Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani shares a moment with supporters during election night celebrations in New York City, November 4, 2025. (Asian Journal Photo)
Zohran Mamdani’s historic win as New York City’s first Muslim and democratic socialist mayor revives debate on socialism’s meaning and how it differs from communism’s past experiments.
A new conversation in America’s largest city
When Zohran Mamdani was elected New York City’s first Muslim mayor on November 4, 2025, his victory did more than mark a milestone in representation, it reignited a national conversation about ideas once considered too radical for mainstream politics.
Calling himself a democratic socialist, Mamdani brought to the forefront a word long misunderstood in the American context: socialism. His win invites renewed curiosity about how socialism differs from communism, and what these terms mean for governance today.
The shared roots of two ideologies
Both socialism and communism trace their origins to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who critiqued 19th-century capitalism for concentrating wealth among industrial elites while keeping workers poor.
From this critique emerged two paths.
Socialism seeks to make capitalism fairer by allowing private ownership but requiring the state to provide public goods and curb inequality.
Communism, meanwhile, envisions the abolition of private property and the creation of a classless, stateless society in which wealth is shared based on need rather than profit.
How socialism works in democracies
Modern socialism often operates within democratic systems. Through elections and policy, governments use taxation, regulation, and social spending to expand opportunity and reduce inequality while preserving markets. Nations such as Sweden, Denmark, and Norway blend capitalism with strong welfare programs and collective bargaining rights.
In the United States, Mamdani’s platform fits broadly within the democratic socialist tradition, calling for affordable housing, significant expansion of public social services, and higher taxes on the wealthy – while explicitly not advocating the elimination of markets or private enterprise.
Communism and its historic record
Communism, in theory, represents Marx’s final stage of social evolution: a world without social classes or government authority.
In practice, attempts to build communist states in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and Cuba produced single-party rule and centralized economies.
While these regimes pursued equality, they often curtailed political freedom and stagnated economically outcomes far removed from Marx’s original vision of voluntary cooperation.
The crucial distinction
Socialism can coexist with democracy, private business, and market incentives.
Communism replaces these with state or collective ownership.
Socialism measures success by reducing inequality while maintaining liberty; communism by erasing class differences altogether.
In short, socialism reforms capitalism, while communism seeks to replace it.
How one city’s election mirrors a worldwide demand for equity and accountability
Mamdani’s victory illustrates how socialist ideas have re-entered the American mainstream at a time of widening inequality and rising living costs. Once a political taboo, “socialism” is now part of civic debate about health care, housing, and labor rights.
Globally, democracies from Europe to Asia are revisiting similar questions – how to preserve market dynamism while ensuring social protection. The conversation that began in a local election reflects a worldwide search for balance between fairness and freedom.
A political vocabulary in transition
As economies evolve, so do the meanings of the ideologies that shape them. Mamdani’s win signals not the triumph of one doctrine but the emergence of a pragmatic new language in public life, one that recognizes the need for economic growth and social equity.
Socialism, as originally used by the followers of Robert Owen, appeared for the first time in their Co-operative Magazine of November 1827 and meant common ownership (not nationalisation or state capitalism). Later, in 1875, at the first meeting of the German Social Democratic Party Eduard Bernstein. and others claimed that the capitalism could be reformed to meet working class interests, By championing gradual, ethically-inspired reforms they rejected socialism’s revolutionary and materialist foundations. Since then, the vast majority of ‘socialist’ groups individuals (e.g. Sanders) & proposals (such as a minimum wage) are better identified as left-leaning, progressive or social democrat.
The socialism Marx envisaged involved ‘abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production’ (Communist Manifesto). Sylvia Pankhurst understood this: ‘Our aim is Communism. Communism is not an affair of party. It is a theory of life and social organisation. It is a life in which property is held in common; in which the community produces, by conscious aim, sufficient to supply the needs of all its members; in which there is no trading, money, wages, or any direct reward for services rendered’ (What is behind the label? A plea for clearness, 1923).
Capitalist hallmarks, such as class society, commodity production, profit motive, exploitation of wage labour, markets, etc., are found throughout the modern world.