Although many parts of the world are rapidly moving toward full-blown fascism, in this brown political landscape, the left has recently achieved two quite significant victories. The first was Catherine Connolly's victory in the Irish presidential election, which took place on 24 October 2025, and the second was Zohran Mamdani's victory in the New York City mayoral election, which took place on 4 November 2025. Of course, these two events do not contradict the thesis presented in the first sentence of this article. As Vladimir Lenin wrote, "history is moving in zigzags and by roundabout ways." So the direction is clear – as always, capitalism in crisis will push us toward fascism, but that doesn't mean that from time to time, small glimmers of light won't emerge, providing a glimmer in this swirling darkness.
In Ireland, the office of president is a symbolic position with no real political power – the president doesn't even have the right to veto – the only thing he can do is refer a case to the Constitutional Court, and if the court deems it constitutional, he is forced to sign it. The presidential term there lasts seven years, and Michael D Higgins held the position for 14 years. President Higgins, who has been associated with Irish workers and trade unions throughout his life, has been one of the most vocal figures on the Irish left. Today, at the age of 85, he has spoken out loudly on the Palestinian issue, criticising Israel's genocidal actions in Gaza.
For almost a century, Ireland has been ruled alternately by two right-wing political parties – the disgustingly neoliberal Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, the latter of which was allied with the Nazis during World War II. However, support for these two rotten parties has been steadily declining in recent years, and they have been forced to form a coalition representing the establishment. However, the events in Gaza have profoundly shaken Ireland, which has been deeply affected by imperialist violence, as Ireland was the first British colony in history. Despite pro-Palestinian protests taking place in Ireland almost weekly, the Irish government has decided to move to break with Ireland's "neutrality" and, attempting to justify this with the alleged "threat from Russia," has begun considering joining NATO. That is to say, NATO, an alliance that de facto supports Palestinian genocide.
That's why this year's presidential campaign focused primarily on the theme of neutrality. Traditionally, most Irish political parties field candidates in the presidential election. The two ruling parties did so: Fine Gael fielded Heather Humphries, while Fianna Fáil fielded Jim Gavin. The fragmented Irish left was also expected to follow suit. Sinn Fèin, the leading party on the Irish nationalist left (supporting Irish unification), planned to field its leader, Mary Lou McDonald. When the Irish communist, labour, and trade union movements learned of this, they immediately took action to prevent this, knowing how polarising (though admittedly also popular) a figure she is. Therefore, they met with Catherine Connolly, an independent MP with significantly more left-wing views than Sinn Fèin, and persuaded her to run.
Connolly's campaign team assembled most of the left-wing elements of the Irish political scene. Catherine Connolly herself decided to focus her campaign primarily on the promise of maintaining this neutrality, which quickly began to garner support. Seeing this, Mary Lou McDonald withdrew her candidacy, ultimately leading to Catherine Connolly gaining the support of the entire non-government political scene in Ireland (with the exception of the far right, anti-vaxxers, and other such fascist elements).
Announcing her campaign, Connolly said: "We must confront climate change. We must be a voice for peace. We must stop the normalisation of war and violence. We must stop the normalisation of homelessness. We must say that these problems are not inevitable... They are man-made, driven by politics, and we can have a different kind of country and a different kind of world." Connolly has also been vocal in her criticism of Israel's criminal actions, calling them genocide. This led to pro-Zionist media, as well as capitalist media worldwide, quickly launching a massive smear campaign against her, labelling her a "left-wing extremist."
Mamdani had to defeat not just a man but an entire apparatus. This in itself doesn't change the system, but it changes the sense of what is possible
Ultimately, Irish voters elected Catherine Connolly as the 10th President of the Republic of Ireland in a landslide, humiliating the Fine Gael/Fianna Fáil coalition government. Connolly won 63.8% of the first preference vote, compared to 29.5% for Fine Gael's Heather Humphries and 7.2% for Fianna Fáil's Jim Gavin.
As Steve James writes for WSWS.org: “Connolly’s election is significant in that it shows the extent to which the anger provoked by the Gaza genocide has become a serious factor in Irish and world politics. The governments that have justified the crimes of the Israeli state are discredited. But Connolly’s victory does not change the political character of the pro-capitalist alliance that formed the basis of her campaign.”
Less than two weeks later, elections were held across the ocean, local elections in the United States in several states and cities. This included the mayoral election in New York City – one of the world's financial capitals, home to one of the world's most bloodthirsty institutions, Wall Street. Indeed, Wall Street is an institution that hates people, and the only thing it loves is money. But worse yet, it's not real money that can be materialised (like factories, land, machinery, etc.), but money in a fictitious, electrical form, the most foolish form of capital.
