Boycott the 2025 New York City Mayoral Election!

Read our editorial on the election boycott here.

The New York City mayoral election is around the corner, and with it, the calls to vote have reached a fever pitch. The candidates in center stage are the fake-socialist Democratic candidate and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member Zohran Mamdani; Andrew Cuomo, the deeply unpopular and shameless “business-as-usual” candidate, running as an Independent following his humiliating defeat to Mamdani in the Democratic primary; and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa, right-wing vigilante founder and leader of the Guardian Angels who has organized protests against migrants while maintaining some superficial contradictions with the Trump administration, and who lost to the hated current NYC Mayor Eric Adams in a landslide in the previous mayoral election.

The hysteria around Mamdani in particular has been utilized by both his supporters and opponents to drag the masses to participate in yet another election to decide who will represent the monopolists of NYC for the next four year. Despite such rhetoric, fundamentally this election cycle is no different from previous ones, and the people are once again presented with two options: whether to participate in the electoral farce, pressured by threats and bribes to legitimize and regenerate the circus, or to boycott it and fight for something new.

This is the significance of Mamdani’s campaign—not all of the things he has promised in his billionaire-backed campaign, but the desperation of the bourgeoisie to pull those disillusioned with electoralism back under their fold. In order to maintain their system wracked by economic and political crises, the capitalists now resort to mobilizing people behind them under the rhetoric of anti-capitalism.

While even a decade ago a competition between Cuomo and Sliwa would have been par for the course, such a race today would more clearly expose the farcical nature of bourgeois elections to the majority of the people, that they have no real choice through voting, and this disillusionment would have profound consequences for the imperialists’ plans to shore up their system. Mamdani is just what the capitalists need to maintain the farce of “democratic rule” and prop up their rotting foundation, to surge life back into the genocidal Democratic mafia with a new, youthful facade.

Below you will read why the elections are farcical, why Mamdani is fundamentally no different from his competitors, and why the election boycott is the only tactic in the interest of the working class.

The US is a Dictatorship of the Rich

The United States is an imperialist bourgeois democracy, which means it is only a democracy for the rich and a dictatorship over the rest of the people, and the rich parasitically live off of not only the US working class but mainly the working people of the world through imperialist domination. Politics is concentrated economics; when wealth and ownership of all facets of society are concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer ultra-rich monopolists—as in the current stage of capitalism, imperialism—there can be no democracy for the masses of people. Workers have no say in their workplaces, students and faculty do not exercise control over their schools, tenants do not have a say in the management of their building. In every sphere of life of working people, what exists is a disenfranchisement fundamentally beyond the Democrat and Republican quibbles about voting rights.

A study from 2014 shows that the bottom 50% of workers in New York City brought home 5.6% of the city’s total income while the top 0.1% of New Yorkers brought in 24%. Over the past ten years, income inequality has only grown worse, particularly with the ongoing economic crisis. It goes without saying that nearly everything involved in the process of production—factories, machinery, warehouses, means of transportation, surplus-value—are owned by the monopolists.

Monopolization, with its greater and greater concentration of wealth, makes for greater and greater concentration of power, and there is no possibility of a candidate free from “corporate influence” – through their donation rackets to pay for candidates to get elected, and stacking all positions of the government with their selected candidates, the alliance of the government and the stock market is clear.

Regardless of who wins the elections, the conditions of the people will continue to get worse under imperialism, because it is not dictated by the individual will of this or that politician, but by the mechanics of the capitalist system itself. The deepening and cyclical general economic crisis of imperialism leads to austerity measures, mass layoffs, and increased terror in order for the capitalists to offload their crisis while trying to squeeze out whatever profits they can. This manifests in all sorts of social and political crises, whether it be the so-called “migrant crisis”, imperialist wars of aggression, tariff battles, crises in housing, transit, education, healthcare, environment, drugs, mass shootings… the list goes on. Add to this the electoral crisis and legitimacy crisis, whereby masses are displaced from the bourgeois electoral mechanisms.

Elections cannot bring reforms that benefit the people because the entire process of generating, implementing, and maintaining such reforms is in the hands of a parasitic class whose existence depends on the exploitation and oppression of the rest of society and the people of the world. To the extent that reforms or policies provide some relief to the people—for example, Trump and Biden giving out money to people during the early stages of the current economic crisis—such results are either the byproduct of decisions that first and foremost benefit the ruling class, or are in fact people’s conquests through class struggle packaged deceitfully by the ruling class and their useful idiots, the opportunists, as “hand-outs” for supporting this or that mafia of the ruling class.

