A Tale of Two Candidates: Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani

Commentator Matt Taibbi, who once advocated many left-wing positions and even supported Bernie Sanders’s two runs for president, seems to be in the middle of a long, strange journey away from those politics. In a Substack essay on Mamdani, Taibbi said that the Democratic nominee was a “Marvel superhero to every Jacobin-reading, keffiyeh-wearing student activist” and that his victory over Cuomo signals that “the electoral mainstreaming of dingbat campus socialism has only begun.” Awkwardly trying to square the circle between this hysteria about Zohran Mamdani and his own past support for Bernie Sanders, Taibbi writes:

Many will argue we saw movement in Mamdani’s direction with the rise of chief backer Bernie Sanders . . . [but] his politics by the time he reached Washington were closer were closer to Eisenhower than Marx, as he pushed ideas like an increased minimum wage, single-payer health care, and drug reimportation to fit the framework of traditional free-market America. Sanders grew up dirt poor in Brooklyn and never lost affection for the party of the New Deal, perhaps to a fault; loyalty to the DNC and figures like pal Joe Biden were a big reason he never reached the White House.

Mamdani is different. Born in Uganda to a postcolonial theorist and a future Hollywood director, he’s a fancy prep school kid like me (Bank Street in Manhattan) and a recent immigrant — in itself not bad, but the crises of America’s past aren’t in his political muscle memory. You’ll get a better sense of his beliefs reading father and Columbia prof Mahmood Mamdani’s impenetrable Citizen and Subject than you will watching docs about Mario Savio or Woodstock.

This is strange in many ways. Sanders’s father was a Polish immigrant, and Mamdani was living in the United States by the time he was seven years old. Does “political muscle memory” start to form before the age of seven?

The claim that what separates Sanders from Mamdani is that the former “never lost affection” for the Democratic Party is also bizarre. Bernie Sanders started his political life as a member of the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), the youth wing of the Socialist Party of America. When he first ran for office in Vermont, it was as a candidate of the small socialist Liberty Union Party. And since then, he’s run as an independent in every election of his life except for his two runs for the Democratic presidential nomination. Zohran Mamdani, by contrast, has only ever run for office as a Democrat.

The most important problem, though, is that the attempted contrast between the two men’s platforms just doesn’t work. Did Sanders focus in elections on short-term reforms like “an increased minimum wage, single-payer health care, and drug reimportation”? Certainly. But Mamdani has similarly focused most of his attention on a local version of the same sort of reform agenda, proposing free buses, a municipal childcare program, and a small-scale experiment with building a few city-owned grocery stores in some of the neighborhoods with the fewest and most expensive private options.

Elsewhere Taibbi has tried to shore up the contrast with the 2021 YDSA clip, saying that he doesn’t “recall Bernie talking about ‘seizing the means of production.’” But this too shows that Taibbi has a very short memory.

There were points during Sanders’s presidential runs in 2016 and 2020 when major media outlets were breathlessly reporting Sanders’s history of calling for socialization of the means of production earlier in his career, just as they are now doing with Mamdani. (Again: anyone who finds that shocking or scandalous should look up “socialism” in a dictionary.) Here’s CNN, for example, “revealing” Sanders’s not-very-secret socialist views that he freely shared in an interview with the Burlington Free Press during his Liberty Union days:

“I favor the public ownership of utilities, banks and major industries. In Vermont we have some $2 billion of deposits in our banks,” Sanders told the paper. “In Vermont, as well as nationally, it is not tolerable to me that the control of capital would remain in the hands of the richest two or three percent of the population to do with it as they like.”

While it’s true that Sanders talks less about long-term horizons for change now than he did in the 1970s, just two years ago he put out a book with the title It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, which suggests that even in the 2020s, he hasn’t abandoned the aspect of his politics that goes beyond short-term policy changes to encompass larger concerns about the iniquities build into our economic system.

Zohran, Bernie, the Bolsheviks, and the Labour Party

The core of the traditional socialist objection to capitalism has always been that, when the means of production (i.e., the physical means of producing goods and services, such as factories and farms) are in the hands of whoever has enough money to afford to buy them, the rest of the population will be faced with a choice between going to work for these owners or dropping out of the economy entirely. In other words, you either have to submit to following orders from an unelected boss for eight of the sixteen hours you’re awake most days of the week, or, in the words of the late socialist philosopher G. A. Cohen, you can “go on the dole, or beg, or simply make no provision for [yourself] and trust to fortune.”

