After Mamdani's First Months: The Maitan Question Comes Due
First time in English: Livio Maitan's "Errors of the GCR"
TL;DRIn March 1978, Livio Maitan wrote the most rigorous self-criticism in Fourth International history. The Gruppi Comunisti Rivoluzionari had stayed too long inside the PCI’s bureaucratic transmission belts and missed what was new and maturing outside them. We publish his document, Gli errori dei GCR, in English below for the first time.The contemporary parallel runs the other way. The DSA’s dirty-stay strategy has just produced Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty in New York and a near-doubling of NYC DSA’s dues-paying membership during the campaign. Maitan never wrote the criticism of an entryist organisation that succeeded. He never had to. The question only arises now: what does the chapter do when its own candidate, in his first weeks, retains the NYPD commissioner who oversaw the Gaza-solidarity crackdowns? The hardest test of entry is not the betrayal of the mass party. It is the day-one concession of the entryist’s own elected official.
In March 1978, Livio Maitan sat down in Rome to write the most rigorous self-criticism in Fourth International history. Gli errori dei GCR is a forensic examination of how the Gruppi Comunisti Rivoluzionari squandered Italy’s revolutionary moment. The document, published below for the first time in English, is not gentle. Maitan identified a fatal strategic hesitation, a psychological and structural embedding within the PCI and CGIL that blinded his organisation to the forces gathering outside the bureaucratic transmission belts. The GCR arrived at the crucial phases of the great ascent, he wrote, ‘in a situation of very grave crisis and in the practical impossibility of really influencing the movement.’
That document has been read for nearly fifty years as the definitive analysis of why entry into mass reformist parties tends to fail. It is. But Maitan was diagnosing one species of failure: the failure to influence a betraying bureaucracy when the dynamic moves outside it. He never wrote the criticism of an entryist organisation that succeeded. He never had to. The question only arises now.
It arrived on a Tuesday morning in November when Zohran Mamdani won the New York mayoralty as a Democratic Socialists of America candidate, and again in January when his first major appointment confirmed the price.
The Numbers Maitan Did Not See Coming
The dirty-stay strategy was always a bet against history. The wager: socialists would use the Democratic ballot line to build a mass base, construct an independent machine within the capitalist party, and eventually orchestrate a split to form a workers’ party. The theory required a delicate dialectic. Use the Democrats tactically while maintaining strategic independence. Keep DSA candidates accountable to the socialist organisation rather than the party whip.
The numbers from the Mamdani campaign are not what the dirty-stay’s critics, including this publication, expected. NYC DSA had 5,910 dues-paying members in October 2024. By December 2025 it had 13,145, nearly doubling during the campaign. National DSA dues-paying membership rose from 50,713 to 92,912 in the same period, recovering from a long post-2021 trough. The chapter outgrew its Lower East Side office and is looking for new headquarters. The ‘Organizing for Power’ programme described in Jacobin presents the chapter as Mamdani’s political home and as the organised pressure that will hold him to a ‘Mamdani mandate’ through canvassing and campaign infrastructure rather than party-state fusion.
This is not what the GCR’s diaspora looked like. It is the opposite. The dirty-stay produced an electoral victory, the electoral victory produced a recruitment surge, and the chapter is now larger and denser than at any point since 2021. The Revolutionary Communists of America, who featured in earlier drafts of this argument as the dynamic alternative drawing radicalised youth out of DSA, have not produced verifiable numbers to back the claim. Their growth narrative traces back to their own publications. The Italian parallel was Lotta Continua and Potere Operaio drawing tens of thousands. The American case is not analogous and we should stop pretending it is.
So the original argument fails on contact with the data. The DSA is not being bypassed by the dynamic. The dirty-stay strategy, by the standard its proponents set themselves, has just been vindicated.
Which is precisely the harder problem.
Tisch on Day One
The PCI was always going to betray. The GCR’s task, in Maitan’s framing, was to be positioned for the betrayal: to recognise it when it came, to win the radicalising base when the leadership balked, to demonstrate the alternative outside. Maitan’s tragedy was that the GCR did the work too late. The betrayal arrived; the GCR was not in shape to capitalise on it.
Mamdani is not a betrayer. He is the dirty-stay’s argument made flesh. He is also, already, making the concessions to the apparatus that any socialist mayor must make to govern a state machine he has inherited intact.
