As we laid out in a previous article, Firebrand does not support Mamdani’s campaign. While we understand the excitement of many, even recent history shows that support for Democrats like Brandon Johnson can disarm the left. We argue for working-class independence from Mamdani and all Democrats, and mass struggle from below to push forward even the modest reforms he proposes.
Some of our critics have argued that we’re premature. Mamdani, after all, has only won the primary. But whether or not one agrees with our use of the word “inevitable” to warn of reformist and Democratic betrayals, it is clear there are many dangers on the road ahead.
No doubt once hedge-fund managers and billionaires stop losing their minds over Mamdani’s upset victory — and stop mourning the loss of the $25 million they threw down the drain into Andrew Cuomo’s campaign — they’ll fund someone they hope can beat him. In desperation they’re even considering backing current mayor Eric Adams, who has been disgraced by a bribery probe and was holding a 20 percent approval rating as of March.
Any involvement with the Democratic Party, no matter the intentions, leads the left down a dark path in service of capital.
Should Mamdani win the mayoral election and remain dedicated to his campaign promises, the matter will be far from settled. We will see the capitalist class and its state apparatus go into overdrive to curtail and crush any attempts at reform from above. In order for Mamdani to get key campaign planks funded, he’ll need to get an income-tax hike past a potentially intransigent neoliberal state governor and fellow Democrat, Kathy Hochul. Donald Trump may try to strip New York City of its federal funds or even Mamdani of his citizenship.
So if we want to win the reforms Mamdani proposes, it’s important to further examine the strategy that underpins his campaign — running as a Democrat.
As I hope to show, having any involvement with the Democratic Party, no matter the intentions, leads the left down a dark path in service of capital. Far from helping to build a socialist workers’ movement, this approach increasingly subordinates socialist consciousness, organization, and politics to our class enemies — especially when socialists “win.”
Dirty surrogates of the Democrats
We can best see evidence of this trajectory in the three dominant electoral strategies inside the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), from where Mamdani originates: the “dirty break,” the “party surrogate” model, and political realignment.
The dirty break strategy posits that socialists should run as Democrats to build up a constituency that can break off to form a new third party at some point in the future. Eric Blanc, the strategy’s main proponent, originally argued for using both the “Democratic and Republican ballot lines to implode the two-party system,” though that quickly switched to just running as Democrats.
The party surrogate model, meanwhile, has envisioned building an independent party apparatus inside the Democrats. This “powerful mass organization” would have “institutional mechanisms for maintaining control and leverage” over those it puts in power, regardless of whether they were elected on the Democrats’ or an independent ballot line. As Seth Ackerman writes in his debut of the model:
“Working within the Democratic Party” has been the prevailing model of progressive political action for decades now, and it suffers from a fundamental limitation: it cedes all real agency to professional politicians.
Both strategies accept that the two-party system is fundamentally hostile to socialist politics. Both are also presented as bolder and more left-wing alternatives to the DSA’s long-standing strategy to realign the Democratic Party.
Then, as now, the realigners naively believed that the Democrats were actually democratic.
Since the 1960s, realignment has sought to refashion the Democrats into a social-democratic or labor party — during the Civil Rights era by kicking out the Dixiecrats, now by building up an amorphous “progressive” wing of politicians and a multiracial voting base.
Andy Sernatinger and Emma Wilde Botta, writing in Tempest, have analyzed the trajectory of the dirty-break and party-surrogate strategies. Since their debut, these positions have drifted more and more to the right, giving up ground on any supposed independence from the Democrats.
The party surrogate model began as neutral on the question of whether to use any or either major-party ballot line, but within a few years its advocates were talking about exclusively running in the Democratic Party.
Any discussion of the “break” in the dirty break, meanwhile, has disappeared. Instead, advocates like Blanc have gotten dirtier and dirtier inside the Democratic Party. He’s currently arguing that the left should ally with liberalism.
As Sernatinger and Wilde Botta write, “Neither model could simply continue DSA’s historic position on realignment — there was too much history pointing to the failures of trying to reform the Democratic Party.” Yet support for the Democrats was brought in through the back door.
David Duhalde, the DSA’s former Deputy Director, makes the organization’s electoral orientation clear: “DSA has changed in rhetoric and putative goals. But the actual changes, especially when it comes to real world actions, are less clear.”
A brief history of the early years of realignment shows how similar both the original arguments for it and its ultimate trajectory were to the direction of its modern alternatives. This history also portends an even worse future as the DSA notches up more victories. Having a clear analysis of the Democratic Party, and an implacable opposition to it, is essential in guiding the socialist workers’ movement towards real power, rather than the illusory power a Mamdani victory would represent.
