"Seize The Means Of Production": Mamdani Lays Bare His Agenda
"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." -Maya Angelou
"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."
- Maya Angelou
Zohran Mamdani’s run for mayor of New York City is a clear and present danger to the stability, economic health, and democratic foundation of both the city and the nation.
His platform is rooted in a radical socialist ideology that has, time and time again, led to failure, repression, and suffering wherever it has been tried.
And thanks to a clip surfacing on social media today, we see that Mamdani is not hiding this. In fact, he has been strikingly open about what he believes and what he plans to do. You can listen to his comments for yourself here.
Speaking in 2021 at the Young Democratic Socialists of America Organizing Conference, Mamdani said his goal is to “continue to elect more socialists” and to be “unapologetic about our socialism.”
He followed that with two key objectives: boycotting Israel and “seizing the means of production.”
The phrase “seizing the means of production” is not some vague slogan—it is the core tenet of Marxist revolutionary ideology. It means that private property, businesses, and industries are taken from their owners and turned over to collective or state control.
Historically, this has been done not through elections or peaceful reform, but through authoritarian rule, state violence, and mass suppression.
In the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin used the seizure of private farms and industry—known as collectivization—to consolidate power and eliminate private enterprise. This led directly to the Holodomor, a man-made famine in Ukraine in which millions died.
In Maoist China, the Great Leap Forward aimed to forcibly collectivize agriculture and industry under state control. It too resulted in catastrophic famine and the deaths of an estimated 30 to 45 million people.
In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro pushed nationalization of key sectors, fixed prices, and expropriated private businesses. The result has been economic ruin, hyperinflation, food and medicine shortages, and mass emigration.
Mamdani’s unapologetic admiration for these ideas should not be taken lightly.
He stated in 2021, “what the purpose is about this entire project, it’s not simply to raise class consciousness, but to win socialism.” He added that “we are doing both of these things in tandem… to also organize for what is correct and for what is right.”
This is the language of ideological revolution, not democratic governance.
His current proposals—government-run grocery stores, free childcare and buses, a $30 minimum wage, rent freezes, and massively taxing the wealthy—fit the same pattern of central planning that has failed in every country that tried it.
These are not practical policies aimed at long-term economic health; they are mechanisms for government control over every facet of economic life.
Even when he tries to soften his message in mainstream interviews, the truth comes through. When asked on Meet the Press if billionaires should exist, he said, “I don’t think that we should have billionaires.” That is not a tax plan. It is a declaration of ideological war on success, wealth creation, and the very people who drive New York City's economy.
He told Jen Psaki on MSNBC that his platform should be expanded nationally: “Absolutely.” He’s not proposing a local experiment; he is advocating for a national movement rooted in the same ideas that brought misery and collapse to multiple countries throughout the 20th century.
Mamdani's defenders claim he isn’t a true communist because he only wants a “pilot project” of government-run grocery stores. But pilot projects have always been the start of larger schemes in socialist regimes. It begins with a few businesses. Just like Covid began with 15 days to slow the spread. It ended in surfers being pulled off paddle boards in the middle of the ocean and being arrested for not wearing masks. People walking in parks in Australia being tackled, beaten and arrested…for breathing fresh air.
First a few businesses. Then…it becomes housing, transportation, wages, healthcare, education—until the state controls everything and individual freedom vanishes.
He told the socialist conference in 2021 that “the ramifications of victory here is the difference between life and death.” This isn’t campaign rhetoric. This is the language of ideological extremism. The suggestion that political victory equates to “life and death” echoes the revolutionary tone used by past regimes that justified extreme measures in the name of justice.
The warning signs are all here. Mamdani is not hiding who he is. He is not moderating his views. He is proudly championing an ideology that has failed wherever it has been implemented. Electing him would be handing the reins of the most economically vital and culturally significant city in the country to a man who openly praises the very ideas that led to economic collapse in Eastern Europe, starvation in Asia, dictatorship in Latin America, and the silencing of dissent in every corner of the globe where socialism has been imposed.
New York has always been a city of opportunity, dynamism, and freedom. Mamdani’s vision would undo all of that. This is not just a bad policy agenda—it is a crisis waiting to happen. As I wrote last week, Democrats must find a way to unseat him before November. If they do, I think they will easily win the 2028 national election.
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Zohran Mamdani victory is only the latest step in a project that began a century ago. The seed was planted the 19 20s. In 1921 the League for Industrial Democracy opened its New York office and started mailing socialist lesson plans to public-school teachers while comrades in the New York Teachers Union pressed the same line from inside the classroom.  
Once voters were primed, operatives moved into Washington. Treasury official Harry Dexter White leaked Bretton Woods drafts to Moscow; State-Department lawyer Alger Hiss steered post-war diplomacy until VENONA decrypts exposed him; the Rosenberg ring delivered Manhattan-Project blueprints that ended America’s nuclear monopoly.   
Driven from Europe, Frankfurt-School exiles set up shop at Columbia in 1934 and reframed Marxism as “critical theory,” training a professoriate that taught the teachers. Their shock-troops, Students for a Democratic Society, exploded to 300 campus chapters by 1969 and graduated straight into newsrooms, law firms, and public-sector unions.  
Michael Harrington’s new Democratic Socialists of America rejected third-party quixotism and burrowed into Democratic primaries. Membership crawled until the Sanders wave; then it rocketed from roughly 6,000 in 2015 to more than 95,000—enough canvassers to dominate every low-turnout race they target.  
Armed with those cadres, the movement captured leverage offices—district-attorney posts, city-council seats, state legislatures—and finally New York City’s 2025 Democratic mayoral primary, where 33-year-old Mamdani upended Andrew Cuomo on a socialist platform of rent freezes, city-run grocery stores, and universal free buses. 
The lesson. Every generation secured a chokepoint—schools, federal agencies, universities, a major party, then the nation’s media capital—ratcheting policy until independence looks cruel and state dependency feels inevitable. Mamdani isn’t the beginning of the danger; he’s proof that the long march is inside the gates and heading for the White House next.
You really ought to ask yourself: why does his message resonate?
Why did Russia have a revolution?
People don't wake up, make the espresso, make an omlette, look out the back window across their deck, the lake, the boat, ready for a day of country living, and say "You know what, honey, you know that revolution we've been talking about? How about we start it today!"
"But we're sailing today, aren't we? I packed a lunch!"
"I know, we talked about sailing but we do that all the time. We lay out by the pool, we garden, we watch movies in our entertainment room. The lake is always there. Let's have that revolution . . . "
Nobody does that.
Revolutions are made by very unhappy people. why are they unhappy? Mostly because society largely doesn't work for them. Not every one, for sure. Some are natural troublemakers or political grifters looking for a mob to lead. But why would a message like Mamdani's resonate?
Please Chris/QTR -- think and write a post on that. Even the founders thought about that, hard, and they made a list, all the things that made them revolt. And they wrote " all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
It's not a thing to take lightly, seizing the means of production, risking your life by revolting. Why the heck doesn't this guy get laughed off whatever soapbox he's on?
Answer: There is a lot of pain out there, and a lot of it is honest pain. I've learned that lesson in life: there is a lot of luck to being "successful". Not if you're an NFL player, or a rock start. But for most of us, we need luck. Not everybody gets lucky. And there isn't much of a soft landing.