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The Mamdani Moment: Reclaiming the Left as a Socialist Project



We need to speak plainly. 

The left, as it exists today in the commanding heights of liberal power, is not a project of the 99 percent. It is not the property of the working class. It is not the voice of the dispossessed, the precarious, the evicted, the indebted, or the bombed.

It is a focus group.

It is a branding exercise.

It is a curated performance of empathy—delivered by political marketers, pollsters, and campaign planners who know exactly which centrist slogan will soothe the suburban professional while leaving the structures of power untouched.

This is not left politics.

This is neoliberalism in progressive charade.

The Betrayal of the Professional Left

Look at the record:

Hillary Clinton preached “stronger together” while her foundation took millions from Wall Street and Gulf monarchies.

Barack Obama spoke of hope while deporting three million people, bailing out banks, and expanding the drone war.

Bill Clinton signed NAFTA, “ended welfare as we know it,” and deregulated the financial sector—setting the stage for the greatest upward transfer of wealth in modern history.

And what did they offer in return?

A politics of representation without power.

A multiculturalism that celebrates difference—so long as it doesn’t challenge capital.

A foreign policy of imperial wars wrapped in the language of DEI, human rights, and “responsibility to protect.”

This is not a mistake.

This is a strategy.

The professional left abandoned class as the central axis of politics.

They replaced it with a technocratic identitarianism that fragments the working majority into competing interest groups—each managed, mediated, and ultimately neutralized by elite institutions. The result?

The rich get richer.
The wars continue.
The planet burns.

And the left applauds a Black general or a trans CEO as proof of progress.

The Mamdani Moment

Enter Zohran Mamdani.

Mamdani offers us hope. He offers us a politics of authenticity. He offers us a register for materializing socialist politics.

This is the Mamdani moment for the left:

A chance to reject the multicultural managerialism of the Clinton-Obama era.

A chance to rebuild the left not as a lobbying firm for marginal reforms—but as a socialist project rooted in working-class power.

Solidarity Is the Weapon: No Left Without the White Working Class

Racial capitalism does not spare anyone at the bottom. It exploits every worker—Black, Brown, white, immigrant, native-born—by pitting them against each other in a race to the floor.

The white worker in Appalachia losing his lung to black lung, the Black worker in Detroit losing her home to foreclosure, the Latino worker in the Central Valley losing his life to heatstroke—they are not natural enemies. They are comrades in the same war.

Anti-racism that stops at symbolism or shaming is not anti-racism at all.

True anti-racism is class war. It must be embedded in working-class pedagogy from day one:

In the union hall, where white miners learn that their pension fund invests in private prisons that cage their Black coworkers’ children.

On the shop floor, where immigrant line workers and white legacy hires strike together against the same boss.

In the community center, where evicted white families and Black families organize rent strikes side by side.

This is not “reaching out.”

This is recognizing reality: the white working class is not the enemy of liberation—it is indispensable to it. Divide them with resentment, and capital wins.

Unite them with shared struggle, and the whole system trembles.

Make Life Livable: Affordability as the North Star

The left must rally around one core element: making our countries affordable again.

Regulate big money—break up monopolies, tax billionaires, break up the largest digital platform corporations with unfettered power, cap rents, nationalize utilities, and smash the financial casinos that turn homes into assets and wages into debt traps.

Unite the 99%—across race, ethnicity, religion, gender—against the oligarchs, the tech bros, the private-equity vultures, and the fascists who profit from our precarity.

Their playbook is simple: divide, deregulate, extract. Ours must be clearer: decommodify life. Make housing, healthcare, education, childcare, and energy public goods, not profit centers. Make our economies work for the 99%. Make life livable for the 99%.

What the Left Must Be

The left is not a message.

It is not a demographic.

It is not a vibe.

The left is organized power from below. It is:

Unions that shut down ports, not just endorse candidates.

Tenant unions that seize buildings, not just beg for rent relief.

Worker cooperatives that own the means of production, not just demand a living wage.

Community land trusts that decommodify housing, not just expand vouchers.

It is universal material demands: 

  • Medicare for All
  • Public housing as a human right
  • Public housing as a human right
  • Free childcare
  • Free public transportation
  • Free education through university
  • A federal job guarantee
  • Worker ownership of industry

It is democracy, not representation.
It is internationalism, not liberal interventionism.
It is class war, not culture war.

 The Task Ahead

The left wins when it unites the dispossessed—across race, nation, gender, and border—into a single fighting force against capital. It loses when it allows itself to be divided, managed, and sold back to the highest bidder. The Mamdani moment is not a theory.

It is an opening.

An opening to organize.
An opening to educate.
An opening to mobilize.

Not for the next election.
Not for the next viral moment.
But for the next system.

The working class is not waiting for permission.

It is not waiting for a seat at the table.


It is building the table—and when the time comes, it will flip it.

Join the fight.
Build the left we need.
The future is unwritten—but it will be socialist, or it will not be at all.

 

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