how are you going to pay?
It’s 2027 and the wealthy have fled New York. To fund the free buses he promised, Shāh Mamdani auctioned off Long Island to Jeff Bezos, who turned the landmass into an Amazon Data Center overnight. Out of spite from losing the bid, Elon Musk spent one of his various billions to develop a new technology: The Circuit Hyper-automated User Maintenance Parametric to restrict X formerly known as Twitter from being accessed by anyone in the Five Boroughs. No-one in New York has seen a rage-bait hot-take for 6 months. The millionaires stupid enough to stick around have been shuttled to make-shift Gulags in Lower Manhattan and the Meatpacking District. Curiously, Shāh Mamdani’s government supermarkets have an overstock of Halal steak. The Adnan echoes through Times Square daily. The Charging Bull is a decapitated husk. The Statue of Liberty has been fitted with a khimar hijab. Luxury apartments rattle, abandoned and charred. The absence of Twitter access has lead to warring factions of Azure-haired Transgender Radicals, Black Lives Matter Thugs and Intifada Jihadists clashing like Olympian lightening in the streets. The Left is eating itself. It’s all very Warriors 1979. How could we have been so foolish? It is everything they warned us about. Marxist Communist Sharia Law arrived in America. And its here to stay.
The intravenous line of conservatism typically reserved for pumping culture-war paranoia and neurodegenerative prions into the households of white American Boomers takes a break from cry-baby whining about everything wrong with the so-called greatest nation on Earth so the FOX News anchors can take turns grabbing the studio camera, filling the frame with their rage-red faces, saliva effervescing from their mouth and yelling “socialism doesn’t work!” in a billionaire-funded fugue state. All triggered by the election of the first muslim democratic socialist, Zohran Mamdani as the Mayor of New York.
When the sock-puppet capitalists aren’t calling for the culling of the homeless, the more positive parts of their oeuvre involves evangelising about the importance of individual willpower, discipline and hard-work to achieve the American dream.
Nothing is impossible in the totally-not-rigged free market… Until you curve their purview towards some civic adjustment that might make people’s lives collective easier—like free buses shuttling liberal New Yorkers to their capitalist grinding mill more effortlessly—and watch closely as glassy-eyed, boot-strap idealists regress into pessimistic defeatists.
How are you going to pay?
Nothing is impossible (except finding the money to pay for things that are free-at-the-point-of-use). Having nice things as a society means we’d have to let the Blacks™ and other undesirables have nice things.
Is it not embarrassing that brave little Israel receives so much juicy foreign aid and gets to enjoy law-enshrined universal, tax-funded basic healthcare ranking in the top ten best medical systems in the world while US Republicans will shut down the whole government because the meddling Democrats won’t let them cut poor people’s health benefits? I’m sure immigrants are to blame somehow.
How are you going to pay?
A tight-rope question in the afterlife of McCarthyist alarmism where “socialist” is thrown around like the weary knuckleball of an arthritic, octogenarian pitcher. Age has made it more an incoherent, political epithet.
And don’t you dare say the wealthy need to cough up! Those poor, diligent, job-creating, cutie-patooties have gone through enough. They’ve earned every penny, goddamnit. Let them enjoy their private jets in peace. Did I mention they’re all so handsome? As a temporarily embarrassed millionaire myself, I’ll be damned if I let anyone redistribute the hard-exploited wealth of the rich that I aspire to be.
So again, I ask you—how are you going to pay for that?
The left is torn over the mayoral victory of a self-described democratic socialist in New York in a way that is, frankly, uninteresting. In one corner, “let-people-enjoy-things” philosophers attempt to eschew despair. This electoral win represents a step towards a hopeful future. In another corner, more learned marxists point out that Mamdani’s capitulations across the campaign already reveal him as the most recent raw meat to be ground up in the capitalist machine of American politics.
Obama’s pseudo-revolutionary imperialism, the democratic establishment’s neutralisation of Sanders and Ocasia-Cortez’s champagne socialist bourgeoisie activism juxtaposed with Israeli capitulations have left a spectrum of disappointment ranging from a yucky, lingering taste to political PTSD in the mouth of the western left. We’ve been burnt before. Mamdani seems like the same kind of different. The world cannot afford the unchecked capitalism of American imperialism but, perhaps more importantly, the American left cannot afford to have its heart broken a forth time.
Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn were my entryways into politics which progressed into Marxism which progressed into Black Radical Thought which has now settled in a sort of, monk-like enlightenment that allows me to snobbishly hover over all with a judgemental tone of what I believe everybody seems to be doing wrong. My distance from America disrupts my investment in a way that widens my scope. I am always right and it is a burden. Everyone’s first mistake is investing in Mamdani beyond political instrumentation.
Ultra-leftists who believe Mamdani to be pointless or worse—an actively sabotaging entity in the fight for class consciousness—make an excellent a point. One of my most persistent hyper-fixations has been on Nazi Germany—plagued by questions like “what were the Nuremberg Trials like?” and “what happened to trans people?” or the most obvious: “How did Germany descend into fascism?” Of course, there’s never a satisfyingly succinct answer to how the latter happened but one can speculate about the events that didn’t happen.
