Starting at just $100, with a few clicks of a mouse and keyboard, one can indulge in the glory of being a landlord without all the fuss and muss of looking into the eyes of the families whose homes — and the conditions of their lives — you own and control.

“No late-night phone calls,” Arrived promises. “Our experts cover maintenance, renewals, and everything in between so you can just focus on earning.” How nice. How very pleasant. It’s an unobstructed path into the investment class, turning every dreamer with a C-note into a homeowner of a sort, if only a fractional one.

Fractional investing — in which an investor buys a part of a share or fund unit — isn’t new, nor is fractional real estate investment. But the app-ification of each is a further step into a brave new world. It’s a bit like a demented dating app, where armchair investors can peruse a list of homes with photos and recent return rates included. Oh, the craftsman with the yellow siding looks nice. And at an annualized dividend of 8.1 percent or higher, you can’t possibly lose! Right swipe.

To click through the homes on offer, available to be “funded,” is to see what it looks like to be as far removed from the essential human need to secure shelter as one can get. Browsing images at a distance, stripped of any sense of living in a space, in a community — and dreaming of profiting from it — is to accept a world in which profit is the highest good.

The Arrived platform offers a disconcerting mix of familiar sins. Many of us have had landlords, and plenty have had bad ones. Some of us have had landlords once removed through a property management company. And large swaths of rental housing are already owned in a diffuse fashion by pension funds and other institutional investors. What’s new with Arrived is how it breaks ownership into innumerable small stakes, dispersing them into the grasping claws of any retail investor with the app. The lines of accountability are so blurred that they might as well not exist. It’s enough to make the right to look your landlord in the eye and ask after fixing a pipe or replacing an appliance feel old-fashioned and passe.

Turning housing into a micro-asset doesn’t just deepen unaccountability; it works to normalize it. And not just for housing, but wherever this sort of platform-based fractional investment spreads.

The obvious argument in favor of a landlord fractional investment platform is that it incentivizes investment in housing. But Arrived repackages existing homes, turning them into investment vehicles and intensifying competition over limited supply, driving prices higher.

There are more effective, just, and human ways to build and access homes at scale. Public investment, through financing and the construction of a variety of home types, would ease speculative pressure, or at least reduce it, and help stabilize communities over the long-term. It would also help recast homes as places to live — and the people in them as neighbors, as humans — rather than units of return.

The stability concern is real. The easy liquidity and platform-based design of Arrived risks a dynamic in which buyers target "high growth" areas, potentially exacerbating geographic inequality while risking extra volatility in the housing market. What happens to prices when everyone charges in at once? What happens to homes when they flee at once? We know how this goes. Not well.

Those who claim to support a free market may balk at regulation that places robust limits on transactions between adults, but those same people seem to love “democratizing” participation in the worst aspects of landlordism — effectively diluting accountability and concentrating power. At another time, we might have recognized this as tyranny, or even a form of mobocracy. It’s certainly a race to the bottom — one in which tenants and their neighborhoods are destined to lose.

The Spanish government has been actively showcasing this agenda in recent weeks. On April 11, Sánchez undertook his fourth official trip to China in just over three years — a frequency unmatched by any of his EU peers. A week later, he hosted a global “Progressive Mobilization” summit in Barcelona that brought together European social democrats with heads of government such as Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa. Both engagements highlighted his administration's mix of diplomatic and developmental ambitions, as it looks to position Spain as a privileged link between Europe and the Global South while also cementing its position as the green energy hub of the Western Mediterranean.

These strategic objectives did not emerge overnight. Instead, having already invested significant political capital in developing relations with the non-Western world in recent years as well as prioritizing the rapid rollout of renewable energy capacity, the Sánchez administration has been better positioned than most EU governments to respond to the profound geopolitical shifts that have accelerated under Trump’s second term.

Sánchez's condemnation of the Israeli slaughter in Gaza, and his willingness to name it as genocide, created an opening diplomatically in the Arab world, particularly in repairing frayed relations with Spain’s major gas supplier, Algeria. Meanwhile, as the EU’s center of gravity shifted rightward, his administration also strengthened ties with the Latin American left, with Sánchez joining Lula’s initiative for progressive governments in the region, La Reunión en Defensa de la Democracia, from 2024. Together he and Lula also pushed for the EU-Mercosur trade agreement, framing it as a counterweight to Trump’s coercive protectionism — despite reservations from Spanish trade unions over the deal's lack of labor protections. A bilateral agreement signed in Barcelona in March will also see Brazil’s rare earths processed domestically in collaboration with Spanish companies.

Yet most significant, as he undertook his first official trip to China in 2023, Sánchez adopted a pro-engagement line, positioning his government as an alternative interlocutor for Beijing among leading EU states. In the context of Italy’s withdrawal from China’s Belt and Road Initiative that same year and Germany’s then Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock describing Beijing as “more and more a systemic rival,” he moved to fill the space left open.

China’s leadership looked favorably on Spain's abstention in the vote on EU tariffs for Chinese electric vehicles in October 2024, as well as Sánchez’s call for them to be reconsidered. But a key turning point was the Spanish prime minister's willingness to meet with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, the same week that Trump unveiled his sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs last year, despite US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warning that the encounter was tantamount to Spain “cutting [its] own throat.”

“China makes up one sixth of the world’s population and is expected to account for 30 percent of global industrial output by 2030, so any major global challenge such as tackling climate change or rebuilding multilateral governance requires cooperation between Europe and China,” insists Catalan Socialist and Vice President of the European Parliament Javi López. He tells Jacobin that Spain’s China policy is based “not on choosing blocs” but on “defending European and Spanish interests in the current panorama . . . in which the US has approved a national security strategy openly hostile to Europe and has directly attacked our interests with its tariff policy.”

In this respect, as political economist Miguel Otero noted in a recent study for the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Sánchez’s overture is motivated by both national “economic realism” and unease at the European Commission’s “excessive alignment” with the US’s China policy, based on containment and systemic rivalry. In terms of economic gains, Sánchez’s diplomatic offensive has been one key factor behind the 331 percent increase in Chinese investment in Spain last year — going from €149 million in 2024 to €643 million in 2025.

“This still remains a relatively low figure, particularly when compared to the total US investment in 2025, but it is also a question of its quality,” international relations analyst Mario Esteban tells Jacobin. “A significant portion of the US inflow belongs to vulture funds investing in things like real estate whereas Chinese investments tend to be more in manufacturing sectors that could potentially expand and strengthen Spain’s industrial base.” Esteban sees the Sánchez administration as attempting to balance the risks of a new overdependency on China and a worrying trade deficit with the potential “to embed Spain within emerging global value chains in sectors such as green technologies and electric vehicles.”

In this respect, he points to the €4.1 billion partnership between Chinese clean technology giant Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL) and the multinational car manufacturer Stellanis to construct one of the EU's largest lithium-iron battery factories at the old Opel plant outside of Zaragoza. At the same time, Spain looks increasingly set to become the main manufacturing hub for Chinese EVs in the EU after a series of agreements were announced with Chinese manufacturers. Chery is investing €400 million to reactivate the ex-Nissan plant in Barcelona, and Desay SV will reopen the Linares plant in Jaén, while on April 24 Chinese state company SAIC Motor announced that the first MG factory in the EU would be built in Spain.

