As Zohran Mamdani passes one hundred days as the mayor of New York City, we are being offered numerous retrospectives of his early returns. Some will seek to grade his policy work and evaluate his success in enacting his agenda. Others will assess the state of his political alliances within government and without. The more ideological balance sheets will seek to match up his actions to his own rhetoric and that of the socialist movement that put him in office.

Another way to view all these aspects is from the vantage point of the contradiction that Mayor Mamdani represents. That is, a contradiction in the properly dialectical Marxist sense: an antagonism that cannot be resolved without overcoming the larger system that gives rise to it, such as that between capital and labor. In this case, the contradiction is between Mamdani as a product of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an organization at least nominally aiming to overturn the capitalist mode of production, and Mamdani as a politician attempting to operate the machinery of the capitalist state apparatus.

Even before his victory, an intra-left battle line had been drawn between two different views on how to relate to a Mamdani administration. This division can be seen as a reflection of the contradiction just described. On one side are those who see the task of DSA as defending Mamdani’s policy agenda and building the base of popular support for it. On the other are those more concerned with calling out compromises or betrayals that separate the new mayor’s actions in power from the principles of a democratic socialist organization.