Congrats, Zohran Mamdani! A 34-year-old Muslim socialist is now mayor of New York City, and, while they have a lot to say, one of his critic’s throwaway lines is that socialism has a 0% success rate. It’s never worked anywhere, apparently.

Forget for now that the US, capitalism’s heartland, has never been more completely and utterly broken, sold off for parts by a mafia-connected reality TV actor. I’m not even looking now at Mamdani’s platform or promised policies.

Forget all this for a moment. I want to pull back and assess the idea that socialism has never worked and that capitalism always has using a metaphor that for me explains why this criticism is not just untrue, but childish and simple.

To hear people tell it, perceived quality of life alone determines whether or not socialism/capitalism is good or bad. For many this is self-explanatory, and they don’t have to actually inspect or compare anything, because it’s self-evident that socialist countries are shitholes while capitalist countries aren’t.

I don’t see how this verdict can be reached so automatically in a country like the US, where school shootings and medical bankruptcies are routine everyday occurences, and for the first time in years the life expectancy is dropping.

Capitalism has a higher PR budget and its mythology has a stronger hold on people here, which is natural and unsurprising. Wealthy people love saying that our society is broken, but curiously none of them blame capitalism, even though all our national leaders in power have been capitalists.

But that still doesn’t get to the point. The real point is that capitalism has spread globally mostly because of the CIA, not the CEOs and all the supposed trickle-down wealth that follows in their wake.

In my view, this topic gets discussed like people watching a chess game, trying to determine who’s the stronger player solely by examining the pieces on the board. At first, it seems like a reasonable way to determine who is better at chess, right?

Maybe the observers understand the full depths of the position perfectly. Maybe they’re just middling amateurs. In either case, the pieces alone are what inform their verdict of who is stronger at chess.

In reality, if you pull back and look away from the board for a moment, you’ll see that one of the chess players is holding a loaded gun to the other’s head. Is the player holding the gun really winning the chess game because they have better tactics and skill? Or is their opponent throwing the game trying not to get killed?

Any chess analysis that ignores the gun is irrelevant, no matter how strong the chess analysis is. The observer could be Magnus Carlsen, but if he doesn’t know there’s a gun to one player’s head, his chess analysis will be missing the point.

When the US says their military exists to protect “America and her interests” they are talking about a system of global military reach that extorts or forcefully replaces duly-elected foreign governments on behalf of US tycoons across industries.

Nobody can accurately say how many foreign governments the US has undermined or replaced. The left doesn’t have the final tally because the number is very high, many coups are still secret or denied, and it’s easy to lose track of them all, while the right also doesn’t know because they seem to genuinely have no idea this is how the world actually works, and they’re very emotionally invested in believing that Western wealth is driven by the ambition and intelligence of its industrialists, not international military fuckery and subterfuge.

Capitalists act like capitalism has spread naturally because it’s so mutually beneficial, not because it was forced at gunpoint. If they were being honest and thoughtful, anybody stating that “socialism has never succeeded” would ask, “If capitalism is so wonderful, why can’t it spread without the US military forcefully intervening to spread it?”

Even economists seem to me now like grandmasters doing expert chess analysis while ignoring the guns over the board that really lead to checkmate.

So even if we allow that quality of life is better in capitalist countries like the US and Canada (which could very well be true, even if right-wing people in both places never tire of saying they’re hopelessly broken; trump ran on the US no longer being great anymore back in 2015, while Canada’s decline is assumed in political ads across parties), it’s not for the reasons most people say it is.

We’ll see if Mamdani remains committed to curbing the establishment’s influence once he’s in office. If he was a national leader in a faraway country that, say, discovered mines with valuable rare minerals Silicon Valley needed, US reps would fly over and pay him a visit, offering wealth and protection for him and his family in exchange for control of the mines. And if he refused, they’d replace him with someone who would sell out his people and cooperate with the US. But because he’s mayor of New York, the establishment will probably just undermine him at every turn and spend untold millions to smear him. Then, whether he succeeds or fails in office, they’ll say he failed very badly and deny their involvement entirely, as if his performance and not their actions are the only thing they’re assessing.

I wish him luck because he has a serious fight ahead.