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2 Truths the Dems Should Take Away From Mamdani’s Win
Message for the Democratic Party: Recognize that America once again has a vibrant and visionary left and welcome a new generation of progressives, and yes, socialists into the party.
Jun 27, 2025
“We have won a city where… the Mayor will use their power… to govern our city as a model for the Democratic Party.”—Zohran Mamdani, June 24, 2025
Zohran Mamdani’s spectacular victory in Tuesday’s Democratic Mayoral Primary in New York City taught us two essential truths about the contemporary American political landscape. Two truths that add up to one unmistakable message for the Democratic Party.
Truth #1: The Democratic Socialist-Social Democratic-New Deal politics that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) reintroduced to the country in 2016, and which Zohran Mamdani articulated so brilliantly in his campaign, speak to the needs and desires of the American people, and they resonate with voters.
Truth #2: The campaign operations of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere—are exemplary and victorious! They are defined by youthful inspiration and disciplined commitment. They represent the polar opposite of the cynical big-money-driven campaigns that have done so much to corrupt our democracy.
Message for the Democratic Party: Recognize that America once again has a vibrant and visionary left and welcome a new generation of progressives, and yes, socialists into the party.
Now is an excellent time to discuss the formation of a caucus of socialists committed to creating a truly vibrant and democratic Democratic Party.
Sadly, the party’s recent record is not promising on this front. The overwhelming experience of the tens of thousands of Bernie Sanders supporters, from across the entire country, who organized to enter into the Democratic Party after 2016 was that they were rebuffed, made to feel unwelcome.
Now, in 2025, the stakes are even higher. We need to defeat fascism. And victory by the Democratic Party remains the clearest route to defeat Trumpism and save our open democratic society.
Given this, we can’t simply hope that the Democratic Party establishment will cease to be recalcitrant. We have to organize to open the party up, so that it can embrace 1) policies that address the needs of the country’s majority and 2) the most-inspired group of (predominantly young) political organizers in the country.
Now is an excellent time to discuss the formation of a caucus of socialists committed to creating a truly vibrant and democratic Democratic Party.
As a longtime member of DSA and the executive director of Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) (the organization that led the successful effort to draft Bernie Sanders to run for President in 2016), I look forward to working together with all progressives and democratic socialists to transform the Democratic Party into the peoples’ party that the country needs at this perilous—and, yet, also promising—moment in our history.
Read PDA’s proposal for an Outside-Inside-Outside strategy to transform the Democratic Party here.
Read PDA’s endorsement of Zohran Mamdani here.
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C. J. Polychroniou on Socialism, Left Internationalism, and the Climate Crisis
The return of Left internationalism inspired by the vision of socialism needs a dramatic turnaround on the global ideological and political landscape.
May 28, 2025
Has neoliberal globalization run its course? Should the Left be on the side of tariffs or protectionism? Can Left internationalism be revived? Political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou tackles these questions in an interview with the independent French-Greek journalist Alexandra Boutri.
Alexandra Boutri: In a recently published essay, you argue that the Left should endorse a new vision of globalization and fight accordingly for a new world order. Can you briefly spell out the pitfalls of neoliberal globalization and why the current world order is a failure?
C. J. Polychroniou: The first thing that stands out about neoliberal globalization is that it has led to an extremely high degree of economic inequality by altering patterns of income distribution and resource allocation while at the same time undermining economic and social rights. As Miatta Fahnbulleh put it a few years back in an essay that appeared in Foreign Affairs, the system “is not working in the interest of the majority of people.” The actual record of neoliberal globalization on economic growth has also been quite dismal, with postwar “managed capitalism” outperforming the neoliberal model on every count. On top of that, under the form of globalization prescribed by neoliberalism “the average global temperature has risen relentlessly,” as Robert Pollin has pointed out. Neoliberal globalization has been bad for people and the environment alike.
Trump’s domestic agenda is the most neoliberal since the onset of neoliberalism.
As far as the current world order is concerned, it would be hilarious if it weren’t so tragic. We have a world in permanent crisis literally since the end of the Second World War, with the nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over humanity’s head. The Doomsday Clock is now closer than ever to midnight. The current war in Ukraine, the annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza and the seizing of land in the occupied West Bank by violent religious extremists under the protection of the Israeli army speak volumes of the dramatic failure of the United Nations and the so-called international community. There is no lawful world order. International law only applies when it suits the strong.
