Zohran’s Win: Can We Build a Socialist Future?

Zohran Mamdani’s victory has sparked rigorous debate among the left on the future of our movement. This win has garnered an array of reactions, from celebrating the dawn of the NYC Soviet to denouncing him as a social fascist. Both of those extreme reactions are inadequate. We must be clear-eyed in charting out avenues for and dangers to the movement at this time and see what implications his campaign has for a left-electoral analysis that goes even further. I write this as an outsider to the campaign, and an outsider to New York City. I hope this will give me the distance to moor my analysis, which we must begin by understanding the Marxist theory of bourgeois-democracy and electoral participation, before moving into a class analysis of Zohran’s campaign and primary victory. 

The Structure of Participation in Bourgeois Government

In his work dissecting liberal rights and Jewish emancipation, On the Jewish Question, Marx argues the broad structure of bourgeois-democracy alienates the core elements of human life – class relations, the family, sexuality, one’s occupation – from the political sphere. Under the European feudal system, one’s role in the estate, as a serf or landlord or free laborer, determined one’s political relationship to the state. The dawn of capitalism and formation of liberal-democratic and republican states now meant that, proletarian or capitalist, individuals participated in electing individuals as abstract political subjects. This hid from view class, race, and patriarchy – everyone is “equal” in the political sphere. For Marx, political man is an “artificial man,” whereby his species-being, or man as embedded in collective society, became non-political; including, of course, the market relations that govern his social-metabolism.¹²

Under this framework, the path for socialist participation in bourgeois democracy has always been fraught with structural issues that have led to failure time and time again. In his article Historical Social Democracy, political scientist Adam Przeworski tries to lay out structural reasons for this – which is all too often attributed to personal faults or moral failures. Although this focuses on the experience of Anglo-European social-democracy, it is emblematic of bourgeois democratic systems at large. I will summarize his most important points below:³

1. Class relations in the electoral sphere become structured by representation, whereby defending proletarian class interests is delegated to leaders. Hence, masses become entangled in the war of individual personalities, which has a long-term demobilizing effect on direct class struggle. No longer will the workers win socialism through their own actions and deeds, but the voice and votes of leaders.
2. Electoralism foreclosed alternative, and potentially successful, tactics. The decline in the use of sustained mass strikes coincided with the liberalization that allowed open socialist activity. Whilst previously a commonly used tactic in the 19th century, as socialist parties joined parliament the electoral repercussions of such sustained strikes largely made parties abandon them as a tactic in favor of continuing to win narrow electoral gains. Parties must be ‘responsible’ and ‘constitutional’ to maintain face.
3. Electoral politics is a game of majorities. Socialists thus have a choice: maintain their class commitments but face parliamentary marginalization, or build cross-class alliances to win a majority, particularly with elements of the petit-bourgeois and intelligentsia, that have a moderating influence on their maximal goals. Even if socialists opt for the first option, there is not necessarily anything stopping such a party from being reduced to simply fighting for a bigger slice of the pie of total social product within a capitalist framework, than the overthrow of capitalism altogether. Class struggle becomes de-emphasized in favor of a politics of the whole, undifferentiated, ‘people.’

At the heart of these issues is the tension between the minimal and maximal goals of socialist parties, or the relationship between the immediate struggle for reform and the long-term vision of proletarian revolution. As British historian E.H. Carr of the Soviet Union writes in Vol. 2 of his magnum opus The Bolshevik Revolution:

“One of the unforeseen effects of this division [between the minimum and maximum program] was to attract into social-democratic parties a large body of members who by conviction or temperament were more interested in the minimum than in the maximum programme; and in countries where some of the minimum demands had in fact been realized, and others seemed likely to be realized in the future, through the process of bourgeois democracy, the parties tended more and more to relegate the demands of the maximum programme to the category of remote theoretical aims and concentrate party activities on the realization of the minimum programme” (pg. 7)

As time went on for social-democratic parties, socialization quickly became nationalization which quickly became a Keynesian policy raising aggregate demand stripped of class politics.⁴ The backsliding of proletarian electoralism into a general populism is downstream of Marx’s original diagnosis of the parliamentary system – one designed against class struggle through structures of formal equality. Parties that originally marketed themselves as the most ardent opponents of the bourgeois legal order, such as the SPD, soon became key factors in stabilizing the capitalist system, promoting imperialist war, and a popular nationalism integrating workers into state structures. 

