Shortly after Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral election, Left Voice published a call for the DSA to seize the moment of rising interest in socialist ideas and break from the Democrats. JoeWrote, a member of the DSA, responded by advocating for the continuation of the “municipal socialism” strategy commonly endorsed by the DSA’s leadership. We appreciate JoeWrote’s response, because we believe the socialist movement in the United States can only be strengthened by serious, open debates over key strategic questions.
With this in mind, we present a response that explains why we believe now is an opportune time for the DSA to reassess its strategy of prioritizing elections tied to the Democratic Party. Through this debate, we aim to recommit our pages to serving as a space for political exchange with members of the DSA and anyone interested in discussing the strategies necessary to build the socialist movement
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The election of Zohran Mamdani was a watershed moment for the socialist movement in the United States. Riding a wave of discontent and organized struggles against rising costs, U.S. support for the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the Trump regime’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights, Mamdani defeated the widely-hated former governor Andrew Cuomo in both the Democratic primary and the general election. His victory as a self-described socialist demonstrated that people in New York City are fed up with the capitalist establishment. It also showed that a significant majority of New Yorkers, including the tens of thousands who campaigned for him, are hungry for an alternative to the liberal compromises and class collaboration that have defined New York politics. In fact, Mamdani’s victory proves that many working people across the United States are more open than ever to the idea of socialism. As revealed by the most recent Gallup poll (conducted two months before Mamdani’s victory), nationwide support for socialism is at an all-time high (39 percent), while support for capitalism has never been lower.
Looking at this phenomenon, one might conclude, as JoeWrote does in his recent response to Left Voice, that campaigns like Mamdani’s are a cause rather than an effect of the growing interest in socialist ideas. For JoeWrote — who argues against Left Voice’s call for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to break with the Democratic Party — Mamdani’s victory suggests that the best way to build socialism is to simply repeat such electoral efforts until a critical mass of political power is achieved. But this is a strategic mistake for several reasons.
First of all, the author sorely underestimates the concrete organizational importance of class independence, which he rejects as ultra-Left. But he also fundamentally misunderstands the political moment we are living through and what’s really behind the rise of opportunists like Mamdani and other populist politicians on the Left. Because of this he overlooks both the incredible opportunities that exist now for the creation of a working-class party for socialism, as well as the pitfalls of pursuing a reformist program within the Democratic Party at a moment when millions of people organizing against the Trump regime are seeking a political alternative. Worst of all, because of his narrow focus on a parliamentary path to socialism, JoeWrote largely ignores the question of class struggle and the relationship between class struggle, socialist organization, and the state. Getting such questions right is essential for everyone who wishes to build a powerful socialist movement in the United States.
Capitalist Crisis and Class Struggle
Like the 2016 primary campaign of Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s 2018 campaign for congress, Mamdani’s victory is yet another sign that working people across the country are hungry for alternatives. But such populist campaigns and the rising levels of class struggle they feed on, are not only representative of class anger. They are also the products of a larger organic crisis, in which, as Antonio Gramsci explained, “the old is dying and the new has yet to be born.” After nearly four decades of privatization, austerity, deregulation, and rampant imperialist exploitation of the global working class, the bloody project of bipartisan neoliberal capitalism has reached its limit. The U.S. ruling class, no longer able to maintain its power and profits through the political consent of the masses, is desperately seeking solutions to this crisis.
Meanwhile, the working class and the oppressed in the U.S. are becoming increasingly restless, creating new opportunities for class-independent political organization. The teachers’ strikes of 2018, the BLM uprising of 2020, the strike wave of 2021, the campus protests for Palestine, and the recent anti-ICE protests and strikes in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis have galvanized millions of young people, students, and union members across the country, including many who went on to join the DSA. This new generation, forged in the heat of battle, represents our best hope for building real working-class power and political organization in the United States.
In response to this ongoing organic crisis and the rise of class struggle nationwide, the Far Right and the Trump administration are pursuing increasingly authoritarian measures aimed at weakening or crushing working people’s ability to fight back. Meanwhile, the more liberal wing of the establishment and the Democrats have repeatedly attempted to de-escalate, contain, and co-opt working-class struggles in an effort to find a new way forward after the collapse of what Nancy Fraser terms “progressive neoliberalism.” On the Left, this crisis has led to the emergence of populist politicians like Sanders, AOC, and Mamdani, who claim to represent the rising anger of the masses eager for alternatives, but who nonetheless remain firmly bound to and dependent on the old order. Their limited horizons, their timid reforms, and their comfortable coexistence with the imperialist Democratic Party have only bolstered the “left wing” of the bourgeoisie and threaten to drive more people back into the arms of the state.
