Communism returns via New York

Following his electoral victory, Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old politician who will take office as mayor of New York on January 1, 2026, becomes not only the first Muslim mayor of the most influential city in the United States, but also the symbol of a historical mutation: the entry onto the center stage of American politics of the discourse of the Global South, articulated directly from within the metropolis-symbol of the Western world. Born in Kampala (Uganda), carrying in his DNA the memory of exile, formed in New York, intellectually marked by the legacy of his father, the political scientist Mahmood Mamdani, one of the most important contemporary theorists of colonialism and the relationship between center and periphery, Zohran brings to American municipal politics a vision deeply positioned in the critical tradition of the power relations that have structured the modern world. His campaign, which emphasized rent control, the nationalization of public services and utilities, free transportation, and universal access to housing, is the expression of a matrix idea: inequality is not a natural fatality, but the result of a created historical order, maintained by the disproportionate accumulation of capital in the Global North and the extraction of resources, labor, and value from the Global South.

What his political opponents have pejoratively called "radical socialism” is in fact rooted in the systemic critique formulated by the Marxist tradition, especially in the fundamental observation in Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto: that the history of societies is the history of class struggles, that the wealth accumulated in one pole is supported by the poverty systematically produced in the other, and that emancipation is not a moral issue, but a political, economic, and institutional one.

Without claiming to be a Marxist in the doctrinal sense, Zohran Mamdani has taken up the essence of Marx's diagnosis of globalized capitalism: the abyss between those who own capital and those who sell their labor is reproduced in new forms, and in the era of metropolis-empires and transcontinental migrations, the working class is no longer strictly national, but transnational, just as the injustice that affects it is.

His election as mayor of New York City is not just the result of a local vote, but the reflection of a tension that is boiling within the West itself, a tension between the economic structure that produces concentration of wealth and the social need for redistribution, between the neoliberal model and the popular demand for a reconstruction of the state as a guarantor of the right to housing, health, food and energy.

• A symbolic fracture in what we know as the "American dream”

In this vein, Mamdani's victory is felt not just as a political shift, but as a symbolic crack in the American mythology of unlimited prosperity and individual meritocracy: for the first time in the history of New York, the quintessential global city, one of those that speaks explicitly about the relationship between North and South, about colonialism and about redistribution, becomes the administrator of the urban mechanisms that concentrate the most capital in the world.

Thus, his mandate is shaping up as a practical implementation, in real conditions, of a historical struggle against wealth inequality, polarization between the West and the rest of the world, and structural disparities that define the global order from the beginning of modernity to the present day, a struggle whose theoretical roots are inevitably found in the radical intuitions enunciated by Marx and rearticulated, in a form adapted to the 21st century, in the political program of a mayor who, for the first time, transforms New York into the central arena of the confrontation between the old order and the possibility of a more equitable world.

All of the above regarding Zohran Mamdani's electoral campaign and political program were reflected in the American press, but also in the Middle East and the Gulf region. Moreover, the respective publications also took over the posts on X of the future mayor of New York City. In one of them, quoted by the American press, Zohran Mamdani wrote that everyone will receive according to their needs and abilities, and in another post he mentioned that all problems can be solved - the cancellation of student debt, Medicare for Allm even the boycott against Israel - by achieving the "ultimate objective": the takeover by the state, as a representative of the people or the masses, of the means of production. Mamdani's statement, which was also taken up by the daily newspaper The New York Post, in the edition of June 30, 2025, is extremely dangerous because it is at the heart of the Marxist theory in which the working class transforms capitalist property into a public good.

In response to the respective post, Ari Kagan, a city councilor in Brooklyn, a refugee from Belarus where he was called Arkadiy Kagan, warns X that everything Zohran Mamdani proposes reproduce the traces of the steps of the Bolsheviks after the October 1917 revolution. Kagan recalls that then the means of production were violently seized, their owners were imprisoned and killed, freedoms were suppressed and farms and shops were confiscated, and adds that the promises of "cheap houses for the poor", "free transport" and "municipal shops" in Mamdani's program are copy-pastes of the Soviet model, which was also applied in Belarus, where the shelves of the respective shops were empty and the queues were permanent.

• Controversies regarding the discourse on the Intifada and political radicalism

Another aspect that has sparked controversy is the fact that Zohran Mamdani, in an article published by The New York Times on June 19, 2025, calls for a "globalization" of the Intifada. On this issue, former Romanian parliamentarian Remus Cernea points out that, in a city torn apart by terrorism in 2001 - New York, Americans elected a mayor who "legitimizes terrorism.” Cernea recalls that the Intifada of 2000-2005 included suicide bombings, bombs in public places, attacks on buses and cafes, stabbings and rocket fire into residential areas by Hamas, which resulted in approximately 741 Israeli civilians killed.