Ruling class politicians talking about the problems of the masses are not shifting society toward realizing their demands, but rather they are forced to deal with the problems of the masses in order to pull the masses backwards, portraying concessions as the result of peaceful protests and elections rather than the rebellious unrest of the people threatening to spill over into open war.

Whether the public face of this process is Mamdani’s wide grin or Cuomo’s scowl does not matter, because it is not a question of policy, but the underlying mechanisms and trends of capitalism itself. The differences that do exist in policy boil down to tactical differences in how to maintain the corpse of US imperialism, whether it is social programs that keep some afloat in the swamp of poverty so that they don’t rebel or using brute force and terror to prevent rebellion through intimidation. All of this is propped up through the US’s domination of the Third World as the sole hegemonic imperialist power, allowing politicians to make relatively larger bribes to sections of US society at the expense of the masses of the world, a situation it is forced to defend ever more savagely because of its crisis.

The Role of Elections in Maintaining the Dictatorship of the Rich

A crucial means by which the ruling class maintains its domination is through elections. Under bourgeois democracy, elections are the process by which the ruling class mobilizes the masses behind their domination.

Elections are the grease applied to the capitalist machine; every few years it must be reapplied to continue functioning properly. The massive and expensive propaganda fair forces allegiance of the masses on demagogic lines and divides them through hysteria and personality politics, mobilizing them behind the bourgeois state and promoting class collaboration under the leadership of the ruling class. In this way, participation in elections can be seen as a health barometer of the ruling class. Insofar as the people reject elections, it shows that the imperialists cannot keep ruling in the same way and the people refuse to be ruled in the same way; in other words, objectively there is a revolutionary situation. The fact that the majority of people do not vote in the US shows the extent of the crisis the ruling class finds itself in.

Despite all their efforts, in New York City the farcical nature of bourgeois democracy was on display in the Democrat mayoral primary last June, where less than 10% of voting-age citizens in NYC voted for Mamdani as their first option, with Cuomo receiving even less than him. Sliwa ran uncontested as a Republican and thus did not receive any votes.

Since the bourgeois elections only represent bourgeois interests, which means greater misery for the people, they must work harder to sell these interests as belonging to the people each time, as their system decays and grows more crisis-ridden. The crisis of legitimacy the ruling class finds itself in amid deepening crises means that the ruling class must carry out its elections with more intensity and pageantry each time in order to convince the masses that “this time it’s different”.

To achieve this, agents of the ruling class among the people try to convince them that voting is in their best interests to mobilize them behind imperialist politicians. They project their own backwardness onto the masses, and their tired antics are nothing but the repurposed talking points of the rich to justify their own servitude. These people, the electoral cretins, opportunists, and revisionists (fake Marxists), are the most dangerous forces to the interests of the people, because they are more effective at deceiving and mobilizing sections of the people behind the imperialists than the imperialists themselves, due to their proximity and flirting with progressive or revolutionary-sounding politics.

This is what makes Mamdani the most nefarious of all the candidates running, because he is the best at selling the needs of capitalism as the needs of the people. That is exactly what elections are for, to mask the dictatorship of capital in the illusion of choice to pick this or that representative of capital.

Zohran Mamdani: Same Stuff, Different Packaging

One illusion of bourgeois democracy is that voters directly choose who has power. However, even in elections where there is a direct vote, the masses that are allowed to vote can only vote for the representatives of those who do have power, i.e., the monopolists. The fact that the rich have only gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer throughout the decades, regardless of voter turnout or who wins, shows that the direction of the economy and policies is determined by something entirely other than elections. The state is a mechanism to maintain and reproduce the domination of the ruling class—regardless of who you put in it, its function remains the same. It is tied by a thousand strings to the rich and there is no avoiding it. The servants of the state conform to the state, not the other way around.

Shortly after Mamdani’s campaign mobilized people to deliver him his primary victory on the rhetoric that billionaires should not exist, he began cold-calling billionaires and has since had several closed-door meetings with the top monopolists of the country. These include top finance, real estate, and tech monopolists, some of which have given him their approval and made donations to his campaign. Mamdani has received at least $1 million in donations from tech and finance millionaires and billionaires so far through his success in selling himself as an anti-billionaire candidate to workers, proving his worth to the ultra-rich as a two-faced servant like all the other politicians in their pay.

Mamdani’s Super PAC and “business advisory council” OneNYC serves to concentrate the very same monopolists responsible for the affordability crisis around his campaign to deliver on his “affordability” plans: “OneNYC is dedicated to tackling New York City’s toughest challenges, from the housing and affordability crises to navigating an era of uncertainty and shrinking federal support.” The advisory council of this supposed pro-Palestine socialist is stacked with Zionist finance capitalists, such as pro-Israel donor Andrew Milgram, and is chaired by Yasser Salem, a former executive of the infamously anti-worker and top monopoly consulting firm McKinsey & Co.

