Faber
Cuervo, 2/12/2025
Translated by Tlaxcala
If socialism were a “sin” or a crime, why would a
socialist candidate have won the mayoralty of New York, the most representative
city of capitalism? Socialism is the highest achievement to which
politics—understood as care for others—can aspire. Authentic socialists seek to
make human freedoms effective, those that truly guarantee dignity. Socialism is
“good living”: that nothing necessary should be lacking for any of us, without
distinction of skin color, beliefs, sexual orientation or social class. No one
is free until they have secured their freedom to be well nourished, their
freedom to obtain good health care, good education, a safe home, and a
dignified job. Capitalism is a raffle cage of hamsters running endlessly in
circles so that every two weeks they can buy the few freedoms the market offers
them.
That Zohran Mamdani, a socialist of Indian origin, has
conquered the New York mayoralty is a breath of fresh air, the possibility of
spreading socialist thought, refining the ideological line, reorganizing social
bases, and strengthening a great party of manual and intellectual workers not
only in the United States but in Latin America and the world.
The rejection, obstruction and crushing of socialist
projects have historically been ordered from Washington and New York, the
anti-communist capitals of the planet. Like an extension of the Ku Klux Klan,
they demonized everything suspected of being “red”; on U.S. soil any allusion
to socialism was prohibited, McCarthyism was born, figures accused of being
communist were persecuted and expelled (Charlie Chaplin, the great comic actor,
among them), and the labor movement was dismantled.
But history keeps surprising us with its dialectical
turns and paradoxes. Today, in the 21st century, in the year 2025, while
another Henry Kissinger reappears with his Operation Condor that filled Latin
America with dictatorships that demonized, persecuted, tortured and
assassinated thousands of socialists, a migrant with socialist thinking wins
the mayoralty of New York. It happens that the new emperor, Donald Trump,
listens in his Oval Office to the “extraterrestrial” Mamdani, accepted into the
political sphere reluctantly.
Socialism has slipped into the country that banned it. It finds its way into the Big Apple, strolls down Wall Street. “I would prefer not to,” Bartleby would say. But this is an idea that has circulated for more than a century and a half—an idea forced to face attacks of all kinds, from all sorts of civil, ecclesiastical, and military authorities. They will have to learn to live with it; no one knows what they will try to do to topple it, just as they did in many other countries.
To survive, capitalism cleverly allowed the
establishment of the Welfare State during part of the 20th century. That
Welfare State was a small-scale reformist democratic socialism, which they had
to accept to stop the social revolutions led by leftist politicians. It was
better to give up something than to lose everything. That is how Europe
achieved a certain stability, avoided new wars, created professional middle
classes and a proletariat content with wages and living conditions. But such
concessions by capital cannot last long. Capital will always seek to multiply
itself through the exploitation of labor, the plunder of national resources, or
inter-imperialist wars. The laws of accumulation and infinitely increasing
returns are the soul of capitalism; without them capitalism does not exist.
That is why this system of production and consumption is soulless—it truly has
no soul. The accumulation of wealth is simultaneously the accumulation of
misery.
A first neoliberal wave then emerged, inaugurated by
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, echoed in Colombia by César Gaviria, the
destroyer of national agriculture and industry. This led to the defeat of
non-traditional parties, of “socialists” and of the leftist movement in
general, which entered an era of ideological crisis and paralysis of the
working masses. In the world, there was a triumph of capitalism which a
political philosopher called “the end of history.” All that domination of
capital was consolidated by the fall of the Berlin Wall and of the regimes of
“real socialism,” which in reality were a fake socialism.
Socialism remains a utopia—a political and economic
project yet to be built. And progress would be the realization of utopias.
Socialism is empathy, care for the House of All (Laudato Si), togetherness,
love, cooperation, justice; it is walking together toward the utopias proposed
by great political philosophers, by Indigenous ancestors. It is therefore an
option—the option of all the oppressed of the world. Socialism is neither a sin
nor a crime.
To advance toward socialism, the left must reinvent
itself. Without struggle, without organization, without thought, without
political consciousness and presence, without connection to the grassroots,
nothing is achieved. Each country has its own history; each left has a résumé
of struggles, achievements, virtues and mistakes. The path of the Colombian
left is not the same as that of the Argentine or Venezuelan left. Therefore,
the path to follow is different for each one.
The Latin American left can learn from Mamdani’s
victory in New York. How did this 34-year-old succeed in winning over an
electorate conditioned against socialism? Mamdani was able to interpret the
urgent needs of New Yorkers; his platform highlighted proposals for free
childcare, free rapid buses financed by taxing the rich, and affordable housing
through rent freezes. He attracted undocumented migrants with his plan to
protect them from the brutal raids of Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
through massive non-violent protests like school walkouts. Mamdani won workers
over by presenting himself as an anti-elitist, in favor of higher wages and
fewer oligarchs. He sided with the working class’s right to economic security
and dignity; to achieve this, he promised to make billionaires pay. In this
way, he managed to channel USAmericans’ anger toward power groups and big
corporations.
Mamdani’s campaign was also helped by the decline of
the tepid “centrism” of the Democratic Party, the last New York mayors who were
anything but progressive, the fatigue Republican voters are beginning to feel
toward the emperor’s useless authoritarianism, and a broken status quo. The
victory ultimately came from millennial youth, workers, liberal middle-class
women, and disenchanted Democrats. Voters saw positively his outsider
temperament, his democratic socialism, his empathy toward Palestinians, and his
distance from corporate and traditional party sponsorship.
