By Patrick MARTIN

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Three weeks from now, on Tuesday, November 4, Democrat Zohran Mamdani is likely to be elected the next mayor of New York City. 

Mamdani won the Democratic primary in June in an upset victory over the favorite of the party establishment, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Mandani’s victory was an expression of a significant movement of broad sections of the population to the left.

In the four months since he won the Democratic primary, however, Mamdani has engaged in a systematic political striptease, repudiating previous positions ranging from “defunding” the police to breaking the control of the super-rich over the city, to supporting the slogan “globalize the intifada,” synonymous with the mobilization of popular opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza all over the world.

Mamdani has held a series of closed-door meetings, in which he schmoozed representatives of the real estate moguls, the stock exchange and the major banks, and he has taken on key advisers from the Democratic Party establishment to provide assurances that there will be nothing radical about the administration that replaces the hated crook and Trump stooge, former police captain Eric Adams.

These actions have produced a shift in the attitude of sections of the ruling class and Democratic Party establishment. The New York Times has still not taken an official position on the election since its “anyone but Mamdani” editorial in June. But its news and opinion pages have become a virtual campaign hub promoting the Democratic candidate.

This reached its peak over the last three days as the Times published a half dozen articles and columns totaling nearly 25,000 words—the length of a short novel—portraying Mamdani as a brilliant, charismatic and history-making figure.

A few points must be made about the longest of these tracts, a cover story in the New York Times Magazine by Astead Herndon, under the gushing headline, “Inside the Improbable, Audacious and (So Far) Unstoppable Rise of Zohran Mamdani.”

Herndon provides details about the effort by Mamdani to ingratiate himself to the Democratic Party establishment and cites the response of longtime Democratic Party fundraiser Robert Wolf:

“Zohran, to me, is more of a progressive capitalist,” Wolf told me, adding that he was convinced by their private interactions that Mamdani understood the importance of the private sector thriving in his New York. “He’s someone that wants to figure out how to use the government in an appropriate way on things that help equality and help the underserved.”

Herndon goes on to observe that Mamdani has “tweaked” his positions in the course of this political adaptation, a gross understatement:

He has made it clear that he wants to support renters, not punish landlords. He wants to support public education, not take a hammer to specialized schools with elite admissions. He supports Palestinian rights; he’s not anti-Zionist. He made key concessions when it comes to policing. Importantly, he made clear that he was open to compromise when it came to his proposed millionaires’ tax. Call it Mamdani 2.0.

In other words, Mamdani promotes the fiction that there are no fundamental divisions in capitalist society, no irreconcilable conflicts between social interests. It is possible to support workers while not being opposed to the oligarchs that exploit them; to support Palestinians without being opposed to the state that is murdering them; to support immigrants without being opposed to the institutions that are jailing, torturing and deporting them.

Mamdani’s rejection of conflicts between social interests means the continued subordination of the working class to the interests of the capitalist class, through the mechanism of the Democratic Party. This is the essential function, not merely of the Mamdani campaign, but of all the efforts of the Democratic Party “left,” including Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Democratic Socialists of America.

The response of Mamdani to the escalating conspiracy of Trump to establish a presidential dictatorship is the most damning refutation of his program of “progressive capitalism.” Trump has already begun referring to “communist New York,” and if Mamdani is elected mayor, he will immediately come under ferocious attack. Trump has threatened direct intervention against New York if Mamdani is elected, and it remains to be seen whether the oligarchy will tolerate, under any circumstances, the installation of even a nominally left-liberal figure to head the financial center of world capitalism.

Under these conditions, Mamdani made the highly conscious and deliberate decision to state that Trump would “deserve credit” if the Gaza ceasefire holds. This was said of an individual who, following Biden, has armed and overseen the massacre of tens of thousands of Palestinians and is presently engaged in a neocolonial project of ethnic cleansing and imperialist domination under the banner of a “ceasefire.”

Like Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and Jacobin magazine—the unofficial organ of the DSA—Mamdani has maintained near-total silence on the Trump administration’s moves to establish a police-military dictatorship in the United States.

At a campaign rally Monday night in Washington Heights, Mamdani appeared side by side with New York state Attorney General Letitia James, indicted last week by the Trump administration on bogus charges of mortgage fraud, in retaliation for her winning a civil suit against the Trump Organization for falsifying tax and property records.

In the course of his speech, Mamdani did not describe himself as a “democratic socialist” or make any reference to socialism (or to capitalism). He mentioned the working class only once. And he said nothing about Trump’s dispatch of the military into cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, or his threats to do the same in New York City. Nor did he reference Trump’s threats to invoke the Insurrection Act or the branding of left-wing opposition as “terrorism.”

Asked directly by reporters on other occasions, Mamdani has declared that his response to the deployment of troops against the people of New York City would be to hire 200 lawyers and file lawsuits—relying on a court system where all roads lead to a Supreme Court controlled by the far right, with three of the nine personally selected by Trump.

The politics of Mamdani are the politics of the Democratic Socialists of America, which functions as a faction of the Democratic Party. The DSA’s “left” rhetoric conceals its real function: to disarm and demobilize the working class in the face of the greatest danger to democratic rights in modern American history.

Analyzing the significance of Mamdani’s primary victory in June, the WSWS noted that it shattered the myth that socialism is “toxic” to American workers and youth and that Trump’s re-election marked a right-wing shift in the American population. It also refuted the claim that criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza is “antisemitic” or politically suicidal, as Mamdani won majorities among younger Jewish voters.

However, the enthusiasm for Mamdani combines political naiveté and a lack of basic historical knowledge. The description of this fairly conservative and affluent middle class semi-reformist as a “socialist” is a reflection of the very low level of political consciousness. In fact, even by the standards of Great Society Democrats and progressive Republicans of the 1960s, Mamdani’s program is rather conservative and certainly not “socialist.” His various maneuvers with oligarchs and real estate tycoons are merely setting the stage for his inevitable post-election abandonment of his promises and principles.

The turn of the American ruling class toward dictatorship—embodied in Trump’s open drive for presidential-military rule and the Democrats’ refusal to oppose it—exposes the impossibility of reconciling the needs of the vast majority with the interests of finance capital. Mamdani’s program and perspective has already proven bankrupt before he has even taken office.

Empty populist demagogy, combined with assurances to Wall Street that he represents no threat to the existing order, and silence on the deadly threat to democracy represented by the Trump administration. That is the campaign of Zohran Mamdani. Workers and young people in New York City and outside it should shake off any illusions and prepare to fight for the genuine socialist alternative to capitalism, represented by the Socialist Equality Party.

Original article:  www.wsws.org