Socialism in New York City? The Capital of Capitalism?

By Arthur Schwartz

Those of you who have read my words of wisdom over the last 20 years know that I am not poor. I had the luck of buying a co-op in 1981 in the West Village and the rest is history. I went from being a student rebel at Columbia, to being someone who bought a townhouse, then sent his kids to private school and top private colleges.

Somehow, I retain the perspective I had when I first came to the Village 44 years ago. I am a union-side lawyer and counsel to New York’s largest disability rights organization. I represent tenants, sue the NYC Transit Authority and NYC, and worked as Bernie Sanders’ lawyer. I do it because I have this thing about injustice, engrained by growing up in the 60s, but I’m also driven by dismay about how unaffordable our city, and our country is for people who haven’t been as lucky as me.

It strikes home when I realize that my children, a lawyer, an engineer, and two M.D.s in the making, will probably never be able to afford living in the neighborhood they grew up in. And in this context, we have a fascinating mayor race. For the first time since Fiorello La Guardia ran 90 years ago, there is a candidate who is challenging the status quo; one who calls himself a “socialist” or a “democratic socialist.”

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In the race for New York City mayor, an outspoken, self-described socialist has a real shot at victory. New York State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani has run an insurgent grassroots campaign that’s defied the odds and shocked the political establishment, beating out corporate Democrat and former Governor Andrew Cuomo in the June primary. In the November general election he will face off against a field including incumbent Mayor Eric Adams. If he pulls it off, Mamdani would chart new territory. While New York has a long history of socialists contesting and even winning elections, none has captured the top office while calling himself a socialist.

The upstart 33-year-old is running on a broad economic populist agenda, promising to make New York affordable by freezing rents on nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments, building more affordable housing, providing free childcare, raising the minimum wage to $30 an hour by 2030, creating city-owned grocery stores, and making public buses fast and free. These proposals would be funded by increasing taxes on the rich. Mamdani’s policy goals, guided by a notion of providing material support for the working class, have set him apart from other progressive mayoral candidates with less ambitious platforms.

Mamdani entered the New York State Assembly in 2021 with the strong backing of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. Today DSA supports his mayoral run and has helped fuel Mamdani’s massive volunteer operation. While former Mayor David Dinkins retained membership in DSA, Mamdani would be the first to actively identify as a socialist. He’s also received the backing of fellow democratic socialist politicians Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Mamdani hasn’t run from the label on the campaign trail, though his opponents have attempted to use it to paint him as an out-of-touch radical. Trump calls him a “communist” and lately, Cuomo and Adams have picked up Trump’s words. Rather, Mamdani explains his political vision as one of redistributed wealth and power, where the necessities of a dignified life are promised and provided as rights for all. A June 11 interview hosted by Charlamagne Tha God on The Breakfast Club radio show illustrated how Mamdani talks about his socialist politics:

Charlamagne: Nowadays, instead of just leaning on the word ‘socialism,’ they just tell people “you should have free healthcare, you should have a free education, you should be able to make a livable wage, they should increase the minimum wage.” Those are just simple concepts that are all socialism. But for some reason ya’ll still find yourselves tripping up over that word, or letting the other side use it.

Mamdani: I think it’s because there are a lot of people making a lot of money in this moment who would want Americans to think that’s the only way that life can be. And I don’t hide this. You know, it’s how I see the world. It’s the world that I want — it’s one of dignity. …And I think it’s about being honest with New Yorkers…Mayor Koch said “if you agree with me on nine out of 12 issues, vote for me. Twelve out of 12, see a psychiatrist.” And I’ve found in New Yorkers an ability to say, “look, maybe I wouldn’t call myself the same word. But I want the same things.” 

After he announced his campaign in October 2024, Mamdani told Jacobin’s Liza Featherstone: “We’re in a city of far more people who are interested both explicitly in socialism but also in alternatives. I started to call myself a socialist after Bernie’s run in 2016. It gave me a language that I didn’t know to describe things that I felt were disparate parts of my beliefs, when in fact they were all intertwined as one.” He added that his campaign will put “working-class people first and ensure that the proposals that we put forward are ones that will clearly and directly benefit those people.”

The lords of real estate and finance in New York are frantic, as if the election of an espoused socialist to City Hall would bring American capitalism to its knees. Yet, Mamdani would not be the first individual to hold the office who identified as a socialist. In 1924, when Congressman Fiorello La Guardia was unable to secure the Republican Party’s nomination for a second congressional term, he was elected on the Socialist Party line. La Guardia had offended Republican leaders when he refused to support their nominee for president and when he accused them of being class-based and anti-immigrant.

Later, in 1932, when President Herbert Hoover created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to make loans to ailing banks and industries during the Great Depression, La Guardia derided it as the “millionaires dole.” He thought the government had an obligation to deal with the misery caused by the fallen economy, but not by rewarding the brokers whose irresponsible behavior had caused the crisis. When Hoover proposed a regressive sales tax to raise federal revenues, La Guardia came up with his own “soak the rich” scheme to impose a luxury tax and eliminate loopholes in the tax code. It failed to pass.