But why should we – even considering what I wrote above – analyse elections in a US city? Firstly, because in the West, in the imperialist core, even uttering the word "socialism" in public debate is almost unimaginable. And secondly, as a wonderful communist activist from New York, whose YouTube channel I heartily recommend and whose Facebook page known as TheFlameOfLiberation, said, this was one of the most competitive elections in the US in the last few decades. We must remember that, essentially, since the 1980s, American political parties – Republicans and Democrats – have stopped pretending to be any different, and Bill Clinton's presidency finally destroyed any illusions of difference, as both parties completely fell into a blind faith in neoliberalism.
The election battle featured three candidates (not the usual two): Zohran Mamdani for the Democratic Party, Curtis Śliwa for the Republican Party, and Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat who lost the primary to Zohran Mamdani and ran as an independent. Furthermore, Cuomo gained the support of big capitalists and Donald Trump himself. He is not only an extreme Zionist but also someone who has spent millions of dollars of public money to exonerate himself from sexual harassment of numerous women.
It was a race between a traditional conservative (Śliwa), a neoliberal imperialist (Cuomo) representing the financial elite and racist supremacy over immigrants, and a young, energetic candidate (Mamdani) who called himself a socialist. Mamdani, therefore, defined himself by a label that, to this day (we're talking about the post-World War II era), immediately dismisses such a person from US public life. Moreover, Mamdani publicly declared support for Gaza (but it must be emphasised that he still supports the right of "Israel" to exist...), which is also groundbreaking in the US, where there is a widespread pro-Zionist consensus among media, elites and political discourse.
This triggered a massive mobilisation within the American establishment, which launched a campaign attacking Mamdani, describing him as a "crazy communist." Trump himself joined in the attack, announcing that he would withdraw federal funding from New York if Mamdani won. However, this campaign failed, and Mamdani won with 50.4% of the vote.
As Dusan Pajović rightly notes in his article, "Mamdani had to defeat not just the man but the entire apparatus that supported him [...] This in itself doesn't change the system, but it changes the sense of what is possible." He also notes that "Mamdani is certainly more left-wing than Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He opposed American imperialism and wrote a program that is decidedly left-wing for conservative America."
I think the conclusion of Dusan Pajović's article is a brilliant commentary on why Mamdani's victory caused such a stir. He writes: "The fact that it's possible at the heart of financial capitalism to elect a candidate who, while not a socialist, openly speaks about the public good, climate justice, and the right to housing means that the horizon is shifting, even by a millimeter. For the "Western Left," which has been struggling with a sense of political hopelessness for decades, even that millimeter means something. Not because New York will become a socialist commune, but because people around the world are seeing that politics doesn't have to look like a Wall Street brochure. Mamdani won't overthrow capitalism, but he could inspire new generations to delve deeper into theory and practice, and ultimately to stop treating this global system as something predetermined."
I'd also add that from a leftist perspective, we can't have any expectations of Mamdani. If he wants to fulfill his promises, he'll make compromises that will ultimately force him to abandon his ideals (the first signs of this are already appearing, such as meetings with Soros and organisations associated with more liberal Wall Street capitalists). If he wants to cling to his ideals, he'll do nothing – but this solution, in my opinion, will maintain social mobilisation around him.
When analysing the above cases – both in Ireland and New York – we must avoid falling into the trap that, surprisingly, appears in many left-wing commentaries around the world. The very fact that I'm writing this article means that I consider it negative to ignore and downplay these events. However, a hasty, optimistic approach is also something that deserves condemnation, as it pushes us towards opportunism.
The issue of electoralism and the belief in supposedly revolutionary change that participation in the institutions of the bourgeois state could bring was already a topic of communist debate over 100 years ago.
Karl Marx in Letter to August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Wilhelm Bracke from 1879 wrote: “Or has German Social-Democracy indeed been infected with the parliamentary disease, believing that, with the popular vote, the Holy Ghost is poured upon those elected, that meetings of the faction are transformed into infallible councils and factional resolutions into sacrosanct dogma?”
"Parliamentary disease" is a brilliant description. Observing the numerous left-wing groups around the world, one must admit that most of them have succumbed to it. They have lost the ability to think beyond bourgeois politics. All they think about is winning any seats (as these are usually parties with minimal support) in parliament, arguing that this will "enter the mainstream and begin spreading the communist narrative in the public sphere." Nothing could be further from the truth...
