[Credit: Isaiah Winters / NYC DSA Shop]
Editorial Note: This piece is written by a Marxist Unity member and may not reflect the views of the caucus as a whole.
On November 4, 2025, New York City will hold elections for Mayor and City Council. NYC-DSA is expected to re-endorse Alexa Aviles and Tiffany Caban for City Council and current DSA-endorsed state legislator Zohran Mamdani for Mayor. Outside of the presidential election, city elections are the biggest, most visible stage for politics in the city, and as such they represent a huge platform for NYC-DSA to agitate, educate and organize New Yorkers around our vision for democracy and socialism. We are well positioned to establish ourselves as a clear alternative: both to the unpopular Mayor Eric Adams currently facing indictment for bribery and wire fraud, and to the field of left-of-center but ultimately status quo candidates like Comptroller Brad Lander, who will campaign on a platform of improved governance and simply not being as cartoonishly corrupt as Eric Adams.
By contrast, NYC-DSA’s platform is bold and popular. Our candidates will oppose budget cuts, police brutality, and the development of a "Cop City" in Queens. They will oppose gentrification and displacement by fighting for the city’s powerful Rent Guidelines Board to institute a rent freeze for the city’s rent stabilized apartments. And, most uniquely, their platform will support the movement for Palestinian liberation, including divestment from Israeli securities and arms manufacturers. These positions allow NYC-DSA candidates to stand out from the crowd, especially given the mixed record of officials like Brad Lander, whose policies on issues like Palestinian liberation and prison construction have been inconsistent, to put it mildly.
The System Is Rigged!
While a bold platform opposing budget cuts, police brutality, gentrification and Israeli apartheid will allow NYC-DSA to make a name for itself during this high visibility election cycle, voters will need assurances that this platform is something we can actually achieve. Otherwise, our platform risks becoming like every other political platform: a set of empty platitudes that vanish after a candidate is elected, to be replaced by more of the same insider, business as usual politics.
Voters have another reason to doubt the viability of broad-reaching platforms: a belief that the political system is rigged to benefit the wealthy few and to prevent popular policies from being enacted. This belief has a strong basis in reality. For example, the concentration of power in the Mayor's office makes it hard for progressive reforms to succeed. The Mayor holds significant power over city agencies and other powerful institutions: specifically, the Mayor has the power to appoint the leaders of city agencies. This power to appoint results in blatant corruption (such as the NYPD Commissioner and his twin brother accepting bribes from nightclub owners for favorable treatment) and more subtle forms of class rule (appointing Commissioners who will take their cues from the rich and powerful in the city). Take the Rent Guidelines Board, whose nine members are appointed entirely by the Mayor, including two seats set aside exclusively for the real estate industry. The board is responsible for setting rents across all of the city’s rent stabilized units, meaning that, ultimately, the Mayor has the power to establish these rents by stacking the board with real-estate friendly members.
In addition to a King-Mayor, the State Government wields outsized control over the City, limiting local control. This isn’t a fluke of history. “Fear City” by Kim Phillips-Fein details at length how Albany and the New York State Financial Control Board waged a political campaign to dismantle working class power in New York City during the 1970s fiscal crisis, which included stripping the city of local self-governance. To this day, the city's dependence on state control hampers efforts to address issues like public transit and housing.
One example of mayoral and state control superseding the city’s democratic functioning came in 2023, when the City Council passed legislation aiming to expand access to a city rental subsidy program. While this legislation was clearly popular—it passed the council, New York’s representative legislative body, with a veto-proof 41-7—Mayor Adams vetoed the bill anyways, claiming that the legislation was too costly for the city.
The Council voted again to overrule the veto, but the Mayor and his appointed Commissioner of the administering agency simply decided to ignore the vote. After the City Council sued to force the Mayor to comply with the bill, the courts ruled with the Mayor. In a sign of the convoluted ways that city democracy is overruled by unaccountable executive control, the courts stated that the council’s bill was moot, not because of anything Adams had done, but because the bill preempted the state law which governed the city’s ability to administer rental assistance.
If these are the tactics the Mayor and the state will use to stop the implementation of policies with a bipartisan majority, how can NYC-DSA expect to implement its more radical platform without a plan to stop the executive branches of the city and state government from putting their thumb on the scale and bring power to the more representative organs of the city?
There are also barriers to New York’s democracy within the City Council itself. Despite its name, the Democratic Party rules the city with an iron-and-ham-fisted approach, with a supermajority on the City Council. Bills only come up for a vote when the Democratic Party Caucus agrees. The party also controls judicial appointments, which includes the judges who sit in housing court and keep the city’s brutal eviction mill churning steadily along.
