The New Dark Age

A Victory Shaped by Crisis, Not Consensus

Zohran Mamdani did not win the mayoralty of New York City because the city suddenly embraced socialism. He won because the crises that capitalism produced have reached a degree of visibility that even the liberal imagination cannot deny. Rents have risen faster than wages for a generation. The subway collapses under its own deferred maintenance. The police budget swells like a tumor while public schools beg for crayons. The working class—whether the gig worker on an e-bike inhaling car exhaust, the Caribbean immigrant holding down two care shifts, or the lifelong New Yorker pushed deeper into the outer boroughs—lives under permanent economic siege. In this environment, a candidate who speaks plainly about housing, transit, and the cost of survival begins to sound less like a visionary and more like someone who can count.

Mamdani’s rise is a product of two intersecting forces: the exhaustion of neoliberal governance and the political maturity of a new generation of organizers. The campaign was not powered by corporate donors or the backroom machinery of the Democratic Party; it was built on the street, through tenant unions, mutual aid networks, campus DSA chapters, and community power that developed in the rubble of pandemic austerity. It is the same infrastructure that distributed groceries when the state abandoned the poor, that kept tenants in their homes when landlords circled like vultures, that defended Palestinians in the borough streets when the political class tried to criminalize solidarity. The state did not produce this victory. The community did.

And yet, this moment is not the destination—it is a contradiction. A self-described democratic socialist now occupies the executive seat of the largest municipal government in the imperial core. A city whose budget is intertwined with Wall Street, whose police are trained alongside the armed wings of settler-colonial projects, whose economy depends on the landlord class like lungs depend on oxygen. To govern here is to step directly into the machinery of empire, where every reform is contested by banks, developers, the NYPD unions, and the political establishment that prefers symbolic progress to material change.

This is the terrain on which Mamdani’s victory must be understood. Not as the arrival of socialism at City Hall, but as the opening of a new front in the long struggle against the ruling class. The working class did not elect a savior. They forced open a door. Whether that door becomes a threshold or a trap now depends on whether movements continue to organize beyond the ballot, build institutions outside the state, and refuse the seduction of managerial governance. As Marx taught us, the point is not merely to interpret the world—or elect a mayor—but to change the material conditions that produce exploitation in the first place.

The Program of Relief Without Rupture

To understand the meaning of Mamdani’s political program, we have to read it not as a manifesto for socialism, but as a platform designed to manage the symptoms of capitalist crisis without confronting its source. His central proposals—free buses, a municipal grocery system, universal childcare, a rent freeze, and a graduated tax on luxury wealth—speak directly to real suffering. They are popular because they target the everyday violence of austerity: the cost of movement, the cost of feeding a family, the cost of raising children, the cost of simply staying alive in the city one calls home. These are not abstract appeals to ideology. They are responses to the suffocating pressures of economic survival in a metropolis where the market has been permitted to devour human life.

But these interventions, while necessary, do not question the architecture of power that produces the crisis. They operate within the horizon of redistribution, not transformation. Social housing does not yet replace private landlords; the transit system remains tied to Albany’s political chokehold; the municipal grocery does not abolish the supremacy of corporate food monopolies; childcare remains a social program rather than a reconstructed social foundation. It is a politics of mitigation, not emancipation—a politics of repairing what capitalism breaks, while leaving the engine intact. In this sense, Mamdani’s project echoes the lineage of European social democracy, which historically sought to cushion the blows of capital while preserving its right to rule.

This does not make the platform unimportant. Relief matters. Bread matters. Transit matters. Children matter. There is profound dignity in making life less unbearable. But we cannot confuse relief with liberation. The political scandal of the moment is that the American state has become so violently indifferent to human need that even moderate redistributive proposals appear revolutionary. The horizon of political imagination has been lowered to the point where survival itself is treated as a radical demand. Yet survival is merely the first condition of struggle, not its culmination.

What is missing from Mamdani’s platform is the question that defines scientific socialism: who controls the means of life? Not how to regulate them, tax them, or plead with them—but how to place housing, transit, food, labor, and land under direct democratic control of the working class itself. Without this, socialism collapses back into its mildest variant: a kinder capitalism, a capitalism that apologizes while it disciplines. This is why the ruling class does not fear the program—only its consequences if movements continue to organize independently of the mayor who now speaks in their name.

City Hall in the Shadow of Empire

Now we enter the territory where contradiction is not simply ideological, but structural. To govern New York City is to sit inside one of the principal command centers of global capitalism. The skyline itself is a monument to finance capital; the city budget is a battlefield shaped by the real estate lobby, the bond market, and the federal policies that treat public need as a liability and private profit as a natural right. No mayor—no matter how sincere, how movement-rooted, or how rhetorically militant—can govern outside these constraints without confronting the forces that enforce them. And those forces are not symbolic. They are the landlords who shape zoning, the banks that dictate credit, the police unions that guard capital with batons and badges, the state legislature in Albany that can override municipal law at will, and the federal government whose sanctions, blockades, and imperial networks ripple into every corner of the municipal economy.

