After writing about the upset election win of socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, a reader sent me an angry email, telling me that Mamdani was a “democratic socialist,” and that Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez were “social democrats.” The sender apparently wanted me to believe that all they wanted was to make New York and the United States into Denmark.
After all, isn’t Denmark one of the world’s happiest countries? Doesn’t it have a $22 minimum wage? (Actually, it has no federal minimum wage). Doesn’t it have wonderful welfare benefits along with lots of personal freedom? So, if we can just elect the kind of politicians that want to turn the US into Denmark, then we should do it.
There are some issues, of course.
For one, Denmark is far from a socialist country and it certainly does not have a socialist planned economy. This is an important point, because AOC, Sanders, and Mamdani all have called for substantial government planning and ownership and Mamdani has gone even further. The socialist online magazine Jacobin recently praised Mamdani precisely because he does call for the full socialist economy:
No one should be surprised that Zohran Mamdani supports democratic control over the economy, the end goal of socialism. But he won because he combined socialist politics with practical solutions to the cost-of-living crisis facing working people.
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.
There is much to process in this short passage, and it speaks volumes about so-called democratic socialists. For that matter, that socialists would want to identify with the Jacobins speaks volumes to their intentions, given that the Jacobins were the first political party to organize and carry out political terror complete with mass executions during the French Revolution. Second, by claiming that “democratic control over the economy” means the state “seizing the means of production,” they speak to the totalitarian and violent nature of their “democratic” beliefs. One does not “seize” anything without coercion. As Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara bragged in a recent interview, “We were not trying to hide Marxism.”
Hellbound and Down 