Portside

One hundred and fourteen years ago a democratic socialist was poised to become Mayor of Los Angeles. Not yet the sprawling megalopolis of today, the city nonetheless ranked second largest in California, and was growing fast. A socialist in the top municipal office? The idea sent the L.A. ruling class into a freakout of red-baiting, lies, half-truths and an occasional accurate depiction of Job Harriman’s progressive positions.

The Socialist Party candidate—a labor attorney, and former vice-presidential running mate of Eugene Debs—had come out on top of an open primary, just short of the majority he needed to win outright. Now he faced off against the incumbent, a champion of the interests that had earned Los Angeles the moniker of “scabbiest town on earth” within the city’s unions. Adding spice to the mix, this would be the first major election in the Golden State in which women could vote, Proposition 4 having just squeaked by in a state referendum the same day Harriman won the mayoral primary.

The business elites threw everything they could muster into their effort to stave off the Apocalypse. The Los Angeles Times—a virulently anti-union publication owned by Harrison Gray Otis, leader of the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association, a close friend and business associate of corrupt Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz—warned every day with a creative variety of arguments that if Harriman were elected, the sky, along with the economy, would crash onto Angelenos’ heads. He editorialized that this election represented “the forces of law and order against Socialism; peace and prosperity against misery and chaos; the Stars and Stripes against the red flag.” What program so enraged and frightened the capitalist class of southern California? Harriman promised to:

·      Reverse an anti-picketing ordinance that had filled Los Angeles jails with peaceful union members for the crime of walking on sidewalks with signs, singing labor songs, while on strike 

·      Investigate the real estate deals that had brought giant payoffs to Otis and his friends when the Owens Valley aqueduct terminated on land they had purchased via insider information (the real life backdrop to events depicted in the film Chinatown)

·      Municipalize city services to save the taxpayers money and improve efficiency;

·      Invest in building community centers, public pools and baths, and increase support for public schools;

·      Oh, and modestly raise taxes on the rich and large businesses to pay for these reforms.

Pretty radical stuff.

Ultimately none of these political ideas or the opposition’s counters to them defeated Harriman. What did was an early historical appearance of the “October Surprise”. A year before the election, a bomb ripped through the Los Angeles Times building, killing twenty workers. When brothers James and John McNamara (a national leader of the Ironworkers union) were arrested and put on trial, Harriman, the top labor attorney in southern California, defended them, believing in their innocence. When he decided to run for mayor, he turned the defense over to crusading lawyer for the damned Clarence Darrow. Darrow had previously proven that labor leaders in Colorado accused of a bombing had been framed, and like Harriman thought the McNamara brothers trial was a rerun.

But the McNamaras were guilty, as Darrow ultimately found out. After secret negotiations with Otis and other Los Angeles business leaders, Darrow—a fervent opponent of the death penalty— unexpectedly changed his clients’ plea to “guilty” just days before the election. The timing was key to the agreement. In exchange the prosecution agreed to ask for prison instead of death sentences. 

Although left out of the loop, Harriman suffered the consequences. Heavily favored to win a week before the election, but firmly tied in the public’s mind to the McNamara’s defense, he and the entire Socialist slate went down to defeat. 

Today democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani is in good position to win the New York City Mayor’s race. With a ferocious ground game, smart media, charisma to spare and a set of goals clustered under the umbrella of “affordability” popular with the working class and youth, his coalition will be a formidable force between now and November. He’ll likely confront a Republican rival, incumbent Mayor Eric Adams and perhaps the disgraced former governor, whom he just defeated in the Democratic primary. If both run the latter two will split the anti-Mamdani vote sufficiently to get him elected. 

But the climb will be slippery. The mud is already being flung by the usual suspects. One shouldn’t be surprised by Trump’s characterization of Mamdani as “a one hundred percent Communist lunatic.” That won’t be the deciding factor, as the unpopular former New Yorker POTUS will probably add more votes to Mamdani’s column than he removes. 

The two biggest problems will come from the right-wing of the Democratic Party—intransigent Zionists and the city’s Wall Street and real estate sectors. Alongside mountains of cash from billionaire bank accounts, the leading edge of the anti-Mandami campaigns will comprise red-baiting and spurious charges of antisemitism. 

What does card-carrying DSA member Mamdani actually stand for?

·      A freeze in rents for stabilized apartments

·      Free city busing

·      Raising the city’s minimum wage to something close to livable:  $30/hour by 2030

·      A community safety department separate from police to deal with mental health related issues

·      City-run grocery stores to bring down food prices

·      Free childcare for children six weeks to five years old

·      Oh, and modestly increasing taxes on corporations and the wealthiest New Yorkers to pay for the above.

Like Harriman’s wish list, not exactly the Bolshevik revolution here, but you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference from what the other side is already saying, and what they will flood the airwaves with for the next few months. It’s the last item, of course—raising taxes on the rich and corporations—that, as in L.A. in 1911, especially infuriates the city’s plutocrats. 

