Introduction:
The whole of Trump’s regime is soaked in the blood of Gaza. He is personally indicted by his link to Epstein and Mossad and his family fortune swells with booty from Arab oil oligarchs content to allow Palestine to starve. There is a unity of essence behind the genocide of Gaza, the kidnapping of immigrant workers and the tariff war escalating particularly against the BRICS; a massive contradiction that is seeking a resolution. A mass movement is emerging at the base of the working class on a trans-hemispheric level, its cutting edges in the United States are neighborhoods confronting the masked fascist ICE thugs and youth who built the Palestine Solidarity movement against the Democratic/Republican party financed genocide in Gaza.
The workers’ movement is mushrooming and is on the march. The unity of essence explodes in the streets as the spirit, intent and demands of the international opposition against the genocide, against the deportations and tariff war wash away the single-issue leftist strategy of the 60’s. We have long argued Palestine is the keystone in the world revolution. It is no coincidence that the Zionist occupation morphs into all out genocide just in time with the decline of U.S./EU imperialism and the abandonment of democratic norms in the U.S. and across Europe. The end of U.S. exceptionalism exposes that it was never really an exception!
The international workers movement must find its footing to resolve this existential contradiction. The emergent movement must create a new leadership to defeat the genocide, defend democracy, protect immigrant labor and defeat tariff wars with workers control and central planning of the world economy. To do so requires a socialist revolution. The reactionary pyrotechnics of the Supreme Court and executive orders are the ruling class response to the masses, from whom they fear a revolutionary resolution to the essence of Capital’s terminal crisis. Although we have not coalesced as an independent movement with the proletarian leadership needed, notably a working class party, the contradiction of capitalist decay is exploding through the surface.
The Latin American revolution has found a home across North America from Los Angeles to New York; increasingly they are the leaders of the Local Unions and they do not forget where they came from. Still, a breakthrough is required to reach and link with the anti-Zionist youth, a breakthrough for these workers to take hemisphere-wide leadership of an antifascist and anti-imperialist workers’ movement that smashes Trump’s deportation terror, forms its own workers’ party and defeats his drive to control all the states and governments of the global south. His aim is to reassert the “great” control the U.S. economy had over its backyard neighbors who are today gravitating to the BRICS, the international popular front of the 21st century.
Making this breakthrough requires leaving dead centrist politics behind, understanding and rejecting the method of the betraying Popular Front leaderships and those of varieties of ‘national Trotskyism.’ Here we point to an intentional confusion of the workers United Front, a class independent front for struggle, with the multi-class People’s Front that subordinates the workers’ program to the leadership of the “democratic” wing of the bourgeoisie. “National Trotskyists” wind up tailing “progressive” comprador bourgeois nationalist forces, such as Nasser, Paz Estenssoro, Peron, Chavez and a list of others. The North American variant finds its home as the left tip of the Democratic Party while feigning independence. A significant critique of Morenoism from within its ranks had been promised by some but has yet to be delivered. Nor has any such critique had an impact on the trajectory of the various derivative tendencies.
We don’t see any evidence candidate Zohran Mamdani is defending or going to defend academic freedom or the students and faculty victimized by Adams, the Zionist college administrators and the NYPD. He feels no pressure to do so because the labor movement of over a million New Yorkers is silent on the subject, even as many of the new locals are graduate student unions. They are silent because they are Democrats, and every day and with every campaign staff appointment Mamdani shows us he’s one also and nothing like a revolutionary fighter for labor and the oppressed.
People’s Fronts lead to fascism historically: now here and even in New York!
The Popular Front/ Peoples Front Parties may appear different in New York and Buenos Aires, but their purpose is to deliver the same results: capital remains in the saddle, the left adapts except in explosive moments and then quickly adapts again to reformist politics and institutionalized class peace. Centrism finds other issues, bigger ‘revolutionary’ fish to fry just at these moments and finds no reason to demand practical moves to build a class-independent workers party or united fronts built on a class struggle basis. At the explosive moments reformism sells alliances with Peronists and Mamdani/AOC/Bernie. This strategy funnels advanced workers to acquiesce in support for the most “trusted” figures of the capitalist dictatorship (Biden/Harris/Kirchner, but also Doumergue and Allende) their very last ditch before melting away before the fascist advance. Trotsky saw the Democrat Party specifically fulfilling this role and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) exposed the fake labor parties that brokered votes for FDR in those years. America was not exceptional in his view. The poison of American exceptionalism bled from the popular frontism of the Communist Party into the SWP and the first national Trotskyism arose in the SWP, beginning with the closing of the International Center.