A more concrete example, laid out by Praful Bidwai in his book Phoenix Moment, is the somewhat recent experiences of the electoral-minded Indian communist movement.⁵ The Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) won a parliamentary majority in the state of West Bengal in 1977 and remained in power for 34 consecutive years. They achieved what many organizers in the United States can only dream of. Now, they’ve been reduced to electoral, and even social, marginalization. Why? Despite passing and implementing major reforms – land-reform and redistribution to the peasantry, industrial planning, health and education reforms, and the expansion of the panchayat system (democratic village councils) – the party suffered from many of the issues that Prezeworski identified.⁶

As they became the political establishment, the CPM now needed to contest elections in the thousands of village-level councils they themselves had created. The party had to create broad cross-class coalitions with the middle and rich peasantry, or even real estate developers and other monied interests, to maintain their electoral dominance. These upper classes played a strong influence on reducing how much influence the most oppressed sections of Bengali society had on the party, particularly the urban peripheral poor and agricultural laborers whose interests were directly opposed to that of the rich peasants who became “communist” partisans. Their rule was eventually overthrown through the mobilization of the very classes they claimed to represent: the urban peripheral poor and peasants.⁷

All too often, the left fails to recognize that participation in bourgeois government changes the structure of these parties. It is not a matter of simply being better socialists, having better lines, or moral excellence, but rather the dominance of capital in shaping the parliamentary terrain. We must be clear that electoralism itself can never establish the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Electoralism is instead a tactic to be exercised with an abundance of caution by disciplined mass movements formed through networks of community organizing, defense, care, and class struggle. Within this context, it is important here to examine the Zohran campaign beyond the individual of Zohran himself, as looking at individual personalities is the game the capitalist system wants us to play. 

The Politics of Affordability 

Zohran’s campaign is one that is social-democratic, and seeks relatively achievable reforms to the municipal structure. His campaign has hinged on the crisis of affordability in New York City, one I doubt I have to convince anyone of. Combatting this is largely the throughline of his political career, from winning debt relief for taxi drivers driven to the verge of suicide, to the fare-free bus pilot that established one fare-free line in every borough. His campaign has a clear and simple message: freeze the rent for over two million New Yorkers living in rent stabilized housing, make all buses fast and free, and universal childcare. Over time, his campaign has expanded those demands into a slate of progressive policies including city-owned grocery stores and a housing policy that includes the public takeover of the buildings of the worst landlords.

Some of Zohran’s most exciting policy proposals open up the door towards a serious resurgence of economic planning as viable discourse, largely ignored by socialist electeds in the United States. His proposal for city-owned grocery stores explicitly rejects a cooperative model, which still operates for profit, in favor of a public ownership model that sells goods at-cost. His housing policy specifically calls for comprehensive, planned, and publicly-financed construction of 20,000 units of rent-stabilized housing, alongside the previously mentioned building take-over policy.⁸ Although certainly inscribed within the capitalist system, it opens the door to pushing such ideas to a larger populace, specifically that the capitalist system inherently overproduces goods because consumption drives production, and not the limits of production driving what can be consumed. 

What makes Zohran’s affordability campaign so interesting is the radical framework underlying it. According to Marxist geographer David Harvey, processes of urbanization have become key to the ability of the capitalist class to re-invest their surplus product produced in their pursuit of profit, which is critical to continued capitalist growth. The archetypal model of capitalist urbanization processes is the massive expansion of Paris in the mid 19th century overseen by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who “understood that his mission was to help solve the surplus-capital and unemployment problem through urbanization,” utilizing debt-financing and the bounties of colonial plantations in the Caribbean and elsewhere (though this is unstated by Harvey), to drive architecture that favored the rising bourgeois class.⁹

Ever since the 1970s, the expansion of urban space has been largely driven by a class alliance between finance capital and multinational conglomerates of real estate developers. This has led to processes Harvey refers to as “creative destruction,” targeting poor, immigrant, and internally colonized black neighborhoods in order to create rich enclaves. Despite acting as the exploited labor pool enabling the transformation of urban space by the capitalist class, this same working class is continually dispossessed for capital to be reinvested. Building off Henri Leferbvre (who originally coined the term), Harvey proposes an urban socialist politics oriented around the right to the city, or “democratic control over the production and utilization of the surplus … establishing democratic management over its urban deployment.”¹⁰ When Zohran says that “the workers who built this city have a right to afford it,” he is drawing on this contestation of the capitalist’s right to urban space. He is establishing that it is indeed the working class and the most oppressed sections of New Yorkers who must be valued and listened to in directing the everyday built construction of what New York is. 

