I am a socialist.

I have no reservations about saying so. In Sri Lanka, that would be entirely uncontroversial since socialism was pretty much accepted as the mainstream political view. But in the US, it causes people to react with surprise because of the red-baiting rhetoric that has long been dominant at all levels of discourse. Socialists have been portrayed as, if not evil, at least as not part of the spectrum of acceptable political views. This is why whenever the opportunity presents itself in discussions about politics, I say that I am a socialist, just so that people realize that we are not scary weirdos. (At least, I do not think people see me as such.)

The neoliberal consensus that has dominated US politics has had as its central aim creating hatred for government in all its forms, as a means of privatizing its functions and abolishing any restraints on the ability of business and the oligarchs to rip off ordinary people. Since socialism believes that basic services such as health care and education and other aspects of daily life that impact the general population should be run by the people for the benefit of people and not private interests, the capitalist class has targeted socialists for vilification.

Although there have been socialist movements in the working classes and unions, and prominent socialists like Eugene Debs in the US, they did not achieve governmental power. Bernie Sanders was one of the few who broke through that barrier, first being elected as mayor of the town of Burlington in Vermont, then going on to Congress, first as a representative and then as a senator. He never shied away from the label of socialist, and his strong and consistent message of advocating for the interests of ordinary people and attacking the wealthy has made the face of socialism acceptable to a significant portion of the population.

The election of a self-proclaimed democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City, decisively beating establishment candidate Andrew Cuomo, was a continuation of that process and gave a boost to the spirits of progressives in the US and dismay to the oligarchy, since New York City is a massive media market. His platform was heavily weighted toward ordinary people, promising many things, the most ambitious of them being free bus service, universal child care, reducing class sizes, and taxing the very wealthy to pay for them.

He took office at the beginning of January. So how has he done so far in the roughly 100 days since then?

He has already taken one step towards taxing the rich, even managing to bring along the oligarch-friendly governor of New York Kathy Hochul, as Liza Featherstone writes.

This week, democratic socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced, with Governor Kathy Hochul, that New York would impose a pied-à-terre tax. While the playful French phrase implies a small dwelling, it’s a misnomer in this case, since the tax only applies to houses, condominiums, and apartments valued at more than $5 million and owned by people whose primary residence is outside of New York City.

The announcement is a real victory for the socialist left and would never have happened without its tireless organizing to elect Mamdani, nor would it have happened without the campaign to “tax the rich,” which has continued since he’s been in office, as New Yorkers have rallied, lobbied, and relentlessly dogged the governor at public events. At the same time, the socialist movement is rightly viewing the new tax as a beginning rather than an end of a longer project of redistributing the city’s staggeringly unequal wealth and of building a New York where everyone can thrive.
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They have not disclosed the rate of taxation, but Hochul and Mamdani said this week that the tax will raise half a billion dollars in revenue. Fiscal Policy Institute acting executive director and chief economist Emily Eisner said she found the half a billion number plausible, noting that the city already has well-developed mechanisms for tax collection and home value assessment. Eisner called the pied-à-terre tax “a significant material gain for the city” and a solid example of progressive taxation.

The rich themselves have reacted with predictable derangement. In a post on X, former Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino called Mamdani’s video announcing the tax “actually the scariest thing I have seen,” and uttered gravely, “it won’t stop there.”

Let’s hope she’s right.

But Hochul, friendly to the plutocrats like so many top Democrats, has been trying to thwart other elements of Mamdani’s agenda. But the above example shows that she can be countered by applying pressure from below.

New York Focus reports that Hochul has reportedly been pressuring the mayor to make cuts to crucial city programs — including housing vouchers for low-income New Yorkers, reducing class sizes in public schools as mandated by law, and providing private school tuition to some students with disabilities — in exchange for help from the state.
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Eisner underscored that the state would need to tax the rich in the near future to keep city programs going in the longer run, from new programs the mayor campaigned on like universal childcare to existing needs like libraries. She says next year is when the impact of Trump’s cuts will be felt the most. At that point, taxing the rich will be needed even more.
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The Left will continue to demand more redistribution and revenue — income and corporate taxes. Hochul continues to insist she won’t do any of that. On the other hand, she also said that she absolutely would not tax the rich, and that anyone demanding she do it was actually cementing her resolve not to. That turned out to be false.