“In France the Popular Front took shape as the union of a reformist program of the working-class parties with the great ‘middle-class’ Radical-Socialist Party. There were no such parties in the United States, but the same social forces nevertheless operated under similar conditions, and the United States equivalent of the Popular Front was simply the New Deal Roosevelt Democratic Party.”
—“Editor’s Comments,” New International, December 1938
Like Trump, the Democratic party is neck deep in and committed to financing the Zionist project and the Gaza genocide. Alongside the GOP neo-cons (like Bolton & Graham) it connived at the Ukraine inter-imperialist proxy war. Obama’s “Pivot towards Asia” challenged China in the region, admonishing it to look inward, play by internationally accepted rules and leave military control of the region’s seas to the USA. Trump’s demagogic attacks on immigrants have negated due process, habeas corpus and ignored judicial independence. Yet Trump’s deportations in real numbers are today still dwarfed by Obama’s not considering Biden was dubbed with the moniker “returner in chief” to liken him to his mentor’s crowning achievement as “Deporter in Chief.”
The ruling class could not resolve the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC), afford to bail out the bankers and bond holders without making the working class pay; and they did, under Obama. Mortgages were foreclosed, jobs were lost and quantitative easing took a bite out of the dollar and living standards. Immigrant workers’ jobs evaporated and Obama became “Deporter in Chief.” The cost to the Democrats was a deepening rift between the abandoned workers and the historic FDR coalition. Right and left populism gripped the landscape, the Tea Party morphed into MAGA on the Right and Bernie dropped his independence, joined the Democratic Party as the leading inspiration to the emergent DSA as a populist force on the “left.”
The ruling class response to the decline of U.S. imperialism is three pronged: 1) they opt for MAGA authoritarianism, 2) they bolster the Democratic Party Leadership and maintain the control and support of the Labor bureaucracy and 3) they foster willfully supplicant social democrats like the DSA, the Berni-crats, AOC and now Mamdani to corral the emergent mass movement into electoralism and away from class struggle and working class political independence. Housebroken socialists claim this is practical and the only possible path. In what they imagine as their glory they take credit for Mamdani and his primary victory. Their analysis of the dynamics of world politics could hardly be more myopic!
What’s happening and who is the vanguard?!
N.Y.C. is at the head of the beast of reformism and electoralism with the revival of New Deal “socialism.” In resisting Trump’s fascism U.S. workers drawn from Latin America are leading the Latin American and Caribbean working class as a whole. It is of top importance to see that Trump is accelerating his attack on Latin American nations, both to recolonize those nations and kick the China-led BRICS Peoples’ Front out of Latin America. So this puts national Trotskyism to the test, as nationalist workers are pushed into a pro-BRICS international popular front against the U.S.. National Trotskyists do this, ipso facto, when they deny Chinese imperialism exists.
This brings us to look at the Brazilian case. New York reformists love Lula and see a monopolar imperialist world with Lula starring as a leading anti-imperialist. Trump helps them retail this view when he imposes 50% tariffs on Brazil and says he does so because Lula is mistreating his fascist co-thinker Jair Bolsonaro. In fact this is rubbish. Trump’s love for Bolsonaro’s strongman politics is no match for the “national interest” politics of the Brazilian ruling class or the declining U.S. empire’s clash with China’s empire-building project. Trump seeks to impose a trade deal. Brazilian leaders shop for a better one for themselves (Belt and Road.) The masses can’t win in either case! Thus we say: No support for Peronism, Lula, the Bolivarians, etc., either as part of Popular Front Parties or as members of popular front international blocs like BRICS. We wrote about this way back when ALBA was formed around Chavez and Castro’s bloc with China. Now BRICS is a much more attractive international Popular Front because it is a rising global force against the U.S. decline and fall.
The working class needs to break this status quo internationally. We show below that despite the Mamdani electoral upset of the Democratic Party machine his campaign is not a solution for the crisis of capitalism and falls well within acceptable bourgeois ruling class parameters! We will contrast the liberal reformism of Mamdani to the revolutionary method and program the working class needs to resolve the terminal crisis facing our class and indeed our species.
Ironically, yet predictably, Obama and the Democrats paved the road for the fascist Trumpian reaction. In addition to the deportations and family separations, under Obama the FBI coordinated with Democratic mayors to crush Occupy. He attacked the Longview ILWU strikers with the Coast Guard, and militarized the police used against both Occupy and Ferguson, just as he perpetuated endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, initiated “drone Tuesdays” killing civilians and even Americans abroad. The Democrats proved they could not manage the decay of the U.S. economy and decline of the empire. The TV audience watched in shock at abandoned Afghans hanging from the fuselages of Air Force transports leaving Kabul. Saigon redux!
