ژورنال سایت خبری سیاسی ژورنال
English Journal is published on Fridays
PDF-English Journal-08 November 2025-No37
Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old Democrat politician, has become mayor-elect of New York, the most populous city in the United States and the country’s financial heart. During the campaign, Donald Trump threatened that if Zohran Mamdani won, he might cut New York’s federal funding.
Mamdani is said to identify as Muslim, yet he is a staunch supporter of the rights of sexual and gender minorities. But the focus of Mamdani’s campaign was not his Muslim identity; it was socialist slogans that led Republicans to brand him a “communist and a threat to national security”.
Mamdani is neither a good socialist nor a ‘proper’ Muslim. Both serve this young politician as instruments to become mayor of New York. He has grasped that by foregrounding his Muslim identity he can attract the votes of the lower, repressed and impoverished “Muslim minority” in New York — those who, in the current climate in America, are caught in the vice of the fascist right and are labelled “terrorist sympathisers”. By supporting Muslims and sexual and gender minorities, Mamdani has managed to disarm the fascist right. After his victory, he called Trump a corrupt billionaire who evades taxes.
But this performance of being Muslim is a very ill-fitting veneer; a cosmetic applied out of political calculation. What carried Mamdani to victory was reliance on “socialist” slogans and demands. Heavy taxation of capitalists, millionaires and billionaires, and allocating relatively substantial social-welfare budgets and financial support to the poor — these constitute Mamdani’s biggest challenge to America’s unequal economic system.
The aim of socialism is not to tax capitalists and subsidise the poor. Socialism means ending wage slavery, taking the means of production out of the hands of the capitalist minority, making all means of production public, and putting all productive capacity to social use for everyone. Unlike capitalism — which is founded on competition, profit, economic inequality and the sweeping removal of the broadest political and civil freedoms — a socialist order is based on equality and freedom. What brought Mamdani victory in New York is that people have seen with their own eyes that, in order to secure a sliver of welfare and healthcare, they must vote for Mamdani. Zohran Mamdani’s ‘identity’ is neither a socialist nor a Muslim. He is a social democrat who wants to allocate a tiny portion of the capitalists’ wealth to the poor. Faced with America’s fascist right, this too is a victory.
Editor: Patty Debonitas
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