Why aren’t Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (nom de guerre: V.I. Lenin), Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro on the campaign trail with Zohran Mamdani, Democrat nominee for mayor of New York City? After all, Election Day is Nov. 4, just three weeks from today!
The ultimate excuse explains these men’s absence from the hustings: They are dead.
However, if they were alive, these giants of Communism would be knocking on doors and manning phone banks to assure that Mamdani captures Gotham City Hall. After all, Mamdani is the son that Marx and Lenin never had.
Zohran, the smiling Stalinist, calls himself a “democratic socialist.” Nonetheless, the silky smooth candidate’s public comments echo the words of the most prominent theoreticians and practitioners of full-throated Communism. This is troubling news for New Yorkers who prefer not to live in Havana on the Hudson.
Consider this sample of Mamdani’s multifarious pronouncements and how they recall those of the ghosts of Communism past.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin arrived in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in 1917, triggering the October Revolution (Photo via Wikimedia Commons. Photo composite by Deroy Murdock)
As Mamdani told the Democratic Socialists of America in 2021, the “end goal” should be “seizing the means of production.”
“This assessment of Mamdani and Marx is spot on, especially as related to seizing the means of production. That’s classic, 100 percent, undeniable, textbook socialism/Marxism,” says Professor Paul Kengor, a Grove City College political scientist and author of The Devil and Karl Marx. “The fact that Mamdani couples that phrase with ‘end goal’ is even more revealing: Marx was all about the end game. As he told his comrades, ‘We have a world to win.’”
Lenin could not agree more. In 1917’s The State and Revolution, he wrote, “in seizing state power, the proletariat thereby ‘abolishes the state as state.’”
Lenin’s words were inspired by Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s longtime companion in political economy. “The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production in the first instance into state property,” Engels postulated in 1877’s Anti-Dühring.
“With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer,” Engels argued in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. “It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.”
‘Communist Manifesto’ co-author Karl Marx (Photo: John Jabez Edwin Mayall via Wikimedia Commons. Composite by Deroy Murdock.)
In a video that resurfaced in mid-July, Mamdani said: “If there was [sic] any system that could guarantee each person housing, whether you call it the abolition of private property or you call it, you know, just a statewide housing guarantee, it is preferable to what is going on right now.”
Mamdani’s dart hit the Communist bullseye.
As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in 1848’s The Communist Manifesto, “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”
“We have shown that at the present time individuals must abolish private property, because the productive forces and forms of intercourse have developed so far that, under the domination of private property, they have become destructive forces, and because the contradiction between the classes has reached its extreme limit,” Marx and Engels expressed in The German Ideology.
“Only by abolishing private property in land and building cheap and hygienic dwellings can the housing problem be solved,” Lenin declared in 1917’s Materials Relating to the Revision of the Party Programme.
Addressing the Supreme State Conference on January 25, 1956, Mao Zedong, Red China’s butcher-in-chief, said: “The changeover from individual to socialist, collective ownership in agriculture and handicrafts and from capitalist to socialist ownership in private industry and commerce is bound to bring about a tremendous liberation of the productive forces.”
“The word ‘share’ appears only four times in The Communist Manifesto,” Professor Kengor told me. “However, ‘abolition’ arises 31 times, and ‘abolish’ and its variants emerge 30 times.”
So, “abolition” does not mean encouraging those who have property to offer some to the have-nots. Nor is it using tax collection to coerce “social justice.” Far worse, it’s about ending private property and empowering Big Government to grab and manhandle it at will.
[Please insert and center photo of Joseph Stalin. Caption:]
Official portrait that marked Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s 70th birthday, December 21, 1949 (Photo: Ivan Segin, via Wikimedia Commons. Composite by Deroy Murdock.)
“No, there should be no billionaires,” Mamdani told NBC’s Kristen Welker on June 29’s Meet the Press.
Discounting 47 years of inflation, Mamdani’s remark rhymes with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s question to the World Communist Youth Conference on July 26, 1978: “With what morality can the [U.S.] leaders talk of human rights in a country where there are millionaires and beggars?”
“We freeze the rent!” Mamdani shouted at a campaign stop earlier this year.
If implemented, this policy would apply only to Gotham’s rent-stabilized apartments. Still, landlords would not be amused.
The Communist Manifesto’s co-authors meant no compliment when they wrote, “the landlord now is but the sleeping partner of the capitalist.”
That was as hot and heavy as Marx and Engels ever got — at least in print.
“We need to abolish private insurance, institute single-payer & nationalize the medical supply chain immediately,” Mamdani demanded in April 2020, via X. “This is no time to put the ideology of capitalism above helping those who are in the greatest need.”
In 1917, Lenin’s “Programme of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party” promised “Full Social insurance of workers” including “free medical and medicinal aid under the control of self-governing sick benefit societies, the management bodies of which are to be elected by the workers.”
Article 120 of the Joseph Stalin-era Soviet Constitution of December 5, 1936, guaranteed “free medical service for the working people and the provision of a wide network of health resorts for the use of the working people.”