To freeze rents is to provoke open conflict with developers whose wealth is tied to perpetual extraction. To make buses free is to contest MTA funding structures that are entangled with debt markets and state-level patronage networks. To tax corporate wealth is to confront a business class whose influence extends smoothly from the boardroom to the newsroom to the legislative chamber. None of these reforms can move unopposed. And here lies the first great test of Mamdani’s administration: will he mobilize the mass organizations that elevated him to power to confront the ruling class directly, or will he attempt to bargain with the very interests that profit from the immiseration of the people?

There is a danger here that history has shown us many times. When movements enter the state without maintaining their autonomy, they do not transform the state—the state transforms them. The municipal government is not a neutral instrument waiting to be steered; it is an apparatus constructed to stabilize capitalist social relations. Its bureaucracies enforce stability, not upheaval; its legal frameworks protect property, not life. Without organized pressure from below—continuous, militant, public, and ungovernable—reforms are either watered down, stalled, or absorbed into the functioning of the very system they were intended to disrupt.

The question, then, is not whether Mamdani has good intentions. It is whether the movements that built his victory can resist the gravitational pull of co-optation. Whether tenant unions, worker centers, transit organizers, and community networks will continue to act as independent forces of struggle rather than as adjuncts to City Hall. If they do, then the mayoralty becomes a pressure point—an opening. If they do not, then this administration becomes another chapter in the long history of reformist containment, where popular energy is redirected into parliamentary procedure until the ruling class regains its footing and resumes its offense.

Internationalism Without Anti-Imperialism

The real fracture line of Mamdani’s politics emerges when we leave the realm of municipal suffering and step onto the terrain of global power. In speeches and interviews, Mamdani has described himself as an internationalist, a supporter of “global solidarity,” an advocate for Palestinian liberation, and a critic of U.S. militarism. These statements resonate because they respond to a city where diasporas of the global South live with the memory of empire in their bones. In Queens alone, one can hear the languages of every nation the United States has destabilized, sanctioned, or bombed in the name of “democracy.” To speak of Palestine, of solidarity, of the right of colonized people to resist—this is no small thing in the imperial core. It is a breach in the narrative of American innocence.

But then the contradictions surface. For when Mamdani speaks of Cuba and Venezuela, he does not treat them as nations besieged by U.S. imperialism. He does not foreground the blockade, the sanctions, the CIA-backed coup attempts, the decades-long economic strangulation designed to crush any experiment in sovereignty not aligned with Washington. Instead, he repeats the language of the empire itself: “dictator,” “authoritarian,” “failed model.” Here, the radical posture collapses into liberal moralism. The analysis that is sharp when aimed at Netanyahu, or at the NYPD’s collaboration with settler-colonial forces, dulls when faced with socialist experiments in the global South. The critique becomes individualized and moral rather than structural and historical.

This is the hallmark of democratic socialism in the imperial core: solidarity for the oppressed, as long as that solidarity does not require a break with U.S. global hegemony. It is safe to condemn occupation in Gaza—because the liberal class has already begun to distance itself from Israel’s most public atrocities. But to defend the Cuban Revolution—to affirm the right of Venezuelans to pursue socialism without U.S. interference—to recognize that every socialist government under siege is not merely flawed but besieged by design—this requires something deeper than compassion. It requires an anti-imperialist analysis rooted in the understanding that the empire is not a foreign policy glitch. It is the organizing principle of the U.S. state and the foundation of the domestic economy.

Without this analysis, internationalism becomes a performance. It expresses sympathy for suffering, but it refuses to name the system that produces that suffering. It supports the victims, but refuses to confront the executioner. And the executioner, in this case, does not carry a flag of convenience: it flies the Stars and Stripes. Thus the contradiction of Mamdani’s politics is not personal—it is structural. It reflects the limits of a socialist imagination that seeks to reform life within the imperial core without dismantling the global machinery of extraction and domination that makes life in the imperial core possible. To cross that line is not merely to defy City Hall. It is to defy Washington. And history shows that this is where reformers either become revolutionaries—or retreat.

The Ceiling of Democratic Socialism

The distinction between democratic socialism and scientific socialism is not academic. It is a faultline that determines whether a political project merely softens the blows of capital or seeks to abolish the conditions that produce those blows. Mamdani’s program—serious, humane, and materially grounded as it is—lives firmly on the reformist side of that divide. It seeks to redistribute resources without dismantling the economic system that concentrates those resources in the first place. It calls for taxing billionaires, but not abolishing the billionaire class; for regulating landlords, but not socializing land; for expanding public transit, but not decommodifying transportation; for dignifying labor, but not ending exploitation. It treats the cruelty of capitalism as a moral failure, not as the inevitable outcome of a system built on profit extracted from living labor.