The ruling class opted for the fascist populist and the Democrats not only wimped out but cannot fight the rising fascist reaction because authoritarianism is the only option the ruling class has to navigate the decline of the empire, which is terminal. In compliance with the desire of the ruling class for an authoritarian administration of its offensive against the workers, the Democrats turned the keys to the White House, Legislature and Judiciary over to the fascist reaction–twice–without a fight!
Now while the masses are suffering the result and are mobilizing in the streets, the Democratic leadership coughs up milquetoast opposition to the implementation of the ruling class Project 2025, its sweeping attacks on our class! The workers, the social movements and the poor are fed up, both with the fascist reaction and the inability of the Democrats to oppose it and defend those who put faith in them.
At this moment the Republicans, Trump and MAGA are floundering in the polls; but the Democrats, equally responsible for the multi-headed and terminal crisis of capitalist decay (which only the willfully blind do not see unfolding,) cannot cleanse themselves of their criminal culpability, and those in rebellion against Trump are feeling the vacuum that exists because there is no independent working class pole. We need a fighting workers’ labor party!
The labor leadership’s long term strategy of siding with the Democratic Party wing of the imperialist ruling class is fracturing along generational lines. Its base, youth from the Occupy, BLM and the Palestine Solidarity generation now populate the work force and are becoming leaders in the organizing drives. Youth are described as numerically 45% “Union Curious” by the Economic Policy Institute. Teen Vogue reports on salting efforts where youth take jobs to instigate or join union organizing drives. The right wing Cato Institute reports as “troubling” the figure that 62% of 18-29 year olds look favorably upon socialism and that 34% of the same age group favor communism. The specter that one third of youth under 30 favor communism cannot be ignored!
Mamdani: tool of the ruling class to corral the mass movement into ineffectual liberal electoralism!
Mamdani, a Democratic Assemblyman, won the NYC Democratic party mayoral primary promising unattainable reforms he identifies as a ‘realistic socialist program.’ In reality his program is liberal reformism squarely in the FDR tradition. We say his reforms are unattainable because the age of reform is over as the tendency of the rate of profit to fall has big capital engaging in a spiral of speculation, not production. Reforms require a growing, profit making economy with an expanding international market share of use value production. That’s no longer the U.S. economy in our era. There’s no returning to a “golden age” that never really was. That age was nothing but triumphant imperialism based on superexploitation of foreign peoples, followed by its forever wars and offshoring of manufacturing.
To capture the imagination, votes and activism of the young disgruntled workers, causing an upset to the entrenched machine, Mamdani’s campaign needed solutions to the economic crisis, the cost of living, affordability of housing and transportation in the city just for starters. But he also had to appeal to the anger of the youth over the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the scapegoating of immigrants, the ICE raids and attacks on DEI, democratic rights and due process.
We will show the limits of Mamdani’s liberalism, his pacifist and electoralist methods and his fake social-democratic reforms which are, in no way, a real threat to big capital or in any way a solution to the crisis our class is rebelling against. Where is the socialism the voters want? Liberal DSA candidates calling themselves socialist are attacked as communists but don’t have a communist program. We fight for the communist program!
“The Fourth International does not discard the program of the old “minimal” demands to the degree to which these have preserved at least part of their vital forcefulness. Indefatigably, it defends the democratic rights and social conquests of the workers. But it carries on this day-to-day work within the framework of the correct actual, that is, revolutionary perspective. Insofar as the old, partial, “minimal” demands of the masses clash with the destructive and degrading tendencies of decadent capitalism – and this occurs at each step – the Fourth International advances a system of transitional demands, the essence of which is contained in the fact that ever more openly and decisively they will be directed against the very bases of the bourgeois regime. The old “minimal program” is superseded by the transitional program, the task of which lies in systematic mobilization of the masses for the proletarian revolution.” -Leon Trotsky (The Transitional Program)
The Material basis for the Peoples Front cross class alliances:
Bobble-head pro-imperialists of the liberal persuasion see no crisis of U.S. capitalism and opt for an anti-Trump, local solution. To do this and believe that there are reform goodies the biggest imperialists will concede as their international fortunes diminish apace requires a mad rejection of history and materialist analysis. Pseudo Marxists who learned no lesson or deny there ever was any lesson to learn from “People’s Fronts” overseas, now rush to embrace Democrats who claim to be socialists. But there is no way out of this crisis except the revolutionary road. For Capital, and hence for Mamdani, the only acceptable real world practice of this Democrat administration will be to block the workers’ exit onto the revolutionary road.
“…Mamdani’s electoral upset of the Democratic Party machine– his campaign is not a solution for the crisis of capitalism and falls well within acceptable bourgeois ruling class parameters!”
