Introduction 

Zohran Mamdani’s stunning and decisive victory in the Democratic Party primary for mayor of New York City marks the start of a new phase in our current cycle of struggle. Previous high points in recent history, like Bernie’s 2020 campaign for President and the historic Black Lives Matter uprisings that summer, demonstrated that millions of people were ready to take action when given a vehicle for struggle, one that could unite new and existing fights under a common banner. After five years of experimentation, the Democratic Socialists of America’s decision to run Zohran for mayor is providing exactly that kind of vehicle.   

Now, as we continue the fight into the general election and prepare for a socialist to take the reins of the largest city in the U.S., it’s important to consolidate lessons learned from the Biden years as we prepare for a new set of obstacles and opportunities. Biden’s presidency was demobilizing and disorganizing for left forces, not least of all due to his inability to present an alternative to Trump’s politics. Two deep fault lines emerged during these years: a vicious escalation in the capitalists’ economic war on the working class, which surged in 2020 and continues as a cost of living crisis; and unending, unflinching U.S. material support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which continues to unleash a crisis in the entire world order. 

Together, these crises are reshaping American politics. Biden and the Democrats offered only status quo answers to both and collapsed in the 2024 election. By contrast, Zohran’s success hinged on his ability to offer a left exit from the cost of living crisis through concrete and achievable policy proposals that would materially improve people’s lives, combined with clear support for Palestinian liberation. It was that clarity on Palestine that mobilized not only Zohran’s activist base, but also the masses of people who recognize the scope and horror of the ongoing catastrophe and are increasingly out of step with a Democratic establishment that refuses to do anything to stop it.

The continued consolidation, organization, and mobilization of all of these forces will be a prerequisite for the success of Zohran’s socialist mayoral project. There will be myriad obstacles, from manufactured crises in the media and battles with the NYPD over policing to the inherent contradictions in managing the capitalist state as a socialist. But there are also major new opportunities that define this new phase of struggle, including the potential to deepen the fissure in the Democratic Party by driving the wedge on Palestine and cost of living, where we’re aligned with the majority of the Democratic base against their funders and political leadership. Our ongoing cycle of struggle has become dominated by Trump and his radical reshaping of the political order. But the situation is entirely fluid; everything is being remade as these struggles arc towards resolution one way or another, and Zohran’s election puts socialists deeper in the heart of the gathering storm. It’s up to us to develop the socialist forces necessary to defeat the right and reshape our society for a new era. 

Part I: The Last Five Years

To understand our current political conjuncture, we must first understand where we’ve been up to now. Our current cycle of struggle began at some point around 2008, when the financial crisis and Obama’s subsequent failure to address it set the stage for the Occupy movement and the return of class politics in the U.S., culminating in the popularity of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential run. Obama’s presidency also unleashed mass white supremacist reaction, first in the Tea Party and then in Trump’s eventual run for president. On the Left, an anti-racist and Black liberation surge erupted with the Black Lives Matter movement around 2014, which shaped the political consciousness of a whole new generation of activists (myself included), even while the establishment attempted to co-opt this anti-racist energy with its own form of “identity politics.” When Trump was elected in 2016, shock became action for a resurgent Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which grew from six thousand to ten thousand members in a matter of months, and then to 25,000 members in 2017 and over 90,000 members by 2020.

During the first phase of struggle for the new DSA, from 2016-2020, there were two key questions born out of the Obama years, Bernie’s campaign, and Trump’s win. The first question concerned DSA’s relationship to elections and ballot lines. Some believed DSA should run on an independent ballot line, like the Green Party (a “clean break” from the Democratic Party). Others argued that DSA should run, like Bernie, in Democratic primaries in order to gather forces to contest power directly against the Democratic establishment, while building DSA as a “party surrogate” organization. Once DSA was strong enough, the argument went, it would be capable of becoming its own political force that could split the Democratic Party and either overtake it with a new party (a “dirty break”) or take it over (a “realignment” of the party like that which forced out the Southern conservatives in the 1960s). 

The second major question was how to square struggles around class with struggles around race. On one side were those who believed that Bernie’s success in 2016 was based on his focus on “universal demands” like Medicare for All, which suggested the importance of “class politics” over “identity politics.” On the other side were those who argued that the two are intertwined, that in the words of Stuart Hall, “race is the modality in which class is lived,” and that the Black liberation struggle had always played a leading role in shaping class struggle in the U.S. Ultimately, after these first years DSA achieved some level of unity on answers to these questions: DSA would run in elections on the Democratic ballot line as an important way to build power, and DSA would champion the fight against racism, sexism, nativism, and queerphobia in all their manifestations. DSA’s consolidation on these issues was made most clear in 2020, when we were thrown into a new, second phase of struggle with its own terrain, questions, and opportunities. 

2020: The Uprisings

2020 saw the explosion of two intertwined mass phenomena that marked high points for the U.S. Left within our current cycle of struggle: the Bernie Sanders campaign for president and the Black Lives Matter uprisings. Both events demonstrated that there is in Marxist terms a “class-in-itself” in the U.S. that is actively struggling to become a “class-for-itself.” In other words, there are millions of people in the U.S. far beyond those class fragments which are already represented in the U.S. Left, who are realizing that they share overlapping interests and enemies and are becoming amorphously networked, and are attempting to cohere shared goals, strategies, and organizations so that they can fight as a unified political bloc to advance their interests themselves in the class struggle. 

There’s much we could say about Bernie Sanders’ policy proposals or personal politics. But regardless of Bernie’s shortcomings and idiosyncrasies, his campaign happened at the right place and time to take on a mass character, becoming a vehicle for millions of people to take the fight to the political establishment. Trump’s first term had seen a rising tide of class struggle, from protests against ICE and the travel ban to a large strike wave across sectors like education and nursing. Bernie’s campaign provided a battering ram for people in motion to wield against Trump and the useless Democratic Party establishment, and a banner under which disparate fights could unite in the arena of national politics. As they organized together, felt solidarity firsthand, and then watched themselves march to victory in three of the first four primary contests, large numbers of people connected in workplaces, neighborhoods, social media, and local scenes began to see themselves as a political bloc, as something approaching a class. Importantly, these millions stretched far beyond the disproportionately white, middle class and college educated confines of the already organized Left, connecting working class strongholds across race, ethnicity, and nationality into a united class struggle.

This shared sense of participating in something bigger deepened as the establishment consolidated to stop Bernie and the campaign marched to defeat at Super Tuesday in early March. But suddenly, Covid broke like a terror over the world and shook all of society to its core. Faced with a massive crisis, the state and the capitalists unleashed the opening moves of a deadly war against the working class, which continues today as a prolonged economic cost of living crisis. As the situation began to feel increasingly desperate, the Black Liberation struggle was the lit match in dry grass. Police murdered Breonna Taylor in March and George Floyd in May, triggering massive uprisings against police brutality and white supremacy.