Affordability politics has the potential to fall into the same traps of many historical minimum programmes by rearticulating socialist politics as that which ultimately sees the edges of the capitalist system as reformable. In other countries, much of Zohran’s policies would not be seen as very radical at all, fitting in nicely with parties like PSOE in Spain. But its liberatory core can form the basis of a new type of political programme: first, it is the working class, and not the capitalist class, that has ultimate control over how a city is built and how its surplus is managed; second, the form this control must take is comprehensive economic planning. Presented in a minor way in Zohran’s platform, but if taken further requires the mass participation of the working class struggling against particularly monopolistic, trans-national, real estate capital that oppresses the poor from New York to Lagos to New Delhi. Otherwise, it is likely that such a politics can and will be co-opted by establishment Democrats, and at worst used to try to stabilize the settler US state against rising revolt.

Def(u/e)nding the Police

One of the most acute fears I hear from socialists about the Zohran campaign is simple: what shall the socialist movement do if Zohran presides, or at worst actively is complicit, in the NYPD beating student protestors? How can the socialist movement be abolitionists under the constraints of executive governance?

It is not like Zohran does not know the right position. During 2020, he openly called to Defund the Police and integrated abolitionist rhetoric into his political speech. Come 2025, the explicit framing of Zohran’s orientation to the police has been: 

1. The police exist in society to tackle violent crimes;
2. Instead of tackling violent crimes, the police have been tasked with being social workers and mental health professionals;
3. Hence we must keep police funding where it is, whilst moving additional resources that could go to the police into a newly created Department of Community Safety (DCS).

The DCS would combine multiple offices, from the Office of Gun Violence Prevention to the Office of Community Mental Health, in order to be able to mount an alternative to a police-response to unhoused individuals or victims of police violence.¹¹ The plan, although truncated, was written by sincere and experienced abolitionist organizers. Zohran has also also turned his sights against some of the worst sections of the NYPD, saying he will dismantle the Strategic Response Group, a counter-insurgency unit deployed to brutalize and intimidate pro-Palestinian protestors.¹² But his policies, like most progressive stances on the police, fail to understand what the police is: a colonial occupation force in primarily black, indigenous, and immigrant communities.

This points towards a deeper failure on the left to defend Defund the Police and other abolitionist ideas. Nobody can deny there has been a coordinated counter-insurgent media strategy to completely propagandize people against Defund. But is it is equally true, as pointed out by a core organizer from A Luta Sigue, a Tennessee-based community organization incubator, that Defund campaigns were primarily led by NGO and middle class organizers who failed to do the requisite social investigation on the direct needs of communities they claimed to be serving.¹³ Defund is necessary, and socialists should not stop fighting for it whilst pushing back on narratives of public safety that demonise the most marginalized. But we must also do sustained work in communities most affected by gun violence, muggings, and other violent crime to listen to their needs and develop alternatives that do not minimize the real lack of safety the many oppressed communities feel – which can translate into unhappy support for more police. In other words, Defund must be paired with a real positive programme. 

Community Control of Policing (CCOP) is one such programme that offers a vision that can ground anti-carceral electoral policy. Its premise is simple:

1. Nations oppressed by imperialism and colonialism have a fundamental right to self-determination, articulated in its modern form by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, but with throughlines in an American context dating back to Walker’s Appeal in 1829, and the Republic of New Afrika in the 20th century; 
2. Black and indigenous peoples are nations within the United States oppressed by settler-colonialism;
3. Therefore, black and indigenous communities, as part of national bodies, have a right to self-determination;
4. As part of this right of self determination, BIPOC communities have a right to determine how policing functions in their communities, including full civilian control of local police;
5. The police are a white supremacist institution in American society, distinct from functions of policing;
6. Hence removing the functions of policing, and placing the police as an institution under full community control, through CCOP, is a step towards the abolition of the police.

