Politicians like Mamdani are the left wing of capital. Full stop. They’ll give you a whole speech about the failures of capitalism, but their solution is always, always just to put a band-aid on a bullet wound and hope you don’t notice the system is still bleeding you dry. It’s a tale as old as time where they co-opt the energy of the masses, promise change from within, and ultimately do nothing but delay the inevitable crisis.
And Mamdani is just the modern day version of Eduard Bernstein. It’s honestly staggering how this playbook hasn’t changed in over a century. Bernstein was a big deal in the SPD, and he’s the guy who looked at Marx’s revolutionary ideas and said, nah, we can just vote our way into socialism. He threw class conflict out the window and argued we could slowly reform capitalism into something nicer. He successfully turned the SPD from a revolutionary party into a mild appendage of liberalism, trading worker power for wage increases and welfare programs that left the capitalist class firmly in charge. Rosa Luxemburg called this out in Reform or Revolution where she said that his strategy sucks the revolutionary soul right out of the working class.
Sound familiar?
Mamdani is doing the exact same thing. He gives great speeches about the 1% and corporate greed, but his entire project is about social democratic reforms within a capitalist framework. These are good things! But they’re treating the symptoms, not the disease.
The real damage is in channelling what could be a millions-strong grassroots movement directly into the graveyard of the Democratic Party. All that energy, all that hope, are funnelled into meaningless action like phone banking and canvassing for a party that is structurally, irrevocably dedicated to preserving capitalism. Instead of building real, independent power through unions, strikes, and community networks, people got a cult of personality around one candidate.
Reforms under capitalism are always conditional and designed to demobilize the masses. Imagine if all that energy had been directed toward unionizing every Amazon warehouse, organizing mass rent strikes, and building community mutual aid networks that create real dual power. Look at movements like MAS in Bolivia to see what’s possible.
And here’s the kicker, the part that should terrify everyone is that the reformist path actively paves the way for fascism. The SPD’s commitment to playing by the bourgeois rules made them utterly unprepared to confront the Nazis. They prioritized legalistic, parliamentary games over mass mobilization and direct action. They disarmed the working class ideologically and organizationally. And when the Nazis started gaining power, the SPD famously refused to support a general strike or armed resistance, clinging to their faith in a system that was already collapsing. They even allied with the Nazis against the communists in the end.
Now look at the “progressive” squad in the Democratic Party. Same playbook. They use leftist rhetoric to absorb grassroots energy, then funnel it back into a party funded by capital. Their watered-down, incrementalist policies fuel mass disillusionment, which the far-right is all too happy to exploit.
The Democrats’ “pragmatic incrementalism” is just managing the decline. It sustains a system that creates the very misery and despair that a Trump capitalizes on. They are the firewall against real change, and their reforms are designed to prevent any sort of structural change. We’re watching the same historical cycle play out in real time.
TLDR: Reformism is a dead end that disarms the working class and ultimately strengthens the far-right. Mamdani is the modern Bernstein, and the Democratic Party is the new SPD.