Embracing Zohran Mamdani: The Global Left's Opportunity for Solidarity

Zamikhaya Maseti

The recent local government election in New York could not escape the attention of those of us who are unapologetically schooled in Left politics, particularly within the Marxist–Leninist tradition.

For beyond the glitter of a Western metropolis choosing its next mayor, there emerged a profoundly symbolic moment in the global struggle for socialism. The rise of Zohran Mamdani, the Mayor in waiting, stirred echoes that resonate far beyond the boroughs of New York, they reverberate through the streets of Cape Town, Mitchells Plain, Khayelitsha and Gugulethu, Nyanga East and kwa Langa, kwa Khikhi eMaholweni, Site B and Site C, and the classrooms of the University of Cape Town, all places with which Mamdani is familiar. His emergence is a reminder that the socialist imagination has not died, and most certainly, the Red Flag will never touch the ground.

His electoral campaign was not only attractive but ideologically proximate to the South African Left, for his own life’s journey carries traces of our struggle, his father once lectured at the University of Cape Town, his family walked our shores, and his political formation carries the scent of our historical battles for human emancipation. In him, one recognises not a foreign experiment, but a familiar tradition, a socialist impulse shaped by the contradictions of the global South and rearticulated within the heart of the capitalist North.

Mamdani’s rise is not an accident of generational politics. It is the culmination of movements long in gestation — tenant struggles, climate justice campaigns, immigrant solidarities — that have found expression within a democratic socialist tradition struggling to reassert itself in the United States.

His ideological posture represents a sharp antithesis to the moral decay of Trump’s conservative republicanism and the managerial centrism that has sterilised the Democratic establishment. Where the Right promises a nostalgic restoration of privilege and fear, Mamdani calls for a moral reconstruction of the city as a commons —a site of shared prosperity rather than private accumulation. He belongs to that rare breed of leaders who do not merely seek to govern a city but to reimagine the meaning of citizenship itself.

For the international Left, the strategic question is not whether Mamdani is pure enough, but whether he represents a terrain worth contesting. The answer must be yes. To treat him with suspicion because he works within the institutional shell of bourgeois democracy would be to repeat the tragic errors that have fragmented progressive forces across the world.

The Marxist tradition, if properly understood, demands not isolation from historical processes but intelligent participation in them. The struggle for socialism cannot be waged in the desert of moral perfection; it must be waged in the contradictions of the present. Mamdani is one such contradiction, socialist in conviction, democratic in method, pragmatic in governance. The global Left must therefore act dialectically, to support him while sharpening its critique, to stand with him while sustaining movement pressure from below.

Those who occupy the radical flank of the Left often mistake criticism for clarity. They forget that revolutions are not born in sterile laboratories of ideological certainty but in living societies with class contradictions and cultural complexities.

Mamdani’s New York will be a laboratory of its own kind, a site where socialism must encounter finance capital, where racial inequality intersects with housing crises, and where ecological sustainability must coexist with economic growth. His project is not a utopian flight from reality but a disciplined attempt to make socialism governable in the heart of capitalism. That alone deserves not antagonism but solidarity.

The hostility that some socialist currents display toward leaders like Mamdani stems from a misunderstanding of revolutionary temporality. They want rupture without groundwork, purity without power, and transformation without transition.

Yet history teaches otherwise.

The Bolsheviks did not emerge ex nihilo; they grew from patient organisational labour within Tsarist legality. The ANC’s Freedom Charter was drafted long before state power was seized. The municipal socialist experiments of Red Vienna or post-war Scandinavia did not abolish capitalism overnight; they disciplined it, humanised it, and prepared the social base for deeper change.

In the same spirit, Mamdani’s programme, fare-free transit, public groceries, rent freezes, taxation on the wealthy, is a transitional architecture of justice. It opens ideological space for the re-politicisation of everyday life, for a consciousness that can see beyond consumerist despair.

To align with Mamdani is not to abandon revolutionary principles; it is to practise revolutionary patience. The Left has exhausted itself in rhetorical purism, leaving the terrain of actual governance to centrists and capitalists.