Marx and Engels realised this and introduced a change in the Communist Manifesto after 1871, because The Commune taught Marx that the working class cannot "lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes." That is, a state to enforce the rule of the most economically powerful class cannot be simply designed over and used by workers to create a new, socialist society.
Rosa Luxemburg was clear that even if socialists were able to achieve a majority in parliament in a given country, this would not signal the victory of socialism. The ruling class would rally around its most trusted state institutions—the police, the army, the state bureaucracy and corrupted party politicians—against parliament if necessary. Rosa Luxemburg in "Reform or Revolution" from 1900 wrote: "In this society, the representative institutions, democratic in form, are in content the instruments of the interests of the ruling class. This manifests itself in a tangible fashion in the fact that as soon as democracy shows the tendency to negate its class character and become transformed into an instrument of the real interests of the population, the democratic forms sacrificed by the bourgeoisie and by its state representatives."
I'm not arguing, however, that electoralism as a strategy for fighting for Marxist or communist policies through bourgeois mechanisms is entirely flawed. Marx himself didn't believe so. Problems begin when elections and everything associated with them become a distraction, and the proletarian movement becomes convinced that capitalist rule can be overthrown by peaceful means, even though capitalist rule is not and never has been maintained by peaceful means. Furthermore, communists infected with the "parliamentary disease"—theoretically the most advanced members of the proletarian movement—make the mistake of believing that "the proletariat simply isn't ready yet." This statement rationalises their failure to engage in real struggle (including armed struggle), not only deceiving themselves and the proletariat but also committing the crime of demobilising the masses.
Rosa Luxemburg also addressed this phenomenon in "Reform of Revolution." In Chapter II, she notes that German social democrats believed that social reforms, like trade union organisations, "would impose on capitalists the only conditions under which they could employ labour." Thus, they viewed reform in this light as a mechanism of "social control" and, therefore, an element of socialism. These sociological mechanisms mean that, in the minds of these self-proclaimed communists, and even worse, in the minds of the proletariat, "innocent labour laws"—as Luxemburg writes—passed by parliament "are transformed into transitional socialist measures, supposedly passed by the proletariat." Rosa Luxemburg rightly notes that, on the contrary, reforms are not an application of "social control," that is, control of a society operating freely in its own labour process, but are merely forms of control used by the class organisation of Capital to produce Capital. So-called social reforms are introduced in the interests of capital.
This over-a-century-old work is timely, demonstrating the absurd assumptions underlying the idea of gradually achieving socialism through social reforms—which, incidentally, must also be applied to reactionary projects such as Chinese Dengism. This theory assumes that, with historical development, the capitalist owner loses his special powers and is reduced to the role of a simple manager. It believes that the expropriation of the means of production cannot be accomplished as a single historical act. Therefore, it resorts to the theory of expropriation by stages. However, contrary to its assumptions, this process always ends when the system stabilises the social situation sufficiently to be deregulated again in the name of increasing profits.
Rosa Luxemburg succinctly summarises this tactic in Chapter VIII: "To present the work of reform as a long-term revolution, and the revolution as a condensed series of reforms, is contrary to history. Social change and legislative reform differ not in duration but in content. The secret of historical change through the use of political power lies precisely in the transformation of simple quantitative change into a new quality, or, more precisely, in the transition of a historical period from one given form of society to another. Therefore, people who advocate the current method of legislative reform, opposed to the seizure of political power and social revolution, are not really choosing a calmer, quieter, and slower path to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of advocating the establishment of a new society, they are advocating superficial modifications of the old society. If we follow the political concepts of revisionism, we will arrive at the same conclusion as we will arrive at if we follow the economic theories of revisionism. Our program becomes not the realisation of socialism, but reform of capitalism; not the suppression of the wage-labour system, but the reduction of exploitation, that is, the suppression of the abuses of capitalism instead of the suppression of capitalism itself."
Therefore, while we should, in a common-sense sense, rejoice at the successes of—let's call them—"progressive" forces around the world, we must not forget that their task in the capitalist system will be merely a temporary rebranding of capitalism to defuse existing social tensions. These victories (or any other electoral victories) will not bring revolution. If communist forces mobilise appropriately and seize the opportunity, they can use such victories to expand their platform (which, however, cannot be tied to parliamentary forces). However, this activity cannot aim to spread faith in the capabilities of these elected representatives, much less offer hope for the social changes they will bring. It can only provide a moment of respite, a certain freedom, thanks to which revolutionary forces will reach the broader masses and prepare them for the return of reactionary forces, in order to strike them with appropriate force. Let us hope (though the chances are slim) that the two victories discussed above will be utilised in this way, and not squandered on political and social potential of those figures.