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ZOHRAN NEEDS TO CREATE POPULAR ASSEMBLIES  
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Gabriel Hetland and Bhaskar Sunkara
December 22, 2025
Jacobin
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_ If Zohran Mamdani is serious about delivering on his promises, he
needs more than policies — he needs institutions that empower
working people. Popular assemblies offer a way to build a new,
bottom-up political culture in New York City. _

Zohran Mamdani should look seriously at making popular assemblies a
key part of his governing strategy., Photo: Neil Constantine /
NurPhoto // Jacobin

 

Zohran Mamdani’s electoral triumph represented more than just an
off-year upset. It confirmed that democratic socialist politics, when
pursued with discipline, vision, and vigor, can resonate broadly even
in a city known for entrenched power structures and the quiet vetoes
of wealth. The campaign succeeded not because New Yorkers suddenly
became ideologues, but because Zohran came across as credible,
authentic, and serious about improving people’s lives. Voters
responded to an affordability agenda rooted in everyday pressures,
housing costs, transit, childcare, groceries, and to a candidate they
trusted to fight for them.

But underlying the campaign was a message of change. Not just policy
change, but a change in how politics is conducted and how workers
relate to power in the city. That second mandate matters just as much
as the first. Delivering affordability without changing the
relationship between citizens and governance risks reproducing a
familiar pattern: a progressive administration hemmed in by hostile
elites, procedural roadblocks, and a social base that mobilizes every
few years only to demobilize once governing begins.

That’s why Mamdani should look seriously at making popular
assemblies a key part of his governing strategy. Because without
reshaping the relationship between the governed and the government,
his administration will not only fall short of its particularly
socialist promise but struggle to deliver on its broader progressive
one too.

Popular Assemblies as a Governing Tool

Affordability should remain the keyword for every socialist in New
York City. Cost-of-living concerns won Zohran power, and his
administration will be judged on its ability to deliver results on
that basis. But socialism
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cannot be reduced to a checklist of redistributive policies, however
necessary they are.

At its core, democratic socialism is a project to build working-class
power through popular struggle, both to win immediate reforms and to
lay the basis for a society beyond capitalism. It aims not only to
improve living standards through redistribution and public provision,
but to increase the capacity of workers to collectively shape the
decisions that shape their lives. These two goals are inseparable.
Material gains make political participation possible, while political
power is what allows those gains to be won, defended, and extended.

There is also a case for popular assemblies that is less lofty but
just as compelling: they can help a Mamdani administration govern.

Zohran Mamdani will enter office facing a dense web of institutional
and economic resistance. In New York, power does not reside only in
City Hall. It is exercised through landlords who can derail
progressive housing policy, through business interests that shape
investment and threaten capital flight, through a political
establishment adept at procedural obstruction, and through a state
structure that limits mayoral authority.

To break through predictable roadblocks, Mamdani will need an
organized base capable of applying pressure beyond election cycles,
contesting elite vetoes, and shifting the balance of power around
concrete policy fights. Popular assemblies offer one way to help build
that capacity, not as symbolic gestures, but as institutions that link
governing priorities to collective action in the city itself.

Mamdani will need an organized base capable of applying pressure
beyond election cycles, contesting elite vetoes, and shifting the
balance of power around concrete policy fights.

In practice, this means creating regular, institutionalized spaces
where ordinary people participate in decisions that affect their
neighborhoods and daily lives. Done well, assemblies can strengthen
associational life, build durable networks of participation, and help
turn episodic electoral support into sustained political power.
Assemblies and associated reforms linked to a broader mass governance
project can deliver material benefits to working-class communities.
Research
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on participatory institutions in Latin American cities shows
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these institutions can only succeed in attracting mass participation
to the extent that they deliver real benefits that matter to
people’s lives. By giving workers and the poor a chance to
deliberate and provide meaningful input into decisions that affect
their lives, popular assemblies can also foster working-class
political empowerment, something key to any vision of democratic
socialism.

