Below is a March 13 letter to the editors of the New York Post by Paul Mailhot, Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of New York. Pointing to the paper’s March 9 feature interview with Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialists of America candidate for mayor in the upcoming Democratic Party primary, Mailhot requests the Post run an interview with him to present “an accurate representation of what a socialist candidate for mayor in New York stands for.” Mailhot has yet to receive an answer.
To the editors of the New York Post
The New York Post recently ran a feature article based on a sit-down interview with the Democratic Socialists of America candidate for mayor of New York — “Socialist NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani wants to hike corporate taxes to pay for loads of freebies.”
In the interest of your readers, and of an accurate representation of what a socialist candidate for mayor in New York stands for, I would like to request the Post do a sit-down interview with me. I am the Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of New York.
My party’s history traces to the founding of the communist movement in the United States in 1919, and all of the militant labor battles and civil rights struggles leading to and since that have marked its development. Our continuity is rooted in the ideas and revolutionary activity of Marx and Engels, Lenin and the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky and the fight against the Stalinist betrayal of communism, and in defense of Cuba’s socialist revolution led by Fidel Castro.
The Socialist Workers Party has run candidates for mayor each election since 1937, and candidates for president for each election since 1948.
Democrat Mamdani’s platform is a list of promises working people are supposed to take for good coin — if he is elected there will be free transit, free child care, no rent increases, lower prices on the grocery shelves, and so on. A slight increase in corporate taxes will do the trick.
But all of the big political questions today are decided on the basis of which class rules. The burdens on working people are the product of a crisis-ridden, profit-first capitalist system in the epoch of imperialism’s decline. If we don’t start with the world, we’ll never be able to understand why working people face ever lower living standards, job speedup, less safety at work, and why the opening guns of World War III grow louder.
Your readers deserve to know there is a working-class alternative in the race for mayor this year. A socialist candidate who stands with fellow workers on union picket lines, joins fights for jobs, better wages and working conditions. My campaign defends constitutional protections, and backs the struggles of African Americans for equal rights and points to the legacy of the internationalist ideas of Malcolm X in his final year. It fights for women’s emancipation.
I am a socialist candidate from a Roman-Catholic family who condemns the Hamas-organized pogrom against Jews on October 7, 2023, and supports the fight against Jew-hatred and for Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews; and for Ukraine’s sovereignty against Moscow’s invasion while at the same time calling for the withdrawal of US troops and nuclear weapons from Europe. The Socialist Workers Party builds actions to end Washington’s brutal economic war against Cuba’s socialist revolution.
Our party defends all those oppressed and exploited by capital, including working farmers, and the millions of workers without papers who should be granted amnesty in order to strengthen the unity of the working class.
The key to humanity moving forward is for working people to break from reliance on capitalist parties’ promises, fight for the working class to take political power, and join the worldwide struggle for socialism.
Please consider this request, and give your readers a chance to read what the Socialist Workers Party candidate has to say.
Paul Mailhot
Socialist Workers Party Candidate
for Mayor of New York
