Zohran Mamdani, the openly socialist Democrat nominee for mayor of New York City, proposed buying up private properties to “convert” them into communes in a 2021 instructional video for the far-left Gravel Institute.
The New York state assemblyman, who beat former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Democrat primary last week, argued that the solution to “America’s housing crisis” is getting the government to “fully commit to a new era of social housing” in a video titled “How Socialists Solved The Housing Crisis”:
“To go further toward the Vienna model, we’ll have to go beyond the market,” Mamdani said. “We can establish community land trusts to gradually buy up housing on the private market and convert it to community ownership.”
“We can give tenants a right of first refusal to buy out their landlords when buildings go up for sale, and we can fully commit to a new era of social housing — ending subsidies for luxury housing development and using our wealth to build beautiful, high quality social housing projects that offer good homes and strong communities to everyone,” he continued. “We won’t decommodify housing overnight, but we know what we have to do and we have history to guide us.”
While Mamdani has denied President Donald Trump’s claim that he is a “communist,” he said that his “end goal” is “seizing the means of production” just weeks after his Gravel Institute video, during a virtual appearance at a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) conference:
“What the purpose is about this entire project — it’s not simply to raise class consciousness, but to win socialism,” the mayoral candidate said in his February 2021 remarks.
He continued, “We have to continue to elect more socialists, and we have to ensure that we are unapologetic about our socialism,” before adding that socialists should “firmly” believe in the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and the “end goal of seizing the means of production, where we do not have the same level of support at this very moment.”
After Trump criticized Mamdani as a “communist lunatic” after his Democrat primary win, the mayoral candidate pushed back:
“No, I am not,” he told NBC’s Kristen Welker when directly asked if he is a communist. “I have already had to start to get used to the fact that the president will talk about how I look, how I sound, where I’m from, who I am, ultimately, because he wants to distract from what I’m fighting for. And I’m fighting for the very working people that he ran a campaign to empower that he has since then betrayed.”
He added, “When we talk about my politics, you know, I call myself a Democratic socialist in many ways inspired by the words of Dr. [Martin Luther] King from decades ago, who said, ‘Call it democracy, call it democratic socialism, there has to be a better distribution of wealth for all of God’s children in this country.”
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