Is DSA the class party of the PMC?

Five Marxist perspectives on Zohran Mamdani’s electoral coalition

Zohran Mamdani’s remarkable triumph in New York City has reignited hope on what had until recently seemed to be America’s weakened and demoralised social democratic left. Above all, Mamdani’s success has proven that despite a slew of internal shenanigans and embarrassing online spats, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) – and specifically its disciplined and pragmatic New York City chapter – remains a potent campaigning force.

There is much to be highlighted about the Mamdani campaign: the importance of moral clarity over Gaza in mobilising an activist base, the effectiveness of Mamdani’s ruthless message-discipline and focus on the cost-of-living, his adept use (and seeming intuitive mastery) of the short-form video format, and his campaign’s success in fostering a vibrant sense of community around in-person campaigning events.

However, one more ambiguous facet of the Mamdani’s phenomenon has been the shape of his electoral coalition. With regards to age and education, the picture is simple: in both the primary and the general election, younger voters and those with college degrees broke decisively for Mamdani. With regards to income, the picture is more complex: Andrew Cuomo consistently dominated amongst both the richest and the poorest strata, while Mamdani’s support was concentrated amongst those on middle incomes. As numerous commentators have observed then, Mamdani’s success was powered not by New York’s poorest workers, but rather by its educated professionals.

This result arguably presents something of a paradox: socialism and social democracy emerged out of the workers’ movement, and have long presented themselves as a distinctly working-class ideologies, promoting not only abstract egalitarian values but the concrete interests of the working class. Why then did a democratic socialist candidate like Mamdani do best amongst educated professionals?

In this short piece, I will briefly set out five possible Marxist interpretations of the class composition of Mamdani’s electoral coalition. Two are “theories of incongruity” – perspectives that treat Mamdani’s primarily middle-income support-base as the sign of something gone awry either for or with socialist politics. Three are “theories of congruity” – perspectives that suggest the composition of Mamdani’s electorate is broadly in line with what we should anticipate for a successful social democratic project based on a materialist analysis of the present historical conjuncture.

Some of these interpretations (or at least, versions of some of these interpretations) have widespread currency in contemporary discussions of Mamdani; others are largely of my own invention; all, however, reflect real ways in which Marxists have historically interpreted democratic politics (and indeed continue to do so). The purpose of this piece is not to assess the relative merits of these interpretations, or to argue for the validity of any particular perspective: it is simply to explore some of the different intellectual frameworks through which one might try to make sense of contemporary political configurations.  

Theories of incongruity

Theories of incongruity treat it as axiomatic that socialist or social democratic politics should be about poor workers defending their interests against rich capitalists. Socialist politicians relying primarily on middle-income voters is a failure. The only question is – who is to blame?

(1) Betrayal from below

The crudest approach to understanding Mamdani’s relative lack of support amongst the poorest New Yorkers would be to treat it as a kind of betrayal from below, based on the old Marxist canard of “false consciousness”. In this telling, New York’s working class is made up of dupes, blinded by tradition, superstition, capitalist ideology, or the lies of the media, and tricked into voting against their own class interests. This is a fundamental problem for socialist politics: it leaves socialist politicians unable to mobilise the support of their own natural constituency, with likely deleterious consequences for their ability to pursue a meaningfully socialist project. 

(2) Betrayal from above

A more sophisticated form of Marxist analysis might point to a form of betrayal from above. In this telling, Mamdani’s coalition reflects the increasing domination of left-wing political movements by middle-class professionals (the infamous “Professional-Managerial Class” or PMC), whose own class-based preoccupations with socio-cultural issues and progressive lifestyle politics have taken precedence over left-wing material concerns and alienated the traditional working class. “Democratic socialists” like Mamdani have traded class politics for progressive moralism, and with it a working-class-based coalition for a new PMC-led one. In the long-term, this has likely voided their politics of any meaningful socialist content.

With regards to Mamdani specifically, defenders of this perspective (which has also today become fairly mainstream) would suggest that despite his apparent focus on bread-and-butter cost-of-living issues, the tone and culture of his campaign was still overwhelmingly shaped by the outlook and weltanschauung of the PMC activists (like Mamdani himself) who staffed and led it. Moreover, results like his are a warning sign: to save their politics from being subsumed into middle-class liberalism, socialists and social democrats need to cast off the ideological baggage of the PMC and re-acclimatise themselves to working-class culture.

