Is New York City mayoral hopeful Zohran Mamdani a Communist? He says he is not, but that doesn’t mean much. After all, he knows he could not win running on the Communist Party line because it is not one of the nine political parties on the ballot in November.
Mamdani was groomed by his far left-wing parents to become a radical activist in the Communist mold. His father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a Marxist professor of African history at Columbia University, and his mother, Mira Nair, is a filmmaker and an anti-Israeli activist.
They gave Zohran the middle name of “Kwame,” after Kwame Nkrumah, the African dictator who was so admired by the Communists in the Soviet Union that they gave him the Lenin Peace Prize in 1962. This was not an odd choice—it made perfect sense given the politics of Zohran’s parents.
Zohran has long been immersed in his father’s writings, most of which are standard Marxist critiques of Western civilization. But it appears his mother’s Indian ancestry has also had an impact on him; he follows Indian politics quite closely.
In 2020, at age 21, Arya Rajendran was elected the mayor of Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala. She is a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPIM. Zohran tweeted her a congratulatory note, calling her “Comrade,” which is classic Communist lexicon describing an ally. He made it clear that he was thinking about running for mayor of New York City, and was encouraged by her Communist victory. “So what kind of mayor does NYC need right now? Me.”
The Communist Party USA (CPUSA), loves Mamdani. After winning the primary, they said, “We stand with Zohran Mamdani against the racist and anti-Communist attacks on him….”
Joe Sims, co-chair of CPUSA, was ecstatic, bragging how Mamdani defeated Andrew Cuomo. “The double digit margin victory sent shockwaves throughout the democratic establishment—shockwaves through Wall Street. What an achievement! And I don’t know about you but it lifted me right up.”
People’s World is the successor to the Daily Worker, once the most prominent Communist publication in America. They also celebrated Mamdani’s primary victory, cheering his policy prescriptions and imploring Democratic leaders to follow suit.
One reason why Mamdani won the primary was the skill employed by his followers; they knew how to manipulate the ranked-choice voting system. He received help from Hammer & Hope, a black radical publication. They ran a “DREAM” campaign. It stands for “Don’t Rank Eric Adams for Mayor” and “Don’t Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor.” Hammer & Hope is not just another left-wing organ. It is a self-avowed communist publication.
Mamdani has long admired black communists. Fred Hampton, the Black Panther leader, was an avowed communist, but that didn’t stop Mamdani from calling the convicted thug a champion of “Black liberation, socialist revolution, and solidarity with the poor, the workers, and the colonized around the world.”
Mamdani’s housing advisor is Cea Weaver. In 2017, she tweeted, “Elect more Communists,” and the year after she said, “Seize private property.” Tascha Van Auken is his field director, and she has worked with the Working Families Party (WFP), an affiliate of the Communist Party . Mamdani is listed on the ballot as the #1 choice of WFP.
Mamdani is fond of using the exact language invoked by Karl Marx. He supports a “social housing” bill that would allow New York state to seize private property for the purpose of renovation and rehabilitation. Indeed, he has explicitly called for the “abolition of private property,” taking a page right out of the Manifesto of the Communist Party. Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote, “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”
Mamdani knows what he is aiming for, explaining, “the end goal of seizing the means of production” is a priority. This is another pick up from Marx and Engels, who wrote that “the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity.”
“Each according to their need, each according to their ability” is what Mamdani wrote in 2020. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx described how people would be treated once communism succeeded: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
Josh Hammer, Newsweek’s senior editor-at-large, got it right when he said Mamdani “is better understood as a full-fledged communist” than as a socialist. Still, some insist Mamdani is a socialist, not a communist. If he is, he is more of the Leninist variety.
Lenin knew what he was talking about when he said, “The goal of socialism is communism.” That has Mamdani’s face written all over it.