Alexandra Boutri: Has neoliberalism’s model of globalization run its course?
C. J. Polychroniou: The current system has been in a terminal state since the outbreak of the global financial crisis of 2007-08. The resurgence of right-wing nationalism across the globe is interrelated to the profound contradictions built specifically into the neoliberal version of globalization. The backlash against globalism by the likes of U.S. President Donald Trump and his MAGA faction needs to be understood in connection with the changes that are occurring in the world economy. Trump is using protectionism as a means of altering the global supply chain in favor of U.S. production and imposing tariffs to reduce the U.S. trade deficit but is simultaneously unleashing the most vicious form of neoliberalism inside the country. He is attending to the mythology of American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny by trying to reassert the dominance of the United States in the world economy while destroying functioning government as part of a plan to axe safety-net programs and letting corporations run roughshod over labor. Trump’s domestic agenda is the most neoliberal since the onset of neoliberalism. It constitutes an open war against working people and social rights, against the poor and the environment. It’s all about making the rich richer and the poor poorer. It’s a domestic agenda based on the politics of astonishing greed and shocking cruelty. Trump’s election therefore does not mean the end of neoliberalism or of globalism.
Alexandra Boutri: Free trade or protectionism? Is this an actual choice for the Left?
C. J. Polychroniou: It depends on what one means by the “left.” You have left-wing liberals, social democrats, left-wing socialists, communists, and anarchists. Left with capital L tends in some circles to refer to the anti-capitalist, socialist-communist-anarchist camp. Personally, I don’t consider the Democrats in the United States or the Social Democrats in Europe as part of the Left. Their loyalty is to capitalism. Hence, they are not agents of transformational change. They want to maintain the existing socioeconomic system but with some modifications in place to make it less disagreeable. The social democratic tale was about capitalism with a human face. It was a popular political program for the first few decades after the end of the Second World War, and it was of course an improvement over laisses faire capitalism and a bourgeois state that catered exclusively to the interests of the capitalist class. Nonetheless, we should be reminded of an old radical dictum: There cannot be democracy, social justice, and equality as long as power belongs to capital.
It may have taken voters quite a long time to realize that the parties of the establishment left had sold out to global capitalism, but when they did, the consequences were cataclysmic in their impact.
The debate regarding free trade versus protectionism is as old as political economy. For what it’s worth, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels confronted this issue back in the 1840s, in the struggles over the Corn Laws. Marx saw free trade for what it is—i.e., “freedom of capital,” and mocked the claim of free-traders that the absence of tariff barriers would abolish the antagonism among classes. But this does not mean that Marx took the side of protectionism, which he saw as a system to defend the status quo. Thus, as he put it, “One may declare oneself an enemy of the constitutional regime without declaring oneself a friend of the ancient regime.”
Interestingly enough, though, Marx ends up in the end endorsing free trade but purely on political grounds because he saw the free trade system as accelerating the prospects of radical change.
The goal of the Left is to move beyond capitalism by constructing an equitable and sustainable economy and a just world order. Rudolf Hilferding, in his book Finance Capital, published more than a century ago, wrote: "The proletariat avoids the bourgeois dilemma—protectionism or free trade—with a solution of its own; neither protectionism nor free trade, but socialism, the organization of production, the conscious control of the economy not by and for the benefit of the capitalist magnates but by and for society as a whole."
Alexandra Boutri: Until recently, antiglobalization was exclusively associated with parties and movements of the Left. However, internationalism has historically been a core component of the Left’s ideological worldview. What happened to Left internationalism but also to social democratic parties whose collapse coincides with the collapse of the antiglobalization movement and the emergence of right-wing antiglobalism?
C. J. Polychroniou: The antiglobalization movement came to life in the 1990s and peaked during the early 2000s. It was inspired mainly by so-called far-left ideologies which saw free trade agreements, multinational corporations, and international economic organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank promoting a new version of colonialism. During those years, millions of people turned out across the world to raise their voice against global corporate power. Center-left and reformist left parties in general did not join the protests against global capitalist expansion for the simple reason that they had embraced neoliberalism and were being showered in turn by campaign cash from big corporations and the financial sector. In a word, they had betrayed the working class in the same manner that the socialist parties had betrayed internationalism in 1914 at the start of the First World War.
