Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We've talked on this show a number of times about how the Mamdani campaign organized 100,000 volunteers, is the number we see to knock on three million doors, catapulting the largely unknown state assemblyman from a year ago from 1% in the polls to City Hall in just that under a year period. Now that the campaign is over, the question we've begun to ask one of them is, what role can those volunteers play in achieving the mayor's lofty policy agenda?

Now, tomorrow, Governor Hochul will deliver her State of the State address, which we expect to include details of her and Mamdani's plan to bring universal childcare to New York, starting with their recently announced two-care program for two-year-olds, but she is yet to agree to the payment model that New Yorkers impressed upon her at a campaign rally back in October, at least New Yorkers who support Mamdani. Listen to this.

[crowd cheering]

Governor Kathy Hochul: Here's what we're going to do.

[crowd chanting, "Tax the rich"]

Governor Kathy Hochul: Well, this crowd is fired up.

Brian Lehrer: "Tax the rich" is the chant, if you can't make out the words. That chant also broke out at Mamdani's inauguration on New Year's. How will those New Yorkers, who chanted "tax the rich" on those occasions, mount pressure on Governor Hochul and broaden support for their policy agenda beyond what some derisively call the "Commie Corridor," like Astoria and places around there?

Joining me now with his prescriptions is Eric Blanc, assistant professor of Labor Studies at Rutgers University and author of the Substack, laborpolitics.com. You can also see him fairly frequently in the pages of The Nation and Jacobin. He also has a piece that we're going to talk about on his newsletter, telling DSA members and other supporters of Mamdani when not to speak up. Eric, welcome back to WNYC.

Eric Blanc: Yes, thanks for having me on.

Brian Lehrer: After the election, you co-authored a piece in Jacobin called Politics is Something We Do, using the example of the Mamdani campaign. Who was the "we," and how can they do politics at this moment differently from other supporters of other politicians in the past?

Eric Blanc: Unfortunately, most people think of politics in this country as, at best, voting. A lot of people don't even vote. The argument we're trying to make in this piece is that if that remains the common sense amongst New Yorkers, we are not going to be able to win the affordable city that New Yorkers deserve. So much of Zohran's vision and promise will be left unfulfilled.

That's for a simple reason, which is that that agenda goes up against the interests of extremely powerful people, extremely powerful corporations. Historically and to the present, the way you overcome that sort of opposition, in an opposition which is going to use its billions of dollars to scare people into not supporting an ambitious agenda, the way you overcome that is through organized people.

It's through neighbors talking to their neighbors. It's through co-workers talking to their co-workers. It's by putting up enough of a fight from below that the powers that be back off, and that you create the space for politicians like Zohran who want to do the right thing, who are raising expectations, but who frankly don't have all the power in the world, can't just, with a sign of the pen, do everything they want.

The only way that we're going to be able to win that affordable city is if hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers not only stay in the fight because we had almost over 100,000 volunteered for the Zohran campaign, but we're going to need many hundred-thousands more getting into the fight. To understand that politics isn't a spectator sport, it's something that you have to get into.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, I wonder if some of you can help us report this story. If you were a Mamdani volunteer during the campaign, are you staying involved now? How are you staying involved now? Do you feel like the administration in these early days is doing enough to set up structures for you to be continually involved, to have an influence that maybe politicians who are allied with Mamdani by themselves can't have, and that a mass mobilization or a continuing movement could actually help to bring results from? 212-433-WNYC. Call in for Mamdani campaign volunteers on what you're doing now or what you think you could be doing now, you and others? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text.

Eric, that article that we referenced in, of yours is a while ago now. In fact, we talked about it with you once before, a couple of months ago. Here we are on January 12. How much organizing is actually happening in these early days? What are volunteers currently doing? What organizations, either being driven by the administration or outside by the DSA or anyone else, how much are they tapping into the volunteer army and getting stuff moving?

Eric Blanc: Yes, I'm happy to report that there's a lot of organizing happening, and that it's already showing results. Just to give a few top-line examples, we had an organizing training. Our Time, which is the organization that came out of the volunteer 100,000 infrastructure, trained up 700 people late last year. Just to give one example of what Our Time did just within 48 hours after the inauguration.

Earlier this month, Our Time had its supporters and broader New Yorkers send over 2,000 letters to Governor Hochul, demanding that she pass ambitious childcare plan by taxing the rich. My understanding is, and this could be confirmed or not, that there was a lot of negotiations happening between the governor and the mayor, and that even this last-minute pressure just getting started, because this movement is really only just getting started, played a significant role in getting Hochul to the table with a much more ambitious proposal around childcare than was initially being proposed by her.