Despite his regular outbursts, the “Little Flower” was elected mayor as the Republican and Fusion party candidate in 1933. Most historians, and just about every mayor who succeeded him, thought he did a pretty good job. He is rightfully recognized as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s partner in the New Deal.

It is extremely easy for people to think of politics in a linear fashion. The mass media use the term “political compass.” For example, the difference between center-left and far-left is based on how extreme they are. According to such a compass, democratic socialism and communism are related ideologies but communism is more extreme and democratic socialism is more moderate. What is missing from this analysis is the communism and social democracy have diverged into two completely distinct and separate systems with two different outlooks in society, and two different sets of solutions.

For democratic socialists, socialism is primarily viewed as a moral solution to capitalism’s failings because capitalism is viewed as inequitable, unequal and destructive. Socialism aims to solve these problems via redistribution of wealth and funding of “radical” welfare programs, such as free public school. Unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps, all achieved via high levels of taxes. Class struggle is not the focus. Instead, the focus is the liberal democratic means of governing without implementing “class rule” which has failed in the USSR, China, and wherever it has been tried.

According to the socialist view, individuals live and work in cooperation with one another. Furthermore, everything that people produce is, in some sense, a social product and everyone who contributes to the production is entitled to share in it. Society as a whole, therefore, should own or at least control property for the benefit of all its members.

This conviction puts socialism in opposition to capitalism, which is based on private ownership and allows individual choices in a free market to determine how goods and services are distributed. Socialists complain that capitalism leads to unfair and exploitative concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of the relative few who emerge victorious from free-market competition—people who then use their wealth and power to reinforce their dominance in society. Because such people are rich, they may choose where and how to live, and their choices in turn limit the options of the poor. As a result, terms such as individual freedom and equality of opportunity may be meaningful for capitalists but can only ring hollow for working people, who must do the capitalists’ bidding if they are to survive. As socialists see it, true freedom and true equality require social control of the resources that provide the basis for prosperity in any society. 

This fundamental conviction nevertheless leaves room for socialists to disagree among themselves with regard to two key points. The first concerns the extent and the kind of property that society should own or control. Some socialists have thought that almost everything except personal items such as clothing should be public property; this is true, for example, of the society envisioned by Thomas More in his Utopia (1516), more than 300 years before Karl Marx. Other socialists, however, have been willing to accept, or even welcome, private ownership of farms, shops, and other small or medium-sized businesses. Some, like Sanders and Mamdani, do not call for public ownership of corporations. (Ironically the foremost proponent is Donald Trump; his purchase of 10% of Intel was applauded by Sanders.)

The second disagreement concerns the way in which society is to exercise its control of property and other resources. The main camps consist of loosely defined groups of centralists and decentralists. On the centralist side are “communists,” who want to invest public control of property in some central authority, such as the state—or the state under the guidance of a political party, as was the case in the Soviet Union. Those in the decentralist camp, who call themselves “democratic socialists,” believe that decisions about the use of public property and resources should be made at the local, or lowest-possible level, by the people most directly affected by those decisions. This is where Mamdani stands, alongside Sanders and AOC.

Can NYC survive as a city where economic decisions are made by voters, and their locally elected and selected representatives like City Council members and Community Board members, instead of big real estate and major corporate interests, like those who have poured $50 million and more into Andrew Cuomo’s campaign? I say yes. It will be fascinating to see. But maybe NYC will be a little more affordable, and maybe there will be a more rational approach to homelessness and mental illness. And maybe, more people, especially the young folks who will inherit this city, will engage in the political process. Cuomo doesn’t inspire them. Adams doesn’t inspire them. Mamdani does. What an exciting prospect.

When Mamdani wins, Fiorello La Guardia will smile down from heaven. Maybe we can name an airport after him! (P.S, that was a joke.)

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LaGuardia’s opponent in the 1937 mayoral race, Joseph Mahoney, explicitly linked radicalism with disorder and chaos: “The radicals are those who are opposed to law and order and who endeavor by force to impose their will upon us. I am as liberal as any man, but I refuse to permit my city to be made unsafe for the law-abiding citizen by men who have no respect for authority.” La Guardia responded defiantly, embracing the label thrust upon him: “I was pronounced dangerous. Was I half as dangerous as the men who were carrying on these manipulations? I have been called a radical. If fighting against existing evils is radical, I am content with the name.” When La Guardia, then president of the Board of Aldermen, proposed funding snow-removal equipment ahead of winter storms, Comptroller Charles Craig reacted furiously, labeling the idea “the wildest kind of radical, socialistic, Black statement.” The accusation crystallized a widespread fear among La Guardia’s contemporaries: that expansive government initiatives were inherently reckless, costly, and ideologically suspect. Yet those very initiatives, dismissed as ideological whims at the time, built much of the essential infrastructure upon which modern New York still relies. La Guardia consistently responded to these charges with moral conviction. Speaking at a police breakfast in 1938, he drew a striking parallel: “I believe [Christ] was sincere in His denunciation of the powerful few who exploited the masses. What some of us who are called radical are trying to do is to answer that call in His name.”

—The New York Times, May 1938