“Spain has been determined to arrive early to the station on green industrialization,” López maintains, pointing to the competitive advantage it now enjoys with “60 percent of its total energy mix coming from renewables.” He also sees the Spanish government as aiming to secure “technological transfers in green industry,” using Chinese foreign direct investment to build domestic technological capabilities and expertise, as China did with Western companies in previous decades.

Yet Esteban insists that success depends on the fine print of these deals: “It remains to be seen to what extent some of these investments will actually generate spillover effects within the local productive sector, because it is not the same for these factories to simply assemble parts that come from China as it is for these components to be manufactured within Spain, with a genuine localization of productive activity.”

Esteban says this will also be a test for China, to see “whether, in the face of the European Commission’s skepticism, it can demonstrate a genuine willingness to reach a more balanced economic relationship with Spain.” That would give credence to Sánchez’s wider policy vision for the EU on China, which Esteban describes as “managed interdependence.” He explains that it is centered on “rebalancing the relationship not primarily by withdrawal, and depending less on China as a means to reduce trade deficits but by making China more dependent on the EU in key industrial sectors where Europe holds a comparative advantage, while also incorporating Chinese technology to strengthen Europe’s industry in other areas.”

If the EU is serious about reducing its dependencies on the United States around energy, digital communications, and industries like defense, it will need to combine de-risking and diversification of supply chains with this type of more calibrated approach to China. According to Otero, even under Joe Biden’s administration, the Sánchez government believed that rolling in behind the US in Cold War–style bloc politics “risked narrowing Europe’s diplomatic autonomy and limiting its economic room for maneuver” on China — concerns that have only multiplied during Trump´s second term.

In a recent speech on the future of Europe, Sánchez called on EU leaders “not to bow down” before the United States but to “take brave decisions” that enable “a more autonomous and free Europe.” In particular, he singled out his government’s lone refusal among NATO states to commit to Trump’s target of spending 5 percent of GDP on defense by 2035, resources that he reiterated would simply “end up going to the US arms industry” rather than developing European industrial capacity given the commitment’s tight time frame.

“On NATO, Spain has been an outlier,” maintains the director of PSOE’s Avanza think tank, Berna León. “It won't fulfill a specific administration's desires around targets that are not tied to our real security needs and capabilities,” he argues. “It is more this than an open opposition to the project itself — although I think the future of NATO is now open to question but because of this administration's decisions and what I think can be described as a terrible job of its current secretary general, [Mark] Rutte.”

“Europe needs to understand that we no longer form part of the core of the global system but now occupy a more ambiguous in-between position,” León continues. He believes that “the Spanish government is the first in Europe to wake up from this fantasy“ — referencing Sánchez’s recent speech at Tsinghua University where he declared multipolarity “not a hypothesis . . . or a wish but already a reality” that “we cannot change.”

Yet for all Sánchez’s frenetic diplomacy in recent months, there are few signs of Europe's willingness to pivot from an obsolete Atlanticism. Over the past eighteen months, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz have made concessions to Trump’s ultimatums their default setting, while Poland and the Baltic states continue to see the United States as the ultimate guarantor against the perceived existential threat from Russia. Even the Iran war does not seem to have shifted such acquiescence. Indeed, on the same day Lula was in Barcelona praising Sánchez’s “bravery” over his stance, Merz was in Paris insisting that “the war must not turn into a transatlantic stress test.”

Alongside a difficult battle over Merz’s deregulation agenda in Brussels, Sánchez also faces a likely general election over the next twelve months — in which he is betting his elevated international profile will be able to mobilize a large part of Podemos’s former electorate and consolidate PSOE’s renewed hegemony over the broad-left vote. Yet despite his party’s numbers improving since the beginning of the Iran war, most polls still have the right-wing bloc on course for an absolute majority, if by a narrowing margin. An underlying issue facing PSOE and coalition partner Sumar is that despite Spain’s impressive headline growth figures and reduced unemployment, real wages fell by 0.3 percent between 2019 and 2025, while rent prices have risen 72 percent over the last decade — way above the EU average of 58 percent.

As Jorge Tamames wrote in Phenomenal World last year, this in part reflects the fact that Spain “seems caught between its new and old growth models,” with the labor market still overreliant on tourism, construction, and low-paid seasonal work, while green industrialization remains at “the budding stages.” Yet it also points to the limits of Sánchez's redistribution agenda, particularly since his government has had to operate without a clear working majority in parliament since 2023, as well as his lack of political will to tackle the housing crisis across his eight years in office.

In this context, the general election could coincide with the US midterms or more likely the French presidential elections next spring so as to reinforce Sánchez’s preferred international lens and his binary framing of “democracy or authoritarianism.” A repeated message at the Global Progressive Mobilization summit in Barcelona was that the far-right wave is now breaking under the weight of Trump’s foreign policy disasters. The reelection bid of Europe’s most prominent center-left figure will be a major test of that thesis.

In 2008, years into the war on terror, Congress added Section 702 to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allowed US intelligence agencies to conduct warrantless communication surveillance of foreigners. Since then, the section’s well-documented misuse has been criticized by Democrats and Republicans alike.

According to the 2022 Office of the Director of National Intelligence memo, federal agents had conducted more than 278,000 “non-compliant FBI queries of raw FISA-acquired information,” many of which occurred during President Donald Trump’s first administration from January 2017 to January 2021.

Moreover, a previously classified September 2021 report from the National Security Agency’s (NSA) Office of the Inspector General also alleged that searches of FISA-acquired data on US citizens “did not always follow NSA procedural and policy requirements” meant to “protect the civil liberties and privacy rights” of Americans.

In particular, the law has allowed federal agents to illegally spy on their wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends, and other family members. It has also been used to surveil an unnamed US senator, an unnamed state senator, and a state judge who “had complained to FBI about alleged civil rights violations perpetrated by a municipal chief of police.”

One of the most high-profile abuses of the law happened to former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, who was a focus of the 2016 special counsel investigation into Russian election interference. In 2019, the Justice Department admitted that it lacked probable cause in two warrant applications for Carter’s communications. Carter sued the Justice Department and the FBI, and the parties reached a settlement last week.

Earlier this month, amid bipartisan backlash over the abuse of Section 702’s spying powers, Congress passed a two-week extension of FISA. Republican leaders are seeking to strike a more permanent deal extending the spy powers by April 30 — the day the two-week deal expires and the last day in session before lawmakers depart DC for a weeklong recess.

Himes has come under scrutiny because of his repeated lobbying for the bill as some experts argue his statements urging for the bill’s passage have been overblown.

“Himes has demonstrated himself to be a bad actor when it comes to FISA reauthorization,” said Hajar Hammado, senior policy adviser for the progressive policy center Demand Progress. “Tens of thousands of Americans have been subject to unlawful sort of searches. It’s an issue that has persisted, and any sort of reauthorization that does not include reforms to protect Americans from warrantless searches will only perpetuate this issue and make it even worse.”

Himes isn’t the only leading Democratic lawmaker who appears to be backing FISA’s reauthorization despite its documented misuse. Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), a long-serving leader on foreign affairs, reportedly pressured the Democrat-dominated Congressional Black Caucus to support a reformless FISA extension. Only after reporting from the Lever and other independent outlets did the caucus quietly announce its opposition to the bill.

House Republicans, who recently widened their majority after the resignation of Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) amid sexual harassment allegations and the death of Rep. David Scott (D-GA), are still in need of Democratic votes to reauthorize FISA because of several conservative detractors. That includes longtime critics of government surveillance overreach like Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY).

