On Thursday night, New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch accepted the “Happy Warrior Award” at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner at the Waldorf Astoria. Tisch used the occasion to taunt her nominal boss, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, for rejecting the call of the Democratic Socialists of America that he fire her for assaulting anti-ICE protesters and pro-Palestinian demonstrators.

The Al Smith dinner, honoring the one-time New York governor and Democratic presidential candidate, is an annual white tie gathering of New York’s movers and shakers, bringing together politicians, billionaire bankers and CEOs, religious figures, media barons and other dignitaries. This year’s fare, at $5,000 a plate, featured filet mignon and chilled lobster salad. A grinning Mamdani, who mounted the dais amid scattered boos, joined in the standing ovation for the police chief.

Tisch is a Zionist and billionaire heiress whom the “democratic socialist” mayor held over from the Eric Adams administration. She opened her remarks with the crack, “Things got a little hot for me this week. Anyone hiring?”

Just two days before, after the DSA had officially urged him to remove Tisch, Mamdani announced, “Jessica Tisch is the police commissioner. I have no plans to change that.”

At another point in her speech, Tisch alluded to Mamdani’s repeated meetings with Donald Trump—three since the mayor’s election last November—quipping, “There’s a lot of talk these days that the mayor’s friends don’t like me. That’s simply not true. President Trump and I get along great!”

Mamdani has said nothing about this public humiliation—exposing the fraud of his anti-establishment and “socialist” pretensions—at the hands of his police commissioner. As of Friday, his office had issued no statement on Tisch’s remarks. Likewise the DSA’s website Democratic Left and its unofficial house organ Jacobin.

In the run-up to the Al Smith event, both the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post (whose owner, Jeff Bezos, is the second richest man in the world, with a net worth of $370 billion) published editorials supporting Tisch. The Post editorial, titled “Mamdani wisely ignores the DSA and sides with his top cop,” gave the mayor a verbal pat on the head.

Over the past month, the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist pretensions of Mamdani and the DSA have suffered one blow after another, as the Mamdani administration dutifully acceded to the demands of its Wall Street and military-intelligence masters.

Last week, on October 8, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs fired seven shots into the SUV of 28-year-old Dominican Republic native Oscar Belgal in the Marble Hill section of the Bronx. Belgal’s five-year-old son, who was in the back seat, escaped injury, but a bullet lodged in Belgal’s neck. Protesters descended on the crowded commercial and residential site and the New York Police Department (NYPD) Strategic Response Group (SRG) was marshaled to suppress them and protect the ICE Gestapo as Belgal was taken into ICE custody.

The previous day, Mamdani snubbed pro-Palestinian demonstrations called to mark the third anniversary of Israel’s launching of genocide against Gaza on October 7, 2023, and instead attended a Zionist vigil condemning the Hamas raid of that day. Pro-Palestinian protesters rallied against the Zionist vigil and chanted “traitor Mamdani.” The anti-Zionist protest was endorsed by the New York Young Democratic Socialists of America and four university YDSA clubs. The parent DSA organization demanded that the YDSA and the campus YDSA clubs revoke their endorsements, to which the youth branches capitulated with the exception of The New School YDSA.

On September 24, the NYPD arrested some 104 participants at a demonstration outside the United Nations called by Jewish Voice for Peace to protest the appearance of Israeli war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu before the UN General Assembly. Mamdani had previously pledged to arrest Netanyahu, against whom the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant, when he came to New York. While Mandani and Tisch’s cops were rounding up the anti-genocide protesters, Netanyahu was calling Israel’s victims “barbarians,” “butchers” and “the worst mass murderers on earth.”

Three days before, Mamdani met with Trump at Gracie Mansion, after which the two held a friendly joint press conference. The following day, Mamdani’s fascist “partner” went before the UN General Assembly and threatened to “annihilate” Iran and “drive them into hell.” This could not have taken Mamdani by surprise. Their previous meeting, at the White House, was on February 26. Two days later, Trump launched the US war of aggression against Iran.

The DSA and Jacobin magazine attempt to rationalize Mamdani’s alliance with Trump and his defense of Tisch as “compromises” that inevitably accompany the task of “managing” the capitalist state for the supposed benefit of working people. In reality, Mamdani’s brief stint as the political head of America’s biggest city and center of global capitalist finance has thoroughly exposed the falsity and duplicity of the DSA’s entire reformist perspective. The DSA’s most prominent representative is not leveraging the state, he is abjectly serving the interests of the class that controls it, as he, as part of the state machine, must.

The entire program of “reforming” the state and the system it defends is bankrupt. Moreover, it reflects definite class interests that are hostile to those of the working class. As Marxists have long held, the capitalist state cannot be reformed, it must be overthrown, dismantled and replaced by a workers’ state established through a socialist revolution led by the working class.

Mamdani and the DSA represent privileged sections of the middle class, which seek not the abolition of wage slavery, inequality and imperialist war, but rather a division of the spoils, currently monopolized by the financial oligarchy, that is more favorable to them. As the escalating crisis of capitalism makes class compromise impossible and fuels a massive growth of working class struggles, the Mamdanis and DSAs of the world join forces with the counterrevolution. Their greatest fear is the emergence of an independent movement of the working class.