For months, Zohran Mamdani’s critics have gnashed their teeth over his self-identification as a democratic socialist, an ideology they consider beyond the pale. Their attacks didn’t work; Mamdani won the New York City mayoral race without backing down, even reiterating his socialist affiliation in his victory speech. So now, his critics are upping the ante. Last week on Fox News, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) claimed that Mamdani isn’t a socialist at all. Instead, Cruz said, he’s something far worse. He’s a Marxist.

The senator is very confused. First, he badly misunderstands what Marxism is. When Mamdani “argues for government seizing the means of production in society,” Cruz said, “that is Marxism.” Cruz is harking back to an earlier bout of right-wing hysteria about Mamdani that broke out last summer, when an old clip emerged of the future mayor at a Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) conference in 2021. In the clip, Mamdani mentions various short-term reforms favored by YDSA and its parent organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). But he also mentions the long-term “end goal” of “seizing the means of production.”

To the extent that any sense can be squeezed out of Cruz’s alarmism, his idea seems to be something like this: Normal, mainstream democratic socialists might want to implement doses of socialism within a fundamentally capitalist framework, like a “Medicare for All” system of single-payer public health insurance. But the end goal of going beyond capitalism entirely is only advocated by crazy marginal extremists, and Marxism is a word that describes that extreme.

This is just plain incorrect. All socialists want private ownership of things like factories, banks, and hospitals to eventually end. Marxism is indeed a variant of socialist thought, but it’s not a more extreme variant. It’s a particular theoretical framework for thinking about systems like capitalism and socialism — their internal economic and political dynamics, and how they rise and fall over the course of history.

Karl Marx and his close collaborator Friedrich Engels called the framework they developed “scientific socialism” since they grounded their ideas about how socialism could be achieved in a social-scientific analysis of capitalism. But the non-Marxist socialists of their day (e.g., the “utopian socialists”) had the same end goal of socializing the means of production. All socialists do; it’s the definition of the term.

The second problem with Cruz’s thinking is that it implies there’s something dangerous and spooky about advocating for the end of private control over productive capacities, as though holding this view were synonymous with fringe political extremism. In fact, mainstream socialist parties all over the world advocated the end goal of socialism until very recently.

Socialist parties — and in particular democratic socialist parties with a strategy informed by a Marxist analysis of material conditions — have long sought to achieve their aims through entirely above-board means. And they have not been secretive about those aims, maintaining that advocating capitalism’s end is no more “extreme” than advocating its continuation.

In the UK, for example, the original version of Clause IV of the Labour 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.”

During the nearly eighty years when this was in the Labour Party constitution, there were many Labour mayors of cities like London and Manchester. They mostly did things like build large-scale council housing estates, bring utilities and transport under municipal ownership or control, expand public health and sanitation services, create public parks, and use wage policy and social programs to raise working-class living standards.

Mainstream socialist parties in many European and Latin American countries had similar long-term horizons, which they defended and took seriously as they implemented short-term reforms. In Sweden, the ruling Social Democrats even made an abortive attempt to move toward that long-term end goal in 1975, with the “Meidner Plan” that would have required companies over a certain size to cede a certain portion of their ownership shares every year to funds controlled by workers. That effort was politically defeated at the time, but it was a glimpse at one way that a society that had already achieved many short-term reformist goals might try to go beyond capitalist ownership relations.