Arizona Republican Representatives Eli Crane and Andy Biggs threw another wrench into the GOP leadership’s plan for a “clean reauthorization” of FISA this week by proposing their own reform amendment requiring warrants for searches made under the auspices of Section 702.

Himes’s protection of the sprawling surveillance state comes as he accepts campaign cash from the premier spy firm contracted by the government.

Since 2024, Himes has received $3,500 from a political committee representing employees of Palantir, the surveillance giant tapped for billions in federal contracts involving Customs and Border Protection, the Department of Defense, the Treasury, and other agencies.

A recent attack advertisement in Himes’s hometown newspaper in Bridgeport, Connecticut, criticized the Democrat for allegedly handing warrantless spy powers to the Trump administration amid its draconian surveillance-driven crackdown on immigration.

“Section 702 allows the government to collect communications between Americans and foreigners located abroad, which agents then search for information about Americans — without warrants. Meanwhile, ICE, and other federal agencies, are bypassing constitutional protections by directly buying sensitive data, including your location, from data brokers,” argues the ad, paid for by leading progressive advocacy groups including Fight for the Future and Demand Progress Action.

“Members of Congress have offered solutions to close these loopholes and protect us from increasingly dangerous mass surveillance,” the ad continues. “Will Congressman Himes continue to stand in the way?”

I had a front row seat to the CIA’s dismantling of the Constitution. I spent nearly fifteen years at the agency, serving as the chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after 9/11 and then as executive assistant to the CIA’s deputy director for operations during the planning of the Iraq War. It was clear even then that the United States was moving to embrace what Vice President Dick Cheney called the “dark side”: torture, assassinations, secret prisons, and extrajudicial “renditions.” It was equally clear that the Justice Department would sit idly by while the federal judiciary looked the other way. This dismantling of checks and balances, normalization of extrajudicial power, and cultivation of a culture of paranoid militarism laid the ground for the subsequent rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement. These forces continue to endanger American democracy, especially as the US far right embraces insurrectionist ideologies.

The Bush administration acted quickly after 9/11 to launch the war on terror with overwhelming bipartisan support. The need for urgency to prevent another attack seemed at the time to justify extraordinary measures that redrew the boundaries of acceptable government conduct. These measures included:

• The USA PATRIOT Act, passed by Congress in October 2001, which eroded Fourth Amendment protections by vastly expanding domestic surveillance capabilities, including against US citizens;

• Use of the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a legal no-man’s-land where suspects were indefinitely detained without trial, establishing a precedent for extrajudicial detention;

• “Enhanced interrogation techniques,” a euphemism for abuse and torture, which undermined international law and domestic accountability; and

• Preemptive war, as in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. This was based on manipulated and utterly false intelligence as well as the logic of “preventive defense” — a profound departure from just war traditions and international consensus.

These policies relied on exceptionalism: the self-serving notion that the United States, thanks to its unique status and threat environment, was singularly entitled to bypass international norms.

Over time, the executive overreach, suspension of habeas corpus, and resort to fear-based rhetoric became normalized. Americans were conditioned to accept a politics of emergency and exception in which the rule of law was no longer paramount but a luxury to be abandoned when times get tough. Consider Guantanamo Bay. This was opened as a makeshift detention camp in January 2002; the CIA filled it within months. At its height, the camp held 684 people. Most Americans had never heard of it; some were vaguely aware that it was a small US military base at the eastern tip of Cuba. I fell into the latter group. But in March 2002, I came face to face with what was really about to happen there.

As the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan, my job after 9/11 was to locate and capture al-Qaeda fighters on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border. This wasn’t hard: they had no money, nowhere to hide, and no way to communicate securely, and they made mistakes. By the first week of March 2002, we had literally filled the jail in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. The Pakistani authorities asked me to move the prisoners out; they didn’t care where. I asked a counterpart in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center — my home office — what to do. My colleague answered quickly: “Put them on a C-12 (cargo plane), and send them to Guantanamo.” “Cuba?” I queried. “Why would we send them to Cuba?” The response: “We’ve come up with a plan to send all al-Qaeda prisoners to Guantanamo. We’ll hold them there for two or three weeks until we can decide in which federal district court to put them on trial.” That made good sense to me. After all, the 9/11 attacks were still an open criminal investigation, with crimes having taken place in the Eastern District of Virginia, the Southern District of New York, the Western District of Pennsylvania, and the Eastern District of Massachusetts.

The problem arose when Vice President Cheney and his underlings heard about this plan and realized that Guantanamo could serve them as a legal no-man’s land. Cheney instructed the CIA to send almost all al-Qaeda prisoners to Guantanamo and to hold them there indefinitely. Others whom the CIA designated as High-Value Targets — later, High-Value Detainees — were rendered to an archipelago of secret prisons around the world, where they were tortured mercilessly. In the end, almost all the Guantanamo detainees were released. None had been charged with a crime. As of 2025, fifteen prisoners remained there. Six of these have never been charged, while a further seven have not been tried. Most are unlikely to ever go to trial because of policy differences between the military tribunal there and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which refuses to accept a plea deal.

The Guantanamo detention camp was by no means the only affront to the US Constitution committed as part of the war on terror. The CIA oversaw a prolific torture program for which nobody was ever punished. It ran secret prisons in multiple foreign countries, some of which were established without the knowledge of their presidents or prime ministers, pursuant to handshake deals between CIA director George Tenet and the heads of those countries’ intelligence services. The CIA deployed assassination squads at least through the Obama administration, according to the New Yorker magazine. And it practiced extraordinary rendition, whereby people were captured overseas and then sent to black sites to undergo torture. To be sure, constitutional violations were not confined to the CIA. In 2001, for example, the White House authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on US citizens in contravention of both the law and the NSA’s own charter. By all accounts, these programs continue.

Abandoning these constraints on the government’s use of force — even lethal force — helped instill a political culture that conflated loyalty to the state with loyalty to a particular ideology: one that prized strength, suspicion, and US supremacy over deliberation, restraint, and diplomatic pluralism. The war on terror did more than erode legal norms; it also reshaped the emotional and psychological terrain of American politics. The post-9/11 years saw a surge of jingoism, Islamophobia, and the public valorization of military and police power. These sentiments provided fertile ground for the emergence of Trumpism:

• Paranoia and the “enemy within”: The war on terror targeted threats at home as well as abroad. This fostered a culture in which loyalty was questioned and dissent delegitimized. The same logic now underpins far-right conspiracies about immigrants, Muslims, “leftists,” and even government institutions themselves, as well as far-left conspiracies about conservatives, libertarians, and anti-government “constitutionalist” activists
.

• Normalized executive power: The bipartisan expansion of presidential powers under George W. Bush continued under Barack Obama, whose administration widened mass surveillance and increased the use of drones for extrajudicial killings abroad. Trump accordingly inherited a system that had already been gutted of serious checks on executive power. He exploited this license to further attack democratic institutions, undermine elections, and improperly empower his political allies. Republicans who had condemned Obama for “ruling by decree” cheered as Trump went on to issue far more executive orders than Obama had
.

• Militarization: The veneration of the military and law enforcement, alongside a growing popular gun culture, contributed to the normalization of violence in US politics. MAGA’s glorification of militias, police, and military symbolism draws directly from the post-9/11 valorization of force.

