Posted October 16, 2025
By a referendum vote, Solidarity adopted the statement The Zohran Mamdani Campaign: Solidarity with the Movement & Critical Notes on the Future, posted on October 2 on the Solidarity website. The authors of this article voted “no” in the referendum. We want to explain why.
As its title indicates, the statement expresses solidarity with the movement around Mamdani’s campaign for mayor of New York City. It supports the reforms in his election platform, and it opposes the Islamophobia directed against him. We agree with all that.
The statement contradicts itself regarding critical support for Mamdani. Early on, it says:
Mamdani clearly chose to run inside the Democratic Party, not to take an independent course. We don’t agree with this perspective; in fact, we see it as a contradiction with the campaign’s demands.
But its penultimate paragraph says:
In the NYC mayoral election, Solidarity members hold differing views on casting our votes. The majority support voting for Mamdani, in solidarity with the movement, against the Islamophobic reaction mobilizing against him, and in critical support of his mayoral campaign.
Less than half the Solidarity membership participated in the referendum. Four-fifths of these voted “yes,” most of the rest voted “no,” and a few abstained. Among those who voted “yes,” some did so because they understood the statement to support Mamdani, while others did so because they understood it to reject support for Democrats and merely note that a majority of Solidarity members critically support Mamdani.
We voted “no” on the statement, because we maintain the position in the Basis of Political Agreement, adopted at Solidarity’s founding in 1986, which includes:
The capitalist parties, especially the Republican and Democratic parties, are fundamentally anti-working class, racist and sexist. We oppose any form of participation in or support for these parties. We call for the working class and its allies to form a new, independent political party that fights for their needs.
Solidarity applied this approach to Jesse Jackson’s 1988 campaign to become the Democratic Party candidate for president and the Rainbow Coalition movement around it. The capitalists’ neoliberal offensive and the working-class retreat were in their early stages, and the Rainbow Coalition could have helped slow or halt the retreat. Except that the movement’s fealty to the Democratic Party precluded this.
In a series of articles, Solidarity expressed both support for the goals of the Rainbow Coalition and an unwillingness to support candidates of the Democratic Party. An October 1988 article, The Rainbow and the Democrats After Atlanta, says:
There is a potential Rainbow alternative. Jackson could be urged to break with the Democrats and create a new Rainbow political force. Not just an electoral campaign, but a massive campaign in the streets around the issues that motivate the Jackson constituencies, the social movements and, we believe, millions of working-class people of all races who have never voted or demonstrated because they saw no hope.
This is the approach we think revolutionary socialists should apply to the Mamdani campaign and the movement around it.
Revolutionary socialists should not support Democratic Party candidates. However good their intentions, their choice to run as Democrats muddles their political message. They call for reforms, but their party stands for capitalism, empire, militarism, war, and policing. Its policies reinforce economic and social inequality and lock in the two-party alternation of greater and lesser evil: Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump…
Running as a Democrat reinforces the view among workers, including activists, that there is no alternative to the capitalist parties and, hence, the capitalist system. To win, you have to run as a Democrat. To run as a Democrat, you have to support the party and support or at least not oppose its candidates. You can denounce “oligarchy,” but you can’t organize mass action to destabilize the system.
The statement criticizes the Democratic Party, but not really the Mamdani campaign. Mamdani has walked back his previous strong statements on Palestine and the police. He says that DSA’s program is not his. He has courted the Democratic Party establishment. And he has received the blessing of Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama, Michael Bloomberg, Kathy Hochul, and Kamala Harris.
The statement includes a passage from Howie Hawkins’s article, The First Phase of the Mamdani Campaign, an edited excerpt from a larger article, Independent Political Action Under Trump, published by CounterPunch on July 8. The passage presciently observes:
Mamdani could find himself in office but not in power. That could mean an outcome like the progressive Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has experienced since being elected in 2023.
This seems to us the likely future of Mamdani in office. It’s possible that Mamdani’s win and the defeat of his program will spark mass action, make NYC ungovernable, and win the day. We hope for that and will work for it, mainly through publicity and solidarity, since we’re not in New York City.
At this point, however, there’s no sign of extralegal action, and elections in the absence of mass action are usually first attempts by workers not yet ready for militant demonstrations, political strikes, and occupations.
Under such circumstances, revolutionaries can best serve the working class by telling the truth. About the role of the Democratic Party, the need for a workers’ party, Mamdani’s impossible situation, the dead end of electoralism, and the need to go beyond elections to working-class methods of struggle.
Aoife Ferrell, Chai Montgomery, Cheryl Peck, Ellis Boal, Giselle Gerolami, Judy Wraight, Peter Solenberger, Ron Lare, Ted McTaggart
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