“You know, we were told for months that this was impossible, a quixotic campaign, that we were stupid,” Gordillo says. The socialist movement has “proven these establishment politicos wrong again.”

Nathan J. Robinson writes that while some of the biggest items on Mamdani’s agenda still are in abeyance, he has been quietly doing many smaller things that address the needs of ordinary people, such as getting rid of much of the construction scaffolding that builders would keep in place even after the need for them ended. While that may seem small, it is something that was a major annoyance for pedestrians in a city where people walk a lot and its elimination provides a visible and tangible benefit.

Mamdani’s video explains how these sheds unnecessarily blight the city and inconvenience people, and lays out his proposed fixes (reducing size requirements for the structures, imposing new fines for sheds left up for too long, changing the building inspection schedule).

The scaffolding initiative is representative of the kind of action that has so far characterized Mamdani’s first 100 days in office: not transformative, not obviously “socialist,” but “material” and visible, improving people’s lives in a small, tangible way. For instance, he has been aggressively filling potholes. The city’s Department of Transportation filled 3,946 potholes in March, the most in a single month in over half a decade. (He poured concrete into the 100,000th pothole of the year himself, hard hat and all.) The New York Times, reviewing his record, notes that:

“Mr. Mamdani has hustled up a litany of quick accomplishments. He has reignited projects to improve bus speeds; built a City Hall rest stop for delivery workers; opened a long-delayed new infirmary for Rikers Island detainees; secured state money to fund an incremental expansion of free preschool; and wielded the powers of his office to go after both abusive employers and bad landlords.”

Mamdani’s actions include making it easier to cancel subscriptions, introducing a website featuring an easy-to-use map of childcare options, providing millions in funding for new public bathrooms, expanding paid time off and issuing warnings to businesses to ensure compliance, upgrading storm drains and catch basins, building new EV charging stations and suing employers who rip off workers. The mayor’s office has released a much longer list of other victories.

Critics have said that this does not really represent socialism but Robinson argues that they are wrong.

Socialism is not just about bringing the means of production into state ownership, but about adhering to a set of egalitarian principles that emphasize solidarity, erode class distinctions, and build the public sector and public assets, making our country work for everyone and not for the profits of large corporations. Fixing potholes may not be “socialist,” but Mamdani’s aggressive effort to escalate small infrastructure fixes is part of a much broader plan to restore faith in the public sector’s ability to get things done. Mamdani is fighting against decades of neoliberal ideology that told people, in Ronald Reagan’s words, that the “scariest words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” Mamdani is trying to demonstrate that the opposite is true: that when you’re struggling, the exact thing you want is for a city worker to show up and help, because they’re good at their jobs, they care about you, and they don’t send you a fat bill.
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Even the fun stuff is very carefully engineered to make a point, and it’s all part of Mamdani’s overall mission to restore faith in the public sector and pave the way for the big, transformative changes that he aims at long term. You can see this as the “compromise” of a radical who has run into reality, but as a socialist (and the author of a book literally called Why You Should Be a Socialist) I think Mamdani is extremely smart to focus early on on delivering small things that people can see and feel. This was the approach taken by the “sewer socialists” in the early 20th century, and by Bernie Sanders when he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont in the 1980s, and it resulted in popular mayoral administrations that served as living disproof of propaganda about socialist politicians bringing “disaster” and “ruin.”

Robinson’s conclusion is important.

As Trump commits war crime after war crime, plunging the economy into chaos and fixing nothing, Mamdani is in New York taking seriously the job of governing, and showing what it would look like if we had a functional country where the state served the people. I do not know how much democratic socialism he will achieve over the course of his tenure, but if he can show that electing democratic socialist mayors is the way to get our infrastructure fixed, while Washington is proving that electing MAGA leaders is an international catastrophe, Mamdani’s tenure will be very good for the left.

The thing that wealthy people fear most is progressive politicians who get results and thus show that voting such people in is in the best interests of ordinary people. They do not want to have people realize that socialist leaders get both small and big things done that benefit people while the neoliberals focus on taking care of the needs of the wealthy at the expense of the rest.

You can be sure that the oligarchs will try their best to undermine Mamdani and thwart his attempts.