They can also help generate consent for progressive policies. Research
consistently shows that people are more likely to accept decisions,
even ones they disagree with, when they believe the process was fair,
inclusive, and meaningful. Participation matters not only for
outcomes, but for legitimacy. The success of the recent event “The
Mayor Is Listening
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which Zohran met for twelve hours with ordinary New Yorkers at the
Museum of the Moving Image, helps show this. The event, which
generated glowing
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stories, was designed to show that Zohran will not govern behind New
Yorkers’ backs but in dialogue with them. While successful, this
exercise was of course limited; Zohran listened but promised nothing
more. Popular assemblies can tap into the energy and excitement this
event generated and link it to a broader process of mass governance.

There is also growing evidence
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well-designed participatory institutions can reduce polarization and
foster unity even with respect to politically charged and contentious
issues such as climate change. Shared experiences of deliberation can
cut across ideological and social divides, countering the gridlock
that increasingly defines both state institutions and civil society.
And because people tend to trust information from peers more than
politicians, assemblies can also function as credible channels for
communication, not just decision-making. One way this has happened is
through citizen assemblies
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empowered to request information from experts, which the assemblies
can discuss and disseminate, in some fashion, to broader publics.

In short, popular assemblies are not a distraction from governing.
They are a way of governing that strengthens the administration’s
hand rather than weakening it.

How Assemblies Could Work

There is no single model of popular assemblies. They have taken many
forms across different contexts: participatory budgeting, health
councils, and water boards in Latin America; neighborhood councils and
citizen panels in Europe and North America; climate assemblies in
France and elsewhere. Outcomes have varied widely.

Participatory budgeting is often cited as a success story, and in
places like Porto Alegre, Brazil, it genuinely was. There, it reshaped
spending priorities, expanded access to services, fostered a culture
of participation and accountability, and gave working-class
communities an effective way to obtain meaningful material resources
such as paving, streetlights, and bus lines. In the United States, by
contrast, participatory budgeting has typically been implemented on a
far smaller scale, controlling only a sliver of municipal budgets and
producing much more limited results.

The lesson is not that assemblies do not work, but that design
matters. Institutions can empower, or they can frustrate. Rather than
insisting on a single form, it makes more sense to identify a set of
principles through which popular assemblies can enhance working-class
political agency and build organizational and mobilizational capacity.

First, assemblies must offer ordinary people real and meaningful
opportunities to affect the decisions that shape their lives.
Participation without influence is a recipe for cynicism. If
assemblies are perceived as merely symbolic, spaces for discussion
with no tangible impact on policy or strategy, they will quickly lose
credibility.

Second, assemblies must be designed to foster meaningful deliberation.
This involves more than airing grievances or tallying preferences. It
means creating structured spaces where participants weigh trade-offs,
hear competing arguments, and offer reasons for preferring one course
of action over another. Creating deliberative spaces is crucial not
just for instrumental reasons but because deliberation is how
non-elites “learn to govern themselves.” Debate and deliberation
are also a key means by which working-class communities can forge
unity across the many divides — of race, gender, language, national
origin, ability, and more — that keep them separated.

Assemblies must offer ordinary people real and meaningful
opportunities to affect the decisions that shape their lives.
Participation without influence is a recipe for cynicism.

However, absent deliberate design, participatory institutions tend to
reproduce existing divisions and inequalities of time, confidence, and
political experience. They could, in other words, become a talk shop
for existing activists. That risk does not argue against assemblies,
but for careful structuring. Deliberation requires facilitation, clear
agendas, and defined decision-making pathways. It also requires
attention to accessibility: meeting times and locations that
accommodate working schedules, childcare, and formats that welcome
people unfamiliar with formal political settings.

This is where political leadership becomes decisive. If popular
assemblies are to reach beyond the already politicized and become
vehicles for broader working-class participation, Zohran and his
administration will need to actively initiate and guide the process.
That means setting clear priorities, signaling that participation will
shape real decisions, and visibly integrating assembly feedback into
the administration’s governing agenda. Without that kind of
leadership, participatory spaces tend to default to those already
comfortable navigating politics.

In New York, assemblies should be organized at two main
scales. Neighborhood assemblies could meet once a month in schools,
libraries, or New York City Housing Authority community centers. These
assemblies would be tied to concrete issues like housing, transit, and
community safety in a defined area and count with relevant city
staff. Borough-level assemblies could meet quarterly to debate and
rank broader priorities, especially around budgets and major projects.
Each yearly assembly cycle would end in a clear decision point (such
as priorities) that feed into published timelines and budget
proposals.