• Conspiracy and disinformation: The Iraq War was sold on the back of false claims about the Iraqi regime’s purported relationship with al-Qaeda and alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. The eventual exposure of these falsehoods undermined public faith in established institutions while simultaneously teaching would-be demagogues that emotionally compelling narratives could overwhelm truth. The lesson was not lost on Trump and MAGA leaders, who have constructed an entire parallel reality around false allegations of election fraud, “deep state” enemies, and “globalist” conspiracy.

The war on terror did not merely embolden authoritarian tendencies; it made them seem natural. This dangerous political transformation culminated on January 6, 2021, when right-wing extremists stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. This insurrection was the logical end point of years of norm-breaking, disinformation, and authoritarian drift. It was also a striking example of how the tools of the war on terror — fear-based politics, mass surveillance, and domestic militarization — had failed to address the most significant threat to American democracy: white nationalist extremism from within. Yet unlike the vigorous post-9/11 mobilization against foreign threats, the state has responded to domestic insurrectionism with caution, even hesitancy. Part of this stems from institutional inertia. But the deeper issue is political: the far right now commands considerable power within one of the two major political parties. Many Republican officials either condoned, minimized, or outright supported the events of January 6. This internal assault on constitutional norms arguably poses a greater threat to American democracy than al-Qaeda ever did.

Matt Kennard’s Irregular Army shows us that this degradation of norms and standards reached into the very heart of the US military, with alarming consequences. By lowering standards to fight endless wars, the Pentagon allowed white supremacists, gang members, and criminals into its ranks, building a chaotic and dangerous army under the flag of the United States. Those who trained in Iraq and Afghanistan would later surface in militias, far-right movements, and, eventually, on the steps of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The tools of conquest abroad became the weapons of insurrection at home. The irregular army Kennard revealed is both a symptom and a legacy of this era — a reminder that corruption of the core institutions of state, once normalized, does not remain on distant battlefields but returns home. The stakes of the battle to reverse this dynamic are high: we are talking about the preservation of the Republic itself.

This decision entrenches junior rates for all workers under twenty-one years of age. A small number of eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-old workers who have been at the same employer for more than six months will benefit from higher rates. However, even this seemingly positive development favors employers.

Let’s say an eighteen-year-old worker has staffed the checkout at an IGA supermarket for four years. If they take the same job at rival supermarket Woolworths, their wage will be up to 30 percent lower just because of their age.

The six-month rule will in practice function as handcuffs tying young workers to their boss. It will cause young workers to be more fearful of their employer and less likely to agitate. Employers will use it to threaten workers not to organize. It will discourage young workers from seeking safer workplaces elsewhere or taking up education opportunities in different cities.

Retail employers are also adept at deploying strategies to avoid those costs in the first place.

This group of eighteen- to nineteen-year-olds, however, is small compared to the vast majority of teenage workers who will continue to be subjected to a process known as “learn or churn.” This means as they age, they either become managers or are de-rostered. This process was alluded to euphemistically during the junior-rates hearing. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) argued to the FWC that young workers “exhibit higher turnover rates than older employees.” This high turnover claim was echoed by the Pharmacy Guild retailers, Red Rooster, and other big employers.

In response to the junior-rates announcement this week, the Australian Retail Council chief executive Chris Rodwell suggested that rather than a cost-of-living crisis, there is a “cost-of-doing-business” crisis. In his view, it’s not workers suffering but retailers struggling with fuel and rent increases.

The ACCI chief executive Andrew McKellar said the changes around junior rates was the FWC “shooting themselves in the foot.” The Australian Industry Group’s Innes Willox argued that employers “simply don’t have endless capacity to absorb these kinds of dramatic cost increases without adverse consequences.”

This is all theater. There are no dramatic cost increases. Any modest cost increases will be offset by employers turbocharging the age-based churning systems they already deploy.

Coles and Woolworths, for example, all employ young people and casual workers at disproportionately higher rates. Notoriously, McDonald’s keeps 85 percent of its workforce in casual employment. This is not an accident: mass casualization enables these employers to de-roster employees as they get older and cost more.

In addition to casualization, many employers, including Kmart and McDonald’s, use sophisticated rostering tools to always favor a younger employee wherever possible.

These types of systems distort the job security of all workers in retail and fast food. They are also what ensures these supermarkets, retailers and fast-food giants keep making eye-watering profits.

Australia added age-based discrimination to prohibited forms of discrimination in employment in 1989. International law clearly prohibits discriminatory junior rates. So how exactly do retail and fast-food employers justify them?

Employers argue that junior rates help children and young people find and secure employment because they make it more profitable for employers to hire them. The Australian Retail Council’s Rodwell stated this very clearly in response to the recent decision when he argued that “junior pay structures have long provided a balanced pathway that supports both youth employment and business viability.”

Junior rates may indeed be quite profitable, but the evidence shows that they actually negatively distort job security for young people. This distortion impacts all workers both at specific companies and across entire sectors.

Junior rates cause employers to deliberately favor cheaper labor. To celebrate the birthday of a child in retail or fast food, an employer cuts their hours. What clearer example of capitalist exploitation and insecurity could there be?

The ACCI argues that junior rates “support, rather than undermine, opportunities for young people to enter the job market.” This is a misleading, narrow definition of “opportunities.” A recent study found that 57 percent of early school leavers did so because they either had a job or were trying to get one. Without junior rates, a young person could work around 40 percent of the hours they currently work for the same income. This would remove pressure to abandon their education. It would also allow them access to the myriad opportunities gained by spending more time in school, in community activities, and with their friends and families.

The beneficiaries of child labor have posed bogus arguments like these for centuries. In reality, these employers don’t celebrate security or opportunity. They value the vulnerability and insecurity that make children less likely to raise safety concerns, complain, or make demands.

To the extent that children are provided an opportunity to learn work skills and share in the community of the workplace, they ought to be fairly rewarded by equal pay for equal work.

The trade union that brought the junior-rates case before the FWC, the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association (SDA), played the role of junior rates’ greatest defender. It argued to the commission that a sixteen-year-old worker at KFC, Woolworths, or Kmart is only worth 50 percent of an adult wage. This argument was influential: the commission concurred “that minors’ work value was likely less, having regard to factors relating to maturity, life experience, and opportunity to have obtained work experience.”

But it’s worth examining why the SDA is playing this negative role. The union has a close working relationship with Australia’s two biggest supermarkets, Woolworths and Coles. About half of the SDA membership is at Woolworths and about one quarter is at Coles. This means the SDA’s existence is more or less entirely reliant on only two employers.

The SDA negotiates enterprise agreements that ensure lower wages for workers and continued profits for Woolworths and Coles. In return for these sweetheart deals, these companies allow and assist the SDA to recruit young workers.

SDA recruitment agents are permitted to interrupt workers, target them on their first shift, interrogate children without parents present, process payroll deductions, and more. Until 2018, SDA even gave 10 percent of the membership fees paid by workers to these two employers as recruitment commissions.

Without this kind of assistance from the bosses, SDA membership would plummet. This is because the SDA doesn’t actually achieve anything for its members. Notoriously, the SDA helped a range of big employers across retail and fast food steal billions of dollars from workers.

But the true value for Woolworths and Coles is in the SDA’s political affiliation. The SDA is the largest trade union affiliate to the Australian Labor Party (ALP). The close relationship between the SDA and the supermarket giants means the ALP has steadfastly refused to support greater regulatory powers against the duopoly to force divestment or other pro-consumer actions.

