Darializa Avila Chevalier with NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani
By Clifford Jackson
The election of Darializa Avila Chavez, Brad Ladner and Claire Valdez is a response to the brutally racist and even more violent economic aspects of this system under capitalism. We are seeing the widening gap between rich and poor across the board that is particularly impacting in a negative way black and brown communities.
The effort to dismantle medicaid, food stamps, and eliminating planned parenthood, (which by the way is the only form of health care outside of medicaid for the poor across society), that like always impacts communities of color more because of a greater concentration of poverty.
The election of these candidates is to make this society more humane and to mitigate the brutal affects of capitalism which precipitates much of the misery going on across the country. This has happened throughout American history.
The communist party as well as socialist movements in the 1930′ led to the creation of many unions as well as the enactment of social safety net programs that were socialist in nature. Unemployment, social security and the public work programs of the 1930’s under FDR are examples.
Senator Huey Long was assassinated in 1935 because of his progressive policies to stop the kind of malnutrition and abject poverty that millions of Americans were suffering from during the Great Depression. Paul Robeson, Angelo Herndon and Benjamin Davis Jr. were all affiliated with the communist party in the 1930’s and 40′ s because they were more responsive and sympathetic to the civil and human rights of black and brown and poor people then all of the so-called venerated institutions of America.
John Maynard Keynes said that “capitalism unfettered destroys society. Mechanisms of regulation and state intervention was necessary .” Racism and unfettered capitalism historically has produced the fact that half the children in nyc live in poverty. Mayor Mamdani, and all of the democratic socialists and progressive candidates that won on election day are a response to that like their aforementioned progenitors.
Free market capitalism is not free it destroys. The financial crisis on wall street 18 years ago, my field of employment for 40 years , is an example of the destructiveness of capitalism. The many Archie Bunker types, who are putative within white America would not live in their middle class and suburban communities if it was not for many unions who were supported and formed by the communist and socialist movements. America’s idyllic communities would not exist without those movements. These are the same people that whenever you are focused on any sense of social justice advocacy you are called, by these same people, a communist or socialist.
When Malcolm X was assassinated, his widow and the family lawyer Percy Sutton were outside of the morgue after they officially identified Malcolm X’s body. She said to a news reporter asking her questions “they accused my husband of taking money from the communist Chinese which was ridiculous.” That is what I am referring to about the pathological and sick aspects of white America especially when it comes to pursuing social justice. These so-called socialists are certainly more humane and on the right side of history as the honorable Mayor Zohran Mamdani epitomizes.
Clifford Jackson, Larchmont