The Mamdani campaign and Mamdani administration will never throw ICE out of New York! Instead it replays the old sanctuary cities record. The sanctuary is violated daily by ICE with the full cooperation of the NYPD. Mamdani will not restore the matriculations of the University students trashed by mayor Adams, the Zionists of the college administrators and the police. Mamdani has promised more police! Every true socialist must fight ICE now and link the fight against its MAGA white nationalism to the defense of Palestinians and the champions of their fight! That’s not election fetishizing but whole hemisphere organizing!
The popular front (the cross class alliance which ties the working class politically to the capitalist class) has remained for most of a century both a roadblock to socialism and a detour towards fascism. Reformists arrive on the scene just as the masses seek a way forward and dangle sweet nothings that block class political independence from emerging through class struggle. The fake socialists exploit illusions in electoral solutions just when revolution is required. They serve the ruling class by burning out activists who spin their wheels with the best of intentions. Even when they “win” they find themselves elected as administrators of the capitalist state which is designed to absorb and defang any internal opposition. The capitalist state must be smashed.
The downward trajectory of month over month jobs creation spans both Democratic and Republican administrations. Reform Democrats do not have the power to turn the material basis of this trajectory around.
The U.S. ruling class knows job creation is down and unemployment is up. They take this opportunity to drive down real wages. Not only by wage stagnation, inflation, elevated interest rates on housing, cars and credit cards, but by playing the racist scapegoating card against immigrant workers. By expelling millions of low wage, un-organized immigrant workers, job openings must be filled by workers born here or naturalized, for sub-living wages. The anti-immigrant deportation drive is an attack on all workers’ wages! Thousands of jobs are opening up in meat packing, food processing plants and in agriculture that only the poorest immigrant workers would take. Market forces will rebalance the ICE created labor shortage turning urban poor into rural migrants while driving up food prices across the board. The capitalists class response to the structural crisis of capitalism is to divide the working class: inviting chauvinist and racist workers into the arms of MAGA and its billionaire benefactors on the right while corporatist Democratic “friends of labor” offer pie in the sky reformist solutions to pacify the left. These can’t be delivered; it’s pure demagoguery!
It is no surprise the popular front wins so much support, even from long time “Marxists” who spent decades railing against cross class politics. We are at a pinnacle point where the Trump/Schumer/Harris genocide and the bi-Partisan anti-immigrant policies are driving a wedge between the Democratic Party’s base and its capitalist leadership; the decades old Popular Front is now faltering. The Popular Front arose in FDR’s first term in a desperate attempt to prevent working class political independence and thwart the class struggle which was breaking out. Overnight the Democrats became a successful Popular Front Party-equivalent to the cheers of the suddenly patriotic Stalinist CP. The same operation was hatched upon the Central and South American working masses, even as their subordination to U.S. imperialism grew. And an increasingly defanged Trotskyism in the U.S. left its internationalism behind in all but hypotheses. This same isolation mindset took root in the whole hemisphere after Trotsky’s assassination and the close of the International Center. Thus a Peoples Front acceptability in the absence of a mass revolutionary workers’ party is the void where Mamdani, Bernie, AOC and the DSA insert their projects as the “politics of the possible” into the workers movement with the complicity of centrists outfits, reformist socialists and other “Leftists.”
But scratch below the surface and the truth is not hard to find:
Just like the national Trotskyists in Argentina who bend to Kirchner Peronism and go on to call for street and workplace “day of actions” that do not break with bourgeois power, we see “Left Voice” Morenoism offer up a deniable de facto critical endorsement that sees Mamdani’s rise as a ‘great opportunity’ for unions to hold his feet to the fire. What we see is the City Workers’ new boss come January!
Contrary to the muddled view that the worker masses must prioritize fighting Trump’s threat to de-naturalize Mamdani in the streets, we fight for working class-political independence and insist that “progressive politics” and the Democrats have been a demobilizing dodge in New York for 150 years!
You can’t portray Mamdani on our side of the class line. He is a bourgeois liberal, a Democrat. City workers need to call a workers’ convention, found a workers’ party and put our own class candidates slate on the ballot. Failure to break free of the Democrat electoral game will set your unions up for being crushed as the bottom of the economy disappears. Listen to the “possibilists’” own words!:
Reported in the WSJ: Kathy Wylde, one of New York’s undisputed power brokers, met with Zohran Mamdani, “He said, ‘Look, I’m not in favor of the government taking over your business,’” Wylde said. “He made clear that he’s not anticapitalist in that sense.”