Fool me once: On realignment
Amid the reactionary 1950s, the American left regrouped. The Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation (SP-SDF), one of the DSA’s predecessors, emerged from the reunification of two factions of the old Socialist Party of America and the liquidation of the third-camp Independent Socialist League led by Max Shachtman and Michael Harrington.
Among the tasks of the new party was to determine its relationship to elections and specifically the Democratic Party. The emerging Civil Rights movement had seemed to expose fault lines between northern New Deal liberals and Southern Dixiecrats. Shachtman, Harrington, and others like Bayard Rustin argued socialists should attempt to realign the Democratic Party:
Let labor, the farmers, the Negro [sic] people and other minorities, the liberal and peace forces, come together in a party of our own; and let the forces of conservatism and big business, the militarists and nationalists, the stand-patters, come together in a political party of their own.
Shachtman argued that a mass base of newly enfranchised Black voters and white workers; the labor, civil rights, and “liberal” movements; and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party could drive the Southern Dixiecrats out of the party.
In the new liberal-labor party that would result, the Socialist Party would serve “as a loyal and honest democratic socialist wing.”
As the Eugene Debs Caucus of the Socialist Party of America reflected in a 1970 factional document:
[T]he basic argument was Marxian: Labor is the motor for social change, labor will not come to the Socialist Party, therefore the Socialist Party must go to labor, which means going into the Democratic Party, either directly or as a by-product of labor involvements.
They further recounted, “It was also argued that in view of restricted ballot access, Democratic Party primaries were perhaps a better forum for electoral activities than direct candidacies.”
Likewise, as one realignment advocate put it in 1962:
The absence of an independent mass working class political party dictates the necessity of working in the arenas of politics that will raise political action to a higher plane and thereby increase the effectiveness and influence of socialists.
None of these arguments should be new to anyone familiar with debates on socialist electoral strategy and the Democratic Party. DSA members, as well as aged New Left Maoists like Liberation Road, argue the same today: our audience, ballot restrictions, and the lack of a powerful existing labor party mean the Democratic Party is where we should be.
Yet when realignment was first presented, it did not mean a rejection of building a socialist or labor party, or even running as a socialist. Those in the Debs caucus accepted realignment,
but understood it as meaning, for instance, that if one ran in a Democratic Primary, one did so openly as a Socialist. Suppression of Socialist identity was no part of the thinking of the bulk of the membership at that time.
This assumption bears out when examining internal Socialist Party documents. As the adopted resolution from the 1960 SP-SDF convention reads:
We are for a political realignment of labor and liberals. However, we are not liberals promoting some new form of liberalism; we are socialists seeking democratic socialism… We are for labor candidates regardless of their formal party ties only when their candidacies involve a real break with the bureaucratic machinery and political attitudes of the capitalist parties.
And a 1961 Socialist Party resolution clearly states:
Support for one or another major party candidate can only be based on the fact that his candidacy represents a real break towards independent political action away from the present two-party stalemate situation… We reject the concept of subordinating the clear socialist positions of the Party to closer collaboration with the official liberal and labor bureaucracy.
Yet just like with the dirty break and party surrogate models, the gravitational pull of the Democratic Party turned stated intentions into distorted actions.
Then, as now, the realigners naively believed that the Democrats were actually democratic. While restricted ballot access was indeed an impediment, activists like those in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party encountered plenty of additional impediments in attempting to work through the Democratic Party machine.
More than blocking or sabotaging left Democrats like Mamdani, an equal or greater danger is the party’s ability to absorb them. Once caught in the party’s web, few movements ever leave.
The realigners also failed to account for how wedded labor leadership was to the Democratic Party bureaucracy — a result of the movement’s previous co-optation in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. The unions had endorsed Roosevelt’s no-strike pledge during the Second World War. The CIO’s Political Action Committee (PAC) had united with big-city machines to support Truman as 1944 Democratic vice-president nominee. McCarthyism and the Smith Act had thrown out the labor radicals. By 1960, union leaders had firmly linked their futures to the Democratic Party apparatus.
As a capitalist party, the Democratic apparatus’s main goals are the protection of capital, imperialism, and its own political power. All of these were under threat as the 1960s radicalization deepened, especially amid the Black liberation and anti-war movements. Instead of pushing co-opted labor leaders to the left, realigners like Rustin were drawn further to the right.