Mamdani’s endorsements come from the same sewage: former Vice President Kamala Harris, one of the main individuals responsible for the intensified US-Israel genocide of Palestinians; Democrat minority leader of the US House of Representatives Hakeem Jeffries, an ardent defender of Israel and whose top five donors include the leading Zionist lobbying group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the world’s largest finance monopolist BlackRock, and the largest arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin; and New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who has a long record of anti-worker stances and policies and who deployed the national guard to NYC for “safety” coinciding with an increase in Palestine solidarity protests in the city.

In Jeffries’ endorsement of Mamdani, the former says that Mamdani will tackle the supposed “startling rise in antisemitic incidents”, a Zionist dog-whistle for cracking down on Palestinian solidarity that was raised to a fever pitch under Biden’s presidency and continued apace under Trump’s. Mamdani has promised to increase funding for anti-hate crime programming by 800%, which has been used across the country and in NYC particularly for targeting pro-Palestine activists.

Mamdani has also publicly moved away from some of his previous rhetoric that helped fuel his rise. He now says New Yorkers have a “shared interest” with billionaires; he has disavowed the phrase “globalize the intifada” and routinely condemns the Palestinian resistance while affirming Israel’s “right to exist”; he has essentially backtracked on his promise to arrest genocidal Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu if he comes to NYC; he has gone from denouncing the police for their brutality and murders and calling to defund them to publicly apologizing to the NYPD and wanting to expand policing under the guise of mental health; and he has requested that current NYPD police commissioner and billionaire heiress Jessica Tisch remain in her post, which she has used for the last year to suppress workers on strike, Palestine solidarity activists, and the mass movement against ICE abductions.

Don’t Vote; Fight for Revolution

Two important principles underlying the election boycott are: 1. Without power, all is illusion, and 2. Everything the people have won has been through revolutionary violence. Anything the capitalist class grants as a concession can be taken back once they are on a better footing so long as they remain in power. While we must fight for basic demands to improve our daily lives, if we do this without connecting this struggle to the conquest of power then we will be stuck in a hamster wheel as the capitalists give with one hand and take with the other. This connection between daily demands and the demand for political power for the working class is all-important and at the heart of the election boycott tactic.

Revolution, which sees the conquest of power as the main goal, and reformism, which aims for gradual peaceful change, are two opposing poles, two different logics; to the extent that you move toward one, you move away from the other. Reformism—and by extension, electoralism—is in essence the preservation of imperialism, because the change that it seeks, or practically carries out, remains within the bounds of legality, and thus cannot develop a force for its overthrow. The accumulation of forces for the overthrow of imperialism cannot happen solely or even mainly within the bounds of legality, but through exceeding it; practice shapes consciousness, and it is revolutionary practice that hammers revolutionary truths into the minds of the people.

What does revolution look like? In the US, the working class currently has no political organization of its own. Its first task is to reconstitute the Communist Party, which once existed as the vanguard of the proletariat before falling into revisionism. The Communist Party is the highest political organization of the working class that concentrates its best elements, it is the basis for leading and combining the various anti-imperialist struggles across the country and fusing them into one torrent against the ruling class, combining the struggles for daily demands with the struggle for power. The process of reconstituting the party requires ideological and practical unity. This means uniting under Maoism, the ideology of the proletariat, the scientific synthesis of the history of class struggle.

Through this process of accumulating forces within the heart of the class struggle, and developing this struggle increasingly outside the bounds of legality, the Communist Party establishes the conditions for the initiation of People’s War, which is revolution carried out through the mobilization and organization of the people in armed struggle, led by the Party, against the imperialist class. No ruling class will or ever has conceded power through moral appeals or pressure; those in power will fight tooth and nail to defend it, which means that the conquest of power for the working class is ultimately a military question.

The conquest of power by the working class means the creation of a society in the image of the working class: socialism, where both production and ownership are socialized, and production is based on the needs of the people rather than the profits of a handful of exploiters.

The election boycott is the only electoral tactic that serves revolution and opposes imperialism. It sharpens the contradiction between revolution and reformism, it educates people that things will only get worse under imperialism and there is no peaceful solution, it mobilizes people to act in their interests and fight for their demands rather than hoping for handouts from the servants of the ultra-rich, and it organizes people into the fight for their demands combined with the struggle for power.

ELECTIONS NO, REVOLUTION YES!

Note: An imprecise term was used when describing everything the monopolists own and has since been corrected.

Photo: Screenshot from the NYC mayoral debate.

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