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.
