by Jeff Mackler, published on Socialist Action, July 25, 2025
As a teenage Superman fan of yesteryear, in the 1950s, I recall that Superman was described on radio as a “strange visitor from another planet.” I couldn’t resist going to my local Oakland movie theater to see the latest iteration starring David Corenswet as Superman. I was surprised. While the July 20 New York Times two-page review was devoid of the multiple political references imbedded in the film, The Times had none! Instead, it focused on Corenswet the person, 33, newly married, living in Philadelphia a Juilliard graduate with a one-year-old child, perpetually in need of diaper changes and demanding, at 2 am, parental attention.
Today’s Superman is similarly portrayed by most reviewers as just a regular guy, indeed, a bonafide crowd pleaser whose updated image is deemed largely responsible for the film’s financial success: $400 million in U.S. and international ticket sales in the first 10 days.
The Warner Brothers-owned DC studios film, like Zorhan Mamdani’s and his NYC mayoral campaign, have managed to remain largely unscathed in the face of political indecision and calculated opportunism on the part of the ruling rich to date.
Indeed, a dozen other Superman reviewers posted similar placid apolitical themes, generally praising the film that is without doubt a box office hit. The January 23 NYT featured a page 3 two-paragraph squib and photo of Superman and his dog Krypto, explaining that past Superman films were “so dark that families weren’t inclined to go watch…. These days when things are dark enough, there’s something to be said to stepping into the light when you go to the movie theater.”
But the Superman movie that I watched last week was far from “light.” Hightech billionaire Lex Luthor and his superrich gang of rightwing sycophants are Superman’s arch enemies, focused on once-and-for-all permanently eliminating Superman, the alien/immigrant/foreign invader.
Anti-Zionist – Pro-Palestine Superman
Today’s biff, bam, boom Hollywood extravaganza, notwithstanding, replete with Superman and his newfound super friends taking down a seemingly impregnable 30-foot monster and the gentle “Man of Steel” swooping down to save a tiny squirrel from being crushed by a 100-story falling skyscraper, Superman’s mission is far from light and apolitical.
Lex Luthor, the evil anti-immigrant sexist bigot billionaire stands squarely opposed to Superman’s central objective, saving the lives of a beleaguered unarmed Muslim Middle Eastern people threatened with annihilation at the hands of its heavily armed, impliedly U.S.-backed Middle Eastern genocide-oriented neighbor. That Zionist Israel is the would-be genocide perpetrator and Palestine is its victim is all but explicit.
But this basic Superman theme has somehow escaped mention on the part of most reviewers. Indeed, all but one of the reviews I perused online praised the film and ignored its politics, especially so, I estimate, because the box office profits are still roaring in.
Mondoweiss: News & Opinion About Palestine, Israel & the U.S., an anti-Zionist publication, was the rare exception stating, The film’s director, “James Gunn’s new Superman movie draws an analogy between Israel and the villainous country of Boravia poised to commit genocide against its near defenseless neighbor – Jarhanpur.” Mondoweiss argues that the film,
“demonstrates how Israel’s idealized image in American culture has been shattered by the widespread acknowledgment of Palestinian oppression.”
Aside from a few vicious swipes from rightwing reviewers, who panned the film as socialist and communist due to their racist objection to the film’s thesis that Superman is a good guy alien, read immigrant, not someone here to pollute America with foreign ideology, the mainstream media welcomed Superman with open arms, an excellent measure of the rapidly changing times.
Mamdani’s refurbished image
New York City’s significantly liberal Democratic Party community, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans six to one, has similarly largely, to date, I emphasize, refrained from attacking NY’s recent Democratic Party primary election winner, Zohran Mamdani, who trounced his opponents in the rank choice voting primary by winning a 56 percent majority by round 2. His leading opponent, former Governor Andrew Cuomo was a distant second.