We're already seeing results, and it's just getting started. There's canvassing now happening every weekend, just like what was done in the lead-up to the election. Now, you have hundreds of volunteers every weekend going and talking to their neighbors, talking to folks all across the city to say, "You deserve more. Your life can be easier. You should be able to afford to live in this city, and this is how we're going to do that."

There's a petition on Governor Hochul and the legislature to pass universal childcare by taxing the rich. Thousands of people are signing it. Organizations are signing it. The organizations that are leading this primarily is, as I mentioned, Our Time, which, if people are interested in getting involved in the canvassing, they can go to ourtime.nyc, but then also DSA. Obviously, DSA is the home of New York City. DSA is the home of Zohran and has been absolutely central to the fight.

These canvases are happening in conjunction between DSA's Tax the Rich campaign and Our Time. For the DSA side of the canvases, people can go to canvass.socialists.nyc. It's really just getting started because a lot of people, I think, are still waiting and seeing what Zohran does. This is a kind of mode of politics that I think we need to move out of is just critiquing or saying it's good.

I think, if anything, Zohran could do even more to provide easier on-ramps for people to get involved. He's telling people that they need to get involved, but I would love to see Zohran actively encouraging people to come out to these canvases. He has a tricky dance with Hochul, but I think that it would be good to err on the side of mass engagement. It's not just around the childcare and tax the rich. It's also on the central question of housing.

There's canvassing now happening with the tenant block in Our Time to put pressure on some of the biggest developers in New York City, thinking about Blackstone, LeFrak, A&E to organize their tenants to demand that the rents be kept from going in exorbitant directions to make repairs that aren't being made. Now, there is this amazing opportunity where people's expectations are raised, and in which there's a partner in City Hall that is going to listen. I think that that is really a unique opportunity for getting this mass engagement that we haven't really seen in New York politics for decades.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a call. Seth in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Seth. Thanks for calling in.

Seth: Thanks, Brian. Thanks, Eric. I just wanted to talk specifically about what this looks like now. I really appreciate Eric talking about the canvases that are going on every weekend. Again, you can sign up for those online. I think the website is canvass, with two S's, .socialists.nyc. There's also work happening to lobby our elected officials to make sure that we tax the rich to pay for our fully funded universal childcare that's permanent, that's statewide, and there are opportunities everywhere in the state. I know, Brian, you have listeners all over. I hope folks, whether you're in New York City or not, will find a way to get plugged into the campaign because what Eric said is right. What the governor and what Mayor Mamdani announced last week, that's just the start of negotiations. We need to win more.

Brian Lehrer: Seth, thank you very much. Eric, you used the term "mass engagement" a minute ago and hoping that Mamdani would get more involved in setting up structures for mass engagement. Well, you know on day two of his administration, and many people have heard this, the mayor established something called the Office of Mass Engagement and appointed his campaign's field director, Tascha Van Auken, as the first director of this new office.

It was unclear to me, from seeing the descriptions of this and hearing him refer to it briefly, if the Office of Mass Engagement was meant to be a portal through which citizens could express what they want from the administration, like an Office of Mass Accessibility, or if an Office of Mass Engagement was actually be an office of mobilization run from the administration. Is it clear to you which or what combination?

Eric Blanc: Yes, the answer is that it's both. One of the things that differentiates this proposal and this new office-- I think it's a great initiative. I think it's really exciting. Tascha's one of the best organizers in the country. I'm sure it's going to be very robust. What differentiates this from just another mechanism for citizens to put in their input is that it's, A, going to be much more collective. It's not just you as an individual sending an email. Every city has that. It's getting together to deliberate and to collectively make concerns known to the city.

I think above all, it's also a mechanism for people to find out how they can act upon those. It's not just a one-way process, where you're giving information to the city. It's also receiving resources and support to be able to take actions around that. Just to give some concrete examples of what that could look like, so many issues in this city are potentially resolvable even under the law. There's just so little capacity from the city, which has been underfunding many of its enforcement programs for years, to deal with them.

For instance, things like inspecting workplaces, health code violations, housing that hasn't been repaired. These are types of just basic everyday concerns that normal people have that unless they themselves are bringing that to the table, to the city's knowledge, then they're going to keep on getting brushed under the rug. It's not just the knowledge. Then it becomes, "Well, how do you fix them?"

Part of the way that you're going to fix them is by giving ordinary New Yorkers tools to start pushing back, so letting workers know, for instance, about their rights at the job, what they can do collectively, how they build a union, how they make demands on their bosses. Similar with tenants. There are so many rights that New Yorkers have that they just don't know about. I think the Office of Mass Engagement is both getting that information, but also giving the tools and the support for ordinary New Yorkers to go out and have those fights and win those fights on their own.