The largest employers, particularly Woolworths and Coles, secure far greater returns from the SDA than these recent, modest changes to junior rates will cost them.

The FWC’s ruling makes it clear that young workers can’t rely on the courts to abolish discriminatory wages. If junior rates — and the yellow unions and sellout deals that have allowed them to endure — are to be genuinely abolished, huge numbers of workers will need to mobilize. That momentum has begun.

The Retail and Fast Food Workers Union (RAFFWU) launched in 2016 in response to the dire pay and conditions facing workers of all ages in fast food and retail. Over the past decade it has helped return over a billion dollars a year in stolen minimum wages by abolishing or replacing SDA-negotiated enterprise agreements. RAFFWU also made headlines by exposing the SDA’s predatory recruitment practices aimed at young workers.

More than legal cases and media coverage, however, it has implemented a strategy of industrial militancy. In 2021, RAFFWU members held the first retail strikes in Australian history at a Sydney bookstore. Members at Apple stores in Brisbane and Newcastle went on strike in 2022. And workers at Woolworths and Coles supermarkets across the nation took coordinated strike action in 2023.

The deals resulting from these actions have deliver far better outcomes for retail workers than the historic and recent agreements negotiated by the SDA. As prices continue to rise for working people, these battles will become more essential.

Coles and Woolworths are predicted to make AUS $1.02 and $1.33 billion in profits, respectively, in the year ahead. Australia should not be staffing its supermarkets with underpaid children for them to do so. As Coles’s RAFFWU delegate Nelio Da Silva put it, “Big companies like Coles and Woolworths are making a bucketload and not sharing it around. People are starting to realize the bigger picture: we aren’t getting what we should be getting.”

Part of the problem is outright misclassification. Employers classify workers performing what amounts to full- or part-time employment as independent contractors when they should be employees. They lack the ability to autonomously set their own wages or hours (the hallmarks of genuine contract work), yet they also lack the benefits of traditional employment, including minimum wage, health insurance, retirement contributions, and paid leave. They end up falling through a gap that is actively maintained by legal ambiguity.

Cracking down on misclassification is essential. But given the volatility of classification standards themselves, it is not enough. Even workers who genuinely prefer flexible, nonstandard arrangements deserve modernized protections that do not evaporate at the whims of a judge or labor secretary. The goal must be a system durable enough to survive the political and legal cycles that have made the current framework so dangerously unstable.

The good news is that solutions already exist. We just need the political will to scale them. Several models have shown how to provide workers with the flexibility some of them want while also providing the core protections and benefits traditional workers enjoy.

One experimental program funded by the Workers Lab, in partnership with the workforce development board in Long Beach, California, demonstrated that flexibility and security are not mutually exclusive. Drawing on a model first developed in the United Kingdom, the program used local workforce boards as an “employer of record”: a single entity that connected workers to multiple employers through a phone-based app, like a digital hiring hall, allowing workers to select jobs based on their skills and schedules and providing portable benefits across multiple gigs. Workers received a single W-2 form, making it far easier to file taxes accurately, claim the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, and qualify for a mortgage.

A model like this could enable gig workers to access paid leave or unemployment insurance, providing them with greater financial security when something goes wrong. The approach creates a structure that combines the benefits of flexible work with the financial security of traditional work, regardless of how any given administration or judge defines a gig worker. An employer-of-record system will be used to support FIFA World Cup workers in Seattle this year.

In 2024, Massachusetts voters passed a ballot initiative allowing rideshare drivers — a quintessential type of gig worker — to work together regardless of platform and to bargain at the sector level rather than the employer level. This promising approach, historically more popular in Europe, allows the union (with some adjusted processes for driver approval) to bargain on behalf of all drivers to raise industry standards.

Most importantly for today's volatile legal environment, these models do not depend on winning a classification battle in court. In the current climate, that may be everything.

To build on this momentum and create an architecture of support for gig workers and independent contractors, Congress should establish protections that do not depend on classification. Workers deserve a national baseline for compensation, legal recourse if mistreated, and portable benefits that apply regardless of whether they’re classified as employees or contractors. The current patchwork of federal, state, and court definitions leaves workers perpetually one legal ruling away from losing what little they have.

Congress should also modernize the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), updating its performance metrics to recognize nonstandard work as legitimate, set expectations for quality nonstandard work, and designate gig workers as a priority population for services. WIOA should empower and encourage workforce boards to act as employers of record, using existing federal funds to give nonstandard workers access to health insurance, paid leave, and workers' compensation, independent of how those workers are classified elsewhere in the law.

And critically, the safety net beneath these worker benefits must be strengthened, not cut. Medicaid, SNAP, and childcare assistance are the last line of defense for nonstandard workers in an environment where classification-based protections can disappear overnight. Weakening these programs does not build a stronger workforce. It simply shifts the cost of instability onto the workers least able to bear it.

The Trump administration's latest move to redefine gig-worker classification is only the most recent reminder of how exposed millions of workers are to political winds and legal battles. And traditional workers have faced an erosion of rights and protections as the president has severely weakened protective institutions like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Labor Relations Board, rolling back child labor regulations, rescinding the rights of thousands of federal employees to collectively bargain, and more. States have a responsibility to step up to protect all workers regardless of classification.

The workers building their lives around flexible arrangements don’t need special treatment. They need what every American worker is promised: basic protections that do not depend on the outcome of the next election or the next case before the Ninth Circuit. A floor that can be yanked away by the stroke of a labor secretary’s pen is not a floor at all.

Zohran’s campaign and early administration have rewritten the political playbook on many important questions, revealing political opportunities for the Left that, before his mayoralty, many thought weren’t there. But when it comes to actively boosting mass organizing, Mayor Mamdani still has room for improvement.

Rhetoric about mass involvement has not yet been consistently matched by deeds. Take Zohran’s election night speech. It was moving, it was rooted in the socialist tradition, and it argued that “we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now, it is something that we do.”

What the speech didn’t do is tell the millions of people watching at home what they could do to get involved in that fight. And for the most part, New Yorkers have returned to the daily grind.

In the fight to tax the rich to pass his agenda, Zohran has put out numerous useful informational videos. But at no point has he called on or provided on-ramps to his supporters to pressure the elected officials blocking that path, nor did he attend the Tax the Rich rally put on in Albany by organizations like Our Time and New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA). Nor is he slated to attend this Thursday’s Tax the Rich! rally in front of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office.

In fairness to the mayor, there’s no cost-free formula to resolving the dilemma of how to relate to Hochul, given that he simultaneously has to pressure and work with her. The mayor has to choose his battles wisely. And given that the governor did concede the pied-à-terre tax after repeatedly insisting that she would not tax the rich at all, and that city council speaker Julie Menin is also now pushing for increased revenue, perhaps Zohran’s approach on taxing the rich was tactically correct. Credit where credit is due: the admin has achieved a lot so far, even without much bottom-up organizing.

The problem is that Zohran’s hesitancy so far to use his massive platform to help New Yorkers join the fight has been less the exception than the norm. For the most part, the message we’ve gotten from the administration and the mayor since election night is, “We’ve got this.” It’s certainly a big improvement from decades of neoliberal neglect. But where are the viral videos about how New Yorkers can get organized to pass his ambitious policy goals?

While Mayor Mamdani’s active support for NYC-DSA’s congressional candidates like Claire Valdez has helped recruit people to the organization, fewer than two thousand people have joined since the election. NYC-DSA now has roughly 14,000 members — a big step forward from our movement’s former marginality, but still a relatively modest number compared to the roughly hundred thousand Zohran campaign volunteers and million voters who backed him in the general.