NY’s ruling rich are still debating how to deal with Democrat Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist of America member (DSA) who decisively won the primary on a broad platform of progressive social and political issues aimed at making NYC affordable for working people. [Free bus service across all 327 routes, a rent freeze on the city’s one million rent-stabilized apartments, free early childcare, higher property taxes on luxury homes, a 2% income tax hike for those earning over $1 million annually, raising the statewide corporate tax rate from 7.5% to 11.5%, construction of 200,000 affordable housing units, five city-owned grocery stores (one per borough), and doubling the state’s minimum wage to $30 an hour by 2030.] (See: Long shot Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani Wins NYC Mayoral Democratic Party Primary in Upset Victory, by this writer, socialistaction.org)
Democrat Mamdani’s new campaign staff
The Mamdani campaign was organized by his former chief of staff in Albany, Elle Bisgaard-Church. Its leadership included a wide range of Democrats, including some of his opponents’ former staffers. Mamdani’s pre-primary campaign team included Patrick Gaspard, a well-known adviser to mayors and presidents, Steven Banks, who ran social services under former NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, Maria Torres-Springer, Mayor Eric Adams’s former first deputy mayor and Kathryn S. Wylde, chief executive of the business lobby, Partnership for New York City.
Other Mamdani organizers are Andrew Epstein, a member of the NY State Assembly who is his chief of staff and Assemblyman Julian Gerson, a former speechwriter for Gov. Kathy Hochul.
Today, Mamdani has focused on winning endorsements and support from the Democratic Party’s tops, including ardent rightwing Zionist and House Minority leader, U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer and Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, House minority leader and leader of the House Democratic Caucus since 2023. Mamdani has met with both in mutually agreed “productive” exchanges accompanied with commitments to organize future meetings with a “broad range” of participants, that is, the central leaders of the Democratic Party.
Mamdani supported “Genocide Harris” in the presidential election.
Nevertheless, his stance on the Israel-Gaza genocide has been a stumbling block regarding the Democratic Party hierarchy’s immediate endorsement. He was an opponent of Biden’s genocidal support to Israel’s slaughter in Gaza and opposed Biden’s Democratic Party primary run for a second term. But again, he did support Democrat Kamala Harris, whose campaign included unqualified support to the Zionist genocide plus a new immigrant deportation proposal that exceeded Trump’s in its reactionary nature.
Mamdani drops “Globalize the Intifada” politics
Schumer and Jeffries have both expressed concern about Mamdani’s previous calls to “globalize the intifada,” a term he has recently pledged to eliminate from his campaign. The term itself, essentially, “Make the Palestinian uprising global,” has won wide support around the world, with a majority of the world’s people expressing solidarity with the oppressed, beleaguered Palestinians and rejecting the colonial, apartheid, racist Zionist state’s ongoing slaughter in Gaza, increasingly known as the world’s largest open air prison. With the Zionist entity responsible for the murder of some 57,000 Palestinians to date – Ralph Nader puts the figure at 100,000 – the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide has been publicly condemned by the United Nations and the International World Court along with ever-increasing numbers of national and international human rights organizations. Need we note that the U.S. government, Zionist Israel’s central military and financial backer under “Genocide Joe” Biden and his Democrats and today under Trump and Co., stand condemned by the world’s people. Today, this includes the U.S. population, where support for Palestine exceeds for the first time in history, support for Israel.
But with more than a whiff of a November victory in the air, Mamdani has unleashed, according to a late July NYT article, “a full-scale charm offensive of private meetings, phone calls and public promises aimed at wooing top party leaders, donors and activists…. meeting with Jewish elected officials in New York City… and taking pointed questions about his views on Israel and tax policy from a group of 150 business leaders in the city.”
Indeed, when his meeting with the NY 150 business leaders resulted in a statement supporting Mamdani, signed by some 1,000 corporate and associate tech figures it was an important indication that Mamdani’s radical-sounding initial campaign platform was negotiable. As with Superman, where Hollywood’s corporate moguls were willing to risk losing profits by distributing a movie with impliedly anti-Zionist themes, albeit without advertising this in the corporate media, the Democrat’s billionaire elite may well have a run with Mamdani, especially now that he has increasingly indicated that he is the candidate of “all the people.” Yesterday’s pariah is rapidly turning into a quite acceptable “lesser evil” if not an emerging champion of the people – yet another ruling class maneuver to steer rising anti-capitalist sentiments into the safe channels of the imperialist Democratic Party.