To work, the assemblies need guaranteed translation, childcare,
stipends for facilitators, and a permanent staff. Assembly calendars
should be synchronized with existing decision cycles, like the state
and city budgets, so they become a sort of front door to real
institutional power until participatory structures in the city are
aligned with the broader proposal outlined here. Assemblies should be
linked to a broader mass governance project that includes projects
initiated from City Hall, budget and data campaigns, support for mass
volunteerism (e.g., a city-backed volunteer corps), and retooling
existing state structures, institutions, and processes under a
coherent and empowered framework.

There are, inevitably, trade-offs — between neighborhood-based and
issue-based assemblies, between advisory and binding authority,
between in-person and hybrid formats. These choices should be guided
by the broader goal of enhancing working-class agency and building a
social base capable of sustaining reform.

Democracy Inside and Outside the State

These questions are not new. Writing in the 1970s, the Marxist
theorist Nicos Poulantzas warned that both social democracy and
Soviet-style state socialism shared a distrust of mass initiative. One
wanted to manage capitalism from above in the interest of workers, the
other suppressed pluralism in the name of the popular will. The
alternative he outlined was a strategy of dual democratization:
transforming representative institutions while simultaneously
expanding direct forms of democracy outside the state.

Mamdani can treat popular enthusiasm as a temporary resource to be
spent or invest in it as the foundation of a new kind of politics.

This was not a rejection of elections or representative government,
but a way of deepening them. Representative democracy, in this view,
is strengthened, not undermined, by an organized citizenry capable of
exerting pressure, generating ideas, and holding leaders accountable.
Such a movement becomes a xxxxxx against both technocratic stagnation
and authoritarian reaction.

That vision remains compelling. Governing from City Hall without an
empowered movement risks sliding into a technocratic form of social
democracy that delivers incremental gains while leaving underlying
power relations intact.

We, after all, were lucky to elect someone who isn’t the second
coming of Bill de Blasio but a socialist already familiar with radical
democratic ideas, but who is also keenly aware of the limits of the
politicization he has thus far unleashed — and the urgent need to
transform that energy into lasting institutional change.

Starting From Where We Are

Zohran Mamdani’s electoral strength far exceeds the organized
strength of the working class in the city. Most people are busy,
skeptical, and unused to sustained political participation.

That is precisely why popular assemblies matter. They can serve as
bridges between electoral support and durable organization.
Neighborhood and borough assemblies, tied to concrete issues of
affordability, can connect people to the agenda that brought Zohran to
office, give them a role in shaping it, and allow them to see
themselves as political actors rather than merely voters.

 
In that sense, assemblies are not simply a way of channeling an
already existing movement. They are a way of helping to build one.
They offer a means of translating electoral enthusiasm into lasting
democratic capacity, of creating, from above, the conditions for
bottom-up participation that does not yet exist at scale.

Zohran Mamdani has been given a rare opportunity. He can treat popular
enthusiasm as a temporary resource to be spent or invest in it as the
foundation of a new kind of politics. Assemblies are not a panacea.
But without institutions that expand political agency alongside
material reform, the promise of this moment will be harder to fulfill
and easier to undo.

If democratic socialism is to mean more than progressive
administration, it must find institutional expression. In New York,
that should begin by giving ordinary people a real seat at the table,
and the power to shape what comes next.

_Thanks to Gianpaolo Baiocchi for his feedback and help with this
article._

_[_GABRIEL HETLAND is an associate professor of Latin American,
Caribbean, and Latinx studies at SUNY Albany and author of Democracy
on the Ground: Local Politics in Latin America’s Left Turn
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(2023).

BHASKAR SUNKARA is the founding editor of _Jacobin_, the president of
the _Nation_ magazine, and the author of _The Socialist Manifesto: The
Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality_
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_Jacobin‘s winter issue, “Municipal Socialism,” is out now.
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* Zohran Mamdani
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* Popular Assemblies
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* Left Politics
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* left political strategy
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* cities
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* Working Class
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* democracy
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* Municipal politics
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* DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM
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* sewer socialism
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* DSA
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* Democratic Socialists of America
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* New York City
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