Zohran Mamdani’s electoral triumph represented more than just an off-year upset. It confirmed that democratic socialist politics, when pursued with discipline, vision, and vigor, can resonate broadly even in a city known for entrenched power structures and the quiet vetoes of wealth. The campaign succeeded not because New Yorkers suddenly became ideologues, but because Zohran came across as credible, authentic, and serious about improving people’s lives. Voters responded to an affordability agenda rooted in everyday pressures, housing costs, transit, childcare, groceries, and to a candidate they trusted to fight for them.
But underlying the campaign was a message of change. Not just policy change, but a change in how politics is conducted and how workers relate to power in the city. That second mandate matters just as much as the first. Delivering affordability without changing the relationship between citizens and governance risks reproducing a familiar pattern: a progressive administration hemmed in by hostile elites, procedural roadblocks, and a social base that mobilizes every few years only to demobilize once governing begins.
That’s why Mamdani should look seriously at making popular assemblies a key part of his governing strategy. Because without reshaping the relationship between the governed and the government, his administration will not only fall short of its particularly socialist promise but struggle to deliver on its broader progressive one too.
Affordability should remain the keyword for every socialist in New York City. Cost-of-living concerns won Zohran power, and his administration will be judged on its ability to deliver results on that basis. But socialism cannot be reduced to a checklist of redistributive policies, however necessary they are.
At its core, democratic socialism is a project to build working-class power through popular struggle, both to win immediate reforms and to lay the basis for a society beyond capitalism. It aims…
Auteur: Gabriel Hetland