CCOP has its origins in the Free Huey and Free Angela Davis campaigns of the 1970s, and is currently most prominently pushed by the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression.¹⁴ Although criticized by some abolitionist organizers as not going far enough, and with real fears of the co-optation of anti-police organizing through liberal ‘community policing’ initiatives that are designed to fail, CCOP as articulated here is based on the basic right of oppressed nations to self-determination. It forms a step to the de-legitimation of the American power-structure itself, and can be agitated for through both sustained community defense organizations and local ballot referendums. Far from being contradictory to abolition, it can serve as a program that can ground socialist electeds by acknowledging that the US does not have any jurisdiction in communities it has subjected to centuries of colonization. Any right to the city cannot ignore colonial divisions within the working class, and must attack the occupying police armies that will serve as the armed reaction against socialist revolution.

“Globalize the Intifada” and the Question of Palestine

One of Zohran’s most endearing qualities is his anti-Zionism. A former SJP member, sponsor of BDS legislation, and who in the early days of his campaign openly said he would arrest Netanyahu if he steps foot in New York City to comply with international law. These stances have put him miles ahead of any major politician. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for instance, has not tweeted about Gaza in months, and took selfies with Biden as he funded the Holocaust of Palestinians in Gaza. Bernie Sanders repeatedly defended Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, which itself is premised on the ongoing Nakba of the Palestinian people – the dispossession of their lands, murder and imprisonment of their children, destruction of their means of life, and of course the enforcement of the Gaza concentration camp. 

That is not to say that Zohran has not backslid on his anti-Zionist politics. As media and organized Zionist pressure bared down on him, he affirmed that “Israel has the right to exist” without qualification. As UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese has repeatedly stated, no state has a right to exist, but states that do exist, like Israel, must uphold international law and the United Nations charter. Sustained internal pressure within the campaign by anti-Zionist organizers and community organizations got him to change course, instead arguing that “Israel has a right to exist as a state with equal rights.” 

Although implicitly a critique of apartheid (the Jewish state, by definition, cannot be one with equal rights for Palestinians), a clear failure to articulate that Israel is an apartheid state explicitly is disappointing. Equally so is his condemnation of October 7th, echoing the rhetoric blasted 24/7 on mainstream news. Nevertheless, the long arc of Zohran’s political career shows that at heart he is an anti-Zionist. In the city where organized Zionist reaction is the absolute strongest in the United States, Zohran’s anti-Zionism would’ve been unthinkable ten, five, even two years ago. However, his ability to take these stances has been a direct result of primary Arab and black community organizers, as well as a militant student movement.
It is this intifada that refused to move even one inch from calling for the destruction of Israel and all settler-colonial states, defended the Palestinian resistance to the hilt, refused to take credence of claims of weaponized “anti-semitism,” and resisted liberal cooperation of their movement for Palestinian liberation – through doxxing, police brutality, and Zionist blackshirts raiding encampments. Zohran has this movement to thank for his win, for opening the space for his still-moderate pro-Palestine politics, and for acting as a cudgel against nonsense accusations of “anti-semitism” that individuals can now see through. This was only possible because of the work to convince individuals that Israel is indeed a settler-colonial entity resembling the Nazi state – leading to a situation where 21% of Americans when polled openly support Hamas.¹⁵

It will take an even broader and escalatory street movement, and a renewed student movement, to make sure that Zohran does not tack further to the right on Palestine as mayor. It is here we must consider Przeworski particularly carefully in order to understand that Zohran cannot substitute for the masses of people struggling against US empire. We will almost inevitably be disappointed. But a wedge has been opened which we must widen through principled political struggle. We must push socialist electeds to fully embrace an anti-fascist politic that is not afraid of calling Israel what it is: an apartheid state. We can use international law tactically for bold political lines, centering the Right of Return of Palestinians alongside core elements of Al-Thawabit: the right of resistance, Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, a rejection of colonialism, and of course a Free Palestine, from the River to the Sea.

The New Cross-Class Alliance: A Popular Front?