“If we want to bring these New Yorkers back to the Democratic Party, then we have to show them that we’re serious about making their life more affordable.” – Zohran Mamdani
“I want to be the party of the New Deal again. The party of the Civil Rights Act, the one that electrified this nation and fights for all people. For that, many would call us radical. But we aren’t “pushing the party left,” we are bringing the party home.” – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
There’s no socialism, no anticapitalism, no workers power in this collapse into support for the bourgeois Democratic Party and the bourgeois state!
Reforms that can’t be delivered without the overthrow of bourgeois state power!
How will Mamdani deliver affordable housing, free child care, access to quality healthcare, and free buses? Governor Kathy Hochul has already promised to block Mamdani’s proposed 2% millionaire tax, while the really rich laugh it off as chump change anyway.
The WSJ reports that Mark Gorton, CEO of investment firm Tower Research said, “New York is a pretty special place. It’s very hard to go somewhere else…,.” “…And are you going to do it for an extra 2%?”
The other option to fund housing and public transit is issuing MUNI bonds to billionaire bond buyers who use them to get triple tax avoidance on their interest. And who pays the interest? Down the line when the bonds come due they must be paid out of the general fund…by the taxpayer, the worker.
Again from Wylde in the WSJ: “He’s already acknowledged that the housing crisis is only going to be addressed if there’s an increase in private supply,” … “So he’s not just talking about social or socialized housing solutions.”
We fight for the price control of housing costs up to the full expropriation of the landlord class who refuse to concede, not for the creation of tax loopholes for public/private housing ventures or sole private ownership. And we don’t ever call for supporting the increased indebtedness of the taxpaying working masses who are stuck with having to pay the bondholders’ yields. (We notice the non-appearance of the traditional reformists’ standard call for a Stock Transfer tax, has it lost its currency?) We don’t offer lifejackets to Wall Street or its state. Communists expropriate big capital and abolish debt, not take it on!
This reform scheme will not happen. Mamdani does not want you to know that the “housing shortage” supports high rents with landlords “warehousing” empty apartments. Rental prices for New York Rent Controlled and Rent Stabilized apartments are raised by the 2-party Rent Stabilization Board political appointees. We say seize all the vacant buildings and apartments and take them under workers control. The Central Labor Council must control and ensure distribution of housing and the Building Trades Department of the AFL-CIO must control the renovation and production of housing.
Mamdani cannot freeze rents. The fake left behind him ignores the fact that Landlords, real estate capital, commercial as well as residential are the N.Y. Democrat power base. Rents are controlled, which is to say RAISED by a N.Y. board they have always controlled as a matter of law. Will Mamdani tie rents to minimum wages? Of course not! Will he organize tenants unions to block his sheriff’s evictions? Real reds of the past put people’s belongings back in the evicted peoples’ apartments. Nor will he pass the hat to pay back rents…even if he knows this history he won’t put it in his platform as he orients toward the monied class while promising to “benefit the working class.” Really!
We demand free quality housing for all! This can be done only by victory over landlord Capital, over Trump, Kushner, Lefrak, Tishman Speyer, SL Green, Blackstone, etc. Victory by labor organized in neighborhood committees and a citywide Workers Council. Of course this will put a hurt on the Democratic Party, whose base in the party clubs is controlled by landlord and slumlord capital. Recall that Trump was a Democrat first.
When the Sheriff throws families on the street, what will Mamdani do? Go to lunch with AOC? The Housing Court Judges are appointed by the Chief Administrative Judge of the State of NY. He has no power to stop evictions and foreclosures. The working class does! The tradition of communists in the Great Depression was to organize the tenants to put the families back in the homes, pass the hat to pay the back rent and shoo the police, wage rent strikes and fight rate hikes. This grew into the mass movement for Municipal Housing, a reform that was won because a rising U.S. imperialism could afford and at the same time profit from it. Naturally, under capitalism, this became part of the decay itself along with the immiseration of the tenant masses.
Among Democrats there is nostalgia for the City Markets that were a feature of the reformist Laguardia administrations. The City carried the fixed capital costs for these and rented store space inside them to vendors. That they were very popular, due to low prices, was no match in the end for the power of giant grocery firms. Mamdani may indeed lower overhead by using City properties as distribution centers, but he will be up against the organized power of the retail grocery chain stores and Big Agra and Trump’s tariff-triggered price floors. The bogus left does not want to hear the answer of history, that only mass wage and price committees, organized across neighborhoods, cities and ultimately continents TOGETHER with general strikes for workers control, industry-wide strikes of agriculture, energy and distribution can restrain and drive down prices to levels workers can afford. Only a workers’ government can smash high
Health care promises:
Mamdani wants to expand access to healthcare. Expanded access to healthcare is hardly the fight for universal healthcare, for free quality healthcare for all, the historic workers Marxist program. He basically promises more social workers to help people access a rapidly shrinking system funded by the state and the federal government! He has no source of funding to make up for the looming cuts from above, let alone an ability to limit the bloated costs of health care insurance companies’ profits and medical equipment prices also skyrocketing from tariffs. We need expanded, free healthcare for all through the expropriation of the healthcare, pharmaceutical and insurance industries and placed under workers control. A planned, socialist economy will achieve the highest quality, truly universal socialized care. This cannot be won through political maneuvering behind the scenes, within the City Council or within the bourgeois governments at the state or Federal level. Lobbying also has no teeth. It will take a Workers’ Government established through socialist revolution that seizes the wealth of Capital with zero compensation to win universal health care.