As the Debs Caucus described:
“Going where labor is” turned out to mean, in practice, toning down everything… Thus at the riotous Democratic Party convention in 1968, Debs Caucus Socialists were on the streets with the demonstrators, but Realignment Socialists were in the convention, with Bayard Rustin acting in effect as black floor manager for Hubert Humphrey…
Realignment people are opposed to anything that separates labor from liberals, so in practice they oppose the entire New Left.
Working with the Democrats ultimately meant constraining socialist politics, a process we have seen play out again today. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders have run interference for Biden’s support for genocide; contorted “Abolish ICE” to mean a kinder, gentler deportation machine; and invoked Martin Luther King, Jr. to finger-wag anti-ICE resistance in Los Angeles. Once-celebrated state senator and DSA member Julia Salazar has twice backed New York City Housing Authority privatization plans.
Instead of condemning Sanders, AOC, and other elected officials like Jamaal Bowman for their behavior, DSA leaders have come to their defense, and continue to champion them as leaders of the democratic-socialist movement.
The trajectories of these strategies and those who uphold them should be unsurprising to regular Firebrand readers. The Democratic Party is more than a ballot line. As we have described, it has powerful tools “to absorb and neutralize discontent by rerouting it into an arena controlled by capital, where it can do no harm.”
In the 1960s, there were forces outside the Socialist Party of America in the New Left. For a time, this New Left stayed outside and was critical of the Democrats, but it was ultimately also absorbed through Black-led electoral efforts and the Rainbow Coalition. If after Mamdani’s win, the DSA and its orientation on the Democrats continue to dominate, the whole left is at serious risk.
Party and consciousness: Why we need working-class independence
In our previous article on Mamdani, Kenneth G. lays out crucial criteria for determining what sorts of political campaigns and candidates we can support. Are they genuinely independent of the Democratic and Republican parties? Are they running for legislative and not executive or judicial office? Is the basis of the campaign rooted in the working class and its interests?
But we should add one more question: does the campaign aid the organization, and thus consciousness, of the working class to develop into a distinct political movement — a party?
Marx, at the 1871 London Congress of the International Workingmen’s Association, fought to add two crucial lines to its resolution on political action:
[T]he working class cannot act, as a class, except by constituting itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed by the propertied classes…
[T]his constitution of the working class into a political party is indispensable in order to ensure the triumph of the social revolution.
Being determines consciousness. Political ideas, products as they are of struggles between classes, can only crystalize into a lasting form through organization and leadership. Only a collective project, a party, can ultimately contend with capitalist ideology.
One of the most pernicious and long-lasting forms of capitalist subordination of workers in this country is through the two-party system — especially the Democratic Party.
Workers are constantly bombarded with ruling-class ideas. Our daily experiences sometimes encourage class solidarity (working, living, and being forced to fight the boss side by side) and other times encourage competition between us (fighting for the same jobs, housing, etc.). Therefore, even when periods of struggle and crisis make radical solutions, slogans, and actions popular among many, that mass feeling can remain fragmented and quickly recede, whether under capitalist reaction or just plain daily living.
This is why we constantly emphasize the need to build class, social movement, and especially revolutionary-socialist organization based on firm and clear politics. These politics are the crystallization of past advances in working-class struggle and consciousness that, in turn, can organize others towards future victories. As the old saying goes, the revolutionary party is the memory of the class.
Capitalist ideology not only tries to divide workers on the basis of race, gender, nationality, disability, and the like. It crucially welds the working class to the capitalist class. Remember the calls of “shared sacrifice” as budgets get cut, or “national interest” when politicians saber-rattle for war. One of the most pernicious and long-lasting forms of capitalist subordination of workers in this country is through the two-party system — especially the Democratic Party.
Advocates for the party-surrogate model might argue that they are building a party, just that it lacks its own ballot line for now. But the gravitational pull of the Democratic Party is immense and inescapable at such close range.
Trapped in the spider’s web
Though the Democratic Party no longer relies on the same urban patronage machines of the 20th century, working inside it is like falling into a massive spider’s web. Its coffers full from billions in corporate donations, the party has built an army of trained cadres, national staff, and thousands of local, state, and federal politicians. Labor and NGO leaders are wedded to its organization through career opportunities, funding, and direct influence. As anemic and rudderless as the party seems today, its apparatus still has a massive influence over the media, get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operations, and popular political horizons.