Nobody predicted that Zohran would win almost 44% percent of the vote in the first round.¹⁶ This would not have been possible without a new class alliance that will upend both New York and municipal politics around the country. Cuomo won individuals making $50,000 dollars or less and those making over $150,000. Zohran overwhelmingly won everyone in between. He even won Manhattan’s Financial District. Despite his monstrous numbers in Flushing and Astoria, some of the poorest New Yorkers, specifically older black voters living in East Harlem and the Bronx, voted against him. Despite this, one of his best demographics was young black voters, and younger voters generally. Nor can we ignore the massive surge not just of the South Asian community for Zohran, but East Asians citywide. His message resonated in immigrant latiné communities. In short, the story of the Zohran campaign, demographics-wise, is generally mobilizing those who hadn’t voted before.¹⁷

Zohran’s coalition is nominally reflective of the Popular Front alliances of the 20th century, generally a cross-class alliance of a strong section of the urban working classes and primarily the middle and upper-middle classes in order to combat rising fascist politics.¹⁸ In some ways it’s clear why Zohran’s message resonated with working-class voters facing precarity through rising prices, and in immigrant communities facing repression by ICE. It is less clear however why Zohran, and other progressive politicians, do so well with white gentrifiers and wealthy sections of the middle classes. Of course, college educated voters are oftentimes exposed to left-wing politics, especially as students, which will peel some of them off towards socialism. The mass appeal of affordability politics among the middle classes though points towards an underlying fear of proletarianization, and which is particularly acute for sections of the lower petit-bourgeois, such as bodega owners, who increasingly resemble the working class in their status. 

For a section of the middle classes, such as those who join NYC-DSA, Zohran’s campaign was appealing precisely because of his avowedly democratic socialist politics. But for many of the middle classes Zohran’s campaign is essentially a modernization campaign. Negatively polarized by the haute-bourgeoisie, real estate capital, and ‘old-money’ aristocrats that currently rule New York, they do not believe they are gaining enough of the social product for their contributions.¹⁹ Zohran thus represents an opportunity by these classes, acknowledging here that ‘middle class’ is still a loose analytical category, to essentially balance the scales in their favor. It is possible that in future election cycles they may once again vacillate towards the right. Although Zohran’s Popular Front against the New York City gentry seems unassailable now, it is very possible that core sections may ultimately betray what comes after him.

Hence, there is a strong danger that the importance of this class in Zohran’s campaign will serve as a moderating force on his political possibilities. We must be wary here of the minimum programme dictating the rhythm of socialist politics, and the middle class in dictating our politics’ content. We must not repeat the 20th century’s Popular Fronts and their turn to marginalizing oppressed classes. Socialists must pour resources into organizing in the Bronx, and bridging gaps with the black, and particularly older, working classes. This requires a focus on extra-parliamentary community defense structures, mutual aid formations, tenant associations, experimental unions, alongside strong communist political education.

Cardinal Points for a Left-Electoral Alternative 

Many of the denunciations of Zohran’s campaign, from Third Worldist Maoist currents²⁰ to Trotskyist sects,²¹ miss the radical core of his politics. I have tried to articulate this, as it can ground electoral politics to serve the aims of communists. I will try to provide a brief sketch of five cardinal points that can give direction to future socialist electoral efforts that can move beyond social-democratic politics. And I do really only mean them as a sketch, unfinished and raw – points to be expanded in future articles. They are as follows:

1. Socio-Ecological Economic Planning

Any serious socialist politics, as I mentioned earlier, is a politics of economic planning. As I attempted to lay out in The Politics of Affordability, Zohran’s campaign has explicitly embraced a limited model of planning as related to city-owned grocery stores and housing – language unused by other progressive politicians which indicates Zohran’s socialist politics. However, his embrace of planning largely lies in the limited control of capital and the de-commodification of certain goods. Planning itself is key to what a non-capitalist economy is in the first place, and has to be articulated by our electeds to agitate against the failures of the capitalist system.

Planning is the only way to solve the key crisis of capitalism: the imbalance of production compared to revenues that leads to overproduction. The United States here is also unique in that it consumes the plurality of resources and energy in the world despite being 4% of the global population. The only way to rectify this is planning, an economic system where the limits of what can be produced determine what can be consumed, rather than the capitalist system where the limits of what can be consumed determine what is ultimately produced.²²

There must be an incredible reduction of frivolous luxury goods, unnecessary consumption, the waste of food, and a strong planning apparatus that can rectify uneven development. Such an apparatus, through democratic participation from local communities, and rooted in ecological processes of bio-feedback, must drive capital towards good housing, healthcare, public transportation, and community development whilst scaling-down the resource and energy impacts of our lives. This is the difficult process of degrowth. But paired with this must be a philosophical and political shift: socio-ecological planning in service of Buen Vivir, a good life.²³