Without any central organizational coordination, protests erupted across every city in the U.S. literally overnight and swiftly became the largest protest movement in U.S. history. As is typically the case in this country, the fight for Black Liberation was the tip of the spear for a broad classwide rebellion, mobilizing those same millions of people who had been stymied months before by the end of the Bernie campaign. Like the campaign, the 2020 Uprisings demonstrated that tens of millions of people were ready to move in unison, sufficiently networked in informal ways to move swiftly into decentralized resistance if given the right spark and the right vehicle. And importantly, the movement reached new class fractions; while Bernie’s campaign had appealed particularly to “downwardly mobile” middle class, college educated people and to immigrant workers and communities, the 2020 Uprisings also energized the Black working class and youth, along with criminalized people who had long struggled against police power. 

However, both the Bernie campaign and the 2020 Uprisings ran into a shared obstacle: insufficient organizational forms. Bernie’s campaign was constrained by being a campaign for office — it planted a flag and created a container within which many people could activate and participate, but by its nature it was time bound and relatively short lived. After facing defeats that were contingent on the electoral form (for instance, being numerically defeated at singular and specific times and places by Biden because the ruling class suddenly cohered in a way that progressive forces were incapable of doing), the campaign demobilized and its organizational structure was lost. 

By contrast, the summer uprising’s organizational form was that of a decentralized street movement. At first, this was a strength: protests called by organizations would end in one place, and then tens of thousands of people would keep marching of their own volition, demonstrating an autonomous will to keep fighting. But within the first couple of weeks, a strong misleadership began to set in, led on the one hand by Democratic Party forces attempting to co-opt the movement, and fed on the other hand by influencers and would-be grifters who attempted to take leadership by posting graphics online calling for a march and then being the ones holding the megaphone when tens of thousands of people showed up. At that time, large masses of people would come to anything that would give them an opportunity to fight; but these masses didn’t have organizational apparatuses or democratic decisionmaking structures by which to set a strategy and begin pursuing it. 

Both the Bernie campaign and the street movement demonstrated a glaring lack of durable class struggle organizations capable of coordinating strategy and pursuing tactics beyond the moment at hand. To be sure, socialist organizations, progressive grassroots groups, and nonprofits participated in both movements, but each faced their own constraints. The grassroots groups and community nonprofits of the broader progressive world had some amount of staff, infrastructure, and resources, but their funding and operational models made it hard to pursue long term strategies and then to pivot when the moment demanded it, particularly when the movement was very street focused and militant. For DSA, one clear constraint was its class composition. DSA was effective at being a political organization for one class fraction, the “downwardly mobile” college educated parts of the working and middle classes, multiracial to an extent but disproportionally non-Black. This made it harder for DSA to effectively relate to an upsurge led by the Black working class; while large numbers of DSA members participated in the (very multiracial) uprisings, the organization as a whole was on the back foot. 

DSA was in the passenger seat in general throughout 2020, including with the Bernie campaign, even though DSA members tried hard to mobilize around it. At this point, DSA had some level of organizing success at local levels. In my chapter, NYC-DSA, we were involved in important campaigns throughout the city and state, we had won our first state office with Julia Salazar’s State Senate race and contributed to AOC’s upset victory, and we had participated in passing important reforms like the 2019 Rent Laws. But 2020 demonstrated that people’s perception of politics in the U.S. is strongly impacted by high level, national political events. These events start locally and don’t happen without local organizing, certainly, and they express themselves differently in each locality. But at the same time, some level of wider politicization seems to happen due to national-level developments like presidential campaigns and protest movements. In 2020, those national political developments came from outside of DSA, and DSA struggled to participate in shaping their direction. Of course, this rising tide of politicization affected DSA locally; in NYC and across the country, the protests resulted in a wave of DSA candidates winning primaries for elected office that summer, and overall our forces grew in size and militancy. But in general, DSA was reactive, a junior partner to the year’s large upsurges.

The gap in organization within the 2020 uprisings was increasingly apparent as the movement struggled to transition out of the initial mass protest phase and into a more protracted fight. As the summer carried on, new organizations popped up to fill the gap, often led by a combination of experienced and newly radicalized activists. Many organizations were short lived, but the longer term effect was the renewal of Abolitionism, a storied political tradition that offered radical ways of confronting police and prison power rooted in the Black liberation struggle. New groups of Abolitionists built on prior campaigns against prison expansion to push for Defunding the Police, which became the watchword of the uprising. Additionally, mutual aid became an important practice among Abolitionists looking to build community safety at the neighborhood level, as a large number of new organizers had gotten involved in forming mutual aid networks in their neighborhoods after Covid hit. The development of an Abolitionist bloc within the Left would become one of the important legacies of the 2020 uprisings in the years that followed.     

For DSA, 2020 answered certain questions and posed new opportunities. DSA’s orientation towards running on the Democratic ballot line was cemented both by the evident impact of the Bernie campaign, and by the subsequent victory of many DSA candidates in Democratic primaries that summer. Meanwhile, the militancy of 2020’s uprisings for Black Liberation underlined that a universalist “class first” politics would be woefully out of step and inadequate for the moment. A new phase of struggle was emerging, shaped by the opportunities and obstacles that Bernie and the uprisings had revealed. Bernie’s campaign demonstrated that it was possible for a socialist to pull together the broader progressive organizational world into something like a popular front with left wing leadership and a broad, class struggle agenda. Crucially, it showed that this type of popular front could act as a vehicle for the self-activity of millions of people.

Ultimately, the Bernie campaign failed to fully execute this strategy. The progressive world was divided between him and Warren, left wing infrastructure was too underdeveloped, building support with Black communities proved difficult, and depoliticization among working class people was too deep to be dispelled in one election cycle. But it proved that there was an opportunity for DSA to seize, an open next step: figure out how to unite the left, the broader grassroots and community groups of the progressive world, and the millions of people who were ready to mobilize and take action overnight into a coherent socialist political bloc capable of setting the agenda for class struggle and not just reacting to national events. 

2021-2023: The Interregnum

After 2020, DSA spent five years in the wilderness, trying to find a way to build on this opportunity. Trump, who had been DSA’s perfect foil and a primary driver of our growth, collapsed (temporarily) under the weight of his mismanagement of the Covid crisis, as Biden lumbered into office announcing a return to the status quo. For a brief moment, Republican leaders seemed eager to leave Trump behind, particularly after the far-right insurrection on January 6th. But in the wake of the earthquake that was the 2020 uprisings, the shaken ruling class and dethroned far-right were eager to launch a counterrevolutionary wave. A mass movement began to mobilize on the right around Covid conspiracism and then election conspiracism, flexing its ability to shape discourse and the entire worldview of millions of people. Meanwhile, capitalists struck back hard against the working class by escalating a brutal class war in the wake of Covid, first with mass death and then mass price gouging and the erosion of our collective ability to afford to live. This had serious demobilizing effects on the millions of people who had previously been engaged in struggle, a situation made profoundly worse by the Biden Administration’s response to the crisis. 