Mamdani proposes creating a corps of workers to provide aid and education in finding insurance, financial aid, and applying for programs. This is not going to solve the problems of access to healthcare, the problem of medical debt and quality care. He also promises to increase funding and prevent hospital closures, but he doesn’t say how except to point to partnering with workers and unions to “take on the fragmented, for-profit healthcare system and lower costs for everyone.” Nowhere in Mamdani’s entire platform does he advocate for struggle, and certainly not class struggle such as strike actions to achieve even his limited goals. Significant gains cannot be won or defended without mass struggle that materially threatens the ruling class and their class rule. And the Democratic Party knows this issue will become political dynamite should the workers be less atomized. Like rents, healthcare is demoralizing to those who see no hope, and demoralization is always the Democrats’ goal. It is the guarantor of their privilege.
The mayor has no real power:
The workers movement has the power but today’s union leadership role is to hold back the mass movement, influencing the ranks so that the mayoral campaign is put into the movement to corral its direction and prevent any breakaway to class independent action in self-defense. The Democrats’ priority has remained unchanged since the 1870s.
New York City has always attracted the workers of the whole world. Today the immigrant population stands at 3.1 million, of which an estimated 560,000 are undocumented. Defending them is the duty of the working class. There is zero reason to expect the Mamdani administration will do so, in fact his promise to expand crimefighting “effectiveness” is objectively a threat of violence against them. “I will not defund the police. I will work with the police because I believe the police have a critical role to play in creating public safety…” (Mamdani quoted in Jacobin) No real Marxist ever said this! Instead we see the examples of Los Angeles and San Francisco, where under Democratic Mayors instruct the local police to verify the “legitimacy” of ICE agents, thereafter subordinating themselves to ICE command. This is all we expect from Mamdani!
Part of his unwritten job description is to maintain the consciousness barrier of the native born worker against the worker-revolutionary traditions of Latin America and the global south. The N.Y.C. fake socialism is responding to red-baiting and Islamophobia with the traditions of N.Y. accepting immigrants and its religious pluralism! Nowhere does Marxism enter into the discussion. This fake militancy is a funhouse mirror image of ‘national Trotskyism’ in Argentina defending the “militancy” of Kirchner against Milei’s tilt to fascism.
Vanguard workers need to break the artificial boundaries between the North and South American Revolution. The workers most under attack in the U.S.A. are economic refugees escaping Latin American conditions resulting from U.S./EU imperialism. Trotskyism needs to organize, defend and unite revolutionary workers across borders as the revolution cannot succeed on a national basis. Latin American Trotskyists must critique and break from the historical aberration of “National Trotskyism.” Reciprocally the North American Trotskyists must fight for union organized defense of immigrants, demand full citizenship rights for immigrant workers and for same contract same work both sides of the borders. A revolutionary workers party would bring Latin American Trotskyists here to organize among the immigrant workers. These are integral parts of the party building for the New International needed to defeat emergent fascism and authoritarianism from N.Y.C. to Tierra Del Fuego.
The industrial workers’ militancy in Argentina depended on the movement of the unemployed and precarious workers to keep the rebellious fires stoked. In Argentina industrial workers occupied and ran factories abandoned by the owners during the 2001 uprising! With thousands of companies on the verge of bankruptcy today we need to recreate this experience here! When the poor are on the move then we see the contradictions of capitalism is on the cusp of explosion.
If unemployment is not in the statistics yet it is the reality; the fact is that chasing out immigrant workers is a cut in jobs and exactly when few new jobs are being produced. We don’t have to wait for the real unemployment on the books that is for the moment disguised by deporting immigrants. The truth, the prevailing economic activity of Capital, of the bosses is like taking links out of a chain and saying it’s still a chain. It is correct for the masses to ask why a pound of steak goes up $2 in a month. It is because of the destruction of the forces of production, the firing of meat packing workers. We say fight layoffs with sitdown strikes!