The net result is a lack of space for independent political alternatives in the city. One independent group, the City Council’s Progressive Caucus, shrank in size two years ago as it closed ranks around a commitment to reducing police budgets that the city’s Democratic Party establishment opposes. However, the Progressives failed to even vote as a bloc on last year’s city budget, demonstrating just how difficult it is to oppose the party's mainstream agenda, even within the ostensibly left-wing opposition. Finally, many young people and immigrants are excluded from the city’s democratic processes, limiting representation for large sections of New York’s diverse population.
The political system provides fundamental barriers to nearly all of NYC-DSA’s political platform. To prove to voters that we are serious about our commitment to a better city, we need to be able to explain how the system is rigged against everyday people and provide a plan for what we can do to fix it. In other words, Socialists need a bold vision for putting working-class New Yorkers into the driver's seat of our city. To help reach this goal, we are putting forward the “Democratize NYC 2025” resolution for consideration at NYC-DSA’s City Convention in October.
The Battle to Democratize New York
The resolution is simple: it establishes a few key platform planks for NYC-DSA’s 2025 city candidates, as well as a committee that will develop a package of legislation, voter referenda, and campaigns for these platform planks. The demands are easy to understand, compelling, and aim to chip away at the undemocratic features of the city’s political system.
To start, we must fight to take power away from the Mayor and put it into the hands of the City Council. Eric Adams may have raised your rent, but we should fight to make it so that Adams (or someone like him) can never raise our rents again! A big narrative this election season will be Eric Adams’ indictment for bribery. Candidates will fall over themselves to prove how different and incorruptible they are, but few of them will focus on the root structural causes for this corruption: the Mayor’s ability to make key political appointments. DSA should take up this lane, fighting to make it so that a Mayor can never again use agencies that are supposed to serve the public good for personal enrichment, by taking the power of appointment away from the Mayor and putting it in the hands of the people. This is exactly what Mexico’s left-wing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador did recently when he successfully shifted the power to make judicial appointments from the President to the people.
“It is a very important reform,” Lopez Obrador said on Thursday. “It reaffirms that in Mexico there is a true democracy, where the people elect their representatives … not the elites … not the oligarchy. Everyone, every citizen,” he added.
We must also fight to take power away from the Democratic Party. We should fight to establish multi-member council districts with proportional representation. This would make the council more representative of the city’s diverse population and give a real voice to constituencies that don’t fit into the Democratic Party agenda, like democratic socialists or Palestinian and Arab New Yorkers. And we should fight to expand the right to vote to all residents over the age of 16, regardless of immigration status, to ensure that all of us have an equal voice in the city’s democratic process.
These democratic reforms would complement other parts of NYC-DSA’s platform. Instead of relying on the Mayor to approve tenant-friendly policies, NYC-DSA can advocate for putting Rent Guidelines Board appointments directly under the control of the more representative City Council, while advocating for increased representation from the city’s majority-renter population, who currently only have two out of nine seats reserved on the board. We can also advocate for taking away the Democratic Party’s power to appoint housing court judges who run the city’s ruthless eviction mills. In addition to being extremely popular with the city’s renters, this would cut back the Democratic Party’s influence while preventing future mayors from using their power of board appointments to impose rent increases that hurt working people.
Instead of giving the Mayor and the Governor the power to make budget decisions (and to use constituent slush funds for political gain), NYC-DSA can advocate for shifting budget power to the City Council and getting serious about participatory budgeting. Instead of waiting in vain for the Democratic Party to fight for Palestinians or those facing police abuse, NYC-DSA can advocate for a system of proportional representation that would open the door to a seat at the table for parties that represent workers’ struggles, the movement for Palestine, fights against the police and incarceration, and democratic socialism. Instead of speaking on behalf of the city’s often-vilified immigrant population, NYC-DSA can advocate for a system that gives immigrants a voice, a vote, a chance to stand and fight for their rights in the city they call home, where they work, pay taxes and send children to school.
Looking Forward
These reforms are not just about fixing current problems: they are part of our vision for democratic socialism. As socialists, we fight for a world where working people have democratic control over society. Fighting for an expanded democracy now is crucial to prepare the masses for their historic task of democratic governance. By campaigning on democratic reforms in 2025, we begin to lay the groundwork for possible future campaigns, such as fighting to expand voter rights, like North NJ DSA’s Noncitizen Voting Rights campaign or a campaign for local Proportional Representation elections to establish a multi-party system in NYC. Both of these campaigns would be of immense strategic importance for NYC-DSA, allowing us to expand our reach into working-class constituencies that have eluded the organization in the past while increasing our material and visible independence from the corrupt, inept Democratic Party in New York.
Ultimately, democratizing our political system is a winning component of a socialist platform for 2025 city elections, a fundamental aspect of our medium-term organizing strategy, and a key component for our long term vision of democratic socialism. Support the fight to democratize our city by signing on to the “Democratize NYC 2025” resolution!