A resurfaced 2021 speech by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is drawing fresh scrutiny to the ideological foundations of the Democratic Socialists of America, as critics argue that the movement’s economic platform and Marxist theory share more common ground than its leaders like to admit.
According to reporting in The Daily Wire, Mamdani β years before winning the mayor’s office β addressed a Young Democratic Socialists of America conference and laid out an objective that went beyond the usual progressive talking points. The movement’s purpose, he said, was not merely to raise class consciousness but “to win socialism.” He called for electing more socialists to office and identified what he described as a main goal: “The end goal of seizing the means of production.”
Mamdani acknowledged at the time that the objective lacked broad public support “at this very moment,” but he did not suggest dropping it. Instead, he argued that socialists should meet voters where they are on kitchen-table issues, organize around them, and gradually build support for a more radical economic transformation down the line.
The ‘Slippery Slope’ Question
The Daily Wire’s report situates Mamdani’s remarks within a broader debate that flared recently when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was asked whether America’s drift toward socialism could become a “slippery slope” into communism.
“I mean, no. I think that’s very silly,” Ocasio-Cortez replied.
The article pushes back on that dismissal, arguing that communism doesn’t necessarily announce itself as communism at the outset. It can arrive instead through popular promises β making housing affordable, guaranteeing universal healthcare, requiring the wealthy to pay their fair share, and giving working Americans more economic power.
DSA Co-Chair on Ownership
The piece also points to comments from Megan Romer, national co-chair of the DSA, in an August interview with The New Yorker. Asked whether America’s largest corporations would remain privately owned under democratic socialism, Romer advocated public ownership of essential industries. When asked directly whether she believed in owning the means of production, she answered plainly: “I do.”
Romer framed the DSA’s approach as incremental rather than revolutionary β shifting economic power gradually from the billionaire class to the working class rather than upending the system overnight. The Daily Wire notes that the DSA’s own platform calls for public ownership of America’s largest corporations and essential industries, aligning the organization’s formal positions with its leaders’ public statements.
A Marxist Throughline
The historical connection, the article argues, is hard to miss. Seizing the means of production β transferring control from capitalist owners to workers β sits at the center of Karl Marx’s communist framework. The only real distinction today, according to the piece, is the time frame. No one is calling for overnight street revolution in the way Marx imagined for his own era. But the political preferences, the article contends, are shifting.
Socialism and communism, the Daily Wire writes, are not two entirely separate traditions that developed independently. They share Marxist roots. Within the Marxist-Leninist tradition, socialism was understood as an earlier stage in the development of communist society β not a wholly different alternative to it. Marx described lower and higher phases of communist society, a relationship Vladimir Lenin later made explicit.
The article acknowledges that modern democratic socialists do not all subscribe to that progression, and many explicitly reject authoritarian communism. Still, it argues, their stated economic objectives can share significant foundations with Marxist theory β and the dividing line between the labels is less clear-cut than the political branding suggests.
The Cuba Caution
The piece offers Cuba as a cautionary case. At the outset of Fidel Castro’s revolution, the article notes, most Cubans were on his side. Nationalization initially targeted only large foreign-owned companies before expanding to domestic businesses, eventually leaving the state in control of most productive property. The result, according to the article, has been decades of extreme poverty, food shortages, and political repression for the vast majority of Cubans β with only a small elite benefiting from the promised seizure of the means of production.
The Daily Wire’s central point is that promising ownership to the working class doesn’t guarantee workers will actually exercise that power, nor that idealistic young socialists will get the society they voted for.
The article frames the real question not as whether democratic socialism and communism are identical, but where their ideas about capitalism, private ownership, and economic power already intersect β and how far the proposed transformation is meant to go. Before concerns about that trajectory are laughed off as “silly,” the piece concludes, their shared intellectual history deserves a closer look.
The op-ed was written by Holly Jean Soto, a liberty and economics communicator and Young Voices contributor who graduated from George Mason University with a bachelor’s degree in economics.
Source: www.dailywire.com β https://www.dailywire.com/news/why-mamdanis-working-class-promises-are-a-slippery-slope-toward-communism