After Bernie’s defeat in the primaries, Biden attempted to capture some of his working class support by adopting a platform that gestured at breaking from neoliberalism. He advanced an ambitious policy agenda under the banner of Build Back Better, which included social programs like universal pre-k, paid parental leave, and free community college and included the PRO Act, which would weaken “right to work” laws and strengthen unions nationwide. Some on the left took these proposals and other initial indicators from Biden’s time in office as evidence that maybe we could push him into governing like FDR, leading a more muscular liberalism with a renewed sense of purpose for state action and a drive to scatter the far right. But Biden’s presidency was a disaster from the start. 

While Bernie had proposed to be organizer-in-chief, Biden pursued an exclusively inside-the-beltway strategy, relying on his long career in Washington to cobble together the legislative support he’d need for Build Back Better. This left him entirely vulnerable to insider maneuvering by a couple of Democratic Party moderates, with no ability to mobilize mass pressure for the agenda from outside of government. Moderates initiated a prolonged political squabble over the agenda and were able to block the vast majority of it, forcing Biden to fall back and focus on more modest infrastructure investment and tax incentives towards climate change mitigation. For those interested in a social welfare state at any level of government, this failure demonstrates that enacting policies to improve people’s lives requires that masses of people outside of government get organized to fight for the agenda. Fixating on internal government machinations leads to demobilization, and demobilization means political death for the agenda. 

Biden’s other fatal error was that he let a newly insurgent Trump and the right set the terms for political discourse through the media and direct political intervention. The result was that Biden wound up governing like a liberal within a Trumpian framework: “exit right from neoliberalism, get the weapons factories humming.” Under pressure from capitalists and a militant Covid conspiracy movement, Biden rejected a more active role for government in managing the Covid crisis on a social level, instead serving business and real estate to facilitate a hasty return to “normal” by pushing a singular emphasis on vaccination and individual responsibility over mask mandates or shutdowns. Then, Republicans successfully instigated several political crises around inflation, crime, and immigration.

To make Build Back Better politically impossible, Republicans blamed Covid-era government spending for runaway inflation; this should have been easy to agitate against, given that the whole world was suffering economically due to shutdowns, supply chain disruptions, and wars while corporations increased prices and recorded record profits. But instead, Democrats proceeded to roll back their spending proposals, end very popular Covid welfare programs, and then insist the economy was fine because the stock market was hitting record highs and inflation was controlled (which required cooling the economy). It was a tale of two economies, with the ruling class thriving and the working class in crisis. By 2024, Democrats were fully committed to defending the economy and the status quo and seemed incapable of acknowledging the crisis, let alone proposing actual policy that would improve people’s lives. (Remember when Kamala Harris briefly floated banning price gouging on groceries, and then instantly changed course after some calls from business leaders unhappy with the idea?) 

When Republicans screeched about crime (which increased during the pandemic, and then decreased again – but all the while remained at historically low levels relative to the 90s), Democrats took direction from Eric Adams and ran on law and order, costing them several Congressional races in New York in the 2022 midterms and ultimately the House. And when Republicans initiated a full court press on immigration, sending asylum seekers to liberal cities as a political pressure tactic, Democrats took the bait and readily agreed that they had a nigh-unsolvable migrant crisis on their hands, urging people to stay away lest city services reach a breaking point. Their hard right pivot on immigration at the national level was complete when Biden proposed a distinctly Trumpian border bill in February of 2024 as part of a bipartisan package to secure aid to Israel and Ukraine, only to have Trump sink the deal to keep the issue alive for election season.

On every issue, the Democratic Party adopted the right’s political framing, completely opting out of contesting the political terrain on any of these so-called “crises” and offering no solutions. Today, as we attempt to mount a defense against the right wing war on immigrants and trans people, the lesson is clear: when the right uses its power in the media to instigate crises, and when liberals go along with it to “pivot to the center” and sideline progressive forces, the only option is to forcefully reject their political framing and offer a genuine alternative.

For our part, the left had a hard time instigating new struggles during the Biden years. We were once again at the whims of the national mood, which was deflated and demobilized. Roe v Wade was overturned and the response was muted, lacking the titanic protests we would’ve expected had this happened during Trump’s first administration. Organizationally, DSA was still reeling from Covid. My chapter, NYC-DSA, had been before Covid an organization of thousands that was practically its own social scene, a world unto itself. But Covid forced everything online, life was getting harder to keep up with, and the Biden administration was a source of constant demobilization and depression while the right wing was growing their own mass movements.

The Left was in recession across tendencies and organizations; membership declined in DSA and outside of it, groups dissolved, and organizers demobilized. The political terrain was difficult to navigate for a left that had been born fighting the first Trump administration, which had driven thousands of people to take up organizing for the first time. NYC-DSA’s electoral project, which had surged with the high tide of 2020, faced less favorable conditions in subsequent years as the pace of victories slowed, though never stopped. Organizing work of other kinds similarly wobbled as activist energy turned increasingly inward. Our organizational culture, mediated by social media and chat platforms and always moving a bit too fast to be sustainable, faced erosion and decreasing social coherence as internal conflicts came to the fore. We still had those core cadre in group chats who kept the lights on, and a broader sphere of supporters, but our intermediate layer of activists and their corresponding social world had been hollowed out. 

2023-2025: New Faultlines, New Struggles

By 2023, the left was still picking itself back up when October 7th and Israel’s subsequent campaign of genocide in Gaza shocked us out of malaise and into action. The mood in NYC-DSA shifted dramatically at this time, as many new people began to come to meetings and get involved, while demobilized veteran members put their boots back on and got to work. A swift, concerted effort by the political establishment to isolate and destroy our organization for our positions on Palestine was successfully rebuffed. The broader, amorphously networked masses that had seemed to be reaching towards organizational coherence in 2020 once again began to pull themselves together, taking part in massive street actions and civil disobedience for Palestine, and then marking their rage at the Democratic Party via the Uncommitted movement at the ballot box, which registered surprisingly strong results in 2024 in an early indication of Palestine’s electoral potency. Campus protests exploded across the country in a historic wave of encampments that brought new vitality to the youth movement. Across all fronts, the movement faced swift and severe repression but successfully set the terms of national debate, an important demonstration of our bloc’s increasing strength and dynamism. 

