A Movement-Building Strategy for All Workers

"'We can be fed' is a call not just for municipal grocery stores but for attacking the corporate domination that keeps workers hungry and angry. To win an election, he says, candidates must defend workers' class interests. But he combines this with 'We can be free,' which means ending raids and detentions. Divided families hear that call, and white workers with German or Italian surnames should remember it from Ellis Island more than a century ago."

"Mamdani's embrace of immigrants recognizes a basic reality. Modern migration is the product of the exploitation of immigrant-sending countries, and of wars that are both a legacy of colonialism and an effort to keep a neocolonial system in place. Enforced debt, low wages, and resource extraction produce displacement and migration, but also make countries attractive to investors. They relocate production, taking advantage of the vast gulf created in the standard of living between the global south and the global north."

Zohran Mamdani's victory centers immigrant and working-class solidarity, celebrating door-knocking Bangladeshi and Gambian organizers. He links defending immigrants to broader class struggle, arguing that dreams require solidarity and that dignity and freedom should be universal. The phrase "We can be fed" calls for confronting corporate domination that causes hunger and precarity, while "We can be free" demands ending raids and detentions. Modern migration stems from exploitation, enforced debt, low wages, resource extraction, and neocolonial wars that displace people and attract investors. Production relocation and vast global living-standard gaps pit workers against each other and criminalize the displaced, unemployed, and homeless.

Read at The Nation