Referring to Cuba’s children, Castro said in 2002: “All get immediate free medical care.” The caudillo wrote on April 4, 2007, in Granma, the official government newspaper, “rest assured that not a single citizen lacks free medical care.”
Red China’s Butcher-in-Chief Mao Zedong (Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Composite by Deroy Murdock.)
“Zohran won New York’s first fare-free bus pilot on five lines across the city. As Mayor, he’ll permanently eliminate the fare on every city bus,” according to Mamdani’s campaign website.
Long before the city bus was invented, Marx and Engels foreshadowed Mamdani’s proposal, although they went further. As they envisioned in The Communist Manifesto: “All the means of transport, railways, canals, steamships, roads, the posts etc. shall be taken over by the state. They shall become the property of the state and shall be placed free at the disposal of the impecunious classes.”
“Abortion should be safe, legal, and free,” Mamdani announced via X on January 22, 2020. “Rights cannot be limited to those who can afford to pay.”
The June 16, 1913, edition of Pravda featured Lenin’s tirade, “The Working Class and Neo-Malthusianism.” In this screed, Lenin favored “the unconditional annulment of all laws against abortions or against the distribution of medical literature on contraceptive measures, etc.”
During the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin issued a November 1920 decree titled “On Women’s Healthcare.” It included a passage “To allow performing the procedure of the artificial interruption of pregnancy free of charge and in the conditions of Soviet clinics, where its maximal harmlessness is ensured…”
Cuban Communist thug Fidel Castro (Photo: Mondadori Publishers via Wikimedia Commons. Composite by Deroy Murdock.)
“I’ll make childcare available to all New Yorkers at no cost,” Mamdani promises in a campaign TV ad.
Castro unveiled a similar arrangement for Cubans on Sept. 17, 1966.
“Three pilot plans are being implemented: one in Pinar del Río, another in Las Villas, and another in Oriente. What does this pilot plan consist of?” Castro asked his audience. “All children will have daycare centers without exception … Now, those centers will be free, and the children will have free milk, food, and everything. And the centers will be free for working women.”
“I’m Zohran Mamdani, and as mayor, I will create a network of city-owned grocery stores,” he pledged on TikTok, via his campaign website. “It’s like a public option, for produce.” He added: “These stores will operate without a profit motive, or having to pay property taxes or rent, and will pass on those savings to you.”
As famine befell the new Bolshevik state, Lenin wrote likewise in his May 22, 1918, “Letter to the Workers of Petrograd:” “every particle of surplus grain must be brought into the state stores, the whole country must be swept clean of concealed or ungarnered grain surpluses.”
“As-Salaam-Alaikum. My name is Zohran Mamdani,” he told protesters on Jan. 6, 2020, with an Arabic keffiyeh adorning his neck. On X, Mamdani amplified his remarks and referred to Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz: “Tonight I stood with my comrades in @VOCALNewYork, @CourtWatchNYC & @ProgressiveOur at her inauguration to make clear that we’re going to abolish cash bail in New York State.”
“[T]he right of Habeas Corpus, that is, the right of any accused person (high treason constitutes an exception) to be released on bail pending the start of the trial, this much-praised right is once more a privilege of the rich. The poor man cannot offer surety and therefore must go to prison,” Friedrich Engels lamented in 1844 (Marx & Engels Collected Works, Volume 3: page 506). A year earlier, parenthetically, Engels analyzed the Irish criminal-justice system. He concluded: “The Irishman is a carefree, cheerful, potato-eating child of nature.” (MECW 3: 389)
Zohran Mamdani, Democrat Party nominee for mayor of New York City (Image generated by Deroy Murdock via Chat GPT, Oct. 14, 2025)
Mamdani announced via X on May 24, 2022: “We need to ban all guns.”
Under the leadership of V.I. Lenin, the Council of People’s Commissars issued “On the Surrender of Weapons.” Among the December 10, 1918, decree’s 15 mandates: “All the population and all institutions of the civil administration are obliged to surrender all serviceable and unserviceable rifles, machine-guns and revolvers of all systems in their possession, the cartridges for them, and sabres of every pattern.” Furthermore, “All permits issued hitherto for the keeping of weapons are deemed invalid.” Also: “All surrendered weapons are intended for the Red Army and are placed under the control of the Chief of Supply, without whose authorization they are not to be expended anywhere.” Finally: “This decree enters into force by telegraph.”
Amid such strict limits on their sacred right to keep and bear arms, the Russian people were squeezed between the hammer and sickle for 73 more years. According to the Black Book of Communism, Lenin and his totalitarian heirs murdered, starved, froze, or forcibly worked to death an estimated 20 million of their constituents in the Soviet Union. Their comrades slaughtered another 74 million men, women, and children in China, Cambodia, North Korea, Ethiopia, and other nations where the cancer of “scientific socialism” metastasized.
“Make no mistake, Zohran Mamdani represents the same kind of Communism as the tyrants of the past,” warns James Lindsay, a best-selling author and scholar of Marxism-Leninism. “If elected, he will bring ruin and suffering to the greatest city in the world: New York, NY.”
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Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor and contributing editor with The American Spectator. He thanks Paul Kengor and James Lindsay for contributing research assistance to this opinion piece.