Some of the main lessons of the Democratic Socialists
of America movement (Mamdani’s party) have to do with identity linked to
working-class consciousness, as well as recognizing the main popular demands
permanently denied by plutocratic neoliberalism dominating the U.S. political
spectrum. No less important was valuing the decline of traditional parties,
particularly the most radical right-wing sector.
The Latin American left can look to the mirror of
these atypical elections that gave victory to the least likely candidate, who,
with a precise strategy and a 90,000-volunteer team, overturned the
predictions. The left can spread—patiently and pedagogically—the theses of
Latin-American-style socialism. To advance from reformist democratic socialism
toward pure socialism, where the capital-labor contradiction can be overcome.
The left has a historical accumulation of social struggles allowing the correction
of errors, the refinement of political project objectives, the reorganization
of cadres and militant bases. It will not start from zero: its historical
legacy is rich.
The Colombian left has been persecuted by blood and
fire. Since the first strikes, massacres of workers have been the official
response. Recall the banana-plantation massacre. Leftist parties have been
repressed, sabotaged, and massacred. From the founding of the first Marxist
party, the Revolutionary Socialist Party, with María Cano as co-founder,
through the Communist Party, the Patriotic Union, and today the Historical
Pact, which they want to eliminate through administrative vetoes and sanctions.
The union movement has also been swept away: many unions were dismantled,
others destroyed by harassment and assassinations. As a result of the
persecution of the legal political movement, socialists and revolutionaries
were pushed to create armed resistance, which led to a bloody war where
uniformed people fell on both sides.
The conditions that demonize all leftist organizations
persist in the country despite the fact that a progressive government is now
leading public dynamics for the first time. The challenges for the Colombian
left include rebuilding its social bases; deindustrialization caused by
misguided economic liberalization, food imports, and the absence of
reindustrialization led to the loss of many workers from its grassroots
support. Added to this is the prohibition of forming unions in the new
semi-industrial and service companies. The service sector employs many young
workers, barely trained to perform their jobs but ill-equipped and unwilling to
defend their rights through organized militancy.
Another challenge for the left is democratizing
participation in major decisions. Bureaucratic cliques have stalled the growth
and strength of the political movement, generating division and discontent
among the popular bases. An urgent task would be to unite rural and urban
social movements; to also unite university youth, teachers, and the artistic
movement with peasants and workers. It is likewise necessary to embrace, in
public discourse, the defense of the central role of manual and intellectual workers
and their political right to influence the nation’s development model.
It is essential to identify the main economic burdens
that overwhelm Colombian workers, small and medium merchants and entrepreneurs,
students, professionals, and single mothers—in order to include them in a
government program. Colombians are enslaved by unjustified charges and taxes:
high public service costs, tolls, notary fees, chambers of commerce fees,
rising rents, banking fees, security and coexistence taxes, high VAT, high
property taxes.
Why must a house obtained through so much effort pay
taxes? Why tax the inheritance of a family asset? Why tax “occasional gains”
from the sale of a property? In “communist” China, no tax is levied on housing;
homes are untouchable because of their function—they are a place to live in
peace. The writer Oscar Wilde was right when he said in his essay The Soul
of Man Under Socialism that “private property is a real curse (…) Property
imposes so many duties that its possession becomes a real breeding-ground of
annoyance. An endless series of responsibilities, a continual devotion to
business, an intolerable anxiety: such is the result.”
In socialism, private property disappears and becomes
collective property. The defenders of capitalism say socialism is bad because
it destroys individual rights and privileges collective ones. More than a
century ago, the Irish writer responded to this claim: “The acceptance of
private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing
man with what he possesses. It has completely demoralized Individualism by
making its objective material profit instead of spiritual progress. To such an
extent that men have come to believe that what matters is having, forgetting
that what matters is being (…) Individualism is therefore the end we shall
reach through socialism.”
Zohran Mamdani, mayor-elect, intends to raise funds to
finance social programs and empower New York’s working class. He will be a
reformist socialist, maneuvering within the heart of corporatist economics. He
will try to improve labor rights, create municipal food stores and public
housing. He will seek to positively change the lives of residents, to manage
capitalism in the interest of workers, looking to the long-term
self-emancipation of those same workers. He will govern limited by bourgeois
laws, but he begins at capitalism’s jugular the path toward a world without
exploitation or oppression. Any achievement in favor of ordinary New Yorkers
will challenge the predatory and warmongering policies of that country.
Socialism is much more than a better distribution of
wealth for all. Socialism seeks to break with capitalism—a system of production
and consumption that has already lived through its best era but continues to
produce inequality and death in torrents. The great problem of capitalism is
the contradiction between capital and labor. The hiring of labor appropriates
the surplus or surplus value that obscenely enriches capitalists, while social
impoverishment grows like foam. Socialism aims for workers to control
production and investment, while the State carries out the basic needs or
fundamental rights. That is, it achieves the overcoming of the capital/labor
contradiction through the supremacy and valuing of labor, which is truly what
creates a nation’s wealth. In socialism, workers leave anonymity and become
their own rulers. Hierarchy and exclusion are replaced by intelligence and the
creativity of labor. It is under a socialist system of production that human
freedoms and dignity can be guaranteed. It is a political economy totally
different from that of capitalism. Socialism is neither a sin nor a crime.
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