Facing a grassroots rebellion, the Democratic Party stumbled into the 2024 presidential election with landmark incoherence. Biden ran on how uniquely evil Trump was, after having governed more and more like Trump in the preceding years. The Biden administration allowed Israel to carry out its genocide against Palestinians — more, it armed Israel, even when Israel violated red line after red line — even while the Democratic base clearly and overwhelmingly favored a ceasefire. The Democrats continued to shift far to the right on immigration and crime, terrified of sounding weak on these issues; they continued Trump’s pivot towards countering China; they continued a distinctly Trumpian policy of trying to shift strategic industry back to the U.S. When campus protests erupted, it was liberal cities, institutions, and media outlets that led the charge in repressing them with severity. While a cost of living crisis shook the entire country, Biden insisted that everything was fine, even while working people suffered tremendously with the cost of groceries, of housing, and of just existing. The Democratic Party walked into the presidential election standing for nothing, swapped candidates at the eleventh hour, and then ran a second campaign that stood for nothing after business leaders and billionaires with total influence over the Harris campaign crushed anything that might resemble a populist economic agenda. 

While the media depicted Trump’s victory as the result of a general cultural shift to the right, the numbers paint a more complete picture: Trump picked up three million votes, yes, but the Democrats hemorrhaged six million votes in their heartlands. The right successfully mobilized a mass reactionary movement in the wake of 2020 that is dangerous, large, and now holds the reins in every branch of government; the Democrats told their base over and over that they hated them, sent police to beat and arrest them, and told voters that they would maintain a miserable status quo. The right’s election strategy was to excite their activists and drive turnout in their base, which they did successfully; the Democrats’s strategy was to appeal to moderates, trot out Liz Cheney, and demobilize their activists on the assumption that they’d vote anyways, even with nothing to vote for.

On the one hand, the election was decided by only a few hundred thousand votes in a handful of swing states, but on the other hand, Democrats lost massive support across the board, in every state and every core constituency in their coalition. Democratic voters simply didn’t want to vote for them, and this cost them every swing state, where working class, Muslim, Arab, and generally pro-Palestine voters could have turned the tide. While the Democratic defeat in the 2024 election was multifaceted and caused by a long list of factors, we can confidently say that it was ultimately two issues, the cost of living and the genocide in Gaza, that cost Democrats the election. Both were the most important faultlines in American politics, and on both the Democrats offered more of the same. 

Trump’s second administration has begun a fascistic onslaught on every front, much worse than his first. The Democratic Party establishment has rolled over and seems to want to wait it out in the hope that the Republicans will fumble their way into losing the midterms. This inaction from Democrats gave the first months of Trump’s second term a muted feeling of resignation, but the winds of the ever-important national mood have been beginning to change as millions of people show that they’re hungry for a fight, even middle class liberals furious at their party’s fecklessness. Meanwhile, as the Democratic establishment found itself in an identity crisis, debating which types of people to throw under the bus first to win back the “working class,” the NYC Mayoral primary quietly emerged as a flashpoint.

A large collection of Democratic primary candidates who had previously marketed themselves as progressives made a calculated choice: pivot to the center to cater to what they perceived to be the national mood under Trump. This was a classic mistake: they bowed to opinion polls instead of fighting to shape public opinion, one of the true tasks of politics. By sharp contrast, NYC-DSA decided to go all in on Zohran and see what would happen if we ran a boldly socialist, pro-Palestine campaign. The result has demonstrated that once again, millions of people are searching for a political vehicle, a banner under which to unite their fights; they will vote for you and even volunteer for you in record numbers if you’re the leftmost candidate in the race, if you’re unabashed in recognizing the core crises of our time and offering socialist solutions.

Zohran’s campaign did a long list of things exceptionally well on both a strategic and operational level. It successfully put forward real policy solutions for the cost of living crisis and for the crisis of neoliberalism in general, rather than running purely on ideology or principle. These policy solutions were clear but detailed, pragmatic but ambitious, and were at the heart of the campaign’s message, above Zohran as an individual personality. The basic thrust of these proposals is to build the government’s capacity to act in response to economic crises and to take an active role in shaping people’s lives, instead of offloading this responsibility to the private sector and consultants. These ideas aren’t radical by 20th century standards, in fact they’re sort of just what the state used to do before neoliberalism; but in today’s politics they seem bold and brand new, when everything else is status quo and personal brands. 

As Kanu Kathir has noted, Zohran’s policy agenda was successful partially because it was able to appeal not only to working class people but also to various swathes of the middle and professional classes who are also impacted by the cost of living, and for whom the campaign promised modernization, good governance, and an end to corruption. After decades of mismanagement and rule by the rich, many middle and professional class people were drawn to a vision of a modern city “run by the experts” that functioned effectively and where they could continue to afford to live. But as Kathir argues, Zohran’s platform also contains a radical, liberatory core: that it should be workers, not capitalists, who should shape the political future of the city, and that it’s the city government’s role to act as the organ by which the working class can plan and administer that city. This central thrust represents a real left alternative to the status quo and to the unchecked power of capitalists to wring endlessly increasing profits out of workers.

The broad appeal of Zohran’s policy agenda allowed the campaign to reach much further than DSA’s base among downwardly mobile college graduates. The campaign began to represent a popular unity between the three constituencies that UK strategist James Schneider identifies as a sociological majority reaching to become a political majority: the asset-poor working class, downwardly mobile graduates and racialised communities. In particular, the campaign was very successful at bringing racialized immigrant communities, who had long been shut out of city politics, into its developing political bloc. And while Zohran continued to face obstacles in bringing the Black working class into his coalition, he did make some inroads and remained competitive. To enable this new working class bloc to win a political majority in the primary, Zohran relied on appealing to middle-and-professional class liberals with his modernization campaign, embodied in his alliance with Brad Lander. Ultimately, Zohran’s path to victory was in successfully forging something like a new popular front between the middle and working classes under socialist leadership and with technocrats and bureaucrats as a minor partner. 

The struggle for Palestinian liberation played a major, perhaps even determinative, role in Zohran’s victory. Although most analysis of the campaign focuses on the role of Zohran’s economic message, which certainly took center stage in campaign communications, Zohran combined his relentless focus on the cost of living with an embrace of left wing causes, particularly Palestinian liberation. His history gave him credibility on the issue; as a young organizer he had co-founded his college’s Students for Justice in Palestine, and one of his biggest acts as an Assemblymember had been to introduce the Not On Our Dime bill, which would prohibit New York nonprofits from supporting Israeli settlements. On the campaign trail he promised to uphold international law by fulfilling the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, advocated for Mahmoud Khalil’s release from detention, and presented moral clarity by calling Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide from the start. The electorate was hungry for this kind of principled outspokenness on the great moral crisis of our time, which they weren’t finding among other candidates too nervous or calculating to stake out a strong position.