Jessica Tisch was appointed NYPD commissioner by Eric Adams in November 2024. Mamdani retained her. The decision was widely read in the New York press as a signal to Jewish leaders and to police-reform sceptics that he would govern within a conventional safety-and-order frame. It was also, in the reading of the 3,500 New York public defenders and legal aid lawyers who signed an open letter calling for her dismissal, the retention of a commissioner whose force has given ‘particular attention’ to pro-Palestinian protests, including riot-gear arrests at Gaza-solidarity encampments and training programmes run with the Anti-Defamation League that treat keffiyehs and watermelon imagery as antisemitic markers. Tisch is openly Jewish, openly pro-Israel, and has hosted Israeli police delegations during her tenure. The mainstream press uses the term ‘pro-Israel’. The activist and left-legal networks use stronger language. The substance is the same.
This is not Maitan’s problem. It is the problem Maitan never had to think about, because the GCR never elected anyone. The dirty-stay produced its mayor; the mayor immediately produced his first concession; the concession is one the chapter’s most committed Palestine-solidarity members cannot tolerate without ceasing to be themselves. Mamdani annulled Adams’s pro-Israel executive decrees in his first hours. He kept the commissioner who polices the protests against Israel. The first signals are precisely the dual signals you would expect from a socialist who has won state office and must now run it.
The NYC DSA Anti-War Working Group circulated an internal memo in November listing demands of the incoming administration, focused almost entirely on Palestine-related policy. The substantive content of those demands has not become public statement. The memo exists; the public escalation does not. That is the gap the chapter must now decide whether to close.
The obvious reading is that DSA has been captured by its own electoral success. But that is not quite right either. Capture would mean the chapter ceased to demand. The Anti-War Working Group memo demands. What is not yet clear is whether the chapter has the discipline mechanism to make those demands cost something when they are ignored.
The Indicator That Did Not Move
The leading indicator is what the most dynamic Palestinian-led formations do with the new mayoralty. The answer, so far, is not very much.
The Palestinian Youth Movement and National SJP declared a formal boycott of DSA in 2024 after the chapter’s failure to enforce its own BDS commitments against Jamaal Bowman. The boycott has not lifted. There has been no joint statement, no rapprochement, no public reconciliation. The rescinded pro-Israel decrees produced praise from Palestine advocates as a class but did not produce a reopening of relations between the most radical Palestinian-led student and youth networks and the largest socialist organisation in the country. They are still organising at one remove from each other, even with a DSA mayor in office.
That is the data point Maitan would have read first. The strategic test is not whether DSA grows. It clearly does. The test is whether the most radical sectors of the movement recognise it as their organisation, and they do not. The encampments did not produce DSA’s recruitment surge. Mamdani did. The two movements are running on parallel tracks, and the dirty-stay has not narrowed the distance between them.
Read again the sequence. The DSA’s BDS and Palestine Solidarity Working Group was dechartered in March 2022 by the National Political Committee, its website disabled, its steering committee members barred from national leadership for a year. The cause: the working group had called for Bowman’s expulsion after his Iron Dome vote and his J Street trip to Israel. The chapter sacrificed the working group to keep the congressman. The congressman crossed every subsequent line. The 2024 NPC eventually withdrew AOC’s endorsement after her panel conflated anti-Zionism with antisemitism. The discipline came, in both cases, after the political moment had passed.
The Mamdani case will not allow that delay. He is governing now. Tisch is in post now. The encampments will return, in some form, the next time the war does. The discipline question for NYC DSA is not whether to act after the moment; it is whether to act during it.
The Cadre Question, Reformulated
Maitan’s 1978 self-criticism identified three interconnected failures. The fetishisation of the mass party. The failure to recognise independent formations. A ‘too liberal structure of the organisation’ that favoured centrifugal tendencies and organisational dilettantism. The DSA exhibits the third in a form Maitan would have recognised, but with the polarity reversed.
The ‘big tent’ or ‘multi-tendency’ model was crucial for rapid growth after 2016. Social democrats, anarchists, communists, all welcome. Maitan’s critique suggests such a structure becomes a liability during periods of intense class struggle: it favours dilettantism and prevents the organisation from acting with strategic unity. ‘For long years,’ Maitan lamented, ‘no national cadre school took place.’ The membership adhered to the Fourth International not through deep assimilation of Marxist methodology but as a vague consensus to the critique of the traditional bureaucracy. When the pressure of 1968 hit, the organisation lacked the cohesive, disciplined leadership necessary to navigate turbulent waters.
The DSA’s problem is not centrifugal departure. It is centripetal absorption. The chapter has nearly doubled in a year. The new layer was recruited by an electoral mobilisation, not by political education. The ‘big tent’ is not leaking; it is flooding. The pollution Maitan worried about, elements ‘who did not possess the requirements of the Leninist militant’, has a different source now: not entrants from outside Marxism, but mayoral-campaign volunteers who joined for one candidate and have no organisational formation beyond him.