Meanwhile, the Right has colonised the emotions of the working class through nationalism and resentment. Mamdani speaks a different language, one that combines the moral vocabulary of solidarity with the pragmatic grammar of administration. He offers the possibility of reclaiming statecraft from technocrats and restoring politics as an ethical vocation. That is why every socialist, from Johannesburg to São Paulo, from Berlin to New York, should view his rise as an international opportunity.

Trump’s conservative republicanism is not merely a domestic American pathology; it is the global manifestation of a reactionary wave seeking to re-racialise politics, to weaponise fear, and to sacralise inequality. To confront that wave demands not rhetorical outrage but organised power.

The liberal centre is too compromised to mount that defence; it is wedded to the same market dogmas that have impoverished the majority. Only a reinvigorated socialist movement, operating both inside and outside the institutions of power, can provide a credible alternative.

Mamdani’s project is precisely that, an effort to fuse movement energy with municipal authority, to translate protest into policy without losing the moral pulse of the streets. That synthesis is what the global Left must nurture, not negate.

There will, of course, be disappointments. The machinery of the city will resist him. Wall Street will discipline him through credit ratings and capital strikes. The political establishment will try to tame his radicalism into a digestible progressivism.

Yet that is exactly why he needs international solidarity, not blind praise, but a global network of support that keeps his socialist ambition alive against the suffocating logic of compromise. Every progressive experiment is vulnerable to capture; the only antidote is a vigilant, organised movement that treats governance as part of the struggle, not its conclusion.

And here, a special appeal must be made to the South African Communist Party, the oldest surviving Communist formation in the global South, whose revolutionary tradition still bears the scent of Chris Hani’s courage and Moses Kotane’s discipline. The SACP cannot afford to view Mamdani’s socialist surge as an American curiosity. It must see in him a kindred project, a young internationalist forging democratic socialism from within the empire that once defined global capitalism.

The Party’s historical duty has never been confined to domestic terrains; it has always been to nurture global solidarity, to stand where class struggle reveals new frontiers. Supporting Mamdani is to reaffirm the SACP’s internationalist heritage, to remind the world that socialism is not a relic of the Cold War but a living doctrine of human emancipation. The SACP must lend its moral weight, its intellectual clarity, and its movement solidarity to this emerging experiment in socialist governance, for New York today could well be what Havana was yesterday, a beacon of possibility amidst imperial arrogance.

Let us then imagine alignment not as endorsement but as engagement. The Left must engage Mamdani’s administration critically, supplying it with ideas, research, and moral reinforcement. Intellectuals must provide the theoretical scaffolding, workers’ movements must supply the militant backbone, and cultural workers must shape the narrative of a new socialist urbanism. If New York can demonstrate that democratic socialism can deliver security, equity, and hope in the belly of the capitalist empire, it will radiate inspiration to every corner of the world still trapped between despair and demagoguery.

The lesson is simple: purity without power is impotence. Power without principle is betrayal. The Left must learn to hold both principle and power in one hand. Mamdani’s coming mayoralty is a test of that maturity. If we fail to support him, we confirm the Right’s caricature of the Left as fragmented and self-defeating. If we stand with him, critically, courageously, collectively, we reopen history itself to the possibility of transformation.

Zohran Mamdani is not a saviour; he is a signal. He is proof that the socialist horizon has not dimmed, that even amid capitalist decay, new generations are willing to reimagine democracy as an instrument of equality rather than an alibi for greed. To stand with him, therefore, is to stand with ourselves, with every dream that once animated the socialist imagination and every struggle that still insists the world can be governed differently.

The global Left, and the SACP in particular, must not be hostile to that possibility. It must embrace it as the beginning of a new chapter in the unfinished struggle for human emancipation.

* Zamikhaya Maseti is a political economy analyst and holds a Magister Philosophae in South African Politics and Political Economy from the erstwhile University of Port Elizabeth, now Nelson Mandela University.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL, Independent Media or The African.