Zohran Mamdani’s anticipated win in New York City’s mayoral elections has implications well beyond the city and America. If he can show again the Left’s ability to swiftly deliver material gains for the working class, then this will provide a much needed momentum for Socialism globally.
Zohran Mamdani’s projected victory in New York will not be just another local win for the Left.In an era defined by the terrifying resurgence of a global, reactionary Right, the stakes are far higher. A single victory, even one as significant as Mamdami’s, is not momentum. It is a foothold.
The neoliberal center has utterly failed to provide a compelling alternative to the politics of resentment, and in that vacuum, quasi-fascist movements—from New Delhi to Rome, Buenos Aires to Washington—are not just winning; they are acting.
If the democratic socialist movement is to be more than a gadfly to a dying liberal order, we must learn the central lesson of our time: The only antidote to the right’s swift, destructive action is the left’s swift, constructive action. The mandate is not just to win. It is to deliver.
The Right’s Poisonous “Action”
For decades, the political landscape has been dominated by a neoliberal consensus that promised prosperity through trickle-down economics. What it delivered was privatization, wage stagnation, poverty and a profound sense of powerlessness. Mainstream center-left parties offered only a “lite” version of this decay—a commitment to managing capitalism’s decline more humanely, while never daring to challenge its fundamental logic.
This created the vacuum. The working class, betrayed and abandoned, grew desperate for anypolitician who promised to do something.
The reactionary Right understood this yearning for action perfectly. Their strategy is a two-stroke engine of manufactured crisis and brutal resolution.
First comes the “violent rhetoric”. This is not just noise; it is a political strategy. By defining a clear “other”—the immigrant, the trans person, the “Communist” — they create a scapegoat for the material misery that neoliberalism caused.
Second, and most crucially, they follow this rhetoric with swift action. Look at Javier Milei in Argentina. He campaigned with a chainsaw, and upon taking office, he immediately unleashed a torrent of “shock therapy” policies: devastating austerity, mass deregulation, and a frontal assault on unions. To his disaffected base, it looks like strength. It looks like a man fulfilling his promise.
Look at Giorgia Meloni in Italy. Her government moved immediately to attack the rights of migrant-led families and LGBTQ+ parents, all under the guise of protecting the “traditional family”. This is a destructive, scapegoating action, but it is action. It delivers on the promise made by the violent rhetoric.
This is the Right’s grim formula: They channel legitimate working-class anger away from capital and direct it toward a manufactured “enemy”, and then they “solve” the problem by swiftly and visibly punishing that enemy. They prove they have the will to govern, even if it is in service of reaction and capital.
The Socialist Answer
The democratic socialist answer cannot be symbolic. It cannot be a “nicer” liberalism. It must be a competing vision of action. It must be a direct, material, and rapid response to the actual crises the working class faces: housing, healthcare, wages, security and the climate.
This is the opposite of the Right’s “action”. It doesn’t find a scapegoat; it identifies a problem(climate change, high energy prices) and a class enemy (monopolistic utilities) and delivers a public good for the entire working class.
This is a model of governing that is not afraid to name its enemy: the billionaires class. It is a politics that says, “Your rent is high because of landlords and real estate speculation. Your bills are high because of private monopolies. We are going to act against them, for you.”
And crucial to this is the willingness and ability to implement reforms and actions biased towards the working class in a swift and urgent manner, almost matching how the Right’s policies and actions are implemented.
Lessons from a Governing Left
This need for swift, material delivery is not theoretical. It is the single common thread in modern socialist success stories. The history of the anti-colonial and socialist left is rich with this mandate.
Look at Thomas Sankara’s revolutionary government in Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1987. His promise was not an abstract utopia; it was “two meals a day and ten liters of water.” This wasn’t a slogan; it was a plan. In four short years, his government launched a “vaccination commando” program that inoculated 2.5 million children against measles, yellow fever, and meningitis in a matter of weeks. His mass literacy campaign reportedly raised the literacy rate from just 13 percent to 73 percent. He redistributed land from feudal landlords directly to the peasants, boosting wheat production to the point of food self-sufficiency. This was action—swift, material, and a direct rebuke to colonial dependency.
Or look at Lula da Silva and the Workers’ Party (PT) in Brazil. When Lula first took office in 2003, he didn’t just give speeches about poverty; he acted. The Bolsa Família program, a conditional cash transfer, was a direct and immediate intervention. It wasn’t a pilot program or a means-tested bureaucratic nightmare. It was a mass program that delivered material aid directly to millions of the poorest families. The effect was not just economic; it was political. It built a durable, class-based coalition that understood, in the most tangible way possible, that the PT government was on their side. That material solidarity is what gave the PT the political space to pursue other structural reforms.
We see a similar, if more recent, dynamic in Chile. Gabriel Boric’s young government has faced monumental struggles, including a constitutional defeat and a hostile congress. Yet, its most significant victory has been one of pure, unambiguous working-class delivery: the 40-hour work week. Against immense corporate opposition, the government passed a law to gradually reduce the standard work week from 45 to 40 hours. This is not a complex financial instrument. It is not an abstract promise. It is the gift of time. It is a material gain delivered to all workers.
Even at the municipal level, this principle of swift delivery for the masses holds. Look at Ada Colau’s tenure in Barcelona. She was a housing activist who ran for mayor on a single promise: to stop the banks and vulture funds from evicting families. Once in office, her administration acted. They passed measures to fine banks for holding empty properties. They invested in cooperative and public housing. They famously pioneered “superblocks” (superilles), reclaiming vast swathes of the city from cars and returning them to pedestrians, creating green, public space. This was municipal socialism in action: a direct confrontation with real estate and finance capital in order to deliver a tangible public good (housing security and a livable city).
The Only Way is to Deliver
The global Right has momentum because it offers a clear, if poisonous, “Us vs. Them”. Their “Us” is the “traditional” nation. Their “Them” is the immigrant, the minority, the “other”.
The socialist project must, and can, offer a more powerful “Us vs. Them.”
“Us” is the multiracial and multinational working class—the tenants, the nurses, the teachers, the warehouse workers, the drivers… “Them” is the billionaire class—the landlords, the union-busting CEOs, and the political class that serves them.
But this “Us” is not built on rhetoric alone. It is not built on academic theory or moral appeals. It is forged in the struggle for, and the delivery of, universal public goods.
When we deliver universal childcare, we build solidarity between the stay-at-home parent and the office worker. When we deliver free public transit, we unite the student and the service worker.
This is the task ahead. Zohran Mamdani’s victory is a vital beachhead. It proves that an organized, class-struggle socialist can win. But the Right is moving swiftly, unified by a program of hate and extraction. The Left must be faster. It must be bolder. It must be more disciplined. Itmust organize, build back unions, take state power, and immediately, unapologetically, use that power to deliver the material goods that the working class has been denied for generations. All around the world the center offers only paralysis. The right offers only chaos. The Left must be the only one offering to build.
Jad Chaaban is a Lebanese economist and political activist. He is an Associate Professor of Development Economics, focusing on the economic analysis of public policy issues that affect the lives of the most vulnerable groups in society.