Present at his meeting with corporate leaders was former NYC mayor billionaire Michael R. Bloomberg, whom Stu Loeser, a former aide to Bloomberg, noted “was surprised when Mr. Mamdani name-checked Michael Bloomberg three times in front of 150 tech leaders in a deliberate move — it’s an attempt to speak a common language and find common ground,” said Loeser.
Zionist corporate leaders sound a warning
At the other side of the country, a self proclaimed Jewish Zionist supporter of Israel, Shaun Maguire, a partner at Silicon Valley’s billionaire venture capital firm, Sequoia Capital, began attacking Mamdani via Maguire’s X account, where he has some 275,000 followers. Maguire charged that Mamdani came from a “culture that lies about everything” and that he was “trying to advance his Islamist interests.”
His statements and others in a similar vein, were widely perceived as anti-Muslim by many in Sequoia’s orbit, some 1,000 of whom had signed a letter asking Sequoia to establish an investigation of Maguire’s remarks that were considered beyond the pale. Maguire’s critics wrote that his remarks were “not a misstep… but a deliberate inflammatory attack that promotes anti-Muslim stereotypes and stokes division.”
In a post on X in reply to these “enemies,” Maguire replied, in a letter signed by some 1,100 tech industry groups and individuals, “I’m going to play nice for now, but am ready to embarrass any of you should you escalate.”
This was no idle threat.
Leading Democrats hesitant over Mamdani
As of July 25 only four of New York City’s 12 congresspersons have endorsed Mamdani. While behind-the scenes negotiations are presently underway, the presence of a “rogue” Democrat leading the nation’s largest and richest city is no doubt worrisome to the ruling rich, whom history has today assigned an unexpected and troublesome problem.
Both of Mamdani’s major opponents, having lost badly in the recent primary and are mired in political, financial and personal scandals, are life-long Democrats, They have been forced to stay in the race for mayor as “independents,” at least for now. And in a city where Democrats are dominant, few give them anything resembling a serious chance at success.
Some Republicans, and Trump himself, have floated the suggestion that a Trump-backed Republican like Bill Ackerman, worth $9 billion, might ally with some Democrats, including Cuomo and current Mayor Adams, in a run for NYC’s top job. The most likely variant, however, was offered by Jay Jacobs, the longtime chair of the state Democratic Party, who stated the obvious, regarding Mamdani’s campaign, initially in cryptic terms. “You can go just so far on a good melody, but ultimately you need lyrics.” Jacobs was specific stating, “If you get elected, you’re going to want to pass things. And you’re not going to be able to do that just on rhetoric and organizing. That takes relationships.” Jacobs concluded for the moment, “I found Mamdani extremely likable, very reasonable. We have strong disagreements on some things, but it’s refreshing to be able to speak to someone who may disagree with you but isn’t filled with venom.” These “relationship” generally include, with regard to most of Mamdani’s campaign promises, either the signature of the state or the city’s top officials and/or a majority of the votes of the elected party officials in power, that is, in New York, the Democratic Party.
Mamdani ‘s primary cross endorsement with liberal Zionist Lander
That Mamdani is flexible is clear. His cross-endorsement deal with Brad Lander, New York City’s comptroller, in NYC’s recent Democratic Party rank choice primary voting system, essentially put Mamdani over the top. Lander, a self-described liberal Zionist, took his distance with Mamdani’s criticism of Israel, especially disagreeing with Mamdani’s “globalize the intifada” statements as evoking “open season against Jews.” But Lander and Mamdani have been hot on the campaign trail in joint appearances across the city ever releasing statements of mutual support, their pro and anti-Zionist politics notwithstanding.
The civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton of the Democratic Party oriented National Action Network and a lifelong hustler for the Democrats indicated that he had met with Mamdani multiple times since the primary. Said Sharpton, “What he’s trying to do is assure a lot of us that he is not insensitive to a lot of our concerns in terms of the Black community, and that he’s not the extreme radical figure that he’s been projected to be.” Like the bulk of the other leading Democrats Sharpton repeats that he has not ruled out endorsing Mamdani because Mamdani, “understands that he’s got to work to show people that he not only has ideas, but that he has a way that he thinks he can fund those ideas.”