The history of European social democracy may be summarized as follows: a period of rather impressive achievements on the social, political, and economic fronts during the first few decades following the end of the Second World, which were made possible because of the role of different actors in the emergence of a social democratic consensus, and capitulation to neoliberal capitalism in the latter part of the 20th century, especially after the end of an era where you had leaders like Willy Brandt in Germany, Bruno Kreisky in Austria, and Olof Palme in Sweden who were undeniably dedicated to the struggle for social justice and economic democracy. The leaders that came after them across the European continent took the position that Keynesian economics no longer had applicability in the new world economic order that had emerged following the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and that fiscal orthodoxy was the way to go. In the 1980s, the so-called socialist governments of Francois Mitterrand in France, Bettino Craxi in Italy, Felipe González in Spain, and Andreas Papandreou in Greece not only failed to carry out even the minimal set of promises they had made to voters during the pre-electoral period, but their economic programs followed the neoliberal prescriptions proposed by the IMF and the World Bank.
The antiglobalization movement of the 1990s was associated with far-left politics and was attacked as such by mainstream media and the establishment parties across the political spectrum. In the eyes of many citizens across Europe, the “left” was still represented by social democratic and socialist parties. It may have taken voters quite a long time to realize that the parties of the establishment left had sold out to global capitalism, but when they did, the consequences were cataclysmic in their impact.
In 2000, 10 out of 15 countries in the European Union still had social democratic or socialist parties in government even though they had abandoned all the traditional social democratic ideas and policies. Nearing the end of the second decade of the new millennium, we could find social democratic parties in government in only two countries in Europe. Even the euro crisis did not help the parties of the traditional left to make a comeback. What was happening instead is that far-right parties were gaining ground across Europe and around the world. The far-right was reinventing itself with a backlash against globalism. The European far-right even adapted the language of the left to its own ends. Of course, it succeeded in doing this by taking advantage of the betrayal of center-left parties as well as of the left’s fractiousness and disunity—issues that have long plagued the left worldwide. Defeating the far-right is, of course, of paramount importance for the future of democracy and of the Left.
The history of Left internationalism is too long and complex to discuss here. Suffice to say, though, that it has both positive and negative aspects. The Second International betrayed the cause of socialism. The Third International, which was created by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky in 1919, was a powerful force toward world revolution, a major step toward world socialism. However, under Josef Stalin, it became purely an instrument of Soviet state policy to advance the Stalinist view of “socialism in one country.” And the Red Lord officially dissolved the Third International in 1943.
It's hard to revive Left internationalism when the left is fractured and there is so much confusion about what the left even represents in today’s world. Of course, there is a plethora of progressive social movements at the forefront for social change, but the return of Left internationalism inspired by the vision of socialism needs a dramatic turnaround on the global ideological and political landscape.
In the postwar era, Cuban internationalism stands virtually alone as an alternative form of globalization. Still, the Left needs a new internationalism that combines solidarity and the quest for social justice and equality with a global climate change policy. The latter is by far the most important issue facing humanity in the 21st century, and nothing would be of greater importance than if the new Left internationalism was built around taking on the greatest challenge of our times—i.e., preventing Earth from becoming unlivable.
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Reimagining Socialism: An Interview With David Kotz
"The biggest problem with regulated capitalism is that it is simply not sustainable in the long run," said the economist.
Dec 24, 2024
In the 1990s, all the talk was about the end of socialism and the unchallenged military and economic superiority of the United States. Nonetheless, two decades later, socialism was revived as a possible political alternative as the Great Recession of 2008 and the intensification of neoliberalism’s cruelties tore a huge hole in people’s faith in capitalism, especially among young people in the United States whose hearts had been captured by Sen. Bernie Sanders’ fiery calls for universal healthcare, free public college, and economic and climate justice. Socialism remains a political alternative taken seriously by many across the United States although its vision is still far away from becoming a hegemonic political project.
However, there are different kinds of socialism, and some of them, such as social democracy and market socialism, seek reform rather than the actual replacement of capitalism. On the other hand, the Soviet model, which is the only version of socialism that gave birth to an alternative socioeconomic system to that of capitalism, had many undesirable features and proved unsustainable.
So what would be the ideal system of socialism in the 21st century? In the interview that follows, radical economist David Kotz dissects the lessons drawn from the experience of the Soviet model, explains why reforming capitalism does not solve the problems built into the system of capitalism, and makes a case in defense of democratic socialism as the only sustainable alternative to capitalism. David Kotz is the author of The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism and of the soon-to-be-published book Socialism for Today: Escaping the Cruelties of Capitalism. He is professor emeritus of economics and senior research fellow at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. From 2010-19, Kotz also served as distinguished professor of economics and co-director of the department of political economy at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.