This is the structural risk the 2025 convention did not resolve. The factions, Bread & Roses, Marxist Unity Group, Reform & Revolution, Groundwork, Socialist Majority, produced duelling programmes and competing claims to organisational discipline. The convention did not pass a binding rule prohibiting Democratic ballot lines. The NPC’s Workers Deserve More platform emphasises pressure on Democrats and the building of mass working-class organisations without enshrining a clean break or a party-surrogate model in statutory language. The strategic ambiguity that allowed the dirty-stay to grow is the same ambiguity that will make the Mamdani test harder to pass. You cannot discipline a mayor on the basis of a strategy you have refused to write down.
The Spoiler Logic Reversed
The GCR hesitated to break with the reformist PCI because they feared being labelled splitters who would weaken the working class against fascism. The DSA hesitates to break with the Democrats because of the spoiler logic: if the socialist runs independent, the right wins. This was the primary mechanism of imaginary discipline imposed on socialists by liberals throughout the Trump era.
Mamdani’s election scrambles the logic. The dirty-stay produced a victory, in a Democratic primary, that the spoiler narrative said could not happen. That is the vindication. But it produces its own discipline, in the opposite direction. The chapter that made Mamdani is now under pressure not to embarrass him. The Anti-War Working Group memo stays internal. The public criticism is restrained. The discipline mechanism that failed to operate against Bowman in 2021 because his expulsion would have broken the relationship with a high-profile elected official now faces the same problem at a higher altitude. Mamdani is the mayor of New York. Expelling him, or even publicly censuring him, is not just an organisational decision. It is a political event with citywide consequences.
The pressure runs the other way too. The genocide in Gaza has not stopped. The encampments will return. PYM and SJP are not going to recognise Tisch’s NYPD as anything other than what it is. The chapter must decide, in real time and in public, whether the Mamdani administration’s posture on Palestine is acceptable or unacceptable. The dirty-stay’s defenders will counsel patience: give the mayor time, win concrete gains, do not let the perfect become the enemy of the good. The dirty-stay’s critics will demand action: discipline now, or the relationship with the most radical sectors of the movement is over for a generation.
There is no neutral position. There is no balance to strike. The chapter that produces a mayor must either discipline the mayor or accept that it cannot. Either answer changes what DSA is.
What Maitan Could Not Anticipate
Maitan’s diagnosis assumed entry would fail. The structural assumption, inherited from Pablo and Mandel’s postwar perspectives, was that any major social upsurge would flow through the traditional mass parties, that revolutionaries needed to be positioned inside these parties to influence the leftward-moving rank and file when the leadership inevitably betrayed the movement. The whole framework was about being ready for the betrayal.
The Mamdani case is the case the framework did not anticipate. Not because the DSA replaced the Democratic Party, which it did not. Not because Mamdani will refuse to make the necessary concessions, which he is already making. But because the dirty-stay, in this instance, produced a candidate who is not the betraying bureaucracy and not the substitute for it. He is something new: a socialist who has won executive office in the largest city in the United States while remaining nominally accountable to a socialist organisation, governing a state machine he did not build, recruited largely by activists who joined his campaign and only secondarily joined the chapter that endorsed him.
The question Maitan could not pose is the question DSA now faces. When the entryist organisation produces its own elected official, when that official must immediately concede to the apparatus he has inherited, when the most radical sectors of the movement that elected him are still organising at one remove from his party, what is the chapter for? Is it the political home of the mayor, the organising vehicle that holds him to the mandate, or the propaganda formation that will discipline him when he breaks with the movement?
The honest answer is that nobody yet knows. The chapter has the institutional density to be the second. It has not yet produced the public discipline that would prove it can be the third. It is being pulled, by the gravity of the office it helped fill, towards being the first.
The Universalisation
This question is not American. It is the question every successful socialist electoralism faces.
Your Party will face it if it accumulates more councillors and MPs. The same problem in a different register: when the entry strategy produces its first elected officials, who disciplines them when they break? Die Linke faced a version of the question for two decades and produced both the BSW split and a series of governing-coalition compromises that have hollowed out the membership. La France Insoumise faces it now with Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s positioning around the New Popular Front and the long-running tension between the parliamentary group and the movement base. Anticapitalistas saw the trap clearly enough to leave Podemos in 2020, but only after Vistalegre had hardened the structure beyond recovery. Each case is different. Each hits the same wall.
Maitan’s framework, developed for organisations that failed to influence betraying bureaucracies, has its hardest application to organisations whose entry strategy succeeded and now must govern without becoming the apparatus they entered. That is the work the Fourth International tradition has not yet done. The Mamdani case is the first test of it on this scale. The Your Party case will be the second.
The Choice, Suspended
Maitan’s 1978 self-criticism was written after the defeat. The GCR had already squandered Italy’s revolutionary moment. The diagnosis was the autopsy.