Why the working class must oppose Mamdani and win the advanced workers from reform to revolution:
Society has long since crossed over from the age of ascendant (even progressive) capitalism which advanced the forces of production and built up the working class (variable capital.) Today we are facing the Terminal Crisis of capitalism which tends towards fascism to crush the working class and its rebellions. The age of decadent capital arrived because our class, and in particular its leadership, has not yet taken the reins of power despite wave after wave of barbarity.
Today, the western imperialist powers and the eastern imperialist upstarts have no economic space for democracy from below. The laws of capitalism, in particular its long term falling rate of profit operate across the world and big Capitals must fight each other over their share of the surplus values we create by working. Resources in minerals and oil, farm land and above all the surplus value Capital steals from labor explain the Trumpian tariff wars, the Ukraine war, the never-ending Nakba against Palestine.
Biden said the “naked self-interest of the U.S. should always guide our Middle East policy…,Were there not an Israel the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.”
For capitalism to survive it must continue its endless wars over control of resources across the global south by means of serial genocidal wars: Gaza, DRC, Sudan, bombed out cities from Serbia, Idlib, Fallujah, Kiev to Gaza, this is the future that is coming home when the Marines invaded Los Angeles, and concentration camps are hastily constructed to warehouse workers in line for deportation, and to terrorize millions of workers to self deport back to the global south where economies are in shambles and authoritarianism reigns. The homeless, the confused and lost people are likely to be next in these camps, and this has just been proposed. This is Hitlerian.
From indignant spontaneity to revolutionary organization:
People are spontaneously defending their neighbors, coworkers, families and friends from ICE raids. The instincts of the masses to hit the streets to defend our communities from ICE and protest the genocide in Gaza are internationalist and correct! But workers must take the step from moral and righteous indignation to calculated, informed revolutionary action! Such requires class political independence and that is exactly why revolutionary workers must expose and oppose the fake socialists like Mamdani! Workers need a total break from Democrat-inspired pacifism so as to build Labor-Black-Brown Community Defense Guards.
The workers movement needs its anti-imperialist and anti-fascist United Front to emerge on the streets just as Mamdani in N.Y.C. tries to dissolve the emerging revolutionary instincts of the masses who are confronting ICE raids and mobilizing against genocide and war into liberal electoralist illusions.
Much of the “Left” in the United States, even the socialist Left, orbits around the Democratic Party either explicitly or implicitly. Playing in the sandbox of the Popular Front, they build sand castles, where reformist electoralism is stroked as a harbinger of escalating class struggle whose program need not be defined. Hence the enthusiasm for and lack of political opposition to bourgeois politicians like Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani. They could learn something from Jimi Hendrix, “castles made of sand wash into the sea eventually.”
These we call a fake left for a catalog of ignorances we call objectivism, opportunist failures and social-imperialism. In the present moment the most horrendous of these is a headfirst collapse into electoralism. We warn workers and all the oppressed and exploited that reformist electoralism buys the fascist wing of the capitalist class the time they need to prepare and then complete the subjugation of the lower classes and elimination of democratic rights and all past conquests; including the right to be organized in unions. The conceptions of “resistance” retailed by the fake left in the Mamdani campaign, like in the Bernie and AOC parliamentary hustles, is completely INADEQUATE to slow the crash of living standards down into depression, war and fascist dystopia. In fact their game right now is poisonous to the working class of the entire western hemisphere.
The Left reinforces illusions in the Democratic Party of imperialism by not speaking the truth about the role these so-called progressive politicians play in keeping the working class away from charting a course of class independence and a workers’ party. Much of the Left dreams of a reformed, ain’t gonna happen “kinder, gentler” Democratic Party of U.S. imperialism.
The Mamdani “program” amounts to telling the vanguard workers to wait for improvements. He can’t deliver these. Improvements that capitalism will not deliver without victorious general strikes and a “dual power” moment, a “pre-revolutionary situation.” Wait for improvements, he says, and go on trusting bourgeois politicians, waiting, atomized, devoid of power and oblivious. Mamdani’s general staff is populated with DNC stalwarts who worked for the likes of Clinton, Obama and Hochul. Counter to this miserable ‘normalcy’ we propose revolutionary optimism. Though time is running out for the planet, we say there is still time for the self-organized working masses to take all political power and build a future out of the wreckage Capital is regurgitating, always nowadays chasing profit mirages.
The rise of Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani is a reflection of the deep discontent within American society. Nothing more. It is not advancing the fight for an egalitarian society and is actually an obstacle. It will take workers breaking from all the capitalist parties and building a workers party that fights for socialist revolution to create an egalitarian society. And part of this fight means recognizing that both the GOP and the Democratic Party are the enemies of the workers and oppressed, that they stand on the other side of the barricades.
