NEW YORK, N.Y. – The Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, are a social fascist formation, the “left” wing of the same capitalist state the working class and the oppressed must overthrow, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s record since January confirms this project by project, block by block.
On July 16, the City Council unanimously passed a $10,000 bonus for the city’s paraprofessional school aides, wage workers starting at $33,222 a year. The same day, facing pressure from the Manhattan Institute and the Citizens Budget Commission, Mamdani reversed his pledge to support the bonus, citing the Taylor Law, New York’s 1967 ban on public-sector strikes. The Taylor Law was passed in response to the transit strike of 1966 and used within months to jail United Federation of Teachers, or UFT, president Albert Shanker. The law not only prohibits walkouts; it docks two days’ pay for every day struck and criminalizes union officers who lead one.
Mamdani argued the bonus sets compensation for a unionized position outside the collective bargaining process, since paraprofessional pay is supposed to be negotiated between the UFT and the city, not legislated directly by the Council. In practice, that means the city’s Law Department won’t process or fund the payments regardless of the Council vote, and the bill now has to survive a court challenge, a process that can drag on for years.
The same pattern runs through housing. Mamdani’s “Block by Block” continues this pattern with his plan to continue the privatization of NYCHA, a process begun under Bill de Blasio and continued under Eric Adams. This project funnels developments into the PACT program, which converts public housing into Section 8 buildings run by private landlords charging up to five times NYCHA’s per-unit rate.
Mamdani is moving forward with the demolition of the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses, more than 2,000 apartments whose main beneficiaries, Related Companies and Essence Development, are private developers executing what residents call a land grab next to Hudson Yards. NYCHA is currently suing 16 senior citizens who refused to vacate. Tenants organizing against the demolition report the authority shutting off heat and hot water in winter and sending police to intimidate them.
Mamdani’s record on policing is similarly shameful. Mamdani ran on dismantling the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, the unit built to hunt and terrorize activists, especially New Afrikan and pro-Palestine demonstrators. It remains fully intact seven months into his term. He has retained and called Commissioner Jessica Tisch “very successful,” saying he is “protected by the best of the best in our NYPD.”
In April, the City Council passed a bill empowering the NYPD to establish “buffer zones” around houses of worship, zones where anti-Zionist demonstrators protesting synagogue-hosted sales of stolen Palestinian land by Zionists could face repression and arrest. As mayor, Mamdani had the power to veto it, just as he had days earlier with a companion bill covering schools. He declined to take a public position and let it become law without his signature instead.
Twelve days before reversing the paraprofessional bonus, Mamdani sat for a friendly interview with the New York Times, a genocide-denying mouthpiece of U.S. Imperialism with a long, documented record of running cover for atrocity. This is the same paper whose correspondent Anne O’Hare McCormick laundered Hitler for an American audience in July 1933, publishing his first exclusive interview with a U.S. reporter under the headline “Hitler Seeks Jobs for All Germans.”
The New York Times has defended and manufactured consent for nearly every U.S. war and coup, from Brazil in 1964 to Bolivia in 2019 to Palestine today. This is a paper of war criminals and their apologists, and Mamdani used the platform to launder his record: calling Netanyahu a war criminal who “belongs in The Hague” while laughing along when the interviewer noted he sounds “like any other capitalist mayor.” Days later he reneged on his pledge to arrest Netanyahu at the UN in September, acknowledging that as mayor he never had the legal authority to do it.
The danger of this laundering lies in Mamdani’s ability to point to partial successes that appear real to the masses: free 2-K child care seats for more than 2,000 children, 2,000 additional 3-K seats, municipal grocery stores promising produce, meat, and pantry staples at 30 percent below market prices, a Mayor’s Office of Deed Theft Prevention aimed at protecting vulnerable homeowners, and the permanent closure of North Infirmary Command on Rikers Island as part of the city’s jail closure plan. These concessions are the bait of social fascism: limited reforms, pilot programs, symbolic victories, and administrative adjustments that allow the Democratic Party to pose as an ally of the exploited and oppressed while preserving privatized housing, police repression, lower wages, and the capitalist state itself.
Every DSA seat won inside the Democratic Party strengthens the state it claims to oppose. It is the consolidation of “left” corporatism, social fascism, the moderate wing of fascism sharing its politics of class collaboration, suppression of class struggle, and redistribution of plunder in place of revolution.
Mamdani gave out $50 FIFA World Cup tickets while breaking his promise to Chinatown’s domestic workers fighting to end 24-hour workdays, sent police to arrest nearly 90 anti-Zionist protesters demonstrating against arms sales to “Israel,” and privatized public housing, and still the DSA issued statements reaffirming its double-faced support for Palestine and national liberation movements abroad, the same “reformism at home, revolution abroad” routine social-democratic governments have run for a century while facilitating the surrender of the movements they claimed to champion.
Reformism betrays the working class precisely because it trades the revolutionary transformation of society for gradual, piecemeal gains, pushing the actual goal into an ever-receding future while the capitalist class gains another reserve of support. This is the function of Mamdani, the DSA, and every peddler of reform in place of revolution.
