At a 2021 conference of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), Zohran Mamdani discussed various short-term reforms favored by the organization. But alongside offering his thoughts on the groups’ immediate aims, he also had something to say about “end goal” of socialist politics: “seizing the means of production.”
In the last week, the clip resurfaced on right-wing social media, where it’s been treated as a damning discovery about Mamdani, who just won a primary to become the Democratic nominee for mayor in New York City.
National Review ran a brief item on the clip under the headline “Uh, That’s Literal Communism!” On CNN, Scott Jennings concurred, saying that Mamdani was “using the language of the Bolsheviks.” Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) said that this was “the scariest thing Mamdani has said” and that it was “straight out of Karl Marx’s Communist playbook.”
It’s unclear why these remarks about the end goal of socialist politics are supposed to be shocking. Days before this supposedly scandalous clip surfaced, when a CNN reporter asked Mamdani whether he “like[d] capitalism,” his response was a forthright “No, I have many critiques.”
And of course, Mamdani constantly called himself a “socialist” during the primary election in which he delivered a knockout blow against former governor Andrew Cuomo, defeating the former governor by 12 points in the final round.
A socialist advocating the socialization of the means of production should be exactly as surprising as a libertarian advocating “liberty” from economic redistribution or a conservative calling to conserve the status quo. This is socialism’s core defining proposition, and it is a mark of how alien many of the…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