This was not the type of campaign that certain (now marginal) sectors in pre-2020 DSA were endlessly encouraging us to run: bread and butter economic populism and universal demands without “identity politics.” DSA today is a post-2020 organization, stamped by the largest protests in this country’s history as much as by Bernie’s insurgent campaigns for president, even if the current counterrevolutionary wave in our wider society tries to erase the uprising’s impact. DSA today has successfully reached unity over the obvious need to thread both the universal and identitarian demands together, not reject one or the other. The result is that Zohran was able to do the exact opposite of the Democratic Party in 2024, which rejected any focus on cost of living and Palestine, alienating disaffected working class voters and actively repressing and demobilizing young people, the left, and anyone who cared about Palestine, especially Muslims and Arabs. Zohran, by contrast, encouraged enthusiasm among all of these groups. He mobilized tens of thousands of young people who didn’t vote in the last mayoral election, majorly expanding the electorate — this alone probably accounts for his crushing margin of victory over Cuomo. And it was his principled stance on Palestine that made it possible for Zohran to generate such strong enthusiasm among these voters.

It’s important to note that many of the young people who formed the core of the campaign’s massive volunteer operation are not of the constituencies who will benefit the most from Zohran’s main proposals. Fewer of them live in rent stabilized housing, or commute primarily by bus, or would currently benefit from universal childcare. It wasn’t pure economic self interest that brought in these young supporters and turned them into activists; it was actually the clear socialist politics of the campaign, on Palestine and on the cost of living, that mobilized and cohered the campaign’s movement base. And it was this movement base which was ultimately the precondition for Zohran’s success. Without tens of thousands of enthusiastic volunteers and donors, the campaign wouldn’t have had a foundation from which to expand its support, or an army with which to do so. Importantly, it is also the strength and relative independence of the movement base that will allow Zohran to continue to take strong positions on Palestine, even under withering pressure; when external forces push him one way, the base is the only thing with the power to push the other way to straighten the rudder. This dynamic, between Zohran and the base, will become one of the most important to navigate as we march towards the general election and then, in all likelihood, the mayoral administration.

By waging and winning this campaign, NYC-DSA has successfully capitalized on the primary opportunity that has lain open to it since 2020: we’ve united the left, the broader grassroots and community groups of the progressive world and the amorphous millions of people who were ready to join the class struggle into a coherent political bloc. Furthermore, we’ve created a vehicle that can enable thousands of people to start to see themselves as political actors, becoming leaders in their own communities and linking their fights to a larger movement. And most importantly, DSA has progressed from being forced to respond to national level political events, to actually being able to intervene on national politics and reshape the terrain for class struggle directly. That means we are now proceeding into a new phase within the cycle of struggle, one which will come with its own set of obstacles and opportunities.  

Part II: Seven Obstacles and Opportunities for a Zohran Mayoralty

By waging and winning the Zohran campaign and consolidating disparate working class and progressive forces into the beginnings of a new political bloc much broader than DSA itself, our movement has successfully moved from the post-2020 moment into something new. But what comes next is both uncertain and of the utmost importance. There are myriad obstacles that we’ll face if we elect Zohran as mayor; it will be incredibly difficult for Zohran to govern within the constraints of the capitalist state, facing a rogue NYPD, a vast and hard to govern city bureaucracy, a budget deficit as Trump pulls federal funds from the city, and an uphill battle to find new revenue in the more moderate state legislature. There will be strong pressures to play an inside game to get new tax increases passed to pay for universal childcare, and the entire political establishment and media will manufacture various scandals and crises to try to sink Zohran’s popularity, culminating in what is sure to be a vicious set of challengers from the right and center in 2029. But there will also be a new set of opportunities: a divided Democratic Party, the chance to alienate business interests from progressives and labor, the chance to politicize the contradictions that do arise so that they polarize people against our enemies, and an opening to become the main face of the battle against Trump’s fascism nationwide, bringing our socialist politics directly into the mainstream. 

The Split in the Establishment

First, we have to win the general election for Zohran. Luckily, the ruling class in New York is in complete disarray, entirely incapable of uniting behind any single challenger to Zohran. There are deep fractures on display. The career politicians are more inclined to support Zohran because they don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, and they’re terrified for their careers. When the opportunity arises, they’re sure to betray Zohran if it serves their interests. But for now we have the initiative and the momentum and they’re on the back foot, allowing Zohran to move to consolidate support among local party institutions and politicians. Many big unions have also been brought over; they supported Cuomo because they’re drawn to power, but now Zohran is ascendant and he’s a better ally for them in the long run. The business leaders, real estate, and billionaire funders, however, will never be able to support Zohran. At most, some of them might try to make a temporary peace, but Zohran’s pro-tenant politics are diametrically opposed to the interests of the landlords and his position on Palestine will remain forever anathema to many of the funders. 

Many segments of the capitalist class are already trying to split the Democratic Party for the general election, supporting Cuomo (or previously Adams’) independent candidacies and trying to find new coalitions with Republicans. This creates, for the time being, a crack in the Democratic Party establishment. This is on top of the deep divisions that exist between the base and the party establishment over the cost of living and Palestine. The Democrats’ status quo politics on these issues, and their miserable campaign strategy of pandering to business leaders and moderate Republicans while beating pro-Palestine activists and denying them even a seat at the table, cost them the 2024 presidential election. Zohran’s campaign, by stark contrast, was built on exactly these issues. His class struggle politics on the cost of living crisis succeeded in actually naming the issue and providing real policy solutions to it, while his moral clarity on Palestine was an indispensable, perhaps even determinitive, part of what energized many new voters and turned them into his most passionate volunteers. This positions our movement in the middle of two fissures with power to shake the entire political establishment.  

Realignment, dirty break, clean break — we’ve theorized over our relationship to the Democratic Party for many years, but at least for now, we’ve moved from the realm of theory to that of practice on this question, where the answer will be influenced concretely by our political actions in the coming years. As in the past, the task of building and cohering independent working class organizations into a stronger political bloc continues to be the most important part of building a party. This is because what we need most to build power is more people and more independent organization in broader parts of the working class than we’ve reached before. This will also involve building a stronger coalitional front with working class, member-led organizations, in addition to organizing with civic and cultural organizations so that we can build community solidarity at the local level. Less important is the part where we figure out when to declare ourselves a party or secure ourselves a ballot line, particularly when that means jumping through the various burdensome and repressive hoops that third parties in the U.S. face. But either way, regardless of one’s timeline for a new party or position on a dirty break or realignment, there is a rarely precedented opening to cause a split in the Democratic coalition. 

This is opportunity #1: Drive the wedge between the progressive institutional actors, unions and working class organizations, and politicians on the one hand, and the business leaders, real estate interests, and billionaire funders on the other, to deepen the crisis of unity in the Democratic Party.

Our task is our own peculiar version of uniting the advanced, winning over the intermediate, and isolating the backwards, applied to the Democratic coalition. Our support for Palestinian liberation will be one of our greatest wedges here, because Democratic voters continue to agree with us by massive margins, and have just delivered a stunning blow to the Israel lobby in New York City, the center of its power. The more space we open up for Palestine politics, the more gravity we exert on vote-seeking members of the political class, and the more we antagonize the Israel lobby and their funding mechanisms, which already have the nonprofit world in a vice grip. The Democratic establishment has been so thoroughly discredited by its position on the genocide that there is growing potential for a strong electoral rebuke of the party nationally, akin to the rebellion over Vietnam that the Democrats faced in the 1960s.

