electoralism

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/25955

Earlier this week, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed Governor Kathy Hochul in her primary bid against Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado, who was running decidedly to her left and whose running mate, India Walton, is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Mamdani justified the endorsement through an appeal to party unity, effective governance, and the need to maintain a cooperative relationship with Albany to deliver reforms.

In Mamdani’s framing, avoiding open confrontation with the governor is the price of “getting things done.” But that logic has consequences. It commits his administration to backing a governor who is currently using emergency executive powers to help hospitals staff around the nurses who are on strike in New York City with scab labor — subordinating a real working-class struggle to the demands of bosses who pay for the Democratic Party.

Mamdani is not alone in his endorsement and has been joined by the entire Democratic congressional delegation from New York. The bloc stretches from centrist Democrat Tom Suozzi — who has defended capitalism and has openly demanded Mamdani and other “socialists” leave the party — to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the city’s most prominent progressive figure, who declined to endorse Hochul in the 2022 primary.

These politicians are often described as representing different wings of the Democrats, but when it comes to maintaining the “unity” of the Party and its electoral viability, they are all united, even if it means betraying the workers’ struggle. What unity are we seeking with Democrats who repress our movements?

Mayor Mamdani has been openly supportive of the nurses’ strike and was greeted with cheers at the picket lines. While such gestures of solidarity may help consolidate an electoral base, they do nothing to shift the balance of forces in negotiations with Albany, which responds to material pressure from below — not simple symbolic alignment with workers. In a moment of open class struggle, the Democratic Party, directly or indirectly, is doing what it always does: closing ranks across its internal factions to, directly or indirectly, defend the authority of the capitalist state against workers who disrupt the interests of their donors.

In many ways, this situation mirrors the Democratic Party’s move to neutralize class struggle by crushing the rail strike in 2022. During that conflict, rail workers voted down a contract and prepared to strike. The Biden administration intervened at the direct request of the rail bosses, first delaying the strike through a Presidential Emergency Board and then pushing Congress to impose a contract workers had already rejected. Progressive Democrats did not break ranks. Figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman voted for legislation that stripped workers of their right to strike, urged rail workers to accept the outcome, and funneled anger toward a symbolic sick-days vote that leadership ensured would fail. The strike was stopped, the bosses got their contract, and workers were told there was no alternative.

The same logic is now at work in New York. Mamdani has gone to the nurses’ picket lines, shaken hands with dozens of striking nurses that consider his administration a friend, and spoken words of solidarity. At the same time, he has endorsed Hochul, who is actively intervening to break the strike.

This is not a contradiction in tone. Rather, it’s a political choice that has material consequences for the strike. In moments like a strike, when class lines are openly drawn, that choice matters. One action signals support for workers; the other strengthens the state and the bosses. And it is the second that carries real weight: hospitals can wait out the strike, nurses’ leverage is drained, and the balance of forces shifts back toward management.

This contradiction is sharper because Mamdani presents himself as a socialist and rose to office on the strength of a campaign that spoke that language. Socialism, at its core, means siding with workers when they confront capital and the state — especially in moments like a strike, when class lines are openly drawn. What’s being revealed here is not a personal inconsistency, but how quickly socialist language loses its meaning when it is tied to a strategy of working within a party that exists to maintain capitalism and step in against workers when their struggles threaten the status quo.

The Backlash Sharpens the Debate over Working Inside the Democratic Party

Much of the backlash to Mamdani’s endorsement has been pushed into informal channels like social media, group chats, and private conversations, precisely because no official space exists to debate it. Rank-and-file members have been writing openly online, trying to make sense of a decision that cut across ongoing strike support and organizing efforts. At the same time, there has been no clear space inside NYC-DSA to collectively process or debate the endorsement. At the organization’s October general body meeting,leadership made clear that criticism of Mamdani was out of bounds— reinforcing a pattern in which strategic disagreements involving elected officials are quietly foreclosed rather than confronted.

The controversy over the Chi Ossé endorsement vote also helps to explain why the current backlash feels familiar to many organizers. Ossé was not proposing an independent break from the Democratic Party — he was exploring a Democratic primary challenge to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and sought the backing of NYC-DSA**.** At that point, Zohran Mamdani stepped inpublicly to oppose the run. He argued at a DSA forum and in media interviews that such a challenge would be “divisive” and would make it harder for his administration to deliver policy wins — effectively urging the organization not to endorse Ossé. Shortly after NYC-DSA voted against endorsement, Ossé withdrew, under pressure from Mamdani to bow down to the Democrats.

