In late May, hundreds of volunteers flooded Herbert Von King Park in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood on a sunny Saturday not just for a rally with then-mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, but to knock on doors and talk to strangers about voting for him. We filled the park and spread out into satellite groups across the lawn, where dozens of field leads coached new and regular volunteers on how to canvass, reviewing the three core campaign promises we had all started to memorize by then.
This scene played out over and over throughout New York City over the past year. In all, over one hundred thousand people volunteered for the Mamdani campaign, knocking on doors, making phone calls, talking to their friends, neighbors, and to strangers. The victory that has shocked the country and the world, culminating in Zohran’s swearing in as mayor yesterday, is because of their labor, and is proof that sustained, mass organizing around clear class politics produces results.
Now comes the test that matters. Will those same people and others energized by the Zohran campaign walk into power with the new administration and feel part of the political project, or watch from the sidelines?
Our default mode on the Left won’t suffice. Treating a socialist mayor like any other politician, “feet to the fire” from day one, isolates City Hall from the very forces that elected them and gives leverage to our many opponents. The tactics of pressure politics we have developed make sense in the context of most other “progressive” elected officials: the Left is a part of an electing coalition, and we need to maintain pressure over politicians to keep them to their promises amid all the compromises.
But we have to think differently now: we have elected one of our own, and socialists have come to occupy a different, more central place in the political process, with new levers of power…
Auteur: Sumathy Kumar