Meanwhile, our socialist economic agenda has the potential to unite working class people and progressives against a capitalist class that is so far in overdrive that it doesn’t want to entertain anything resembling its past compromises with labor and the welfare state. Our support for rent regulations, social housing, and tenant power is one potentially powerful wedge against a particular segment of the capitalists, i.e. landlords, who have already been fighting tooth and nail to beat rent stabilization since the 2019 New York rent laws greatly curtailed their ability to expand their profits in rent-stabilized buildings, which comprise almost half of the rental housing stock in the city. This has created a looming omnicrisis in New York City housing: an aging housing stock with many buildings needing serious investment, which landlords are unwilling to do under stabilization; a massive amount of illegal deregulation, which has weakened rent stabilization, fueled gentrification and displacement, and lined the pockets of landlords through fraud; and a growing wave of foreclosures as a variety of factors bring the landlords’ bills due and tip over their house of cards. This crisis is coming to a head and is exactly the kind of situation where socialists can put forward bold new solutions (expansion of stabilization, social housing, and tenant takeovers) to actually fix the problem and greatly improve the lives of many working and even middle class people, building a powerful and majoritarian social base. Other openings to broaden our base of support and widen the breach in the Democratic Party certainly exist across the entire field of struggle; we should identify and then seize them. 

A Party In and Outside of the State

We must also be clear-eyed in analyzing the obstacles ahead. 

Obstacle #1 is fundamental: Managing the capitalist state as a socialist is notoriously difficult and even debilitating.

I’m certain everyone in NYC-DSA felt a strong sense of responsibility settle onto their shoulders the morning after our primary victory. If Zohran becomes mayor, a socialist will be at the head of the largest city in the country, with a budget of over $100 billion. This opportunity is very, very large, for every type of organizing we do. And it’s imperative that we have as many successes as possible, proving to people that socialists are responsible and trustworthy stewards of governance and power, who make people’s lives meaningfully better and bring them into politics in new ways. These wins can reorient large numbers of people towards our socialist project and reshape American politics nationally.

At the same time, we know that every type of power will be aligned against us to make sure we fail. More than that, the contradictions in attempting to carry out this project will be massive and constant. To paraphrase something Allende once said during his socialist presidency in Chile: we will have all the drawbacks of capitalism, and none of the benefits of socialism. Our revenue sources will be limited; budget shortfalls due to Trump’s rollback of federal funds will threaten to force us to implement austerity. There will be enormous pressures to keep business leaders happy, lest we risk capital flight and another decrease of city revenue. And the city won’t actually have access to the kinds of funding sources necessary to implement very many large social programs, which are easier to fund on the state and federal level. Basically, the room to maneuver will be highly constrained and there will be a great deal of pressure to act as good, “responsible” managers and stewards of the city. 

However, this doesn’t mean the situation is impossible. Zohran is not the first socialist mayor; we have over a hundred years of precedent for Socialists and Communists running cities, states, and countries across the world very successfully, even when constrained by capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. We’re actually very good at running things and making material gains for working people, especially compared to capitalists. There is a vast amount of historical experience in the 20th century and beyond to draw on as we develop our own practice for governing and holding power. But while the left may be good at improving people’s lives, even under constrained circumstances, we’re not always as good at maintaining and growing our project over a longer period of time.

Kanu Kathir notes the example of the decline of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which governed the state of West Bengal for thirty-four consecutive years, and passed many reforms that improved people’s lives, but was ultimately marginalized due to the erosion of their ties to the working classes they originally represented. The history of our movement is rife with many such cases, where Socialists and Communists once in government wind up institutionalizing themselves, accommodating themselves to purely parliamentary approaches to politics, compromising with and then absorbing the professional and middle classes, and demobilizing and disorganizing the independent working class to protect their own power in government. Zohran’s administration will face these same pressures, particularly when our movement makes the middle class elements of his new popular front anxious, or when compromise with moderates in Albany becomes difficult. 

This is obstacle #2: We must avoid at all costs the drive to demobilize our dynamic, class struggle organizations and growing movement at the ground level to pursue an insider strategy, or to smooth things over with the middle classes, or to consolidate power for the mayoral administration.

This sequence of events is so common in our history as to be more the rule than the exception – so how do we prevent it? If the question of achieving power was posed in the 19th century and answered in the 20th, the question of preventing disorganization and bureaucratization once in power was posed by the 20th century and must be answered in the 21st. Cultural revolution, autonomism, the commune movement – there have been many attempts at working through what it takes to keep working class power mobilized, dynamic, and independent enough to push forward against the ossifying pressures of institutionalization, compromise, and demobilization which eventually wind up coming from inside the house. We now have the perfect chance to start experimenting to find an answer for our own conditions.

This is opportunity #2: We have a golden chance to immediately begin to build power both inside and outside the state simultaneously.

We have in DSA an organization that is dynamic, democratic, and oriented towards class struggle. As we move into developing our own form of socialist governance, we must constantly experiment with building forms of power in-and-outside the state. This will mean the development of new organizational forms that can build popular, mass democratic power parallel to the state and empower broader layers of working class people to become their own agents of change. This independent base of support will be a necessary lifeline for the mayoral administration, helping Zohran stick to his principles against overwhelming pressure from the ruling class and rushing to his defense when he comes under fire. We should learn as much as possible from the example of socialist struggle in Latin America, where innovative movements of workers, peasants, and Indigenous people, grassroots forms of power like communes, and mass socialist parties all thread together in a broader democratic socialist strategy inside-and-outside the state. As DSA puts one foot into the operations of the state, we must ensure it keeps the other foot outside. Our organization is currently able to connect and coordinate across both levels of power, and being able to grow our role as that kind of connective tissue without liquidating into the state is essential for growing our forces for the fights ahead.

There is a particular dynamic to executive office that makes it especially important to continue growing power for our movement outside the state. DSA’s past electoral victories have been for mostly legislative seats, which has had advantages: we haven’t had to risk the contradictions that come with executive office, like administering the state with all of its carceral arms, and we’ve been able to build power in the legislative bodies that are capable of passing big and important reforms. At the same time, legislative offices don’t have as much power on their own, and are subject to severe pressures from the Democratic establishment, which controls things like committee placements or the advancement of legislation. Furthermore, legislators like AOC and many of our New York Socialists in Office are decently insulated against electoral challengers from the right, which has the risk of reducing their reliance on their activist movement base to protect their office. For the mayoral office, the dynamic is entirely the reverse. The contradictions in governing the city will be immense, but the power of Zohran’s administration to set the agenda will be high as well. To accomplish his most ambitious goals, Zohran will need to rely on his movement base of activists to organize and create pressure on the rest of the political system towards reform.

