Zohran Mamdani Needs to Create Popular Assemblies

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 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.

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 on participatory institutions in Latin American cities shows that 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,” in 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 news 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 that 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 bulwark 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.

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.