Not by Popular Power Alone
Grassroots worker organization and mobilization is essential to the success of any socialist electoral project. But socialists in executive office can’t neglect other elements, like maintaining wide popular support and alliances within the state.
To exert real pressure on elites and defend himself from the attacks likely to come from Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani can’t rely on popular mobilization alone. He will need to forge political alliances and drastically expand his base of support. (Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)
With every passing day, it looks more likely that democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani will be New York City’s next mayor.
The prospect is thrilling for the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), of which I am a member and from whose ranks Mamdani rose, and for the US left broadly. Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary against former governor Andrew Cuomo and his gigantic AIPAC-funded war chest demonstrates the potential of an ambitious left-wing economic pitch and the waning influence of the pro-Israel lobby.
If Mamdani does win in November, his program holds out the promise of breaking with the austerity and corruption of the Eric Adams administration. It also has the potential to expand the popular imagination when it comes to what the public sector can do to improve ordinary people’s lives. Yet a Mamdani mayoralty would face daunting challenges: from the hostility of the city’s economic elite, to opposition to his agenda by the Democratic state government, to the threat of federal funding cuts or worse from the Trump administration.
As many writers have emphasized, to have any hope of passing his agenda, Mamdani will need a groundswell of grassroots mobilization. His supporters in DSA, unions like AFSCME DC 37 and UAW Region 9A, and other groups that helped him win the election will need to organize to show their support for the mayor’s agenda and put public pressure on elected officials and moneyed interests who stand in the way.
Mobilization of Mamdani’s existing activist or supporter base won’t be enough, however. The campaign says that it had fifty thousand people volunteer during the primary, and he won about 570,000 votes. For context, there were 4.7 million registered voters in New York City as of 2024, and the city boasts an estimated total population of 8.5 million. To exert real pressure on elites — and defend himself from the attacks likely to come from DC — Mamdani will need to forge political alliances and drastically expand his base of support.
To understand the terrain on which the potential socialist mayor might be fighting, it’s worth revisiting some socialist history and theory from the twentieth century — including what we might learn from the tragic case of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government.
Popular Power and Its Limits
Many left-wing strategists have emphasized the need to build institutions of working-class power at the grassroots level, independent of the state. Such institutions of “popular power,” as they are sometimes called, might include trade unions (or sectoral or national trade union federations), workplace cooperatives, tenants’ unions, and democratic assemblies (from the neighborhood level to larger geographic units, like cities or regions).
Such institutions of popular power play two important roles in socialist strategy. First, in a society that has not yet transitioned beyond capitalism, they are workers’ means of fighting back against the power of capital. Through organizing themselves in unions, tenants’ councils, and the like, working-class people are able to use their collective strength to resist exploitation — by, say, striking for higher wages or withholding rent to demand housing improvements. Such institutions can also act as a counterweight to capitalist pressure on the state, mobilizing to get governments to pass pro-worker reforms and, ideally, to bring more of the economy under collective ownership and control.
Second, these institutions are essentially seeds of the new order inside of the old, and they become the muscle behind a socialist transition. Socialists often argue that, as more of the economy is socialized, popular institutions of workplace and neighborhood democracy can and should take on a greater role in ordering our everyday lives. The experiences of the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile, and various citywide general strikes are seen as offering glimpses of what such a popular, democratic reordering of society might look like.
But popular power alone is insufficient to effect a socialist transition.
First, socialists have to win and hold majority support for our project. Building popular power is not sufficient for maintaining majority support, because even in the most optimistic scenario, the activist base that makes up the core of institutions of popular power will always be a minority of society. Socialist governments must also use the power of the bully pulpit and pass popular policy reforms, to bolster their legitimacy and popularity. They can thereby strengthen their hand in pursuing more radical economic transformation down the road.
Second, state policy is necessary for fundamental aspects of a socialist transition. It falls to the national government, for instance, to nationalize (certain) firms and industries, to set up public banks, and to establish and enforce regulations governing everything from financial transactions to environmental stewardship to workers’ rights. These sorts of questions can’t feasibly be addressed by institutions of popular power alone (though a democratic socialist government would certainly incorporate their input or assign them decision-making authority as appropriate).
Moreover, a socialist government can play an essential role in promoting and developing institutions of popular power. By using their public platform and legislative authority to build up such institutions, they help workers expand their collective power and begin to lay the groundwork for a more fundamental transformation of the economy and the state. (Such a perspective is broadly in line with the strategy of “revolutionary reformism” of Ralph Miliband and the democratic socialist strategy developed by Nicos Poulantzas in his later work.)
