Bourgeois newspapers everywhere have generated stories about the narrow victories of two members of the Democratic Socialists of America, along with a former member, in Democratic Party primary elections in New York City June 23. All were endorsed by DSA member and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Middle-class radicals hailed the result, claiming a gigantic shift in politics was underway, while President Donald Trump claimed the vote represented a resurgence of the “communist menace.”
What is really going on?
Much of the liberal press has anointed Mamdani as the Democrats’ new “kingmaker” after his endorsement boosted the campaigns of Claire Valdez, Darializa Chevalier and Brad Lander, the former DSA member. They all present plans to try to make capitalism “work,” rather than to organize working people ourselves to fight for what we need.
The key to the appeal of these candidates to the middle-class left is their stance on one issue — opposition to the existence of Israel. Chevalier, for example, attended a pro-Hamas rally in New York on Oct. 8, 2023, just one day after Hamas death squads systematically carried out the worst pogrom since the Holocaust, killing some 1,200 people, overwhelmingly Jews. Subsequently, Chevalier joined an encampment at Columbia University in 2024 where pro-Hamas groups spread Jew-hatred and harassed and intimidated Jewish students.
Denouncing Israel, the only country that provides Jews with an unconditional refuge, was a litmus test in all three races. During the campaign, Mamdani repeated age-old antisemitic slurs, accusing rival politicians who support the existence of Israel of being “dark money monsters.”
Chevalier defeated incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th Congressional District, focusing on the charge he “takes AIPAC money.” AIPAC is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
The election results did not represent a significant political shift. Only 17% of registered Democrats in New York City voted in the primaries. Most working people saw no wing of the Democratic Party offering anything to address the social catastrophe workers face today. Nor any answer to the escalating conflicts among capitalist powers worldwide that are driving toward a new world war. The vast majority stayed home.
All together the DSA-backed candidates got votes from 3.5% of registered Democrats, a tiny sliver, and mostly from better-off middle-class neighborhoods, like Manhattan’s Upper West Side, gentrified areas in Harlem, Greenwich Village and Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and Park Slope.
The DSA won these primaries by getting out the vote by appealing to aspiring meritocratic layers who fear a worsening of the capitalist crisis will push them down into the working class — a class they disdain and fear. Their candidates emphasized appealing to those they’ve led to back Jew-hating “pro-Palestine” actions to support them at the ballot box.
Lander said it made him “queasy” to denounce AIPAC, “given the antisemitic tropes at play here about Jews and money and power.” Nonetheless, he said, “I have to.”
Yes, he did if he wanted the DSA’s backing. Lander’s opponent, Congressman Dan Goldman, was subjected to anti-Jewish protests from the owner of Poetica Coffee shop in Brooklyn who said the café made a major mistake to serve him and should have refused because he supported the existence of Israel. Unlike Lander, Goldman refused to cave in to the blood libel.
The DSA and its backers are wrong. The key question facing the working class is not eliminating Jews from the face of the earth. Finding a road to unify the working class to fight effectively against Jew-hatred and today’s growing capitalist crisis and wars is what is decisive.
Election results were starkly different in the district covering the working-class south and west Bronx where Rep. Ritchie Torres, a pro-Israel Democrat, trounced opponent Michael Blake in the primary. Blake had highlighted his support for Mamdani and his opposition to Israel’s war to defend its existence.
Any notion that the DSA is leading a “communist resurgence” is as false as the claim the primary results represented a surge in support for the DSA. Despite Trump’s smears against “communism” and columns in the New York Post run under a “Hot to Trotsky” banner, the DSA is focused on dragging working people into looking to one of the two main parties that uphold capitalist exploitation, as does Trump’s MAGA supporters.
But today both of these parties face a serious challenge. After decades of steady decline, fewer than 65% of voters are registered as either Democrat or Republican, the smallest number in at least 90 years. Millions of workers and farmers, facing worsening working and living conditions, are open to looking elsewhere. They see no serious answers to what they face coming from the bosses’ parties, MAGA Republicans or DSAers.
One response by all wings of the Democrats and Republicans is making it harder for working-class parties like the Socialist Workers Party to get on the ballot.
I encourage working people to join those of us organizing independently of the bosses’ two-party shell game. It’s only after we break with all shades of the Democrats and Republicans that working people will have our hands free to fight for what we need.
Workers don’t have to start from scratch. My party, the Socialist Workers Party, fights to organize the working class to take political power into its own hands, to end a world where profits for the ruling rich and their meritocratic hangers-on determine all politics, and to join working people worldwide to transform the world.