Brian Lehrer: With Eric Blanc right now, assistant professor of Labor Studies at Rutgers and author of the Substack laborpolitics.com, as well as being a contributor to The Nation and Jacobin. We're talking about his writings on how the movement that helped elected Mamdani can help get his policy agenda through Albany and elsewhere, and also, and we haven't gotten to this part yet, how they cannot make it harder. We probably have a very relevant caller on the line, Grace in Brooklyn, who identifies herself as co-chair of NYC-DSA, Democratic Socialists of America. I think I know which Grace this is. Grace, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Grace: Hi, Brian, thanks for taking my call.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.

Grace: I just want to add to Eric's points that DSA and I think the left more broadly has been building towards this kind of politics for a long time. Even Tascha herself for a long time was chief of staff for one of our socialists in office in Albany, Phara Souffrant Forrest, who has invested a lot of time in building a program called Bklyn ROOTS that organizes people in her district to take politics beyond the ballot box.

In 2021, we passed revenue raisers on the wealthy in New York using a similar model that we're using now in conjunction with Our Time and other coalition groups. We've really been trying to build this muscle and are now poised with the 100,000 Mamdani volunteers to grow hopefully at a rate that we haven't seen before and pass some truly historic legislation and revenue raisers.

Brian Lehrer: What does the deployment look like for you as co-chair of DSA? Then I'm going to ask you to react to Eric's article, should the left criticize Zohran in cases when he says that DSA should not? What's the deployment like as far as you're involved with or could describe to the listeners?

Grace: Yes, a lot of it is modeled after how we build electoral campaigns. We have canvassing operations. These are really the building blocks of a lot of our activism. Having repeated volunteer opportunities that are easy to plug into, you don't need any experience necessarily. You can really build community and have a good time through them. We have weekly canvases that, as Eric already pointed out, you can find at canvass.socialists.nyc.

You can canvas in your neighborhood, very nearby. You can do this on a regular basis, build rapport not only with your fellow volunteers, but also with your neighbors whose doors you're knocking and you're building community with by talking to them face-to-face. We're using the same building blocks that we use for an electoral campaign, but just deploying them for slightly different aims.

Brian Lehrer: I want to invite the two of you to engage, if you're both willing. On your article, your Substack post, Should the Left Criticize Zohran? Eric, we know that one of the troubles of democracy is the potential for excess infighting. More seats at the table bring more conflicting opinions. This has certainly happened plenty on the left as elsewhere in politics. What's the debate there? What were you advising people on the left with respect to that? Then I want to get Grace's take on whatever you say.

Eric Blanc: Sure. The argument in the piece is not that DSA should never criticize Zohran. I think it's actually quite important for organizations outside of the government to maintain some sort of level of independence and right to criticize. There's going to be all sorts of things Zohran does that we don't agree with, and that, frankly, it's fine to criticize. There's ways of doing that that are productive. There's ways that are less productive.

The main argument I'm trying to make in that piece is that, in some ways, this is the wrong debate because the reality is, as long as the power relations are as they currently are, which is to say that the bosses and the establishment have so much of the power, there's going to be so many things that Zohran just can't do even if we want him to. The question of criticizing him for that actually misses the point. The real question is, how do we as organizers change the relationship of forces by bringing in the hundreds of thousands into the fight, such that things that currently aren't on the table or compromises that are being made that we would like not to see don't have to continue?

I think that that is just a much more productive and useful question. It's a harder question because it's easy to post something online and to say, "Zohran is this, this," whatever. It's actually much harder to go and talk to your co-worker who doesn't already agree with you, talk to your neighbor who doesn't already agree with you. To me, it's going to be that outward-facing orientation that is really going to make this administration and our movement a success.

Brian Lehrer: Just to make it as concrete as possible for the listeners, can you give an example where you're responding to people in the DSA or wherever, criticizing Mamdani for reappointing Police Commissioner Tisch, or what's a concrete example you gave some in the article? I don't have it in front of me.

Eric Blanc: Yes, I think that was the immediate impetus. It was not, in fact, the leadership of New York City DSA. Correct me if I'm wrong. Grace probably agree on this entirely. There were some DSA members and other activists who were accusing Zohran of having abandoned his campaign promises, which I actually don't think is true in this case because he said he was going to reappoint Tisch, but basically accusing him of betraying his mandate.

I think that that's a good example of something that, frankly, he just doesn't have the power right now to have a radically different or more progressive police commissioner at this point. That could change if Tisch goes against the agenda he laid out. For the time being, I don't think that's the big fight that we should be waging. If we're going to wage it, it's going to be more productive. If it looks like talking to our neighbors about the type of public safety program we want, it's not going to just be by posting around Zohran online.

Brian Lehrer: Grace, as co-chair of NYC-DSA, your thoughts?

