Free Buses!
Article: Bill Ayers. Illustration: Rory Robertson-Shaw.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine
R.E.M.
When Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old state assemblyman and self-described democratic socialist, decisively won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City in June 2025, the entire liberal establishment lost their shit. The authorities reached for their fainting hankies, and the insinuation (if not the exact words) of the rulers and their enablers was unmistakable: 'Bolsheviks take over NYC!'
The frenzied commentary ran the gamut, from disbelief to delirium, agitation to hysteria, and alarm to panic. Now that reality has settled in, the powerful have arrived at what they hope is a broad and reasoned consensus: Mamdani must be stopped at all costs! The madman-in-chief suggested denaturalising Mamdani and then deporting him; the realists, after scolding and patronising the electorate for their misguided idealism, got busy raising millions of dollars to buy the election for anyone but Zohran. All the talk of the last several months about 'saving democracy' and 'undermining the will of the people' was shed like a dirty shirt, and the guy Mamdani crushed was dusted off and rehabilitated by the elite.
It's as if Mamdani were planning to defund the police, seize the banks, and nationalise the ports as well as the Yankees.
I like those ideas myself, but that's just me; nothing in Zohran Mamdani's policy proposals, campaign promises, or past activities suggests that these are anywhere in his sights. In fact, what's got the rulers in a tizzy is relatively modest: making city buses free, establishing five city-run grocery stores, raising the minimum wage so that working people can afford to live in the city with some dignity, and freezing rents on rent-subsidised apartments.
But in their minds, something devilish is lurking: free buses today, and universal healthcare looms; rent freezes today, landlords rounded up and sent to re-education camps tomorrow. And before long, people will get the idea that housing is a human right and that everyone has a right to a place to call home. Then what? Food is a human right? Education? There's no end!
Plus, Mamdani has refused to support Israel's genocidal assault against the Palestinians. He's an immigrant from Africa and a Muslim. That's three strikes right there.
When a leading US Senator was asked by a reporter days after the election if a socialist mayor of the largest American city created problems for the Democratic Party, he responded, 'I'm a capitalist.' There were no follow-up questions, which was typical, but sad, because I have a few. For example, do you mean that you own the means of production? Or is it merely that you embrace selfishness, murderous competition, selective humanisation that renders large sections of human beings as disposable, and mindless growth—the vilest human qualities and the beating heart of capitalism? But 'I'm a capitalist' stands alone—no elaboration, no further explanation needed—because the words socialism and capitalism function metaphorically in American political discourse. Socialism is bad, cruel and authoritarian; capitalism is good, prosperous and free.
The 1% promotes the myth that socialists want to make human beings into worker bees or indistinguishable ants in the colony, while capitalists will one day set us all free. Vote for free buses and you're on the way to the anthill.
Illustration: Rory Robertson-Shaw.
In Chicago today, we have socialist roads, socialist garbage collection, and a socialist fire department. We've agreed as a community over decades of living together that it's best if everyone's garbage gets collected by the city, and that the 'freedom' to let your trash pile up in your yard or alley is unhealthy and stupid. We also believe that, as a community, it's a good idea to have a firehouse in every neighbourhood, rather than waiting for a catastrophic fire to erupt and then taking bids from competing private contractors to see who will fight it. After the Second World War, Chicago took over the privately owned elevated and subway lines, streetcars and bus companies, and unified and modernised a fragmented transportation system into a public entity—everyday socialism.
Or, as it was called in Milwaukee, "sewer socialism." Emil Seidel (1910-1912), Daniel Hoan (1916-1940), and Frank Zeidler (1948-1960) were all democratic socialists who ran corruption-free administrations and took a pragmatic approach to governance. They're remembered for things like building an extensive park system, installing public drinking fountains, and requiring factory owners to install toilets for their workers.
We have models in the modern world, of course, of socialism without freedom, which is subjugation and control. But if we look honestly at what's right before our eyes, we can see clearly that freedom without socialism is privilege, predation, exploitation, and injustice.
The brutality of capitalism is apparent in every direction: war, invasion and occupation throughout the world exacting tribute in resources and labor from the Global South; militarised police forces at home; white supremacy cemented into law, culture, and social structures; super-exploitation of an underpaid underclass of workers; the looming catastrophic climate collapse; the banality of evil in the increasingly pervasive carceral state. Capitalism willfully and skillfully promotes greed, turning frenzied accumulation from an obvious vice into an exalted virtue. It deliberately degrades human qualities such as mutual care, kindness, and the sense that we're all better off when we're all better off.
As an 80-year-old person now, I marvel at the all-conquering nature of capitalism and the ways market competition can be applied as a model for every aspect of human life. Take elder care, the plundering, profit-driven American care system that takes the basic human impulse to care for one another and transforms it into a market—the Care Industry—with its fangs and talons covered in golden gauze.
If Zohran Mamdani becomes mayor of New York, the capitalists will work overtime to undermine his every initiative, and then proclaim that, "once again, socialism failed."
Let's fight that—arm-in-arm, shoulder-to-shoulder.
Bill Ayers is a retired professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 1969, he co-founded the Weather Underground, a revolutionary organisation that carried out 'extreme vandalism'; bombings of property and symbolic targets in protest of war, racism and U.S. imperialism.
Each issue we print 40,000 copies, worth £120,000 to our vendors. Your £3/month subscription is used to print 30 copies per issue, worth £90 for our vendors. We went from 1000 copies per issue in 2018 to 40,000 per issue in 2025. The only thing stopping us from doing more is money. With your support, we can go even further. Help us print and distribute more copies for free to anyone who wants to sell it by becoming a monthly subscriber.