C.J. Polychroniou: David, in a soon-to-be-published book titled Socialism for Today, you make the case that democratic socialism is the only alternative to the long list of severe problems (massive social inequalities and economic disparities, environmental degradation, racism, poverty, homelessness, and so on) that plague the United States under capitalism. Now, you acknowledge that a shift to a radically different economic system would be a difficult and costly process but also maintain that the problems mentioned above cannot be solved by reforming capitalism. What do you understand by the term “reform of capitalism,” and do you think all struggles to reform capitalism have ultimately failed?
David Kotz: By reform of capitalism, we generally mean the introduction of institutions and policies that modify the way the system works but without replacing its core features—private ownership of the means of production, the wage-labor relation, and the pursuit of profit by the capitalist class as the basic logic of the system. Since the end of World War II, we have seen two types of reform of capitalism. First, the type of reform that emerged in the industrialized countries after the Second World War and came to be called regulated capitalism or social democratic capitalism and, second, the unrestrained version of capitalism that emerged in the 1980s and has been nothing short of a disaster.
Social democratic capitalism included a more active role for government in the economy, a major role for unions in the capital-labor relation, and changes in the way corporations conduct their businesses. Reforming capitalism along a social democratic line was a process that had started before World War II, thanks to the rise of working-class politics and the fact that socialist parties, in some cases, rose to power. But big business and its political representatives also went along out of fear that capitalism might not survive the political pressures from below without reforms. Sweden led the way to social democratic capitalism in the 1930s, but reform capitalism also spread to other parts of Western Europe after the end of the Second World War. In the United States, reform capitalism took place with Roosevelt’s New Deal policies on account of the Great Depression and had many common features with European social democracy.
"Full equality is antithetical to the logic and functioning of capitalism. A capitalist economy cannot work without exploiting workers."
Regulated capitalism in the United States produced many benefits for working people. Starting in the early 1950s, labor productivity went up, wages increased, and income inequality remained relatively stable. By the late 1960s, regulated capitalism also led to major improvements in air and water quality and in occupational safety and health. Those regulations were passed under pressure from a broad coalition of environmental activists, consumer product safety activists, and labor unions. People of color also advanced in economic opportunities. Nonetheless, while regulated capitalism created favorable conditions for making progress toward social, economic, and racial equality, full equality remained a chimera. The empirical evidence suggests that racial/ethnic equality and gender equality can be reduced through political and economic struggle but cannot be eliminated. Full equality is antithetical to the logic and functioning of capitalism. A capitalist economy cannot work without exploiting workers. The improvements made by regulated capitalism were indeed limited and did not resolve all the problems generated by capitalism. Unions had to make major concessions to secure agreements for the reforms from the powerful business interests. The official poverty rate declined over the period of the duration of regulated capitalism, but deep pockets of poverty remained in many parts of the country. The imperialist drive of capitalism also was not tamed in postwar regulated capitalism, and capitalist democracies remained only partially democratic as wealthy individuals and large corporations remained politically powerful.
The biggest problem with regulated capitalism is that it is simply not sustainable in the long run. Why? Because it generates a powerful drive on the part of capitalists to resist restriction in the pursuit of the maximization of profit, which is what capitalism is all about. Capitalism has always faced periodic economic crises. When such crises occur, capitalists will grab the opportunity to overthrow regulated capitalism. This is what happened in the 1970s, and regulated capitalism gave way to a decade of accelerating inflation and a severe business cycle. The neoliberal reforms of capitalism in the early 1980s were born out of the inability of regulated capitalism to persist and bring long-term stability.
C.J. Polychroniou: OK, but since the aim seems to be full equality and the absence of exploitation from human affairs, the argument can also be rather easily made that 20th-century efforts to build a full-fledged socialist alternative to capitalism also failed. Isn’t that so?
