Will Mamdani’s Victory Advance a Solidarity Economy in New York City?

On Election Day, New York City didn’t just elect a new mayor. Voters opened the door to a deeper transformation—what I call a municipal revolution. Zohran Mamdani’s victory, powered by nearly 100,000 volunteers and the largest voter turnout in 50 years, demonstrated that economic populism centered on meeting material needs can build multiracial and multigenerational coalitions capable of defeating entrenched political machines. For the first time in generations, a democratic socialist who openly challenges corporate power will occupy Gracie Mansion.

Yet from a radical municipalist perspective, this electoral triumph raises a fundamental question: Will this campaign lead to genuine democratic and economic transformation, or will it follow the trajectory of past progressive victories?

Take, for example, Barack Obama’s election as president in 2008, which saw grassroots energy dissipate subsequently into institutional channels. The distinction here matters enormously. The notion of radical municipalism is not only about electing better people to existing offices, but fundamentally restructuring power itself.

Electoral Limits

Mamdani talked about rent, groceries, and subway fares. This economic populism united diverse constituencies.

Mamdani’s campaign activated a base of nearly 100,000 volunteers who knocked on three million doors, building vital neighborhood-based organizing infrastructure. His 42 staging sites, with neighborhood captains coordinating outreach from Staten Island to the South Bronx, modeled a distributed leadership model. His platform embodies what municipalism calls for: organizing society around meeting people’s needs rather than enabling capital accumulation.

The proposed rent freeze for the two million New Yorkers living in stabilized apartments, fare-free buses, universal childcare, and city-owned grocery stores reject neoliberal urbanism’s logic. The funding mechanism matters too: Mamdani’s proposed $4 billion tax increase on individuals earning over $1 million annually, combined with raising the corporate tax rate to match New Jersey’s, explicitly redistributes wealth to fund collective provision. This represents a direct challenge to capital’s dominance over urban space and governance.

Moreover, the campaign transcended MAGA-style politics by focusing on the cost of living. While opponents deployed familiar attacks around identity and “law and order,” Mamdani talked about rent, groceries, and subway fares. This economic populism united diverse constituencies—working-class communities of color, young people who were priced out of neighborhoods, and immigrant families struggling with childcare costs—around shared material interests rather than fragmented identities.

Yet radical municipalism demands more than electing the right person to existing institutions. Municipalism is about community self-governed, direct democracy in which people act together to chart a future, not merely installing progressive leadership in existing hierarchical structures. The mayor’s office, even occupied by a democratic socialist, remains an institution that concentrates power rather than shares it.

Past campaigns, as noted above, have struggled to maintain grassroots energy after the election date, often redirecting volunteers into institutional channels. The lesson is clear: Without deliberate structural transformation, even the most energized volunteer base demobilizes after Election Day. Supporters become spectators, asked occasionally to mobilize for specific campaigns (and to donate money) but excluded from ongoing governance.

Building Dual Power Through Assemblies

Radical municipalism demands active participation, even or especially after Election Day. Mamdani’s campaign can learn from people’s movement assemblies, which have been used in places like Barcelona, Spain, and Jackson, MS. These are grassroots forums where community members deliberate and decide on issues affecting them. But these cannot be advisory councils or consultation mechanisms that provide democratic aesthetics while preserving centralized power.

Radical municipalism seeks to build people’s assemblies to counter state power, while also taking over local state power itself. By so doing, these institutions anticipate or “prefigure” a more bottom-up, truly democratic order that can advance an economy rooted in values of solidarity.

What does this mean in a place like New York City? It means transforming the city’s existing 59 community boards from advisory bodies into decision-making assemblies with binding authority over neighborhood budgets, land use decisions, public safety approaches, and local economic development. The goal is to make democracy more participatory—devolving power to the local level, making face-to-face decision-making possible. All of his campaign organizing hubs, from the Astoria headquarters where Mamdani built his base to the dozens of staging locations across the five boroughs, should become permanent spaces for direct democracy.

New York City has infrastructure to build on. The city’s powerful tenant organizing tradition, from the Metropolitan Council on Housing to the Crown Heights Tenant Union, already practices assembly-based decision-making. The challenge is scaling this model to the level of the city and giving it real authority over resource allocation. When the state government in Albany blocks local initiatives, organized assemblies can sustain direct action campaigns. When capital threatens disinvestment, assemblies become the democratic foundation for bottom-up economic institutions.

From Services to Solidarity Economy

The vision must extend beyond municipalized services to constructing what radical municipalists call a solidarity economy, a polity and economy based on community self-determination and cooperation instead of extraction and exploitation. City-owned grocery stores represent a start, but genuine economic transformation requires more.

