THE election of Zohan Mamdani as mayor of New York City on Tuesday has sent a massive shock wave throughout the administration of President Donald Trump and the entire US ruling class.
34-year-old Mamdani came from nowhere to win an overwhelming vote to become mayor of a city that boasts it is the home of US capitalism, containing as it does the Wall Street stock market, while accommodating a horde of the multi-billionaire heads of the world’s leading banks and hedge funds.
Mamdani won with over 50% of a vote that was amongst the highest recorded in the city’s mayoral elections, comfortably beating former governor Andrew Cuomo, previously a Democrat candidate but now standing as an independent after failing to be selected as the Democrat candidate.
The Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa trailed in with a miserable 7% of the vote.
What made Mamdani’s overwhelming victory such a cataclysmic event was that he stood on a platform of wealth distribution and opposition to what was termed ‘unbridled capitalism’.
Amongst the policies promised in his campaign, was freezing some rents, providing free child care, no-cost buses and opening up city-owned grocery stores.
These would be paid for by hiking up taxes on New York’s ultra wealthy and the mega rich companies.
His campaign pledged to transform city government to restore power to the working class and a fight back against a hostile Trump administration – a pledge that won the overwhelming support of New York’s workers and youth.
New York City epitomises the vast gulf between the rich and working class in the US.
It is home to the world’s highest concentration of millionaires and billionaires while at the same time homelessness and poverty amongst workers and youth has reached levels not seen since the 1930s Great Depression era.
To make matters worse, not just for Trump but also for the Democrat party leadership which held back from endorsing him until days before the election, was that Mamdani stood as self-proclaimed democratic socialist who denounced Zionist genocide and made clear that if Israeli prime minister and wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in New York, he would abide by international law and have him arrested.
Small wonder that his overwhelming victory has sent shock waves throughout the US capitalist class and Trump administration.
They threw everything at Mamdani, with Trump declaring him a ‘communist’ and threatening to withhold all federal funds to New York City if he was elected, while throwing his support behind Cuomo.
The City’s billionaires poured billions into the Cuomo’s campaign in the final month before the vote in a failed attempt to hold back an election victory that would threaten their domination.
Instead, the working class dealt a massive blow to the US ruling class with New York workers and youth showing they would not be intimidated, or bought off with threats, or sent reeling from supporting a candidate openly declaring himself to be a socialist who wanted to ‘return power to the working class’.
This vote has reverberated amongst workers and young people across the US and worldwide as a powerful demonstration that the working class in the most powerful capitalist nation is on the move towards a massive confrontation with a capitalist class that is diving headfirst into economic collapse and determined to make workers pay with their lives.
A revolutionary situation has emerged sharply in America and has grown even more intense this week as the US federal shutdown enters its second month.
Around 700,000 federal employees are furloughed without pay while the funding for food stamps that 42 million workers rely on for food has dried up.
The way forward for the US working class and workers and youth across the world is to take the mass movement that has erupted forward to the seizing of power from the capitalists and advancing society to socialism worldwide.
This requires the building of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to provide the leadership to mobilise the strength of the working class to bring down bankrupt capitalism and deposit it in the dustbin of history with the victory of the world socialist revolution.
Forward to the victory of the world socialist revolution!