The DSA is not yet in that position. The chapter has more dues-paying members than at any point in five years. The mayoralty is two months old. The Anti-War Working Group memo exists. The discipline mechanism has not been tested but has not yet been proved to be absent. The leading indicator, the PYM and SJP boycott, has not lifted, but it has not yet hardened into a settled refusal. The space for an answer to the Mamdani question is open. It will not stay open indefinitely.
What Maitan would have wanted to know, looking at this conjuncture, is whether the chapter that elected the mayor can act independently of the mayor. Whether the cadre formation, growing fast and recruited largely by an electoral campaign, can produce the political education that turns 13,000 dues-payers into something other than a mayoral campaign in suspended animation. Whether the relationship with the Palestinian-led formations can be rebuilt on a basis the PYM finds credible, which means on a basis the mayor’s office may not.
The students in the encampments are not waiting for the NPC to resolve its internal debates. The Palestinian Youth Movement is not waiting for DSA to decide whether Tisch is a red line or merely a yellow flag. The genocide is not waiting at all.
History offered the GCR the same choice it is now offering the DSA, but with the polarity reversed. The GCR chose the safety of the institution and spent the next decade writing self-criticisms. The DSA has chosen the risk of the office, which is a different risk. The autopsy, if it has to be written, will not look like Maitan’s. It will be a new document for a problem the Fourth International tradition has not yet had to solve.
The chapter is choosing right now. It does not yet know what it has chosen.
The Errors of the GCR
From Verification of Leninism in Italy 1968-72, in Livio Maitan & Ernest Mandel, Il partito leninista. Originally published in Bandiera Rossa no. 4, 1 March 1978. Translated for Red Mole, March 2026.
The critique of the revolutionary left must include a chapter reserved for the Gruppi Comunisti Rivoluzionari, the Italian section of the Fourth International. A heavy responsibility falls upon us insofar as, having worked for twenty years to build the revolutionary party and having succeeded in certain periods, especially between ‘65 and ‘67, in having a leading role among the critical forces of the left, we arrived at the crucial phases of the great ascent in a situation of very serious crisis and in the practical impossibility of really influencing the movement. Clarifying the errors we have committed is indispensable not only for the purposes of an organic assessment, but also and above all to draw the necessary lessons from them.
The severe blow that was dealt to us with a diaspora of a conspicuous part of our cadres, a blow that would have irreparably swept away any organisation that did not have a historical justification and an international dimension, prevented us from exercising a function as a national force in ‘68-69 with all the easily imaginable consequences. But not even those who made a different choice have managed to register decisive progress on the road to building the revolutionary party, even if some have collaborated in the formation of organisations that were temporarily more substantial than ours.
Beyond the objective obstacles on which we have already dwelt, at the root of our crisis of ‘68 there were very serious errors. First of all, the turn that put an end to entrism was accomplished with a delay due to an underestimation of the forces that were already operating outside the logic of bureaucratic organisations. Having remained too long entangled in these organisations, which were the only channel of contact with social forces, hindered our timely understanding of what new was maturing and prevented us from drawing at the right moment the conclusion that independent action was an indispensable necessity not only to valorise the new ferments, but also to help mature the forces still under the aegis of the bureaucracies.
This underestimation had moreover entailed: a) a tolerance toward forms of application of entrism that did not correspond to the spirit and not even to the letter of congress resolutions, but had relevance insofar as a praxis of this kind distinguished cadres known as Trotskyists and determined in the eyes of many critical militants a misunderstanding of our real positions; b) a delay in the analysis of the student movement and its dynamics; c) an incomprehension of the urgency and the effective possibilities of constituting a youth organisation of the JCR type, at a moment when broad strata of young people, students in the first place, were undergoing the force of attraction of revolutionary positions, abandoning traditional youth organisations.
Furthermore, we had not understood then the limits of the memberships, quite broad, that we had counted in a given period. For many, membership in the Fourth International was not a membership due to assimilation of the theses and methodology of revolutionary Marxism, but rather a consensus with the critique of traditional bureaucracy, formulated by militants who participated in the life of organisations without sectarian qualms, who knew how to provide answers to many theoretical and political questions and appeared as an integral part of an international organisation. The serious error was to have ignored or to have completely underestimated this problem, neglecting, among other things, the indispensable work of militant formation. For many years there was no national cadre school and only very sporadically were local schools held. At the same time, the process of assimilation and selection was hindered by a too ‘liberal’ structure of the organisation which, though originating from the legitimate concern to avoid sectarian crystallisation with all the inevitable deformations, ended up favouring centrifugal tendencies, organisational dilettantism, and the very pollution of the organisation with elements who did not possess the requirements of the Leninist militant.