Maybe you’re a communist and you don’t know it | Opinion

If someone finds dark women more attractive than blonde women, he’s probably a communist. I know, this sounds more sexist than Marxist: what relationship do brunettes have with the ownership of the means of production or blondes with surplus value? It all started, as it couldn’t be otherwise, from a very strange tweet. 9mmSMG, an American account with over 250,000 followers, compares the artist Rama Duwaji – wife of the mayor-elect of New York, Zohran Mamdani – with the actress Sydney Sweeney in a message. And the text accompanying the photos says that “communism is when everyone pretends that the first woman (Duwaji) is more attractive than the second (Sweeney)”.

The tweet was shared more than 5,000 times in four days and received another 5,000 replies. One says: “It seems to me that at no time in human history have so many people been wrong about what the word ‘communism’ means.” Another makes up a Marx quote: “’The first woman is more attractive than the second woman.’” Marx, K (1867). Capital: Critique of Political Economy (vol.1). Hamburg: Otto Meissner publishing house.

The tweeter clarifies in another message that his publication should not be taken literally and assures that it is a metaphor for a “falsely egalitarian” society. Maybe I’m too red or spend too little time in X to understand it. What seems clear is that “communism” has become a container word, like woke up anti-fascist or (let’s face it) fascist. It means what everyone wants it to mean and only serves to disqualify any idea that smacks of progressive, such as reducing working hours or the status of interns.

We have already seen this, for example, in the 2021 regional elections. The campaign slogan of Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s PP forced us to choose between “communism or freedom”. Communism was the evil opposition, although we could hardly classify it as social democratic, and freedom was the option defended by Ayuso. Freedom is another of those wildcard words: sometimes it just consists of the freedom not to pay taxes or, as was the case then, the freedom to have a few beers (I’m in favor of this, I’m not hiding).

Mamdani has been defined, at the same time, as communist and Islamist, two ideologies that are difficult to reconcile. In reality, the elected mayor is part of the Democratic Socialists of America, which is the left wing of the Democratic Party. To understand whether he is very close to Leninism or rather to the moderate side of a center-left European party, let us remember that one of his leading proposals is that buses should be free. For comparison, as of 2020 all public transport is free in another city that has a reputation as a communist paradise: Luxembourg. Its mayor, Lydie Polfer, is a member of the Democratic Party, which on paper is liberal, but can already be seen showing revolutionary tendencies.

Freezing rent on some of the city’s apartments or free nurseries are other Mamdani ideas, which may be right or a catastrophic mistake, but which simply go along the lines of (very partial) redistribution of wealth and equal opportunities. The PP, in fact, is in favor of free education from zero to three years. Is Feijóo a communist? I’m starting to doubt.

This being the case, it is not surprising that a good number of despite what has been said, it is important to point out that communism, real communism, does not work. I am referring to the President of the United States, Donald Trump, who in a recent interview on Fox and in other statements from the Oval Office, showed strength and historical perspective, recalling on both occasions the very ancient origins of this terrible ideology: “Look, you can go back a thousand years, it’s been done many times, a thousand years, it never worked.” If communism means anything, its history could have begun at any time.