Mamdani praises billionaire Bloomberg
Stu Loeser, a former aide to former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, was surprised when Mamdani praised Bloomberg at his recent meeting with tech leaders. “Name-checking Michael Bloomberg three times in front of 150 tech leaders is a deliberate move — it’s an attempt to speak a common language and find common ground,” Loeser stated, adding, that Mamdani had also talked about cutting waste in government and how he understood that some families moved their children to charter schools because public schools were not meeting their needs — both issues that he did not expect Mamdani to address.
That Mamdani expressed a vague sympathy with charter school parents, that is, supporters of private as opposed to public schools, is not new in NY, where shifts in funding charter schools have been supported in part by the city’s United Federation of Teachers, Local 2, AFL-CIO. When it comes to “productive” relations between pro-capitalist politicians, from Mamdani to Bloomberg, “everything is negotiable,” Mamdani’s “democratic socialism” included.
Bloomberg’s former aid Loeser stated the obvious, that is, from the viewpoint of NY’s ruling class and electoral elite, “Mamdani is clearly trying to be seen as reaching out to the people who aren’t already inclined to support him and put meat on the bones of his ideas and say that his job would be to represent everybody and not just the people who voted for him.” [Emphasis added.]
Following Mamdani’s Washington, D.C. meeting with congressional representatives, including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another “progressive Democrat,” a term I consider an oxymoron, Vermont’s Becca Balint, commented that she was “impressed by Mamdani’s ability to listen to his voters. There’s plenty that he could gain from his new friends in Washington. When you’re running that kind of a high-profile race, let’s be clear, you want to have validators and endorsers.”
“All that crap about socialism and communism”
Balint concluded with a not-to-veiled warning, “Now that he has won [the primary, editor], he is the main target and he knows he’s going to have to have his own war chest to be able to rebut all that crap about socialism and communism.”
It’s “all that crap” that concerns the ruling rich the most. Mamdani’s “charm offensive” is aimed at convincing NY’s capitalist elite that he means no harm to their continued control of the nation’s richest city. With a $116 billion annual budget the city’s insiders and top corporate leaders resent even the implication that the ruling rich, who usually avoid all taxes, will be taxed even the minimal amounts proposed in Mamdani’s platform.
Indeed, his post primary meetings were specifically aimed at such assurances.
That the outsider Mamdani, a supporter of Palestinian freedom, won the NYC mayoral primary, while starting with a poll rating of 1 percent, sent a bit of a shiver up the backs of the ruling class; the same with the Superman movie’s near explicit solidarity with the beleaguered Palestinians. But the super rich are more than wary of the deepening mass opposition to the U.S.-backed Zionist Palestinian mass murder as well as the violent ICE deportations and imprisonment of unprecedented numbers of immigrants; the same with the deepening of Trump’s persecution of student immigrant rights activists and Palestine defenders. Indeed, both have been seen as central to the Democrats resounding defeats in the last presidential elections. Democrats have been compelled, at least for the moment, to proceed with a modicum of caution.
No to the twin parties of capitalism
But both capitalist parties, driven by the ever-deepening U.S. and worldwide crises, see no way out other than on the backs of working people.
They will be stopped only in the face of massive united antiwar and social justice movements in the streets. Independent mass struggles, as with the recent immigrant rights/anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles and elsewhere, signaled a deep rejection of capitalist and pro-capitalist parties. The formation of a massively reinvigorated, expanded and fighting trade union movement that organizes to challenge capitalist oppression and exploitation at the point of production and in the political arena, is on the order of the day. Breaking with the Democrats in all its manifestations and building a deeply-rooted independent Labor Party in alliance with all the oppressed is the first critical step in this direction.
Jeff Mackler stands as a principled voice for revolutionary socialism. As the national secretary of Socialist Action, a Trotskyist political organization, Mackler has spent decades fighting capitalism, imperialism, and environmental destruction—often from far outside the mainstream.