It’s true that Zohran has walked picket lines and that the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants is doing important work supporting some tenants’ organizing against bad landlords. Furthermore, the admin’s Office of Mass Engagement (OME) is a promising initiative. Hopefully we’ll soon see big things from OME, and Zohran’s lack of an initial focus on bottom-up organizing could be because it takes time to set up a robust new city office. On the other hand, even the best city agencies won’t have much latitude to wage big policy fights or antagonize establishment politicians — for that, you need working-class organizing outside the state.

Overall, the scale of Zohran-backed organizing initiatives is significantly below what is demanded by the moment.

In his first hundred days speech, Zohran framed his approach as replicating Milwaukee’s famous socialist administrations in the early twentieth century: “Today we know these leaders as the ‘sewer socialists.’ But for years, Milwaukeeans knew them simply as leaders who delivered. It’s time we bring that to New York City.”

Zohran is right that Milwaukee’s sewer socialists made significant improvements in the lives of working people. At the same time, however, they always focused on building up workers’ organized strength in mass unions and the Socialist Party. As party leader Victor Berger put it, “We must have a moral, physical and intellectual strengthening of the proletariat, before all things.”

A sense of this can be gleaned from the Milwaukee Free Press’s story about the speech Berger gave at the election night rally when the socialists won the 1910 mayoral race:

Mr. Berger stepped forward, and a hush fell upon the audience as he began to speak. “I want to ask every man and woman in this audience to stand up here and now enter a solemn pledge to do everything in our power to help the men whom the people have chosen to fulfill their duty,” said Mr. Berger. Like a mighty wave of humanity, the crowd surged to its feet, and in a shout that shook the building and echoed down the street to the thousands who waited there, they gave the required pledge.

One of the core differences between the socialists and even the best of progressives was that the latter were not consistently oriented toward building bottom-up organizations. The Milwaukee Socialists’ rank-and-file political machine, combined with their leadership of the state’s entire organized labor movement, provided city hall with the power it needed to drive through legislation and shape public opinion.

Indeed, the city’s socialist mayor, Daniel Hoan, underscored that if other cities wanted to emulate Milwaukee’s success, electing “honest and competent men” was insufficient: “A permanent political party must be formed to supply encouragement and active assistance to the current executive and his administration and to ensure that successive executives carry on the desired policies.”

One of the key reasons why Socialists were successful at passing transformative reforms was that establishment politicians feared that failing to do so would enable the Socialists and their unions to convince Milwaukee constituents to vote them out in the next election.

Given that the sewer socialists lacked a majority on the city council, historian Todd Fulda notes that Mayor Hoan took “a populist approach to governing, appealing directly to the citizens of Milwaukee to support his reforms and pressure the nonpartisan aldermen to support them as well.” The same approach informed the party’s approach on a statewide level, leading the organizers to map out the legislature to figure out pressure points to flip movable officeholders.

One socialist journalist at the time noted that “many of the things that the Socialist administration has done and is doing could have been done and may have been done by non-Socialist administrations.” But such gifts from above “always had the defect and taint of something being handed to the workers with an air of benevolence.” This was no longer the case:

With every slight advantage now gained in education, social and economic conditions, the worker feels that it is his by right of the strength of the class to which he belongs. . . .  This is really the great thing that the election of the Socialists to power in the city and county has done for the workers, or rather that the workers did for themselves.

With Zohran delivering the goods, excellently communicating this to the public, and remaining very popular, is a focus more on bottom-up organizing actually necessary? Yes, for four key reasons.

First, it’s going to take a lot more power to pass Zohran’s most ambitious policy goals, such as free childcare for every New Yorker aged six weeks to five years and building 200,000 affordable, union-built, rent-stabilized housing units. Opposition and sabotage from our local oligarchs and their political lackeys have been relatively muted for the time being. Unless far more working-class New Yorkers get involved in the fight, it’s hard to see how the full agenda can be won.

Second, even with the most charismatic politicians in the world and the best communications game, popularity and good vibes can evaporate quickly without a strong organized base. When the first serious crisis hits (and it will, eventually), ordinary people are going to look to trusted messengers in their lives, workplaces, and neighborhoods to figure out whether they should still support Zohran or not. Until we help develop a widespread intermediary layer of organized working-class leaders — well beyond the reach of the current college-educated left — our project remains fragile.

Third, Zohran can only be mayor for two terms. If we depend entirely on his charms and brilliance to deliver wins for us, it will be much harder to sustain this momentum and to keep transforming New York into the affordable city we know it can become.

Fourth, everybody is looking to Zohran’s tenure as mayor as a model, both locally, statewide, and potentially for national executive office. We’re going to fall short across the United States and the world if the lesson learned from his time in office is just that you have to deliver and communicate well.

Even the most principled, charismatic, and competent leftist politicians on their own can only deliver so much as long as working people stay on the sidelines. And since most of our candidates elsewhere won’t be able to rely on Zohran’s astronomic charm, nor the same level of media attention, grassroots organizing elsewhere becomes even more important. We need all anti-corporate officials, Zohran included, to use their platforms and positions to directly encourage and funnel ordinary people into mass democratic organizations and largescale campaigns for change.

Zohran has articulated this vision; it’s now a question of consistently putting it into practice. As he declared in his election victory speech: “Let the words we’ve spoken together, the dreams we’ve dreamt together, become the agenda we deliver together.”

My approach to the Zohran-DSA contradiction is to view it through the lens of revolutionary honesty. It is Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the Communist Manifesto who proclaim that “the Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” To obfuscate or soften our positions for immediate advantage would be, in this view, a betrayal of the revolution.

In a similar vein, socialists love to quote the Guinean socialist leader Amílcar Cabral, who told his party members in 1965: “Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories.” It’s a compelling call to revolutionary honesty, to trusting the masses rather than thinking the difficult realities of revolution need to be hidden or sugarcoated.

Naturally, on some level there will always be competing views on what the truth of any political situation actually is, which is why serious political debate is necessary. But in politics, there is a particular pressure to say things that we know aren’t quite true or do things that we know contradict our stated vision and objective. This is the kind of political falsehood I refer to.

In that sense, truth-telling is an appealing dictum, particularly in contrast to the disingenuous character of so much politics. And so we might apply it directly to the situation we face now. Can DSA be honest? Can Zohran Mamdani? What are the conditions in which this becomes possible?

It might be tempting to deploy the above quotes in a “holding accountable” manner, taking every opportunity to call out DSA electeds for soft-pedaling the true aims of the revolution. The problem with this, however, is that Amílcar Cabral was confronting a rather different situation than Zohran Mamdani, one that faced very different contradictions.

As the leader of a revolutionary army and government, he could view the totality of his politics through a lens of revolutionary honesty. Zohran, if he wants to succeed as mayor, will at times find it necessary to tell lies and claim easy victories. The question is whether we, as socialists who ultimately want him to succeed, can defend our own ability to be politically principled and clear-eyed about strategic realities.

By stepping into bourgeois elected office, and into responsibility for managing the largest city in the United States, Mamdani finds himself caught between two projects: that of managing capitalism and that of overturning it. That contradiction is structural, and it is not a property of either his policy agenda or his personal beliefs. The question is whether the movement that elected him will manage the contradiction or be torn apart by it.

