Mamdani aims to suck workers back into the Democratic Party
NEW YORK — Amid growing national and international attention focused on the 2025 New York City elections, there’s only one candidate for mayor offering a working-class road forward, that’s Paul Mailhot, running on the Socialist Workers Party ticket.
Despite the pledges of each of the other three candidates to “serve all New Yorkers,” in fact, if elected, they’ll serve the interests of the wealthy ruling capitalist families.
Zohran Mamdani, the front-runner, calls himself a socialist. He’s the nominee of the Democratic Party, the oldest capitalist party in the United States and one of the major imperialist parties in the world.
Democrat Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York, is now running as an “independent” after losing the Democratic primary to Mamdani. Cuomo’s policies during the pandemic emptied hospitals of elderly patients with COVID, shipping them to nursing homes, with deadly consequences.
Curtis Sliwa is the nominee of the imperialist rulers’ other main party, the Republicans. He is the founder of the vigilante group the Guardian Angels.
“The proposals espoused by Mamdani, Cuomo and Sliwa hide the fact that behind the big challenges workers face today — from deteriorating economic and social conditions to the rise in Jew-hatred and the threat of another world war — is a crisis of the capitalist profit system that the three of them defend,” Mailhot told the Militant.
Mamdani’s signature proposals would temporarily freeze rent for some New York families, provide free bus rides, and set up a handful of city-run grocery stores. “Working people don’t see these ideas as having an impact on the key issues they and their families face,” Mailhot said.
“Lack of jobs on the one hand, and rising prices on the other, are hitting workers hard,” Mailhot said. “There is no way to reform capitalism into a system that benefits working people.”
We can counter the consequences of the capitalist crisis, Mailhot said, “through a fight led by the unions for a public works program to provide jobs to fill social needs — at union-scale wages — and cost-of-living adjustments to protect wages and benefits from inflation. Instead of layoffs, we fight to cut the workweek to 30 hours at 40 hours pay, with no cut in take-home pay, to spread the jobs available around.”
The Labor Department reported in September that annual inflation rose 3%, less than what economists expected. “But for workers any further rise in food, gas, child care, and housing is a crisis,” Mailhot said.
“Workers we talk with welcome the discussion about our socialist program, not just because it makes sense in today’s world, but because the only way to move forward is to rely on ourselves and each other,” the SWP candidate said. “They like the coverage in the Militant about union struggles, fights against deportations of immigrant workers.”
Mamdani has received massive media attention, in part because he has affixed a socialist label to his Democratic Party campaign. However, as the elections get closer, Mamdani reassures the owners of banking and industry he is a reliable defender of capitalist rule.
Mamdani advances Jew-hatred
Mamdani shares the Jew-hatred, however veiled, that is increasingly common among the middle-class and “woke” left he is a part of. His campaign has more deeply normalized Jew-hatred in mainstream capitalist politics.
In his statement on the second anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom killing 1,200 Jews and others in Israel, Mamdani claimed Israel’s defensive struggle to prevent another Holocaust is a “genocidal war.” He used the anniversary of Hamas’ massacre to promote the lie that Israel is an “apartheid” state. His response to rising incidents of Jew-hatred is to attack the existence of the only country that unconditionally offers Jews a refuge.
In response to the likelihood of a Mamdani electoral victory, more than 1,000 Jewish rabbis signed a statement noting the danger of “rising anti-Zionism and its political normalization.” The petition is a call to support another of the capitalist candidates in the election.
“But relying on other Democratic and Republican politicians is no solution. Lesser-evil politics is a dead-end,” Mailhot said. “The only force that can truly end Jew-hatred is the working class, as part of the struggle to emancipate itself from the shackles of capitalist exploitation and oppression, which is the root cause of antisemitism and all forms of discrimination based on nationality.”
‘Rehabilitating’ Democratic Party
While millions of workers are disillusioned with the bosses’ parties, Mamdani joins Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America in trying to shore up support for the Democratic Party, with the enthusiastic backing of Stalinist currents and the middle-class left.
Mamdani claims his campaign drew some 37,000 people to register to vote in the Democratic Party primary in the 14 days leading up to the deadline.
Soon after the primary elections the Democratic Party leadership threw its backing behind Mamdani. “In these times, the Democratic Party needs to stick together with the maximum solidarity and focus,” Mamdani said. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul endorsed him and big-business figures are acclimating to his likely election.
Mamdani held an “intimate gathering” with the president of the Real Estate Board of New York, which represents the city’s biggest landlords, the New York Times reports.
“Workers and young people looking for socialist solutions to the crisis of capitalism won’t find them in the Mamdani campaign,” Mailhot said.
“To the workers and young people we talk with about our election campaign, we emphasize it will be through revolutionary struggles involving working people in their millions that humanity is going to march forward to a world where people can really live together on this planet in peace and in security and with freedom,” said Mailhot. “The toiling majority will finally realize the type of rewarding life human intelligence and labor is so abundantly capable of producing. That is what the Socialist Workers Party dedicates itself to.
“To those who want to fight for a better world, we invite you to take your place in the front ranks of these struggles. There is no better way in which you can find so rewarding, and so purposeful, a life.”