Theories of congruity

Theories of congruity treat the pattern of votes in the New York Mayoral elections (educated salary-earners confronting a coalition of the elite and the poor) as a natural product of contemporary political and economic conditions. The question then is – what are those conditions?

(3) The PMC as vanguard of the unfinished bourgeois revolution

One classic Marxist approach to political analysis is to return to Marx’s theory of the stages of history, and to suggest that we are in fact earlier on in the process than people generally assume. In this view, the traditional understanding of socialist politics as pitting the workers against the bourgeoisie does not (yet) apply, because the bourgeois revolution that must precede socialism still remains unfinished.

America, in this telling, is still fundamentally a semi-feudal regime: economic power is in the hands of a (largely) hereditary oligarchy, who preside over an uncompetitive, cronyist economic system based primarily on the extraction of rents; political sovereignty is in practice parcelled out amongst members of this same semi-feudal elite. It is thus natural for a socialist like Mamdani to rely on the support of the PMC - the most progressive strata of the bourgeois class, and the social category with the greatest immediate interest in the completion of the bourgeois revolution and in the elimination of the power of the feudal elites whose interests are represented by Cuomo. As for the low-income workers who also supported Cuomo? They are essentially just a twenty-first century version of the nineteenth-century peasantry, famously dismissed by Marx as a reactionary “sack of potatoes”.

(4) The PMC = the salariat = the proletariat

A simpler and more straightforward Marxist perspective is that what we are seeing in New York politics is in fact traditional socialist class politics, but that people are confused about what this means. According to this perspective, we have wrongly conflated income and education with class. Far from being bourgeois, the so-called “PMC” are simply salaried workers – proletarians forced to sell their labour to an employer, whose high cultural capital belies a reality of economic immiseration produced by exorbitant living costs and crushing burdens of (largely student) debt. In fact, they represent the most educated, organised, and politically advanced section of the proletariat – precisely those workers on whom Marxists historically relied to form the disciplined political nucleus of the labour movement.

Mamdani’s “PMC” supporters are thus the vanguard of the proletariat, organised politically by the DSA, and whose economic interests (ably represented by Mamdani) are pitted directly against those of the haute-bourgeoisie represented by Cuomo. Cuomo’s supposedly “working-class” supporters meanwhile are simply the disorganised lumpenproletariat – dependent less on selling their labour than on pensions, state handouts, and petty forms of commerce. Politically as unreliable as Marx predicted, they were seduced in this instance by patrimonial politics and the iron death-mask of Mario Cuomo.

(5) The PMC as new universal class

Perhaps the most iconoclastic Marxist (or perhaps even post-Marxist) approach to interpreting Mamdani’s electoral coalition is to acknowledge the division between the working class and the PMC, but to suggest that the PMC has taken over the working class’s historical political role as the class upon whose interests a socialist or social democratic project should be based.

From this perspective, a crucial point to understand is that Marx and his successors did not link socialism to the interests of the emerging industrial working class because they believed the workers to be in some sense the most “deserving”. Rather, they did so because they believed the material interests of the workers (conditioned by their place in the industrial capitalist economy) to align with those of humanity as a whole. The proletariat could thus function as the “universal class”, whose political triumph would in turn liberate humankind. 

Today however, what remains of the old industrial working class is demonstrably incapable of playing such a role; recent transformations of capitalism have now fostered within it a defensive, particularist, and even reactionary political subjectivity. The mantle of the “universal class” has instead fallen onto the PMC - the class whose material interests clash most directly with those of the contemporary techno-capitalist oligarchy, and whose education, style of work, and broader cultural habitus have combined to create a progressive, egalitarian, and universalist political outlook (reflected in consistently strong support for redistribution, human rights, and democratic public authority).

From this perspective then, it is only natural that the PMC - as the new universal class - should form  the core of any new social democratic coalition. Mamdani’s great achievement is to have correctly identified this socialist potential, and to have converted it into political actuality; the DSA are building socialism - as the class party of the PMC.

David Klemperer is a historian and researcher working at the University of Bath’s Institute for Policy Research, and co-editor of Renewal – a journal of social democracy.