Grace: Yes, I largely agree with Eric here. I have been saying both internally in DSA spaces and externally for a while that the challenge of our success with electing Zohran is that we now, as a left-wing movement, need to move from being in a position of criticizing power to being in a position of actually responsibly wielding that power. That means really leaning on and expanding what we've already learned in our collaboration projects with our city council members and with our state legislative members, where we talk with them weekly. We work out as many problems and strategic considerations and conversations internally before we bring anything externally.

Our goal with electing Zohran was certainly not to elect a target for ourselves. It's to figure out how having a socialist at the top of the ladder in New York City politics can be used to enact real change for the people of New York. Our role as DSA, like Eric was saying, is to change the conditions that Zohran is operating in. We want to collaborate and communicate with the administration when possible and appropriate so that we're all swimming in the same direction, but we're not trying to just critique him, to critique the power that is on the table. We want to actually use that power so that it benefits all the working people of New York.

Brian Lehrer: Grace, we so appreciate you calling in and being a part of this segment. Thank you very much.

Grace: Yes, thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Peter in Washington Heights, you're on WNYC with Eric Blanc. Hi, Peter.

Peter: Hi, Brian. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Peter: I'm just curious why there is all this talk about Zohran, Zohran, Zohran. I think the people who voted for him in large part voted for an agenda, not a personality. It does appear that the people you're talking to here are trying to create a cult of personality. We've seen what's happened with that in Washington. We saw what happened with that in places from the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany. Cults of personality, do they get what people want achieved at the end of the day?

Brian Lehrer: Eric, what do you think about that critique?

Eric Blanc: Yes, it's interesting. I see the exact opposite, which is to say, really what I'm trying to argue, and I think what Grace was arguing, is that it's not about Zohran. It's about what we do, that we're actually actively pushing back against the idea that it's going to be some great leader who's going to be able to bring us into the promised land. That's just not accurate, and it's not what we're pushing.

In fact, that's why we're spending so much time going out and trying to involve and keep involved hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. It's precisely because we don't believe in a cult of personnel. We don't think Zohran has magic powers. He's a charismatic dude, but that's limited in what you can actually achieve. It's really going to be up to ordinary people to make this happen, not Zohran himself. I agree that the question is the agenda and that the real issue is how we fight to win it.

Brian Lehrer: Peter, thank you for raising it, though. It's an important thing to keep people honest on. Last thing, I actually want to switch gears to some major national news that you're writing about before you go. We are seeing mobilizations across the country in response to an ICE agent shooting and killing an American citizen in Minneapolis. You wrote in The Nation that protesters should target ICE's corporate collaborators. That's what you call them, "corporate collaborators." While most of the focus of the protest movement right now is against ICE itself, who are those corporate collaborators? Why would this be an effective strategy for those who are activated by the events of the last week, not to mention the last year?

Eric Blanc: I think so many people feel powerless that we see ICE agents gunning down both immigrants and non-immigrants alike now. They want to know what can be done. It does feel to me that, obviously, the protests are useful for making it clear we don't support this, but it's not so obvious how that directly stops ICE. The question is, how do we stop ICE? What we point out in the article is that ICE can't function without the active support of the private sector.

It's dependent on major corporations for its logistics, back-end, and for many of its operations. For instance, Amazon hosts its web services. Palantir is deeply involved. Also, you have major corporations who are doing all sorts of other things that you wouldn't even know in the public were involved. Dell, UPS, FedEx, Motorola, Comcast, AT&T, Home Depot, and Lowe's. If a movement decides that it's going to pressure these companies to break their ties from ICE, and I think that we should, and that's a really strategic thing, we've already seen in this country how effective that can be.

Think about the Tesla takedown, which pressured Elon Musk essentially out of the White House. Think about the mass pressure that got Jimmy Kimmel rehired at Disney. The reality is we have direct leverage over companies. We can boycott them, not just in general, but I would suggest starting with one-day boycotts, which you can really measure. You can have employees call in sick. You can have leverage over these companies because they depend on our money, and they depend on our labor to function. This is a really smart strategic turn.

I would argue that if we're able to win that fight, and it is a winnable fight, that is going to be the type of mass-organizing that's going to put the movement in a position to stop Trump's anti-democratic maneuvers, which I think are almost inevitable in 2026 and 2028. You need to be able to essentially force the private sector and the rest of the pillars of institutional support for the regime to break from the regime if we're going to have any chance of not just ending ISIS horrors against undocumented people and the broader American public, but in saving American democracy.

Brian Lehrer: Eric Blanc, assistant professor of Labor Studies at Rutgers, author of the Substack laborpolitics.com, and a contributor to Jacobin and The Nation. Eric, thank you very much.

Eric Blanc: Thanks for having me on.

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