The Steps to Establishing Marxism — And How the U.S. Is Slipping Left
Since the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that brought Vladimir Lenin to power in Russia, every communist system has ultimately failed. From Russia to North Korea, Laos, Cuba, Cambodia, Eastern Europe, and China, communism promised to make everyone equal but, in effect, made nearly everyone equally poor, except for a handful of wealthy party cadres at the top.
To maintain this unnatural system of collectivization, every communist country became a totalitarian dictatorship. In order for the Communist Party to remain in power, restrictions on normal freedoms, such as freedom of speech, assembly, the press, religion, and political affiliation, were enforced by secret police, coupled with centrally controlled courts, prisons, and gulags.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ 1848 Communist Manifesto laid out ten measures for abolishing capitalism. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 book The Road to Serfdom argued that even well-intentioned central economic planning tends to erode political liberty and personal freedom. In 1958, W. Cleon Skousen published The Naked Communist, which included a list of 45 goals he said represented a communist strategy for the gradual takeover of the United States. On January 10, 1963, Rep. A. S. Herlong Jr. of Florida read the list into the Congressional Record.
Across the United States, there are examples of nearly every one of these steps toward communism. California and New York are the most obvious examples, but the militant left, the extreme left, and Democratic Socialists are pushing similar policies at the state and federal levels.
These include state-run enterprises that undercut private businesses, direct price controls in place of market pricing, government seizure of private real estate, confiscatory taxation of accumulated wealth, and jurisdiction-level withdrawal from uniform federal law enforcement.
They also include organized ideological movements capturing the leadership of core public institutions, coalition networks linking avowedly socialist organizations to mainstream advocacy groups, federal proposals to nationalize parts of strategic industries, the political normalization of these ideas beyond the socialist fringe, and the rebranding of confiscation, nationalization, and seizure under administrative or otherwise benign-sounding terminology.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, appointed a Rent Guidelines Board that approved a rent freeze covering roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments.
Mamdani has also made government seizure of privately owned buildings an explicit policy goal. Announcing his “Block by Block” plan, he said his administration would “take aggressive legal action to remove negligent owners and property managers, and for buildings that have suffered chronic neglect, we will work to transfer ownership to responsible stewards,” whom he described as “community land trusts, non-profits, or even the tenants themselves.”
The City Council, with the backing of his administration, is advancing legislation to revive the “Third Party Transfer” program. Under the proposal, the city could take ownership of buildings from landlords with code violations and unpaid taxes and transfer the deeds to nonprofit organizations or tenant groups it determines are better suited to manage the properties.
California also has rent controls at the local level. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Monica, Berkeley, West Hollywood, and numerous other cities each enforce their own rent-control ordinances.