The Mamdani project (and DSA’s electoral project more generally) is predicated on the idea that it is possible for an elected socialist not merely to serve as a tribune of the Left but to govern effectively and deliver tangible improvements to the life of the city’s working class. This entails working with various political and economic actors on their own conventionally capitalist terms. That means balancing the budget, navigating the bond market, and facing down an antagonistic federal government, a centrist governor, and a council speaker hostile to much of the mayor’s agenda, among other things.

But another, perhaps even greater obstacle emanates from within the city government itself. New York, like virtually all major US cities, has in essence two governments: the civilian bureaucracy overseen by the mayor, and the New York Police Department. As Stuart Schrader explains in his recently released Blue Power, police, through their unions, have “built a political movement that made cops untouchable,” able to “strong-arm local leaders and nullify attempts at public oversight.” And these police departments are reliable allies of the forces of urban capital, especially finance and real estate, which prefer them to the more democratically accountable parts of the state. It is to this particular struggle that we now turn.

Mamdani’s relationship with the New York Police Department was always bound to be a central obstacle to the objectives of his administration. His choice to retain Jessica Tisch, daughter of a billionaire family, as police commissioner was perceived by many as an attempt to reassure ruling-class forces in NYC, and it provoked criticism from much of his base. But it can also be seen as his attempt to deal strategically with something of an impossible situation.

While the cops nominally answer to the mayor, the reality is quite a bit more complicated. As in many big cities, the NYPD — with its 33,000 officers and $6.4 billion budget — represents an independent base of power, one that is in some ways more powerful than the mayor’s office itself. The bloated nature of urban police departments, alongside the neoliberal hollowing out of the civilian state, means that armed agents of the state are woven into the operation of society in all kinds of ways — not only in high-profile situations like mental health crises, where Mamdani has argued for replacing them with unarmed specialists, but even in mundane things like assisting stranded motorists, administering parades, and filling out paperwork after a burglary.

That this is no way to run a healthy society doesn’t mean you can just rip the cops out of these processes all at once without creating disorder, and as a result they have the ability to undermine the livability of the city and therefore the legitimacy of the mayor. This is what happened during the mayoralty of Bill de Blasio, who provoked open revolt from the police — to the point that they even publicly threatened his daughter — even while failing to meaningfully reform them, and this should stand as a cautionary example. It is what makes their power so difficult to challenge, as calls to defund the police are easy to spin as a deepening of austerity rather than a redirection of government toward human needs.

In light of all this, the identity of the police commissioner becomes a fraught matter. You could appoint Angela Davis to the position, and all that would result is a complete loss of whatever control you might have over the department; the best scenario at the outset of Mamdani’s regime was probably someone who could command the loyalty of the department without doing too much to actively undermine the mayor.

There may have been better options than Tisch — journalist Spencer Ackerman, for example, suggested reaching into the ranks of South Asian officers, one section of cops who do broadly support Mamdani. But breaking the structural power of the NYPD is a long-term project that can’t be resolved by picking the right figurehead.

Mamdani is surely aware of this dynamic, and his proposal for a Department of Community Safety can be understood as another road to defunding, as it would reassign tasks such as mental health crisis response to unarmed civilian employees. But “defund the police” didn’t fail just because it chose the wrong slogan. Even if police will sometimes claim to be eager to shed some of their non-core duties, as Mamdani regularly cites for rhetorical effect, left unsaid is that the cops don’t intend this to accompany a commensurate reduction in their budget and head count.

Progress on the Department of Community Safety has been slow in the early going. Rather than the original proposal for a department with a billion-dollar budget, which would require city council legislation, he has opted for a smaller Office of Community Safety operating within the mayor’s office. This did not come about until March, even after the January police shooting of a young man having a mental health emergency, the very situation Mamdani had pledged to prevent.

While it’s impossible to know what has happened behind the scenes, the scale and timing of the office’s rollout suggests the delicate balance of power not just with the city council but with Tisch and the NYPD leadership. Tisch did not attend the launch press conference and has been evasive about her support for the larger department proposal.

She has also stalled another Mamdani promise: the disbanding of the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, notorious for its violent responses to political protest. It was only on April 9, as his first one hundred days in office ended, that the mayor first broached the possibility of overruling the commissioner if the two could not come to an agreement on the issue. This again suggests a complex power struggle unfolding behind the scenes.

Under such conditions, what does revolutionary honesty demand of us? In the simplest terms, we can simply continue to demand Mamdani’s original platform. But we can also go beyond it, to a more capacious form of abolitionism that envisions the sort of broad dismantling of carceral institutions that briefly came to prominence after the George Floyd rebellion of 2020. This shouldn’t take the form of simply demanding a maximalist program from Mamdani, since he is structurally unable to achieve it even if he wants to. But neither should we make a virtue of necessity and pretend that the compromises that must be struck with the Blue Power are anything but that.

A second theme of the Mamdani mayoralty is its relationship to other politicians and branches of government. Many feared that the far-right Trump administration would extend its string of attacks on big cities to New York, whether by denying federal funds or by sending in an invasion of immigration enforcement raids in the manner of Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis. This has mostly been forestalled for now, whether because of Mamdani’s apparent ability to personally charm the president, the defeat of the regime on the streets of Minneapolis, or the distraction of the numerous crises into which the White House has recklessly plunged the country.

Attention has thus focused on Mamdani’s dealings with politicians on the city and state levels. Most significant is his, and DSA’s, relationship to Governor Kathy Hochul. Hochul is a pro-corporate centrist and has habitually blocked the Left’s agenda in the state. In particular, she has opposed one of the mayor’s central proposals: raising taxes on the wealthy to close a budget gap and preserve public services. And yet after barely a month in office, and despite having a primary opponent to her left (he would later drop out), Mamdani endorsed Hochul for reelection.

Strategically, the move is understandable; Hochul is very likely to win, and Mamdani needs her cooperation to raise taxes on the rich and fund his agenda. In an article in the Nation, he defended his move by speaking of Hochul as “someone willing to engage in an honest dialogue that leads to results” and the Democratic Party as a “big tent” that “channels conflict toward progress.” He called Hochul, a creature of the Democratic establishment that blocked progressive change for years, someone who “believe[s] in transformation.” To whatever extent these phrases have any content, they certainly seem jarring. Revolutionary honesty, it is not.

There are also strategic critiques, of course, though these are difficult to adjudicate from the outside. Was the endorsement necessary? What, concretely, did Mamdani get from it? Can this move be credited for the governor’s tentative recent move toward taxing the rich, in the form of a limited tax on high-value second homes? There was also the peculiarity of his timing — many months before the primary election and in the midst of a nurses’ strike that Mamdani ostensibly supported and Hochul was attempting to break. But all of this is secondary to the basic incompatibility between the principles of a socialist politics and the substance of what Mamdani decided he was compelled to say.

Mamdani’s move immediately posed a challenge for his socialist base, both in the form of his fellow elected officials and the rank-and-file base of the Democratic Socialists of America. And indeed, the response they showed is encouraging, as an example of the possibility of remaining honest even when one component of your political project feels structurally compelled to dishonesty.

In the immediate aftermath of the endorsement, socialist State Senator Jabari Brisport made a statement that, while not naming Mamdani, was unmistakable in its target: Hochul, he said, was “by billionaires, for billionaires,” and “no politician will ever wield enough leverage to change that.” To underscore his point, he went on to declare “our movement is bigger than any one decision by any individual” and endorsed Hochul’s primary opponent, Antonio Delgado.