What that episode revealed was not a disagreement over electoral tactics, but a pattern that is consistent with the strategy of the right wing of DSA: Mamdani intervening to shut down debate and independent challenges in order to protect Democratic Party leadership and unity. That memory is resurfacing now because the same dynamic is playing out at a larger scale. Tens of thousands of people joined DSA over the past few years — many radicalized through Palestine solidarity and opposition to Democratic governors and mayors, including Hochul, who presided over repression and criminalization of the movement. For those members, Mamdani’s role was understood as an expression of that rupture with the party of war, imperialism, policing, and strikebreaking. His endorsement of Hochul, like his intervention against Ossé, signals something else: that when pressure mounts, he is more willing to discipline the movement on behalf of Democratic Party stability than to break with it on behalf of the people who organized to elect him

Recent events have only intensified this tension. After the NYPD shooting of Jabez Chakraborty during a mental health crisis, Mamdani was criticized for avoiding to name police responsibility. On Mamdani’s watch, NYPD carried out arrests of anti-ICE protesters, like the repression during recent demonstrations at Columbia University and the protest at the Hilton Garden Inn. He also stood by as his NYPD arrested 13 striking nurses outside the headquarters of the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA) on Thursday. All of this reveals well whose interests Mamdani’s administration really ends up protecting.

For many organizers, his decision to retain Jessica Tisch as police commissioner — a move that raised alarms before Mamdani took office and sparked debate within the DSA — makes the Hochul endorsement feel less like an isolated misstep and more like a pattern impossible to ignore.

Within this context, NYC-DSA leadership released a statement responding to Mamdani’s endorsement that avoided naming the endorsement itself or confronting its implications for the strike. The statement functioned less as a political reckoning than as damage control. It offered criticism without drawing lines and thus avoided intervening on a key debate involving working class and socialist politics at a moment when clarity was urgently needed.

Other responses on the Left have tried to smooth over the contradiction instead of confronting it. Figures like Eric Blanc have framed Mamdani’s endorsement mostly as a question of timing or leverage — that he should have waited, pushed harder for concessions, or played the endorsement more strategically. Writers associated with the Bread & Roses caucus go further, arguing that the endorsement itself was a mistake in the middle of an active class fight: backing a governor who is intervening to weaken an ongoing nurses’ strike doesn’t just send a bad message, it materially undercuts the pressure needed to win.

But for a lot of activists, even this framing stops one step short. The problem isn’t only that the endorsement came at the wrong moment, or even that it weakened a specific struggle. It’s that the same pattern keeps repeating whenever left figures try to govern inside the Democratic Party. Each time, the logic of governing pulls them away from confrontation and toward managing conflict, calming things down, and keeping institutions running — even when those institutions are being used against workers, migrants, and protesters. That’s why this contradiction no longer feels theoretical. People are living it, learning from it, and finding it harder and harder to ignore.

The Lesson Clear Is Clear: We Need a Party of Our Own

Again and again, movements are told that proximity to capitalist power can be turned into leverage — that staying inside the Democratic Party, avoiding open rupture, and maintaining relationships with party leadership will ultimately strengthen struggles from below. Yet each time class struggle sharpens, the opposite occurs. The party closes ranks. State power is deployed to contain disruption. And left-identified figures are pulled into legitimizing that process, whether through votes, endorsements, silence, or appeals for patience.

This is not a failure of individual judgment; it is the normal operation of a party that exists to govern capitalism. The nurses’ strike makes this impossible to ignore. Nurses aren’t debating strategy in the abstract. They’re standing in the cold, on an open-ended strike, trying to stop hospitals from grinding them down and replacing them. From that vantage point, an endorsement isn’t neutral. It doesn’t land as “we’ll work this out later.” It lands as a signal about whose side the state is on — and who is expected to absorb the cost. Whatever the intention, it weakens the fight that’s actually happening.

When people say “this is just how politics works,” they mean that this is where working-class power is supposed to stop. That strikes can pressure, but not disrupt too much. That movements can push, but not force a break. Anyone who’s actually been in these fights knows that’s false. We’ve seen what happens when workers self-organize, escalate together, and stop waiting for permission.

Minneapolis showed that. Not because it was clean or complete, but because it stripped things down. When people acted on their own terms — in workplaces, neighborhoods, and the streets — power became visible fast. Not institutional power. Collective power. The kind that doesn’t ask first.

Now, more militants are recognizing a pattern they’ve lived through repeatedly: you can’t build independent working-class power while remaining politically tied to a party whose job is to contain that power once it becomes disruptive.

The answer isn’t abstention or retreat from politics. It’s not “giving up on elections.” It’s the opposite: We need a political organization that answers to people in struggle — not to party leadership, donors, or the need to keep the system stable. A party that does not mediate class conflict, but takes sides in it. A party that uses elections not to contain movements, but to strengthen strikes, organize mass resistance, and prepare for confrontation with capital.

A party worthy of nurses on strike. Worthy of the tens of thousands of DSA members who keep organizing anyway. Worthy of the Zohran canvassers who knocked doors because they believed they were building something real and for the rank and file of DSA that is organic part of the struggles, from Minneapolis to California.

It’s a conclusion people are reaching by living through this again and again — watching how the Democratic Party pulls left figures into line as soon as struggle sharpens. The task now is to break the cycle by organizing toward a socialist, working-class party — independent of the Democrats and rooted in real struggles.

The post Why Is Zohran Mamdani Endorsing Strikebreaker Kathy Hochul? appeared first on Left Voice.

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