‘We are working-class women of color’: the long-shot socialist run for the White House

It’s 20 January 2025, the day of the presidential inauguration. After taking the oath of office the new president, a 44-year-old woman, born in the Bronx to Dominican parents, takes her seat in the office and gets to work.

In one of the first acts of Claudia de la Cruz’s presidency, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk watch on as the government seizes control of Amazon and Tesla, along with all of the top 100 corporations in the US.

And that’s just the start. De la Cruz, America’s first socialist president, goes on to abolish the Senate and the supreme court – there isn’t a specific plan as to how – as well as disbanding the FBI and the CIA and reining in the military.

Barring a major miracle, none of this will happen. The Party for Socialism and Liberation, which sees a socialist US as part of a step towards “the creation of a communist world”, won about 85,000 votes in the 2020 presidential election, slightly more than Kanye West. But De la Cruz, the party’s presidential candidate, is optimistic about this moment in American politics – even if she is realistic about what she and her running mate, Karina Garcia, can achieve at the ballot box next year.

“The only way that historically we’ve been able to transform anything in society is through struggle, through movement,” De la Cruz says.

“Nothing that we have earned as working-class people in society has been something that has been granted to us by the benevolence of the ruling class: not voting rights, not access to the most basic human rights.”

De la Cruz is speaking to the Guardian in a coffee shop in midtown Manhattan. It’s cold outside, and she and Garcia, 38, are each wearing a keffiyeh, the scarf which has long been a symbol of support for Palestine, and has taken on even