Socialist movements have always fought for short-term reforms to improve the material conditions of the working class in the here and now, giving ordinary people more security and dignity and nudging us in the general direction of a more equal society. Zohran Mamdani’s platform in his race for the New York City mayoralty and Bernie Sanders’s platforms in his runs for president are solidly in this tradition. But socialists (i.e., advocates of “social” ownership) have also always had a long-term vision of addressing the core problem at the heart of the capitalist mode of production.

Between the nineteenth century and the third decade of the twenty-first century, different socialist thinkers have had all sorts of different ideas about exactly what a desirable postcapitalist society could realistically look like, and there have been rich and complicated debates between them on those details. But in broad strokes, socialist visions have focused on having at least major means of production owned by the workers themselves, by broader communities, or some combination of the two (as in proposals that often pop up in socialist literature for various industries to be “nationalized under workers’ control”).

The basic principle is that rather than one part of the population controlling the means of production so the rest of us are de facto forced to go to work for them, we can run the economic machine together, collectively and democratically, and we can all enjoy its fruits.

When Scott Jennings says that talk of socializing the means of production is “the language of the Bolsheviks,” he’s not wrong, but his statement is deeply misleading. The Bolsheviks were a socialist party, so they propounded the same long-term goal of socialization as every other socialist party around the world. Earlier socialists had assumed that the transition to socialism would happen in the advanced, highly industrialized capitalist West, and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously argued that these were the only circumstances in which a flourishing socialism could be built. Otherwise, they claimed, an attempt to achieve a collective economy would only mean the egalitarian rationing of crumbs, and the experiment wouldn’t last long.

(The pair even went as far as to speculate in 1882 that the only way backward Russia could hope to transition to socialism would be if a revolution there were the “signal” for a transition to socialism in the West, so Russia could essentially borrow a preexisting industrial base.)

Despite all this, the contingencies of history in the dying Russian Empire at the end of World War I meant the Bolsheviks were able to take power in Russia, but the revolution there wasn’t a signal for (successful) revolutions elsewhere. Isolated in an undeveloped country, invaded by armies from a number of hostile countries, and ripped apart by famine and intense civil war, the Bolsheviks ended up instituting an increasingly authoritarian regime.

Socialist movements elsewhere were split by this development. Some upheld the new Soviet Union as a model, while their democratic socialist critics insisted that, since the whole point of socialism was to extend democracy from politics to economics, Soviet-style authoritarianism was unacceptable. But crucially, both sides of this debate continued to believe in the “end goal” of “seizing the means of production.”

If Mamdani becomes the next mayor of New York City, he won’t be the first or second or probably even the hundredth mayor of a major city in a capitalist country who belongs to a democratic socialist movement that subscribes to that long-term goal. In the United Kingdom, for example, the Labour Party upheld Mamdani’s “end goal” for most of its history.

The original Clause IV of the party’s constitution committed the party to “secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.” This was only changed in the 1990s, when Labour Party leader Tony Blair guided the party through its centrist lurch toward “free-market” orthodoxy that closely paralleled Bill Clinton’s abandonment of the legacy of the New Deal.

During that time, there were certainly many mayors of cities like London and Manchester who belonged to the Labour Party and believed in Clause IV. Nothing apocalyptic happened to those cities on their watch. Similarly, the internationally lauded system of municipal housing in Vienna, for example, was first constructed under a prolonged period of governance by Austrian democratic socialist politicians with the same long-term horizons. Similar things are true about a good many other cities around the world.

Instead of using any talk of shifting the means of production into the hands of ordinary people as a basis for hysterical red-baiting attacks, perhaps defenders of the status quo could try giving us a rational argument about why, contrary to that old Bernie Sanders quote, it should be “tolerable” to us that “the control of capital would remain in the hands of the richest two or three percent of the population to do with it as they like.”

If the very idea of having a long-term end goal of changing that reality is shocking, there must be a good reason why we should have to live with that state of affairs until the end of time.

I can’t wait to hear what it is.