Popular Power and the Chilean Experience
The overthrow of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity (Unidad Popular, UP) government in Chile in the early 1970s is a source of cautionary advice as we think about the tasks of socialists in government. In a 2023 Catalyst article, René Rojas argues against a common analysis on the Left that the UP government was overthrown because Allende did not push hard or fast enough — in particular, that Allende did not sufficiently mobilize or empower the organs of popular power that supported the government. Miliband, for instance, argued that Allende erred in refusing to arm his peasant and working-class supporters.
Some socialists say that the UP government was fatally compromised by a large-scale capital strike, which might have been prevented had Allende moved more quickly to expropriate private property. Yet as Rojas points out, the UP government and its supporters (often acting on their own initiative) were actually nationalizing and expropriating firms at a rapid pace: “By 1973, over half of the total national output was accounted for by the public sector, including banking, mining, foreign trade, basic industry, and even important light manufacturing sectors like textiles and key foodstuffs.”
Rojas argues also that Allende had not secured a popular majority for a more aggressive program, and concerns at the time about the loss of popular support if the UP government exceeded its mandate were reasonable. Rojas notes that Allende’s government was elected on a pledge to begin the transition to socialism — which meant “accomplish[ing] critical transformative and redistributive reforms that would better position working people and the labor movement to carry out more comprehensive anti-capitalist restructuring” down the road — not to complete it.
Finally, Rojas contends that workers would not have been practically prepared for such a showdown:
Rising popular power organs . . . were key instruments that workers built to confront measures deployed by elites against the Chilean road’s progress. Yet they were erected atop organizational and strategic capacities that generations of workers, poor people, and their parties had painstakingly struggled to develop. Faced with the prospect of an unwinnable civil war, Allende was compelled to avert a useless bloodbath. As the campaign for socialism was to be fought over the long haul, Allende and popular militants understood the need to preserve and nurture these capacities. His unwillingness to risk their destruction in a premature and hopeless final battle reflected a commitment to promoting workers’ interests in a manner rooted in the class’s demands and preferences.
Rojas makes a compelling case that Allende’s best chance for averting a coup lay in shoring up support among the significant portion of the working class loyal to the Christian Democrats (CD). This required coming to an agreement with leaders of the party’s left-wing faction (which was broadly supportive of the UP’s “road to socialism” up until right before the coup); such an agreement would have “meant restricting the scope of ongoing expropriations, tamping down on [Allende supporters’] preparations for armed confrontation, and making explicit assurances of enduring political pluralism and civil liberties.” The failure to come to such an agreement reduced the UP’s working-class support and allowed right-wing, pro-coup CD leaders to marginalize their party’s left.
The Allende experience suggests that a socialist government needs time and broad political alliances to develop its project, including the building up of popular power. The alternative, racing to a direct and final confrontation with the capitalist class, will likely be disastrous.
A Socialist in New York’s City Hall
What do these experiences mean for a potential Mamdani administration? Of course, Mamdani is not attempting to jump-start a transition to a socialist economy, nor could he if he wanted to. “Socialism in one city” is a nonstarter.
Still, his ambitious redistributive policies could help grow the socialist movement in and beyond New York. Unsurprisingly, these proposals have attracted the ire of economic elites and their political allies. His forthright defense of immigrant and Palestinian rights, as well as his being a Muslim and a socialist, have also made him a target of the Trump administration. Donald Trump and his allies have gone as far as suggesting they would cut off federal funding to New York City or even try to arrest or deport Mamdani. Given that Trump sent National Guard troops and Marines to quell protests in Los Angeles and has taken Washington, DC’s police force under federal control on the thinnest of pretexts, the president’s comments don’t seem like idle threats.
Mamdani will no doubt need grassroots mobilization to pass his agenda: both to demonstrate popular enthusiasm for him and his program, and to threaten political opponents with loss of support and their elected offices. Labor unions and tenants’ councils, for instance, are organs of popular power in New York City that can play an important role here, as can DSA’s committed activist base. Mamdani ought to do what he can to build up such institutions, both to strengthen his own hand and to empower working-class forces generally.
But to succeed as mayor, or even just to ward off attacks from Trump, he will need to maintain wide popularity, including from centrist Democratic leaders and millions of ordinary people who do not share the politics of his hardcore DSA supporters. This may mean, as Aziz Huq has argued, that Mamdani will have to navigate trade-offs between more aggressive moves (say, seizing Trump’s New York City properties) and a more moderate governing approach that will win the support of anti-Trump centrists.
So the Mamdani mayoralty will have to walk a political tightrope. It needs to create, strengthen, and mobilize organs of popular power while also maintaining broad public backing and alliances with adjacent political groupings. And Mamdani’s success or failure in passing policies that materially improve the lives of working-class New Yorkers will in turn influence how successful he is in both building popular power and shoring up sufficiently wide support.