Political experts quoted by the American press claim that radical populism of the Mamdani type is located in the register of resentment, historical guilt and anger against the "system", up to a "racism against whites" in the idea of higher taxes, reasons that give water to the mill of the promises made by the future mayor of New York regarding the "elimination of capitalism", "free housing for all", "abolition of the police", "universal free transportation", "erasing all debts", "full redistribution of wealth", promises that cannot be covered from an economic point of view and denote fiscal irresponsibility.

However, the Iranian press - Tehran Times, Iran Diplomacy, Iran International, Press TV Iran -, but also that of the Arab region - Al Jazeera - praise the "young Muslim” who defeated the American "corrupt system” and present him as coming from a modest immigrant family and representing the fight for social equity, transforming Zohran Mamdani's victory into a sign of the "collapse of Western capitalism's morality”, the failure of American capitalism and the "rebirth of human and Islamic values” in the heart of the West.

• Factors of the pro-Mamdani vote: social fatigue and the reaction of American society

In counterpoint, the daily experience in the USA invoked by a Romanian who has been living there for almost three decades, in a YouTube comment signed greymatter2525 - subscribed account @Burntwaffle9699 - to a clip by Sabin Gherman, x-rays the socio-economic context that made the Mamdani phenomenon possible: a taxpayer with good income, a homeowner since 23-24 years old and with investments, says that he pays so many taxes annually that "he could almost buy a two-room apartment in Baciu" (ed. note - near Cluj-Napoca), declares that he probably lives better than 90% of the citizens of that state, but that "stability is missing", because the USA has become a "debt-driven hyperfinancialized rentier system" that extracts resources from the poor and middle classes to the elites. This type of system makes the author of the YouTube comment, a Romanian living in the US, feel more like a "technofeudal serf” than a free citizen, and this social fatigue would explain the reaction of the New York electorate after "30-50 years of failed policy” from both parties, Democratic and Republican.

Furthermore, political scientist Adrian Papahagi rejects the idea that Zohran Mamdani is "an educated man" in a professional sense, describes him as an activist who sings hip-hop and rap and has a BA in African studies "from a top-notch university", then turns the spotlight on his father, Professor Mahmood Mamdani from Columbia, seen as a bearer of "anti-colonial resentment", citing from Wikipedia passages from the book "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror" (2004) where the author shows that suicide bombers should be understood "as a category of soldiers" in the logic of "modern political violence", an interpretation that an academic contextualizes as an analysis that emphasizes US foreign policy decisions during the Cold War that would have created the conditions for the proliferation of militant Islamism. Papahagi concludes that Mamdani Jr.'s "deep identity" as an "African-born Indian Muslim" would dictate stronger solidarities than civic ones, not a "New Yorker" one, weaving an ideological bridge between the father's work and the son's project.

• The Mamdani Effect in Europe, a Danger to the Single Market?

Beyond the polemic, the impact of the "Mamdani Phenomenon" reverberated in Europe, where the left political parties see his victory in the New York elections as proof that a radical agenda can reverse the offensive of the right and the far right, as noted by a Reuters analysis. According to the cited source, Manon Aubry, co-chair of the Left group in the European Parliament, was in New York to support Zohran Mamdani, and comparisons have gone as far as the Netherlands and Ireland, with examples of the rise of independent lefts. For example, in the UK, Zack Polanski, the first Jewish leader of the Green Party in England and Wales, is being compared to Mamdani for his use of social media and calling for a wealth tax to reduce inequality, saying that "hope has triumphed over hate” and that "this resonates around the world”, while the British context remains marked by the cost of living, with food inflation at 19% in March 2023, the highest in 45 years, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves announcing "hard choices” and possible tax increases.

In Germany, Die Linke (The Left) is betting on free or heavily subsidized transport and rent control, and leader Jan van Aken says he is "in close contact with Zohran Mamdani and his team” and that "his victory gives us a boost”, while the SPD, through parliamentarian Rasha Nasr, says the lesson from New York means returning to "social policies for the majority of society”, after the party achieved its worst result since World War II.

In this context, political scientist Philipp Koeker noted for Reuters that parties that do not want to lose votes to the far right should focus on their own solutions to real problems, not imitating the anti-immigration agenda.

All this mixture of leftist enthusiasm, anti-capitalist criticism, symbolism of the Global South and institutional resistance of the North of the West makes Zohran Mamdani simultaneously a promise and a fear, a program and an indictment, a theory reduced to practice, in which direct references to Marx, the invocation of the takeover of the means of production, the plea for nationalizations and the chants about the "globalization of the Intifada" meet with the fear of the historical memory of the 20th century, with the European revolts of the cost of living, with the enthusiasm of the continental left and the cynicism of the markets, in a city that has tested the limits of the world and which is now becoming the perfect stage for the confrontation between wealth inequality and the desire for redistribution, between the West and the South, between the socialist promise and the capitalist reality.