jew-hating violence are a danger for the working class that must be taken on,” Mailhot said, calling attention to Mamdani’s statement after Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre.
“On Oct. 8, 2023, a day after the worst pogrom since the Nazi Holocaust, Mamdani said he ‘mourns the hundreds of people killed across Israel and Palestine in the last 36 hours.’ But this was not killing in the abstract. It was the targeted killing of Jews by Hamas, with one aim, the destruction of Israel,” Mailhot said.
“Mamdani’s support for the slogan ‘globalize the intifada’ glorifies the suicide bombings directed at killing Israeli citizens — Jews and Arabs alike — by the hundreds that took place in the early 2000s.
“The recent firebombing of Jews in Boulder, Colorado, the killing of two staffers of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., who were assumed to be Jewish, and the attack on the home of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro are only the most recent results of those forces in the U.S. that call for Israel’s destruction. “The SWP joins fights against Jew-hatred and defends the existence of Israel as a refuge for the Jews,” Mailhot said, as part of its internationalist course to strengthen working people on the road to taking power from the capitalists.
“The operation of capitalism, with its unceasing drive to maximize profits, pushes the world economy into crisis, spurs rightist movements, incites the scapegoating of Jews, and ultimately drags working people into worldwide wars,” Mailhot said.
“Capitalist rule seeks to place the whole burden of militarism, economic downturns with their twin scourges of unemployment and high prices, and social catastrophes onto the backs of working people,” he said.
“The Socialist Workers Party demands and fights for employment and a decent living for all. We invite workers who want to fight for a better world to help spread the word about our working-class campaign, and to join the Socialist Workers Party on the front lines of the coming class battles.”