Currently most New York City residents pay around 3% of their income in city taxes. The wealthiest income earners pay closer to 4%, with an absurdly flat cap for people making $500K and above. New York City at last count is home to 350,000 millionaires. The richest 1 percent of New Yorkers tripled its share of the city’s total income from 12 percent in 1980 to 36 percent in 2022. 

These statistics represent a flashing red sign about the city’s lack of affordability—along with an “X marks the spot” for the buried treasure that can pay for decent public services for the 95 per cent of the city’s inhabitants who aren’t millionaires. The slight tax increase Mamdani is calling for—2% on individuals making a million dollars a year—will not crimp the lifestyle of the rich in the least. 

When socialists run for public office, or when measures to reduce economic inequality are placed before the voters (e.g., taxing the rich, a raise in the minimum wage, help for renters), you can count on the most reactionary sectors of the ruling class to spend freely to convince everyone to see the world through the same warped lens they do. You can also bank on the same tired tropes at the core of their argument. Behold:  these tax increases are going to hurt everyone; small business can’t afford it; the wealthiest New Yorkers (mislabeled “job creators”) will flee the city and go to a more welcoming business environment; and all the jobs will leave with them. 

In the real world, these things never happen. Take the California example, 101 years after Harriman’s defeat. In 2012, over the dire predictions that the “job creators” and their jobs would flee California, voters passed a progressive tax bumping top income earners up a couple percentage points. The tax, Proposition 30, has brought in seven to nine billion dollars a year, and prevented public services from going over a fiscal cliff in the aftermath of the Great Recession. In the years following its passage, the state minted ten thousand new millionaires, and 1.4 million new jobs.

In New York, where much of the wealth is clustered in finance and real estate, the former creates relatively few working-class jobs and the latter can’t move. The lies may be countered with clear messaging explaining the real problems, how to address them, and who should pay to fix them. Which is what Mamdani has been doing. 

But there is another weapon in the anti-Mamdani arsenal: the charge of anti-semitism—which for AIPAC and its candidates means the duplicitous conflation of ‘anti-Zionist’ with ‘antisemitic’. A deluge of these talking points and ads in support of Cuomo failed to take Mamdani down in the primary, but that doesn’t mean that the stream of invective will stop during the next stage of the campaign. For a recent example we could turn our gaze across the Atlantic to England, where another democratic socialist, Jeremy Corbyn, who achieved a surprise momentary capture of leadership in the Labor Party, was brought low principally by a combination of the highly organized repetition of the lie (mostly by the right-wing of his own party) and a fumbled response to it. 

Two big things are different in this regard in New York 2025 compared with the England of a few years back: the war in Gaza and its impact on Jewish opinion about Israel, which means the deception in the equation of Jewish and Zionist is much clearer to many more people; and the charismatic Mamdani is not the curt Corbyn, despite similarities in their democratic socialist politics. 

What would a Mamdani victory mean at this moment in our history?

A democratic socialist mayor in the largest city in the United States would be a tremendous boost to anti-fascist morale as the mass movement to oppose Trump and MAGA is slowly gaining steam. It would arguably provide a programmatic roadmap to victory in the 2026 elections (presuming they are going to be held, and held fairly).

Yes, we are aware that New York City is not the rest of the country. But the largest urban centers are farther to the left than any other stash of votes, and they are where the resistance to Trump and MAGA has been and will likely continue to be strongest—an important indicator of possible electoral victory, if the coalitions emerging from organization of the mass demonstrations are able to develop the necessary synergy between street and ballot box forms of activism. A sclerotic neoliberal politics as usual will not mobilize this base. 

Here in California municipal democratic socialist politics have gained ground over the last few election cycles. In all, there are more than three dozen DSA-affiliated officeholders in the state—the most since the heyday of the Socialist Party more than one hundred years ago—including four mayors, fifteen city council members, a state assembly member, a county supervisor, and occupants of various down ballot offices, all of whom push for progressive policies shunned or feared by the rest of their fellow officeholders.

If Mamdani loses, the leadership of the Democratic Party will redouble its push to field empty neoliberal suits in 2026. Harriman’s defeat in LA in 1911 set back the cause of working-class politics for decades. A high-profile loss like that today would make it that much harder to remold the Democratic Party as a majoritarian progressive force.  Alternatively a win will provide wind in the sails to the anti-MAGA movement, on the strength of which Democrats can reclaim power. That’s why it’s necessary to forcefully demonstrate the viability of Mamdani’s politics now. 

California DSA members may be three thousand miles away from this historic battle but we can nonetheless help. Mamdani needs every penny he can raise to fight the onslaught of right-wing lies propelled by billionaire funding. Send him your hard-earned dollars here.