Scientific socialism begins where democratic socialism ends. It does not ask how to manage capitalism more humanely. It asks how to end it. It begins with an analysis of class power: who owns the means of production, who owns the land, who controls the supply chains, who benefits from rent extraction, who profits from racialized policing, who determines where credit flows and where foreclosures fall. It is a theory of power rooted in the material organization of society—not in electoral policy, not in goodwill, not in moral persuasion. And it understands that the capitalist state, even when occupied by sympathetic administrators, remains structurally organized to defend capital’s dominance.

This is the contradiction Mamdani now inhabits. He governs a city whose wealth is produced by workers and siphoned upward into financial instruments incomprehensible to the human hand. He stands at the helm of an administrative apparatus designed to preserve order—even when the existing order is misery for the majority. Without a revolutionary program, the state shapes the socialist, not the other way around. It happened to Syriza in Greece. It happened to Podemos in Spain. It happened to countless municipal socialists who believed the state could be convinced to behave differently if only decent people held office.

The lesson scientific socialism offers is clear: the state will concede reforms when it is forced to by organized mass power. Not by politeness. Not by committee. Not by the moral clarity of a mayoral address. If the movement that carried Mamdani to victory retreats into the quiet professionalism of municipal governance—if tenants stop organizing, if workers stop striking, if communities stop disrupting—then the administration will drift inevitably into accommodation. But if the movement remains militant, independent, and willing to break the peace that capital demands, then the mayoralty becomes a lever—not an endpoint. The question is not whether Mamdani can change the system. It is whether the people who elected him will continue to fight, regardless of whether City Hall blesses the struggle or begs for calm.

The Test of Power: Confrontation, Not Administration

We now arrive at the decisive question: what does it mean to govern in the belly of the beast? The liberal fantasy suggests that the state is a neutral instrument—an empty vessel waiting to be filled with moral courage and sound policy. But the state is not neutral. It is an apparatus built to safeguard property, discipline labor, and protect the uninterrupted circulation of capital. To administer such a structure without preparing to confront it is to be governed by it. And this is where every socialist in office must make a choice: to negotiate with capital or to organize against it.

Mamdani’s administration will confront this choice the moment it touches housing. To freeze rents is to pull the emergency brake on the real estate class—one of the most powerful, litigious, and deeply entrenched ruling blocs in New York history. These are the men who bulldozed rent control, cleared neighborhoods with eminent domain, weaponized policing to protect property, and turned the right to shelter into an auction. They do not negotiate. They retaliate. And they have the courts, the media, and Albany on speed dial. If the rent freeze becomes a symbolic gesture—poorly enforced, riddled with loopholes, or quietly surrendered under pressure—then the administration will reveal itself as another manager of the status quo. But if the freeze becomes a line in the sand, defended by organized tenants in the streets, then something new enters history.

The same is true for transit. “Fare-free buses” is not a technocratic proposal—it is a direct challenge to debt financing, state austerity, and the commodification of movement. To make mobility a right is to strike at the heart of how capitalism organizes urban life: by determining who may move freely and who must be trapped. The ruling class knows this. They will frame it as irresponsible, unrealistic, unsustainable. They will ask “how do we pay for it?” as if the city does not already hemorrhage billions into corporate subsidies, private policing, bond interest, and real estate tax abatements. The question is not financial. It is political. If movement organizers, bus operators, and working-class riders do not mobilize in defense of this demand, it will die under the weight of “pragmatism.”

And labor—always the heart of the contradiction. A $30 minimum wage, just-cause protections, and city vendor labor standards threaten not only small business associations but multinational contractors whose profits rely on precarious labor. The struggle here will not be won in hearings or advisory boards. It will be won where capitalism consolidates its power: in worksites, warehouses, hospitals, kitchens, schools, streets. If workers strike, blockade, walk out, and organize—infrastructure shifts. If workers wait politely for policy—policy becomes apology.

This is the truth democratic socialism rarely says aloud: reforms cannot survive without confrontation. If Mamdani governs as a manager seeking consensus, the ruling class will smother his administration in its cradle. If he governs as a tribune of struggle—backed not by electoral goodwill but by disruptive mass power—then the contradictions of this city become faultlines capable of rupturing old realities. The fate of this administration depends not on what he believes or promises, but on whether the working class refuses to stand down now that one of its own has a seat at the table.

The Counter-Offensive Will Be Immediate

None of this will unfold in silence. The ruling class does not wait to see whether a reform succeeds before it attacks. It attacks the moment the possibility of success appears. The newspapers owned by real estate billionaires will discover new anxieties about “fiscal responsibility.” The police unions will warn of chaos should their budgets face even the faintest scrutiny. Albany power brokers will rediscover their passion for “home rule” only when the home in question threatens wealth. Developers, private equity firms, and property management conglomerates will manufacture panic—rents will “collapse,” jobs will “flee,” the city will “fall into disorder.” The language is already written. The press releases are pre-drafted. The crisis narratives are waiting in sealed envelopes.

