As the New York City mayoral campaign rolls on, it doesn’t look as if voters are having any buyer’s remorse about the man they chose as the Democrat Party’s nominee. Zohran Mamdani, who is all of 33 years old, still has a commanding lead in the polls. His opposition is divided and unappealing (really, who wants to see Andrew Cuomo elected to anything?), as well as split three ways (or at least two ways, since hardly anyone is going to vote for Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa). If all this holds for the next few weeks, Zohran Mamdani will be the next mayor of New York, and so the nagging question keeps recurring: is he a communist?
When Mamdani won the Democrat primary in late June, President Donald Trump called Mamdani “a 100% Communist Lunatic.” Asked if he really was a communist, Mamdani responded emphatically: “No, I am not. I call myself a Democratic socialist, in many ways, inspired by the words of [Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.] from decades ago, who said, ‘Call it democracy or call it democratic socialism: There has to be a better distribution of wealth for all of God’s children in this country.’”
On Wednesday, Mamdani was asked: "Are there elements of communism in your platform?" In his answer, he echoed much of what he had said in June in his reply to Trump’s charge, although tellingly, he left out the flat-out denial he gave back then. "The elements of my platform are all about affordability,” Mamdani declared, “and I am a democratic socialist. When New Yorkers ask me what it means, I take them to the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, who said, 'Call it democracy or call it democratic socialism, there must be a better distribution of wealth for all of God's children in this country.'"
Well, great, but people wondered if King was a communist, too. And it isn’t just Mamdani’s policies that have aroused suspicion. In late Feb. 2021, Assembly Member Mamdani was a featured speaker at the online Winter Outreach Conference of the Young Democratic Socialists of America, which on its logo featured three primary slogans: “Cancel Student Debt,” “Defund the Police,” and “Covid-19 Relief.”
Mamdani, who had been a member of the New York State Assembly for a few days shy of two months, happily told attendees: “I am very lucky in that I have five other DSA-endorsed comrades who are with me in the assembly and the state senate.” He explained that it was important to have such “comrades” because they made it “much easier to run a campaign that will be built around raising class consciousness.” That would involve showing that the various issues of the day were actually “an issue of capitalism.”
Mamdani lamented that “we clearly do not have the numbers, as they are at this moment, to win the radical legislation that we need to bring about.” Consequently, “we have to continue to elect more socialists. And we have to ensure that we are unapologetic about our socialism.” He touted an academic boycott campaign that would prohibit students from studying at universities in Israel that he claimed had developed weapons technology for the Israel Defence Forces.
Related: Mamdani Destroyed in Four Words by an Unexpected Critic
He emphasized the importance of moving from the goals of the day to the overall goal of the movement: “It’s critical, the way that we organize, the way that we set up our — you know, set up our work and our priorities, that we do not leave any one issue for the other, that we do not meet a moment and only look at what people are ready for, but that we are doing both of these things in tandem. Because it is critical for us to both meet people where they’re at and to also organize for what is correct and for what is right, and to ensure that, over time, we can bring people to that issue.”
Mamdani maintained: “I sincerely believe in this political project. I sincerely believe in socialism…. It can be such a lonely experience to be a socialist, and it was for me.” Yet he exhorted his comrades to persevere, emphasizing that the conference attendees must understand “that it is socialism that we are fighting for.” Mamdani listed some pet issues of the left and then reminded his audience of the larger overall goal: “But then there are also other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it’s BDS or whether it is the end goal of seizing the means of production, where we do not have the same level of support at this very moment.”
“The end goal of seizing the means of production.” Are there any journalists out there who will dare ask Mamdani if he still holds to this Marxist goal? No? Not even one?