Through the lens of Buen Vivir, we can learn from the experiences of socialist countries and translate that into our everyday experiences. In China, the right to join a union is part of the rights of every citizen, and entering a union is automatic in any industry. The All-China Trade Union Federation is integrated into the party-state, serving to protect the basic labor rights of every Chinese citizen whilst helping organize the economic life of society. In a similar manner, universal unionism under a planning apparatus can serve to protect the rights of communities, empower them to democratically manage the economy, and serve as a sharp breaking point to social-democratic politics; although, of course, extended to everyone regardless of citizenship.²⁴

2. The Right to the City

As articulated previously, the right to the city constitutes the democratic management of processes of urbanization, or surplus that must be currently invested by the capitalist class in infrastructure, luxury housing, gated communities, and elite restaurants to forestall crisis. Zohran’s politics of affordability already contain within it an articulation that is indeed working class New Yorkers, those “who built this city” who “should be able to live in it.” He has argued the importance that New Yorkers who have lived in the city for generations are not priced out in favor of capitalists, who control the city as their personal shopping mall. But the politics of affordability is cooptable. Already, liberals are trying to claim the politics of affordability as the capitalist politics of abundance for ‘everyone.’ It is the right to the city, through the central pivot of the democratic dictatorship of labor, that affordability resists cooptation. 

3. The Right of Oppressed Nations to Self-Determination and Anti-Colonialism

Unless a socialist politics tackles settler-colonialism, it cannot destabilize the basis of the American project. This is almost completely missing from Zohran’s platform, and in doing so makes the same mistakes of the Socialist Party of America and other socialist formations that failed to recognize the conditions that produced racialized subjects.²⁵ Recognizing that black and indigenous peoples are colonized subject, subject to a continual process of genocide and dispossession, serves as the starting of a serious socialist project in this country. To challenge this, we must recognize not just racialized divisions within the working class, but national divisions: black people constitute a common nation, with an internal class structure, culture, dialect, and common means of oppression. Since the civil rights movement, black communities across the country have been unevenly integrated into American capitalism through service or government jobs on the lower-end of the wage scale, or not integrated at all. They face the domination of capital in their communities, who transform their neighborhoods to serve nearby wealthier white communities – from everything from environmental services work to domestic care. Indigenous nations face particular conditions on reservations, still serving as frontiers for the expansion of settler society.

The right of these nations to self-determination can build an anti-American consciousness. It can be the basis of a front for economic, political, and food sovereignty in these communities, and to peel them away from the American state that places them under colonial oppression. And of course, it can serve as a new way of thinking about how to combat the police – understanding them as occupying armies that have currently captured the role of policing, and which can be smashed all the same to transfer the right to policing to oppressed communities. In other words, it is a right that can ground an abolitionist movement.

 A broad front against colonialism more specifically can also constitute a starting point for organizing immigrant communities: recognizing the US as an illegitimate settler-colonial state calls into question the border regime that rules the lives of so many who have every right to free movement. As a friend of mine says: let us burn the plantation of captive nations. 

4. Anti-Zionism and Anti-Imperialism

There is no socialist politics without anti-Zionism. Far from being an electoral burden, a whole mass of people in the United States are indeed seeking out anti-Zionist politics. We cannot back down here. Central to any coherent anti-Zionist politics must be a Free Palestine, with no exceptions, alongside affirming the Right of Return and Resistance. Zohran is the most openly pro-Palestine candidate to win an office of this magnitude in generations. He has spoken out against US coups and imperialist war, including the American bombing and aggression against Iran. He has openly called the New York state assembly a “bastion of Zionism.”²⁶ But for our politics to battle US empire, we have to go farther than Zohran believes we can go, and fight imperial domination both materially and ideologically. 

A vibrant anti-imperialist politics rejects US militarism and economic coercion, but goes beyond that to reject the unequal system of global trade as a whole. Global unequal exchange, or the extreme de-valuation of commodities produced in the Global South compared to those in the Global North, leads to the transfer of value, embodied in physical commodities, from the South to the North: limiting Southern development whilst expanding the possibilities for Northern development. To combat this, our politics must include the full transfer of technology from North to South, a global system of reparations, and the agitation of wage increases across global supply chains. 

