- by A Carruthers
- The Guardian
- Issue #2173
Zohran Mamdani. Photo: Karamccurdy – wikimedia.org (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Undoubtedly Mamdani’s victory over Cuomo to take the mayorship of New York City is progress, and the joy and momentum from it should be relished and exploited to the hilt. However there are two question marks that need addressing.
Mamdani has accused Cuba of being a “dictatorship” yet Cuba has precisely delivered on most, if not all, of the policies Mamdani espouses. Cuba has revolutionised home ownership and communal aid, delivered on healthcare, education. It has done this through the tried-and-tested organisational ability of the Communist Party of Cuba and the famous Committees for the Defence of the Revolution and other community groups.
It has even done so under the boot of a crushing US embargo. Mamdani can sign documents and make decrees, but to carry out these policies requires personnel. Mamdani doesn’t have that. In the US there is this idea that the leader that is voted in can just snap their fingers and deliver on policies. But enacting policies requires people. NYC, and the US in general, is disorganised and does not believe in local committees or even an organised political force like a Communist Party and local revolutionary committees.
Socialist democracy is not just top down. It’s also bottom up. Authority from above is complemented from below. So how Mamdani can actually carry forward these policies is anyone’s guess. His approach in a sense is too dictatorial; as if policies of top-down state welfare alone can fix it.
Public ownership and state-led works are good. If Mamdani can implement his policies in this area, it will be a step forward for NYC residents. However, to pull it off, Mamdani will need people in the billionaire class, like Governor Kathy Hochul, to sign off on legislation. In countries like Cuba and China, billionaires are often getting in trouble with the government, thus the government “cracks down” on capital expansion and even jails, or executes billionaires.
As a ‘democratic’ socialist operating in the US Mamdani can’t just pursue no-tolerance policies for billionaires. Yet precisely for him to succeed he will need to neutralise the power of the billionaire class and assert the role of the state in allocating funding for working-class policies. He will need to control the means of legislation.
Unfortunately given how Mamdani interprets democracy, it is unlikely that he will pursue a full-scale corruption crackdown. In Brazil this was carried out for Bolsonaro, who is now serving a lengthy jail term. Mamdani does not have that kind of working-class power over the billionaire class.
We will be wishing Mamdani all the best. He has a massive task ahead of him. But to summarise, he will need to deliver. He will need to establish from existing networks local committees and create new mass working groups to organise and sharpen the delivery of policies.
He will need to assert control over the state and over the means of legislation, rather than trusting the ‘democracy’ of the US system. Only when the working class forces assert power over the state can it bend it towards the people and establish a true socialist democracy.
The United States is not a democracy. It’s a dictatorship, a brutal dictatorship of the billionaire class. We wish Mamdani all the best in building momentum over time to overthrow this class.