More than blocking or sabotaging left Democrats like Mamdani, an equal or greater danger is the party’s ability to absorb them. Once caught in the party’s web, few movements ever leave. And “party surrogate” or not, it’s already starting to happen.
Political ideas, products as they are of struggles between classes, can only crystalize into a lasting form through organization and leadership. Only a collective project, a party, can ultimately contend with capitalist ideology.
As detailed by Politico, the political consulting firm Tusk Strategies, which ran Cuomo’s campaign, have made overtures to Mamdani. Business leaders have also called his office since his win, though his spokesman “would not say who has been on the phone.”
The Democrats have many ways to co-opt would-be radicals like Mamdani. As AOC herself has said,
Behind closed doors, your arm is twisted… Political pressure gets put on you, and every trick in the book — psychological and otherwise — is used to get us to abandon the working class.
So long as these socialists remain tied up in the Democratic Party, the Democrats are easily positioned to coax, pressure, and paralyze. In the words of Sam Bell, Rhode Island state senator and DSA member, “It takes an enormous amount of emotional strength to stand against a political establishment, to stand against the group of people you’re spending time with all the time.”
Unfortunately, wins like Mamdani’s only draw socialists deeper into the spider’s web. David Duhalde admits, “The more strength socialists get in and around the Democratic Party — largely winning offices and pushing legislation — the harder it will be to break with the Party.”
This echoes the argument from another attempt to build a “party within a party.” At the 1986 National Rainbow Coalition convention, Jesse Jackson told his supporters, “We have too much invested in the Democratic Party. When you have money in the bank you don’t walk away from it.”
Identifying with the Democratic Party has a clearly negative effect on class consciousness and our organizing. Why did many deny or excuse immigrant children in cages or the record number of deportations when they happened under Obama and Biden? Why did many ignore Tara Reade’s allegations against Biden, even as the media discussed the sexual-assault cases against Trump? Why did mass protests dry up under the Biden years — at least until the genocide in Gaza began? Examples abound, from the abortion rights to the marriage equality movements, of direct and indirect, and wholly negative, influence by the Democrats.
The lack of our own party makes it more difficult, if not impossible, for workers to hold a Biden, AOC, or Mamdani to their campaign promises. Such politicians are not dependent on a democratically organized working-class party for their credibility and future success. Not only do we not have a party to mobilize our power on the streets and in workplaces independently of politicians. Many workers instead identify with the interests and accept the horizons of the capitalist party to whom they’ve been told to pledge loyalty.
The Mamdani campaign and the DSA’s attachment to the Democratic Party do little to build, and in fact hamper, the independent organization of the working class.
We cannot remain neutral on how someone votes, let alone call for a vote for a Democrat, no matter how strategic the reasoning may seem. Even unconsciously, most workers solidify their loyalty and link their interests with a party like the Democrats through the act of voting.
After many in the US correctly turned away from Biden, Harris, and the Democratic Party for backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Mamdani’s election risks reigniting hope that the party is reformable. Instead, socialists should take that disgust over the genocide, combine it with the real desire for rent freezes and the like, and draw them to their organizational conclusion: a complete break with the Democrats.
From a moment to a movement
Mamdani’s primary win and the excitement it generates is a moment — only a moment. Should Mamdani win and become the manager of New York City, the “capital of capitalism,” while facing all the pressures of the state apparatus and the Democratic Party, people will need to draw the correct conclusions and get ready to fight. Otherwise, excitement could quickly lead to despair and paralysis.
Things aren’t looking good on that front. As one revolutionary in New York described:
I’m close with many comrades in DSA and JVP [Jewish Voice for Peace] actively involved in Mamdani’s campaign and I’ve talked with him myself — Zohran is accessible in the streets — and there is zero discussion about what, how, and whether to build the infrastructures of dissent needed to actually win the things Zohran is talking about. Outside of far leftists like myself raising these issues — which are often met with abstract agreement — there’s zero talk of planning and building beyond electoral work.
Change is not going to happen through the Democratic Party or managing the capitalist state, even at the city level. Only mass struggle and an independent working-class political movement can do that. How many people can be convinced by this argument will be directly related to the size and strength of revolutionary organizations in New York and their ability to influence wider layers. Unfortunately many revolutionaries and would-be revolutionaries have not yet committed to build them.
It doesn’t matter what language the left wants to use — “realignment,” “dirty break,” “surrogate.” The Mamdani campaign and the DSA’s attachment to the Democratic Party do little to build this independent organization of the working class. In fact, they hamper it. We must do the opposite. We must fight to build it instead.