Political Program, A Workers/Labor Party and International Class Struggle
“The revolutionaries always consider that the reforms and acquisitions are only a by-product of the revolutionary struggle. If we say that we will only demand what they can give, the ruling class will give only one-tenth or none of what we demand. When we demand more and can impose our demands, the capitalists are compelled to give the maximum. The more extended and militant the spirit of the workers, the more is demanded and won. They are not sterile slogans; they are means of pressure on the bourgeoisie, and will give the greatest possible material results immediately.” – Leon Trotsky (The Political Backwardness of American Workers)
The greatest defect of the left, progressives and workers movement today is that they are at most defensive and reactive, rarely fighting for what is objectively necessary for the working class to survive. There is scarce agreement upon what that is and there is a great aversion to discussing program, as if the unity to be sought is already seen: the democratic only program of the unity of anarchism, social democracy and liberalism, a popular front program.
Mamdani serves big Capital by creating a pressure relief valve for the newly discontented. He has no program for social transformation, only promises that electoral solutions can assuage social needs in a time of a terminal crisis that his movement denies.
In actuality he represents classically reactionary petty bourgeois socialism, really liberalism, containing many elements of such outlined by Marx 183 years ago in Chapter 3 of the Communist Manifesto where, “for the benefit of the working class” and society at large, reforms are proposed not least of all those which benefit the small capitalist feeling the burdens of big capitalist concentration and burdensome regulations.
The workers Transitional Program was proposed by Trotsky as the program serving from the day of its writing until the triumph of the revolution:
“The Fourth International does not discard the program of the old “minimal” demands to the degree to which these have preserved at least part of their vital forcefulness. Indefatigably, it defends the democratic rights and social conquests of the workers. But it carries on this day-to-day work within the framework of the correct actual, that is, revolutionary perspective. Insofar as the old, partial, “minimal” demands of the masses clash with the destructive and degrading tendencies of decadent capitalism – and this occurs at each step – the Fourth International advances a system of transitional demands, the essence of which is contained in the fact that ever more openly and decisively they will be directed against the very bases of the bourgeois regime. The old “minimal program” is superseded by the transitional program, the task of which lies in systematic mobilization of the masses for the proletarian revolution.” – Leon Trotsky
For Mass Labor Action to drive ICE and the Military off the streets.
Soldiers and National Guards go home! Workers in uniform turn your guns around!
Workers and labor organizations appeal to the National Guard and military to side with the workers and immigrants against ICE and Genocide!
Demolish the Wall! No one is illegal! Full citizenship rights for all immigrant workers and their families.
Labor must fight to rescind the victimization of Palestine Solidarity activists. Reinstate all expelled students and the fired faculty! Grant the earned unjustly denied degrees!
Build Labor Black and Brown self defense guards against ICE, Police brutality, Zionist and fascist street thugs. Labor must open our halls to immigrants and anti-genocide activists to organize a mass movement for workers self defense! Defend immigrant and non-white communities!
Defeat the Trump tariff war! For workers control of international trade. Production for profit is destroying the planet and threatens species survival. The tariff war, currency war and trade wars are a dead end for the working class. Satisfy human need with a socialist production plan designed by the workers themselves.
Against Layoffs! A job is the workers right and last defense against homelessness and starvation. Mobilize entire communities in support of sitdown strikes and plant occupations! We will not be replaced by robots: share the work and shorten the work day!
Socialists fight for:
Jobs for All! Big Capital loves the unemployed maintained as a reserve army of labor to drive down wages! Socialist fight for 25 hours work for 40 hours pay and a sliding scale of wages, hours and prices.
Build workers wage, price and hours committees to organize full employment through workers control of production! For a 100% Cost of Living Allowance indexed to inflation for all workers!
Neighborhood Committees to fight slumlords and rent gouging. Housing is a right! We demand a public works program to build free, quality housing for all! Free, non-polluting urban transportation for all! City Workers Councils to define routes, port facilities, carbon free utilities.
For free, quality healthcare for all through the expropriation under workers control of the healthcare, pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Not one penny in compensation! Health is your right. We demand socialized medicine.
No support for the Democratic/Republican Parties or Mamdani or any other bourgeois politician. Build a Fighting Workers/Labor Party. Fight for a Workers Government through socialist revolution to Smash Trump/MAGA fascist reaction!
Expropriate the commanding heights of the economy without indemnification. For workers councils which establish a central plan to rebuild the economy.
Workers of the World Unite! Defeat capitalist dictatorship through international class solidarity and struggle!
For a new Workers International based on the method of Trotsky’s 1938 Transitional Program. For the World Socialist Revolution!
Communist Workers Group U.S.A. 08/15/25
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