This is why class independence is about more than just principle.
Class Independence Is Not about Principle. It’s about Power.
Faced with a political regime that has declared war on working people both at home and abroad, the task for the Left is clear. We must do everything possible to unite our struggles and build the independent power of the working class to defend itself and achieve its demands. This means uniting the labor movement with the struggle against ICE and for full democratic rights for immigrants — because immigrants are workers too. It means organizing rank-and-file-led general strikes and mass demonstrations — like those held in Spain and Italy last year — against the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, as well as the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the expansion of settlements in the West Bank. And in a less defensive way, it means uniting our fight for safe, affordable housing and basic services (like free childcare and public transit) with broader national demands for universal health care and free public higher education available to all, including immigrants.
Building such united struggles while supporting and campaigning for sewer socialists and politicians within the Democratic Party is not just contradictory; it is impossible. This is because the real power of the working class is not, and never has been, in the halls of government, where compromise is the order of the day, and where politicians like Sanders, AOC, and Mamdani pragmatically — so they would say — accept the limits imposed upon them by the ruling class and its representatives. On the contrary, the real power of the working class lies in the streets and in our workplaces. While there is room, as I will explain in the next section, for socialists to engage in parliamentary politics, our goal is not merely to elect representatives. Our aim is to win our demands, whenever possible, while building the forces necessary for a final confrontation with capital. This is the only way to bring about a socialist world.
The electoral approach advocated by people like JoeWrote not only ignores the centrality of class struggle; it channels class anger and organization into support for the state and its repressive apparatuses, including the military and the police which are used to suppress working-class organization and struggle. In fact, DSA electeds like AOC and Jamaal Bowman have voted in favor of breaking strikes, funding Israel’s military, and supporting coup attempts in Latin America. Meanwhile, Mamdani’s police department has arrested striking nurses and anti-ICE activists. The NYPD, under the new mayor, has also actively supported and defended ICE agents operating in the city, despite New York’s designation as a sanctuary city. All of this has occurred without a single word or complaint from Mamdani. But when New Yorkers threw snowballs at NYPD officers after the last blizzard, Mamdani wasted no time rushing to the defense of the cops.
Such contradictions, including Mamdani’s two bizarrely cordial visits to the White House, are not mere growing pains or simple mistakes that can be corrected, as JoeWrote would have us believe; they are baked into the strategy of running for an executive position in the Democratic Party. For Mamdani, who is more of a left populist than a socialist, the priority is to deliver on as many of his campaign promises as possible, regardless of the collateral costs to working people in other areas of our lives. After all, New Yorkers shouldn’t have to choose between libraries and childcare. Yet instead of mobilizing his base to take action in the streets, Mamdani is seeking to advance his agenda by making backroom room deals and endorsing fellow Democrats like Hakeem Jeffries and Kathy Hochul — even when they are running against left-wing challengers in the DSA.
By encouraging the DSA to focus its organizing efforts on campaigns like Mamdani’s, JoeWrote advocates for a strategy that ultimately drives people back into the arms of the Democrats. Worse, he fosters the illusion that the state, which does everything it can to limit class struggle and working class power, can ever be a fair arbiter of class conflict. For JoeWrote, using the Democratic ballot line is just a tactic. But tactics without a broader strategy are useless. Unfortunately, the overarching strategy of the DSA leadership, which JoeWrote seems to support, is equally confused. The idea that the DSA can continue to grow by winning high-profile elections and that some day they will have enough electeds to make a dirty break with the Democrats and form a party of their own, is not supported by the facts. DSA electeds have, almost without exception, adapted themselves to the politics of the Democratic Party. They have repeatedly defended and endorsed some of the party’s worst politicians and platforms, and have done nothing to advocate for an independent party. Indeed, as Charlie Post nicely explained in 2021, the timeline for an eventual break has effectively been postponed indefinitely.