In 1925, The German Communist Party (KPD) lead by Ernst Thälmann sought to overthrow the liberal democracy of the Weimar Republic. They established themselves as a natural anti-body to the rise of the Nazi Party. However, they also developed an adversarial relationship with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) as “social fascists”.
The Iron Front—a coalition comprised of German social democrats, trade unionists, and democratic socialists—sought to defend liberal democracy from far-left communists and the authoritarian right.
As Hitler’s power grew, Thälmann proposed a coalition with the Iron Front—calling for collaborative general strikes—who refused in favour of exhausting the state-governed channels of resistance. Later, Thälmann called for a coalition of liberals, social democrats, and even conservatives to violently overthrow against the fascistic threat. By that time, Hitler had already risen to power.
When I look at Mamdani, I don’t see “a social fascist”. I don’t see a secret harbinger of radical change nor do I see a stumbling block for class consciousness. What I see when I look at Zohran Mamdani is opportunity, an access point, a pivotal moment in time that doesn’t dictate the future but throws multiversal chips in the air. They’ll land where they may.
Any opinion of Mamdani is inherently tempered by lack of proximity to his area of governance. He exists to non-New Yorkers as a ceremonial means to a larger question: How can this person’s electoral success help people suffering in the Anglo-American heart of empire and beyond?
Mamdani’s legacy is single, democratic socialist success story in an electoral political system ravaged with tentacles of conservative doctrine. The American individualism of a lefty in office hits like lightening, dispelling the myth that it can never land in the same place. My lack of faith in the colonial infrastructure precludes me from seeing anyone welcomed into the fray as anything other than an accessory.
The left of the Weimar Republic greased the runway for a failed art-school painter to waltz into the German seat of power and become western civilisation’s foremost barometer for evil. What can we do differently? How do we seize opportunities and how do we let them pass us by?
Every year, when a Black performer finds themselves snubbed by the American Award’s circuit—the same conversation happens year after year.
We need to divest and build our own awards show.
The constant reiteration of what needs to be done feels like watching a collective unravelling, the yearly humiliation ritual where my brethren and I bond over disrespect from the Academies, declaring we don’t care but never looking away. I ultimately don’t really care whether one divests from the Oscars or tunes in. When it comes to media consumption, I try to practice a discipline of alignment. I make music so it is professionally expedient for me to watch the Grammy’s with the intimate knowledge that they’re not constructed to service my personal tastes or interests. I’ve fostered compartments in myself; where enjoyment, intrigue, investment, ethics and social utility all occupy different units.
Politics faces similar cycles of unravelling—similar reiterations of what needs to be done that, in order to confront, require a similar cordoning off of external stimuli into inner compartments.
What needs to be done is simple:
We need to build strong, left-wing movements and a vanguard party.
The need is as simple as The Rock’s answer to the question: “How do I look like you?” It’s simple. He says. All you need to do is work-out eight hours a day. Difficulty comes in realisation.
It is not defeatist or pessimistic to state plainly how little influence leftists command within the imperial core. The historical punitivity levelled against leftists ranges from electoral ridicule to carceral violence to judicial murder. The overarching strategy to acquire power has been nowhere near as relentless or organised in its pursuit of victory in the way the conservatives have been eking towards for decades. This is by cruel and intelligent design. The historical snuffing out of global, left-wing movements by imperialists means that energy floods towards the perfection of theory as a matter of safety. The success of an anti-capitalist future will rely on both surgical precision and blunt-force instrumentation. This is what is most crucial about Mamdani—his ability to present himself as an electoral figure unwilling to glaze American capitalism is an optical victory that required a deft touch. We need optical victories. We need material victories. We need to win the culture war. We need to win the actual war. These needs require fuel, dedication, strength, focus, delusional senses of bravery, successful executions and tactical clarity.
But how are you going to pay?
Sometimes, I wish leftists were the notorious boogeyman that conservatives paint them to be. I wish the New York Post’s cover of Zohran Mamdani was the reality. I wish Antifa was an well-orchestrated organisation that the right-wing is trying to pretend it is. These fictions are ploys by the far-right factions to delegitimise the liberal opposition (whose political neglect has lead Anglo-American society into the disrepair that the authoritarian right are currently capitalising off) and present them as caricatures of militant leftism in order to consolidate power. Whole time the actual, modern left is rendered a rag-tag rebel group with mildly overlapping ideologues who all believe their issue is the most pressing.
In the grand scheme of things, Zohran Mamdani is simultaneously important and inconsequential. The bureaucratic labyrinth of the United States government erects high, granite walls, where a brass Minotaur puffs smoke from its snout at anyone who reaches the centre and actually wants to govern on behalf of the people. Bold moves are accomplished by those willing to flout the rules without regard and, as much as Mamdani has proven himself highly competent at electoral campaigns, there’s very little chance he’s a trojan-horse radical ready to get militant in the face of America’s hyper-capitalist machine. Even if he were, there is little leftist infrastructure to support his sabotage. But the Anglo-American axis tilts more further and further towards fascism. And as the violence looms, getting closer and larger, the question keeps whistling in the wind to nobody in particular:
How are you going to pay?
Yeah, mate, when they're yelling 'Communism!' I'm like... if only it was
As incisive, unflinching, complex and propulsively argued as always, leaving some doors still open for hope and other futures, despite starting from dark satire.