Organization against Demobilization

Zohran and any of his successors will be guaranteed to face strong competitive challengers in future elections, meaning that the activist and movement base must be permanently mobilized to continue to build power for continuous reelection. Demobilization would have severe repercussions for both the viability of implementing Zohran’s platform and of continuing the socialist mayoral project. Zohran won the primary by playing to his base; after he consolidates power, he should continue to do so to give us the greatest chance at success. And DSA should continue to grow as a mass organization capable of facilitating the independent activity of that base, particularly prepared to fight the kinds of attacks we’ll face from an establishment hellbent on shattering our political project along faultlines we can already predict.

Obstacle #3: Manufactured crises have the potential to polarize and demobilize both the middle class and working class segments of Zohran’s coalition.

The right wing and media establishment will deploy the exact same playbook they honed for the past several years against Biden to manufacture fake crises and negatively polarize New Yorkers against Zohran. The NYPD will slow down work and a crisis of policing will be messaged throughout the media as a new wave of deadly crime. If the city is dirty or broken down or inefficient, which it already is, it will now be the socialists’ fault according to legacy news outlets and podcasters alike, who will be hunting for views and engagement and relevance in an attention economy that rewards controversy. Economic downturns due to Trump’s policies and budget cuts due to losses of federal funding will be used to argue for the absolute necessity of austerity in The New York Times and other bastions of “responsible” liberalism. Waves of new migration will be weaponized, rising rents will be blamed on the rent freeze, grocery price increases will be equated to bread lines, and any and all antisemitism will be as a rule laid at Zohran’s feet. The professional and middle class elements of Zohran’s popular front will be highly susceptible to each of these manufactured crises due to their class interests and desire for respectability, and if the past few years are anything to go by, the working class elements will be quite vulnerable to this misinformation too. We’ve already gotten a taste of what is to come, first with the media’s hyperfixation on Zohran’s stance on the phrase “globalize the Intifada,” which he’s never publicly said; and then when they attacked him after a mass shooter killed four people in late July, attempting to blame Zohran’s past comments in support of defunding the police for the violence, which occurred while “law and order” Eric Adams is still mayor. 

To fight back, we need to capitalize on opportunity #3: Drive straight into every contradiction and manufactured crisis so that they become politicizing, not demobilizing, for our base.

In order to fight back against this massive media war, we must do what the Biden administration failed to do: stay obsessively on message and confront the misinformation head on, aggressively and directly, rather than let it dictate our movements. We’ll need to solidify alternative media and ways of getting our message out there even when mainstream media is blanketing the airwaves with propaganda against us. And our task in DSA and in the organized left will be to politicize every contradiction that arises as forcefully as possible. We will need to meet the moment head on, and get very good at targeting our real enemies in a way that creates open political space and pressure on our allies and on the mayoral administration, which knows it faces certain constraints that we don’t. When a crisis of policing unfolds, the media will go into overdrive with the goal of disorganizing and demobilizing our side, hounding Zohran on whether he supports defunding the police and trying to get us to fall into their framing by focusing our fire on Zohran, too. But we’ll have to always remember that the mayor’s office is a site of struggle between different forces; with Zohran’s win, the terrain becomes vastly more favorable towards us, but getting Zohran to move with us politically is less a question of personal accountability with the man himself, and more about making the strength of our side unavoidable and indispensable, opening space so that it’s politically easy for Zohran to bend towards us.

This should be the core of our strategy: everything we do should be organizing and mobilizing for our side. The biggest threat is disorganization and demobilization. We should assess everything by this criteria: does it strengthen our side or weaken our side? We should never give in to our enemy’s framing on any issue, and aggressively reframe every issue towards our message. In the example of an increasingly rogue NYPD: our enemies will attempt to disorganize our side by challenging Zohran’s commitment to “safety” on the one hand and past support for Defund on the other hand. Our goal is for Zohran to disband the Strategic Response Group, reduce police funding in ways that he’s committed to, and establish a Department of Community Safety to build a real alternative to the NYPD. Rather than create a campaign to pressure Zohran to say what we want about the police, our role should be to clearly articulate our political priorities in DSA and our working class organizations, and then mobilize against the rogue NYPD and call on the administration to reign in their lawlessness. This still has the effect of putting our own pressures on the mayoral administration, but in a way that punches past them towards our real enemies and encourages outward mobilization of our forces, rather than turning inward in demobilizing critique or line struggle.

By the same token, Zohran’s administration will need to follow the same orientation against demobilization to ensure it has the best chance at success. Take the same example of the NYPD. So far, Zohran has attempted an aggressive strategy of disorganizing his opponent by trying to polarize rank and file police against their institutional leadership. He’s talked often about eliminating mandatory overtime for police and shifting parts of their work towards a future Department of Community Safety so that they can “get back to focusing on the work they signed up to do.” It’s a bold maneuver, clearly meant to try to avoid the situation Mayor Bill de Blasio faced, where police power did its best to destroy his administration. But at the same time, walking this tightrope requires deep caution. Defund might be an unpopular slogan among some people nowadays, but there’s a real risk of demobilization when we soften our stance towards policing. Just five years ago, police brutality touched off the largest protest wave in our country’s history, which reached far beyond the confines of the activist Left. American voters are used to disillusionment with politicians and are often looking for signs of betrayal, flip-flopping, and a politician’s incorporation into the status quo. Their enthusiasm is hard won, and can be hard to reignite once dampened. As he navigates the twists and turns of city politics with a requisite tactical flexibility, Zohran must be careful not to risk demobilizing the very supporters he will rely on to pass any of his agenda, let alone to win reelection.   

Finally, none of this talk about avoiding disorganization means we should never criticize Zohran directly. On the contrary, direct criticism can sometimes be a way to mobilize our side, demonstrate our power, and create the right kind of pressure on the administration. For example, the left’s swift rebuke of AOC’s comments in defense of Iron Dome funding was an effective way to demonstrate our unity on this issue, organized other socialists in office around our position, and sent a signal to Zohran that he’ll need to continue to energize his base around Palestine. Importantly, the mayoral administration knows it will be constrained and unable to say certain things or take certain positions. Zohran will be relying on us to say the things he can’t, to act as a counterweight to the withering pressures he faces from the other side. There has already been a push and pull between the left and Zohran over his various statements about Israel; DSA’s role should be to hold clear lines on Palestine that increase unity among our forces and open up more political space for Zohran to maneuver under pressure. This also means growing the level of organization within Zohran’s base of canvassers, volunteers, and supporters so that they can continue to speak about their political desires and become leaders in their own right. We have to find a balance between both direct and indirect pressure, finding ways to politicize contradictions, shortcomings, and failures that arise so that they become opportunities to keep the mobilization and pressure up, allowing our movement and Zohran to stay on the offensive.