We must welcome South-led economic development, including South-South cooperation, a global charter for labor rights, and support attempts by the South to impose commodity price increases through trans-national cartels on the North.²⁷ We must agitate against global capitalism as a whole, and for the sovereignty and freedom of the masses of the world’s population in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. To do so, socialist politicians cannot be afraid of learning from and working with the governments of China, Cuba, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Iran. The most active way to do this must be integrating socialist electeds with Progressive International (PI) for both international exchanges and political education. DSA electeds particularly must be accountable to both the national DSA platform and the internationally democratically deliberated PI declaration.²⁸

5. For a Radical Reconstruction 

Any socialist and abolitionist movement must root itself in struggles and movements of the oppressed in this continent. Perhaps the one with the most power in popular memory is that brief revolutionary period of Reconstruction, right after the Civil War. Decried by some as a bourgeois-democratic revolution par excellence, it is in Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction we see what this period really was: the establishment of Dictatorships of the Proletariat throughout the South. For the first time, the oppressed masses – newly freed slaves, oppressed freedmen, and even the poorest whites – democratically managed their everyday lives and smashed the Planter aristocracy, utilizing the state-power of the Union Army to their own ends. South Carolina’s Legislature was poorer and more destitute than the Petrograd Soviet itself. Grasping at their power, they set up the structures of Abolition Democracy that would free themselves from poverty, such as the public school. Freed slaves saw the calling of the Lord, who had come to break the chains of oppression. While they won constitutional changes, such as birthright citizenship, what must be explicated from Reconstruction is the possibility of an indigenous counter-American socialism through a dictatorship of labor.²⁹

The struggle for socialism is one of the struggles of historical traditions as well. For too long, socialist electeds have relied upon the speeches, statements, and acts of imperialists and anti-communists. In his victory speech, Zohran drew upon the likes of FDR’s wellspring of memory, deeply embedded in the American psyche, to charge his campaign – whilst implicitly brushing aside Japanese internment and Jim Crow. There is an alternative, that he himself has shown by articulating his father’s anti-colonialism in Uganda and his struggle for black liberation alongside the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the South. Reconstruction, leading up to those struggles of the oppressed in the 20th century, offers an alternative path. But to draw upon Reconstruction, we cannot be afraid to fight to complete it, in service of the black and brown working masses of the entire globe. We cannot be afraid to say we stand for the dictatorship of labor.³⁰ We cannot be afraid of revolution and abolition. 

Most of all, we cannot be afraid of socialism itself.

கானு கதிர், Kanu Kathir is a member of Emerge and an organizer with Philly DSA, involved primarily in international solidarity and anti-Zionist organizing.

Partisan articles do not necessarily reflect the official views of Emerge.