And then there is foreign policy, the soft underbelly of every reformist politician in the imperial core. The same forces that could tolerate a rent freeze or a bus fare holiday if properly negotiated will suddenly become defenders of “democracy” when the conversation shifts to Cuba, Venezuela, Palestine, or any nation that refuses to kneel before Washington. Mamdani’s derisive comments toward socialist governments of the global South—passed off as principled critiques—will be seized upon as evidence of his “reasonableness” by the liberal class. But those same comments are also the opening through which reactionary forces will drive their wedge. If you can isolate Cuba, you can isolate Palestine. If you can isolate Venezuela, you can isolate tenant unions. Imperial logic does not stay overseas. It returns home through policing, media narratives, zoning decisions, and budget allocations.

This is how the ruling class fights: not in one arena, but in all arenas simultaneously. It tries to split movements from within by elevating “reasonable voices” who can be negotiated into surrender. It weaponizes identity politics to pit diaspora communities against each other. It deploys the language of “anti-extremism” to criminalize mass protest. It uses prosecutors instead of generals, zoning boards instead of tanks, nonprofit intermediaries instead of diplomats. And when all else fails, it falls back on the one institution that never wavers: the police, whose role is not to protect life, but to protect property from life.

Mamdani will not be targeted because of who he is. He will be targeted because of what his election symbolizes: the specter of the working class realizing that power does not come from elections alone. The ruling class fears a mayor backed not by polite supporters, but by organizations willing to withhold rent, disrupt infrastructure, blockade evictions, shut down precincts, and strike at the sites of accumulation. They fear a population that has learned the lesson of the George Floyd uprisings—that the state responds to pressure, not pleading. They fear a city that remembers that it can become ungovernable.

And so the counter-offensive will come. It will be loud, it will be coordinated, it will be vicious, and it will come wrapped in the language of public interest. The danger is not the attack itself—the danger is whether the movements that brought Mamdani to office can withstand the storm without fracturing, retreating, or seeking validation from the very institutions built to neutralize them. The ruling class has one historical talent and one alone: it waits for the moment when hope becomes doubt, then turns doubt into resignation. If this administration falls to that rhythm, it will not fall to external enemies—it will fall to the soft suffocation of lowered expectations.

From Representation to Organization

The temptation now—especially among those who poured sweat, hours, canvassing shifts, WhatsApp logistics, tenant meetings, and mutual aid distribution into this victory—is to exhale. To feel that “one of ours” is in office. To believe the struggle has entered a safer, gentler stage. But representation does not replace organization. And symbolism, even when it speaks our language, does not substitute for power. The ruling class understands this; it never mistakes elections for surrender. Only the oppressed are taught to believe that voting is where movements go to rest.

The people did not elect a mayor—they created leverage. And leverage is meaningful only when it is applied. Tenant unions must remain independent. Worker centers must remain militant. Transit organizers must remain disruptive. The neighborhood committees that grew during the pandemic must not dissolve into nostalgia. The movement must treat City Hall as a terrain of struggle, not a sanctuary. This means confrontation where necessary, pressure without apology, and no sentimental loyalty to individuals over the collective needs of the class that made this moment possible.

There will be those who say: “Let him govern. Give him time. Be patient. Don’t make things harder.” But struggle is not an inconvenience to governance—it is the very condition under which meaningful governance becomes possible. The reforms on the table—rent freezes, fare-free transit, municipal childcare, labor standards—will only materialize if the mayor can point to a city too organized, too loud, too unified in its demands to ignore. Without that, every proposal is reduced to negotiation. And negotiation in this city is simply the slow erosion of principle into compromise.

What separates democratic socialism from scientific socialism is not vocabulary or aspiration—it is strategy. Democratic socialism seeks to persuade the state to behave differently. Scientific socialism understands that the state behaves as it does because of who controls it, who finances it, and who it was built to protect. To shift that structure requires not eloquence, nor virtue, nor administrative skill—but mass politics. Not a movement that cheers, but a movement that acts. Not a movement that waits, but a movement that organizes. Not a movement that hopes, but a movement that threatens the stability of the system that makes hope necessary.

If Mamdani’s victory is to matter, it cannot be the end of a campaign. It must be the beginning of dual power—institutions, councils, unions, assemblies, networks capable of acting with or without permission from City Hall. To build those forms of power is not charity work, nor civic engagement, nor policy advocacy. It is preparation for conflict. And conflict is not the failure of politics—it is the birthplace of liberation. The question before the city now is not who Mamdani will become. The question is who we will become when the state refuses to bend.