NYC-DSA, for its part, was a bit more circumspect, but demonstrated independence in its own way. Its statement, presented as a direct response to Mamdani’s endorsement, does not criticize Mamdani directly, to the chagrin of some members. But it does say that the organization “does not believe that Governor Kathy Hochul has risen to meet this moment” and goes on to underscore that “Mayor Mamdani has been clear that the Governor must tax the rich” and that DSA “will work to make sure she meets that demand.” Even if a bit evasive about the meaning of the endorsement itself, this rhetoric at least establishes that the organization has priorities that are separable from and not dependent on the mayor.

This positions DSA as a force that will fight for the substantive platform Mamdani ran on, and not as an army that the mayor can call into whatever battle he chooses. This is important, and indeed the relationship it discloses may be the key to the success of the entire socialist electoral project. It recalls the moment when Hochul, having belatedly endorsed Mamdani before the election, faced a rally crowd chanting “Tax the rich” during her speech.

The chanting was a fleeting, cathartic thing, but it stands in for something more profound, something that Mamdani and all socialist politicians should welcome. It represents the autonomous reality of masses in motion, existing prior to and apart from elected leaders. That autonomy is ultimately the source of strength of the politicians themselves. It allows Mamdani to say to Hochul, “You see, this is what brought me here, and not only can you not control it, but I can’t control it either.” Genuine mass politics tells the truth and demands what its wants, and it is not subject to the strategic considerations of a politician within the bourgeois state.

Alongside all these bigger struggles, there has of course been the steady stream of news coverage and social media chatter, reacting to various statements made or positions taken by Mamdani and those around him. This is where the question of honesty comes up in the most obvious way. Sometimes it’s the tabloid press trying to tie Mamdani to DSA positions that they expect to be unpopular. Other times it’s DSA members and other leftists expressing alarm at Mamdani for what they perceive to be excessive concessions to those right-wing critics, whether it’s his disavowal of the phrase “Globalize the intifada” or his occasional posts in praise of the NYPD.

This is also an area where the contradiction between the needs of the movement and the exigencies of governing can play out in the most straightforward way. Maybe Mamdani won’t say “Globalize the intifada” (which he says he never did anyway), but we can. He may not be able to call the cops racist or call for a radical restructuring of the NYPD, even if he might agree on some level. But we can, and we must. Leave the cheerleading to the mayor’s office; we can continue to tell the truth.

Nevertheless, DSA organizers will inevitably pore over Mamdani’s public statements, scrutinizing them to determine whether they reflect a political compromise or an actual shift in political objectives. In this instance, managing the contradiction requires some way of communicating across the divide, some semi-reliable signal of what the mayor is really up to. And so here it is worthwhile to look more closely at the internal relations between Zohran and DSA, rather than simply contrasting them.

Thus far, I have mostly portrayed DSA and the Zohran apparatus (e.g., the mayor’s office and Our Time) as disconnected entities operating at arm’s length from one another. But this is obviously not the case. In addition to the plethora of DSA members employed by the mayor’s office, there are also formal mechanisms for coordination with the organization as a whole, in the form of regular meetings with the NYC chapter’s elected cochairs. This mirrors the system of Socialists in Office committees, which are intended to be mechanisms for cogovernance between representatives of DSA’s membership and its elected state and local legislators.

Here is where the “inside” and “outside” of the fabled inside-outside strategy meet. And it is also here that the principle of revolutionary honesty meets the exigencies of operating within the state. Invariably, the delicate business of legislating or governing means that elected officials cannot be fully open about all the behind-the-scenes realities of politics, even with DSA members themselves — the organization, after all, is a remarkably permeable one, that anyone can join simply by putting their credit card details into a website. Thus, the best elected officials can do at times is to convene, for a frank discussion, a smaller group of trusted leaders, who must then exercise their own judgment about enlightening the broader membership.

For those who fear that socialist electeds will inevitably pull DSA in the direction of liberal co-optation, it is here, in the metaphorical and literal meeting of the politicians and the masses, that the greatest danger lies. And it is not a concern we should ignore but one we should attend to closely. At the same time, if we are indeed going to attempt the experiment of twenty-first-century American electoral socialism at all, it is inevitable and necessary for some such mechanisms to exist.

Earlier this month, NYC-DSA convened a forum with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the chapter debated whether to re-endorse her for election to the House of Representatives. AOC had been a flash point in the organization for years, and one particularly sore point was her vote to fund Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. In the last cycle, though the chapter endorsed her, DSA’s national leadership split, leading to no national endorsement.

This year, it seemed, might be a breaking point. As public opinion continues to turn against Israel, how is it tenable to have an elected official taking votes like these, particularly as it becomes clear that there is no real political calculation that justifies shying away from the correct position? Whatever one thinks of the compromises the relationship with AOC entails, DSA has continued to tell an obvious truth: the distinction between “defensive” and “offensive” weapons is meaningless in a situation where Israel is the aggressor against occupied Palestinians and its neighboring countries, and defensive missile shields enable it to wage endless war while being shielded from the consequences.

At the forum, to the surprise of many, AOC announced that she now opposed any military aid to Israel, of any kind. While for some this was too little, too late, most factions across the DSA spectrum rushed to take credit and declare victory, and in some sense they all deserved to. By whatever combination of backroom pressure and public outrage, socialists had continued to tell the truth, and eventually Representative Ocasio-Cortez decided she could too. She was held accountable. Or we built power. Or both. Or perhaps, as AOC’s ambitions continue to evolve, and the broader liberal position shifts against Israel, neither is true.

This is not meant as a call for all factions of DSA, or of the Left more broadly, to simply get along. It’s not even really a call to abandon debates over building power or holding electeds accountable. After all, if the Zohran mayoralty represents an objective contradiction that we cannot currently transcend, then that contradiction will inevitably be represented within DSA itself. That is one way of looking at the importance and function of our big tent, multitendency nature.

A plea for revolutionary honesty is a call for us to be honest about the things we agree on, among ourselves and with the public. But there are important disagreements and unknowns that should be debated, and some deeper, more substantive kinds of analysis that should get more emphasis. I’ll suggest just one that bears directly on Mamdani and the rest of DSA’s elected officials.

Ultimately, the fate of DSA’s audacious, precarious project of electoral socialism depends on the truth of its basic premise: that it is possible, in the current phase of capitalism, to build up a new kind of institutionalized social democracy to replace the broken Fordist one that sustained the twentieth century’s heavily unionized welfare states. For no matter the stated range of ideologies within DSA’s big tent, even the most revolutionary and least gradualist tendencies wouldn’t really have a reason to be there if they didn’t believe, on some level, that the project of twenty-first-century social democracy was viable for at least a little while.

If it is, it’s not a regime that would look just like the high tide of the postwar welfare states. And likely not one that would last indefinitely, or transition smoothly into postcapitalism. At some point, there will either be a revolutionary rupture that takes power from the capitalist class for good, or the new social democracy will suffer the same fate as the old, beaten back by ruling-class counterrevolution.

We need serious analysis of that question, an understanding of the ways the project can be stymied and redirected by the forces of capital. Perhaps we need to start building new kinds of institutions that can point beyond the popular state, such as the popular assemblies proposed by Bhaskar Sunkara and Gabriel Hetland. But in the meantime, we can still organize, tell the truth, and try to use whatever levers of state power we get our hands on to keep our promises to the working class.