Mamdani’s election is being welcomed as a step forward for the leftist and communist movement and for Palestine. We believe however his election does not represent the advance of the working class as a political force, rather
The widespread mobilisations for Palestine have revealed a real and important moral anger. But anger alone is not organisation, and without organisation, anger against the system cannot become power. Mamdani appears radical not because the class is strong, but exactly because it is unorganised: he is a symbol in place of a strategy. His politics stand on moral condemnation of imperialism, not on the need to build independent working-class power capable of analysing it on its economic premises and ultimately confronting it in a fierce struggle.
Channeling outrage into representation rather than into disciplined struggle – and in this way finally exhausting it without changing the power relation between labour and capital – is the trademark of petty-bourgeois ideology. His programme shows it clearly: a rent freeze that leaves landlords and property ownership and financial ventures untouched; windfall taxes that assume the capitalist state can be morally persuaded; investment plans that treat exploitation as an ethical failure rather than a class relation.
The result is familiar. The class is once again encouraged to look upwards for someone who will speak for us rather than organising itself as the force capable of changing society.
This is all the more problematic since, operating from a local position, the scale of change that Mamdani can produce will never match that of capital, which operates not merely at the metropolitan but at the national level. This limitation is not Mamdani’s fault per se, yet it adds to the deception of the movement, channelling anti-capitalist resentment into local reformist policies that neither foster class consciousness nor challenge the dynamics of capital accumulation.
Representative figures of this type do not advance the communist movement: they absorb it. They convert mass anger into speeches, appeals, and symbolic votes, and in doing so redirect the struggle away from the workplaces, institutions, and all other spaces where real power is built.
We won’t celebrate his victory. The question is not whether we have good voices in institutions of the state, but whether the working class is building the organisation, required to act as a political subject in its own right.
Our task remains the same: to construct a rooted, disciplined and educated cadre organisation capable of transforming moral outrage into revolutionary force. Unly working-class organisation is real power, the rest is a capitalist lie.