David Kotz: There were two types of post-capitalist systems that emerged from efforts to move beyond capitalism. One was the Soviet model that emerged after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. The second was market socialism that surfaced following the collapse of the Soviet model. Neither type succeeded in building a sustainable alternative system. But let me focus on the first type since it did abolish capitalism and build an alternative system. The Soviet model, which spread to many other countries around the world, though with some variations, relied initially on an institution called “soviets,” elected by workers, peasants, soldiers, and sailors. It was supposed to be the supreme authority in the new social and political order. But soon after the revolution, the Bolshevik party established a repressive regime that did not tolerate dissent. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin became the top leader of the Soviet Union. He established a brutal dictatorship that went on to eliminate much of the leadership that had made the revolution.
Under the Soviet model, all enterprises were owned by the state and allocation decisions were made by a highly centralized and hierarchical form of economic planning. Five-year and one-year plans were formulated for the entire country. Enterprises were given target outputs and provided with the inputs and labor time needed to produce them. Enterprise decision-makers did not aim for maximum profit. There were markets in the Soviet model in the sense that people bought consumer goods in stores and workers decided on jobs in the labor market. However, buying and selling in the Soviet economy did not generate “market forces.” Market forces refers to a system in which relative profitability determines which products will get additional inputs and which will be cut back. Thus, market exchange took place, but the system was not guided by market forces.
Centralized economic planning transformed the Soviet economy from a backward agricultural economy to an industrialized economy in record time. In just a couple of decades, an industrial base was built that allowed the Soviet Union to produce military hardware that was key to the defeat of Nazi Germany. Between the 1950-70s, the Soviet economy was growing so fast that Western analysts were afraid that it would soon surpass the leading capitalist economies. The Soviet model transformed the lives of the Soviet people for the better in many measurable ways. Between 1950 and 1975, consumption per person in the Soviet Union grew faster than in the U.S. By the 1980s, Soviet production surpassed that of the U.S. in steel, cement, metal-cutting and metal-forming machines, wheat, milk, and cotton. It had more doctors and hospital beds per capita than the United States. There was continuous full employment, stable prices, and no ups and downs of the business cycle, while income was relatively equally distributed.
However, the system had serious economic problems. Many sectors of the economy were inefficient, many consumer goods were of low quality, and many consumer services were simply unavailable. Households often faced shortages of consumer goods.
C.J. Polychroniou: In thinking then about a sustainable alternative system to capitalism, what do we keep from the experience of the Soviet model?
David Kotz: As I sought to indicate earlier, the Soviet model brought significant economic and social progress for some 60 years. In my view, the problems of the Soviet model stemmed from its authoritarian and repressive political institutions and the highly centralized form of economic planning that was adopted. But while the Soviet model lacked popular democracy, it did include the key institutions that socialists have long supported: production for use rather than profit, public ownership of enterprises, and a planned economy. The entire experience of the Soviet model holds useful and important lessons for a future socialism.
C.J. Polychroniou: What about market socialism? What lessons should we draw from that experience?
David Kotz: The idea of combining market allocation with socialist planning has a long history. New models of market socialism were proposed following the collapse of the Soviet model in 1991. The hope was that markets would guarantee economic efficiency while a socialist state assured economic justice and material security. Market socialism did not emerge in Russia after the collapse of state socialism, but it did emerge in China after 1978 under the post-Mao leadership of Deng Xiaoping. In China, market forces were introduced gradually and with a high degree of state oversight to avoid economic chaos. The record shows that market socialism not only reproduced many of the problems of capitalism but has a tendency to promote a return to capitalism. That’s because market forces can do their job of allocating resources only by activating the profit motive as the primary force of productive activity.
C.J. Polychroniou: In your book, you argue that economic planning is the institution that can achieve the aim of creating just and sustainable societies—not market forces. But you also argue that an “effective and sustainable socialism” requires direct participatory planning and new forms of public ownership of the means of production. Can you briefly lay out the basic features of democratic socialism?
David Kotz: Here I can respond only briefly to this question, which I consider in detail in my forthcoming book. My view follows closely the model of socialism in Pat Devine’s book Democracy and Economic Planning. The following are some of the key features of a future democratic socialism in my view:
- Economic allocation decisions are made by all parties affected by the decision. That includes workers, consumers, and the local community.
- Differences are settled whenever possible by negotiation and compromise among the relevant parties. If necessary, majority voting can be used.
- The mass media are free to criticize the state and its officials.
- Individuals are free to criticize the state and its officials.
Democratic socialism will inevitably face a contradiction between wide participation in decision-making and the need to make allocation decisions in a timely manner, allocation decisions that are inter-dependent in an actual economy. It will not be perfect, but it promises the best possible future for the human species.
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