According to a 2024 report, New York City has 76 worker cooperatives, concentrated in sectors such as home care, cleaning, and food service. Mamdani should aim to both strengthen these existing businesses and encourage the formation of new worker co-ops through such means as preferential city contracts, technical assistance from organizations like the NYC Network of Worker Cooperatives, and financing from a new city-owned public bank, as the New Economy Project in New York City has advocated. Every city contract for building maintenance, food service in public buildings, and transportation services should prioritize worker-owned businesses.

Community land trusts can permanently remove housing from speculative markets, ensuring affordability in perpetuity rather than through temporary subsidies. New York City already has successful models such as the Cooper Square Community Land Trust on the Lower East Side, which has protected 400 units of affordable housing since 1959. The administration should establish neighborhood-based land trusts in every community board district, using city-owned vacant lots and acquiring buildings through tax foreclosure. This creates affordability in perpetuity rather than through temporary subsidies that expire.

A public bank, modeled after California’s nascent initiatives, could fund co-op and community projects rather than channeling public monies through Wall Street institutions. This bank could help finance land trust acquisitions, worker co-op startups, and green infrastructure projects while keeping financial returns in public hands.

The feminization of politics, another hallmark of radical municipalism, involves questioning patriarchal models of organization and supporting care work. This should reshape not just what a city administration does, but how decision-making processes can center care, relationship, and reproduction rather than competition and hierarchy.

Toward Global Solidarity

The city of New York is large, but it cannot transform governance and the economy in isolation. The municipalist movement, although grounded in local action, is highly aware of the global nature of challenges. Black Panther Party theorist Huey P. Newton developed the concept of revolutionary intercommunalism to argue that oppressed communities can only achieve liberation by building cooperative frameworks across territorial boundaries to struggle together against a common empire of global capital.

The 100,000 volunteers who built this campaign face a choice. They can celebrate….Or they can recognize that electoral victory is only the beginning.

For this reason, Mayor-elect Mamdani should connect with potential global allies like Barcelona en Comu’s citizen platforms, Cooperation Jackson’s solidarity economy efforts in Mississippi, and Kurdish democratic confederalism in Rojava in northern Syria. These potential partners can help build transnational movements to challenge capital, and, by so doing, help Mamdani achieve his policy goals.

If the transition from neoliberalism to a solidarity economy is to occur, a global network of fearless cities is a prerequisite. Urban movements face similar challenges across the world—gentrification, austerity, climate change, and authoritarian nationalism. Coordinated responses at the local level, sharing strategies and resources across borders, offer possibilities that isolated cities cannot achieve alone.

What’s Next

The 100,000 volunteers who built this campaign face a choice. They can celebrate the victory, perhaps stay involved through occasional volunteer opportunities, and hope Mayor Mamdani implements his agenda when he takes office. Or they can recognize that electoral victory is only the beginning of transformation and not its completion.

Radical municipalism means creating institutions like people’s assemblies and neighborhood unions where people learn to manage their common life through face-to-face politics and develop the skills and power to truly govern the city. Taking the mayor’s office differs from controlling the city: The former involves winning an election, the latter requires building permanent institutions of popular power.

What are some next steps?

For Mayor-elect Mamdani, the hard work begins now. The question isn’t whether to implement the campaign platform. The question is whether to use the mayor’s office to build institutions that democratize power itself, creating structures that outlast his mayoralty and shift authority from City Hall to neighborhoods. Without this transformation, the next administration can simply roll back policy gains. With neighborhood assemblies controlling real resources and a solidarity economy providing material alternatives, the movement becomes institutionalized.

To everyone who volunteered, voted, and organized—including supporters in the nonprofit community—the most important message is this: Don’t go home. The stakes are immense and immediate. Donald Trump remains the US president, and his administration continues to threaten immigrant families and tear communities apart. Rising seas and climate disasters demand cooperative economic structures now, not in a decade. The municipalist revolution isn’t won at the ballot box alone. It’s built in the neighborhoods, block by block, assembly by assembly, until popular power becomes the lived reality of urban life.

Mamdani’s victory opened the door to that possibility. What happens next will determine whether that door stays open or closes.

The choice is not just Mamdani’s, but belongs to the movement behind his campaign. The question is whether New Yorkers will settle for a progressive mayor or build the assemblies, cooperatives, and networks needed to support lasting transformation. History, in short, will remember not just election night, but whether the grassroots energy that won this race built the foundation for genuine democratic power.