Worst of all, it turns out the strategy of using the Democratic ballot line is also not good for growing the ranks of the organization. According to the DSA’s own data, membership fell from a high of almost 100,000 paper members in 2020 to 55,000 in 2024. This decline can be attributed to two factors: the DSA leadership’s failure to champion class struggle during the BLM uprisings of 2020, which drove many activists away, and the mediating effect of Biden and Harris’s election that same year, which significantly slowed membership growth. The wishy-washy position of many DSA electeds on Israel and Gaza, at a time when public opinion was turning against Israel and U.S. imperialism, didn’t help either. Seen from this perspective, the 45,000 new members who joined after the elections of Trump in 2024 and Mamdani in 2025 were not so much a net gain, as JoeWrote likes to crow, but rather a replacement of those lost during the intervening period of Democratic rule. In other words, the DSA is no larger thanks to Mamdani than it was in 2021.
The good news is that there is an alternative to this strategy of class collaboration, one that does not involve merely abstaining from elections or public politics.
From Electoralism to Revolutionary Parliamentarism
JoeWrote argues that refusing to run on the Democratic ballot line would be political suicide for socialists and that the only way to remain relevant and connect with workers is to compete for their attention within the Democratic Party. But one does not need to cooperate with or support the representatives of the ruling class to be relevant or to reach workers open to our ideas. Socialists have faced similar obstacles in the past, and their many victories show that we can successfully run for office independent of bourgeois influence without compromising our defense of the working class or our larger strategy. Revolutionary parliamentarism is a tactic that socialists have used since before the Second International to spread our ideas, to agitate for class struggle on the streets, and to highlight the system’s contradictions by directly confronting, rather than collaborating with, bourgeois parties and the state. And there are plenty of contemporary examples.
Long before AOC and Mamdani used the Democratic primaries to win their elections, and two years before Sanders chose to run as a so-called democratic socialist, independent socialist candidate Kshama Sawant won a seat on the Seattle City Council. This victory provided her and her tiny party of fewer than 300 members a national platform to promote socialist ideas and advocate for a national $15 minimum wage, which Sawant spearheaded in Seattle. Imagine what could be accomplished with 100,000 dedicated members. Unfortunately, Sawant’s party, Socialist Alternative, which had grown dramatically thanks to her victory, ultimately undermined its own strategy by endorsing Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary. This led to a mass exodus of members and contributed to the party’s eventual decline. Nevertheless, her victory showed that independent socialist campaigns can not only win but can also serve as a banner for socialist ideas, even in the United States.
Meanwhile, in Argentina, representatives of the Workers Left Front–Unity (FIT-U), which includes members of Left Voice’s sister organization, the Socialist Workers Party (PTS), have won several seats in Congress by running on an explicitly socialist platform. These electeds, including Congresspersons Myriam Bregman and Nicolás del Caño, have used their positions to highlight the crimes of the Javier Milei administration and to agitate for and lead class struggle, sometimes on the very doorstep of Congress. Unlike DSA elected officials, FIT representatives do not vote for military or police budgets, nor do they endorse candidates from bourgeois parties. All of our representatives in Argentina earn the same salary as a teacher and donate the remainder to support workers’ struggles. FIT representatives not only oppose the Far Right but also call for mobilization, standing alongside demonstrators protesting Milei and facing the same repression. For socialists, our focus is not on parliament but on the class struggle. Our parliamentary activity aims to raise class consciousness and organize effective resistance to our class enemies in the streets and our workplaces.
In this time of imperialist war against Iran and Gaza, the DSA, whose base is mobilizing against the war and in defense of migrants, would do well to think more about how to agitate for the kind of class struggle we witnessed in Minneapolis and worry less about making backroom deals with Democrats.
Of course, a clean break with the Democratic Party at this moment would not automatically lead to the formation of a working-class socialist party. The DSA’s program lacks a perspective for the working class to seize power. Despite being the largest socialist organization in America, it does not represent the combative vanguard forged in recent years through movements like BLM and the struggles for unionization, nor from the profound experiences in Minneapolis. But breaking with the Democrats would unleash a process of debate and shared political experience in class struggle within the broader movement against Trump. Most importantly, it would create a clear vision of class independence that could unite the many millions of workers and radicalized youth disillusioned with the Democrats and the system they defend.
The post Parliamentarism without Class Independence Is No Strategy for Building Socialism appeared first on Left Voice.
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