1. Marx, Karl, On the Jewish Question, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/ ↩︎
2. Social-metabolism refers to the way human beings, in collective society, regulate their relationships with nature through physical and energetic transformations. Much like mammals must take in oxygen from the environment, and water and nutrients from the earth, and release waste-products that enter into ecological feedback loops, human society does much of the same thing. ↩︎
3. Przeworski, Adam, Historical Social Democracy, New Left Review. You can find the essay here with relevant sections being The Decision to Participate, The Dilemma of Proletarian Electoralism, Dissolving the Class Appeal.  ↩︎
4. In the simplest terms, Keynes argued that capitalist systems must provide basic welfare to the poor – given productive capacity depends on the amount of aggregate (or effective) demand, governments must raise the psychological propensity of the masses to consume. However, this removes from economics, like the neoclassical economists, any idea of exploitation ↩︎
5. Bidwai, Praful, The Phoenix Moment: Challenges Confronting the Indian Left, Leftword Books. ↩︎
6. Panchayats are a type of rural and decentralized village governance apparatus, largely pursued by Left coalitions in West Bengal and Kerala, which was expanded to other states and finally formalised in the Indian constitution in 1992. Although a powerful tool for decentralized planning, they can also be infamously corrupt and serve to uphold caste and class differences in the rural countryside by systematically excluding participation of the poor, Dalits, lower-castes, and religious minorities. ↩︎
7. What tipped off the ouster of the CPM in West Bengal were the Nandigram agitations of 2007-2008. Attempting to clear land to build a Tata factory, the CPM dispossessed the poor peasants living there brutally: acquiring their land by force, harassing and brutalizing its residents, and refused to give adequate compensation when expropriations occurred. The Nandigram agitations are infamous in the history of West Bengal, with the deaths of many anti-CPM activists still unresolved, and propelled the current fascistic Trinamool Congress into power in West Bengal. ↩︎
8. You can find Zohran’s housing policy memo here. ↩︎
9. Harvey, David, The Right to the City, New Left Review. You can find the article in question here. ↩︎
10. Ibid. ↩︎
11. You can find the full DCS proposal here. ↩︎
12. Zohran has also called for major cuts to the Communications Department of the NYPD as well, which currently staffs 80 officers. He explicates his position on the NYPD Strategic Response Group and Communications Department in his full interview with the New York Editorial Board here. ↩︎
13. Prolematic, On the Mass Line, https://medium.com/@prolematic/on-the-mass-line-32a8e6410a88. ↩︎
14. You can find more about the NAARPR here and their branches in various cities, with the most prominent one in Chicago. ↩︎
15. As the Middle East Eye reported. ↩︎
16. New York City uses Ranked Choice Voting. ↩︎
17. The New York Times has a neighborhood-by-neighborhood breakdown of the results which includes a demographic overview. ↩︎
18. Georgi Dimitrov, one of the Comintern’s leading theorists of anti-fascism, articulates what the Popular Front (at the time called the People’s Front) policy entails here. A more lively discussion of the topic can be found throughout the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, where (abridged) proceedings can be found on the Internet Archive. ↩︎
19. As a comrade of mine noted, progressive New York City politicians lining up behind Zohran to take on this ruling cabal is also loosely a reflection of the Popular Front politics at play. ↩︎
20. A prescient example can be found in the Gonzaloite newspaper The Worker – “Fake Socialist Zohran Mamdani Wins the NYC Mayoral Democratic Primary.” ↩︎
21. Similarly, the Revolutionary Communists of America denounced Zohran in “Why communists can’t support Zohran Mamdani.” ↩︎
22. This is a summary of the ‘upstream-downstream’ argument in favor of economic planning by third worldist economist Arghiri Emmanuel. A fuller explanation can be found in his books Unequal Exchange and Profits and Crisis, but a summary can be read in his article The Socialist Project in a Disintegrated Capitalist World. ↩︎
23. An overview of the concept has been laid out by the Ministry of External Relations of Bolivia here. Buen Vivir, or Sumak Kawsay in Quechua, has its roots in the tradition of Andean Socialism, but emerged in its modern connotations through the contemporary mobilization of indigenous peoples and the electoral victories of Evo Morales and Rafael Correa in Bolivia and Ecuador respectively. ↩︎
24. Immanuel Ness articulates the structure of unions in China in various places, but a short overview can be found in this podcast with Revolutionary Left Radio. He has a forthcoming book on the topic, although he has written about the trade-union movement in China in Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class. ↩︎
25. Although split between factions, it is generally accepted that the Socialist Party of America failed to articulate a coherent critique of racism in the United States, going as far as to have white-only clubs in the South – as laid out by Robin D.G. Kelley in his book Hammer and Hoe. ↩︎
26. As he says in this speech from 2022, starting from the 39:18 minute mark. ↩︎
27. PI explicitly supports the aims of South-South cooperation, and has drafted a Global Charter for Labour Rights that can be found here. The extraction of surplus through price-fixing is the strategy of OPEC, and has been discussed among certain Global South nations for other commodities. Famously, it was proposed in a multilateral forum by Algerian president Houari Boumedienne in his speech to the United Nations Problems of Third World Development in 1975, which you can find here, although discussed as a potential strategy by Arghiri Emmanuel in Unequal Exchange published three years earlier. ↩︎
28. PI’s founding declaration can be found here. ↩︎
29. Du Bois, W. E. B., Black Reconstruction: Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880, Routledge ↩︎
30. The use of the term “dictatorship of labor” draws upon Du Bois’s own characterization of the Reconstruction governments. Consider for instance his discussion of the Reconstruction government of Louisiana: “back of this smoke screen lay the real charge [the charge by the capitalist class in question being ‘lawlessness’ among freed slaves], which was the attempt to subject this state so rich in raw materials, and saw for trade, to a dictatorship of labor [my own emphasis] rather than an oligarchy of capitalists” (Black Reconstruction, p. 430). ↩︎