The Deepening Political Crisis

On the national level, Trump and the Republicans are attempting to make Zohran and DSA enemy number one. But despite their distinct base of support, overall the Right is very unpopular and minoritarian, and we will be the most visible force fighting back against them. That means DSA and the movement as a whole are now entering the stage of history in a new way. Every corner of the organization should begin to prepare our battle plans for the next several years, the campaigns we want to run, and the people we want to organize, because Zohran’s success relies on us. We have to immediately level up our ability to navigate complex political terrain. Our internal conflicts will be spotlighted and our enemies will use every opportunity to demobilize us and break our organization down. But at the same time, we will have unprecedented opportunities to deepen and politicize the crises that Trump and the capitalist system are unleashing.

We can predict that the Right and the ruling class will be eager to escalate their attacks and repression against us, opening up new opportunities that we should be ready to step into as the political crisis of Trump’s authoritarian consolidation deepens. We’re seeing this happen already: when Trump threatened to deport Zohran, new and broader swaths of people were politicized, and our task will be to give them a vehicle to leap into motion. Trump has already manufactured crises to send the National Guard to Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and beyond, and he’s vastly expanded ICE’s repressive apparatus. This has begun to create a spiraling dynamic as Democrats begin to push back in some cities and states, with each side increasingly obliged to escalate. We can be certain that as soon as Zohran takes office, there will be a looming showdown as Trump attempts to occupy the city with the National Guard and take direct control, with Zohran in position to fight back against ICE’s expanding reign of terror. 

This is opportunity #4, perhaps the most radical potential in Zohran’s mayoralty: When political crises escalate to the point where opposing political forces find them intolerable and uncontrollable, it is possible for the political order to rupture in new and unpredictable ways.

It seems increasingly likely that we are in the midst of an era-defining shift in U.S. politics that will remake the status quo one way or the other for the next period to come. These shifts happen periodically in U.S. history: the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Great Depression and Second World War, and the 1960s and 70s all involved the realignment of major political coalitions and the scattering of one set of forces or another. Sometimes, an economic crisis is the driving factor in destabilizing the existing political order and making way for a new one. And we may very well be heading for another recession or depression. But there is often an important role played by political crisis, where the contradiction between opposing forces becomes untenable in a way that opens up new possibilities. 

This was the dynamic during the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, our historical experience of a revolutionary process in this country. Mass political forces and smaller, intransigent instigators on both sides went back and forth deepening the crisis of slavery until it reached a breaking point. Noel Ignatiev called this strategy one of creative provocation: “Slavery bred rebellion, which provoked repression, which led black people to leave the South, which gave rise to a black community in the north, which was the basis of Abolitionism, which engendered John Brown, who provoked Southern retaliation, which compelled northern resistance, which led to Civil War.” Even when the abolitionists struggled and failed to achieve success in their near-term political objectives, “[e]very one of their campaigns moved the country toward Civil War, the condition for and turning point in the abolition of slavery.” The same was true for the radical pro-slavery forces in the South, who at all turns strove to “divide all who could be divided,” to “compel moderates within the proslavery camp to adopt secession in spite of themselves.” The process involved all manner of strategies and tactics; petitioning, party building, direct action, mass politics, armed struggle. There was notably a crucial electoral element; it was the ascension of the Republican Party and the election of Lincoln that triggered Southern secession, even though Lincoln was a moderate. It was then ultimately the work of radicals and the rebellion of enslaved people that forced Lincoln into a war to abolish slavery and liquidate the slaveholding class – which opened the way for new, though short lived, forms of revolutionary post-war political power. 

We can learn from this historical episode that rather than seeing crisis as an event that we’re waiting for or forced to react to, we can actually instigate it by deepening the contradictions in the current political order. Furthermore, a wide variety of tactical and strategic approaches by a multitude of different social forces can all contribute to the unfolding dynamic; it’s not one or the other. And even in a worst case scenario where Zohran faces impossible contradictions or fails to pass his policy agenda, his position as mayor will open possibilities that are bigger than a single mayoral administration in one city. DSA will be “in play” both in New York City and nationally and can find novel opportunities for creative provocation to polarize greater numbers of people against Trump and towards a gathering political bloc led by socialists. Fighting back against ICE and their mass deportation campaign can become our own version of the abolitionist resistance to enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act, which radicalized many moderates against the Southern states and deepened the crisis of government. The presidential campaign in 2028 will be another flashpoint, where people across the country will be looking for a chance to fight back against Trumpism. This will all happen alongside whatever new crises Trump unleashes, as the international order wobbles and the U.S.’s status as world hegemon continues to decline. 

To be clear, it would be too much to predict that our actions in the current conjuncture might initiate a process ending in civil war or revolution. But the old order is certainly giving way to something new. The next era can be worse than what came before, or it can be better, and our movements are most of what’s standing in the way of it getting worse. We should aim to deepen the present crises in a way that builds our forces, popularizes new alternative visions for the future of our society, and opens better possibilities for a rupture with the established order and a qualitative shift in the status quo towards working class power. 

Onward Together

We face this new phase of struggle earlier than any of us could’ve predicted. DSA and our broader left ecosystem wouldn’t have considered ourselves organizationally mature enough to undertake this project before now. But one clear lesson we can draw from Zohran’s runaway success in this election is that the masses are ahead of us, and are dragging us forward to heighten the struggle. We can’t be afraid of success. We know we’ll face overwhelming contradictions, but we have to lean into and politicize them. Our organization as a whole will have to be ready to take in thousands of new members, and crucially, we have to let them shape and take leadership over the organization. This is how DSA exploded onto the scene in 2016 and 2017. We were the beneficiary of two factors: we had “democratic socialists” in our name, which Bernie had just popularized; and our organization was one of the few where an old guard didn’t cling to power, willing to see their organization destroyed rather than lose their own control. This type of intransigence and bureaucratic centralism led to the dissolution, split, and decline into irrelevance of several leading left organizations that had existed for decades before 2016.

But for DSA, the ability of new members to lead and shape the organization meant renewed vitality and an explosion of growth and activity. We need to open up space for that to happen again. People outside our organization want to join us. They want to talk about the terrible state of our present society and their hopes for the future. They want to become organizers and agents of change and leaders who can take part in our democratic culture, shape our strategy, and build new organizing projects they feel ownership over. All of us who are already here in DSA have to get ready to not just lead but to follow, to learn and grow with those who will join us. It’s a time for all of us to be open to new possibilities, to let our internal democracy and strategic deliberation become deeper, broader, and more inclusive, and to let a thousand new organizing experiments bloom. It’s a time to study our histories and then go out and write our own. Together, we’ve already started. 

Landry L. is a member of NYC-DSA, where they work to build connections with local working class organizations. They also organize with the Crown Heights Tenant Union. Landry is a member of DSA Emerge.