I was a socialist for most of my life—here's why

I wasn't rich, I wasn't evil, and I wasn't obsessed with getting free stuff—I wanted a better world (and was misinformed).

When Zohran Mamdani, a socialist, won the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City, conservative social media erupted into hysteria. Perhaps for good reason—we should fear communism. It destroys countries and lives.

But as someone who really was “a communist” for most of their life, I can tell you that the right’s interpretations of leftists (and hysterical finger-pointing screams of “s/he’s a communist!”) read as clownish and misinformed. These responses certainly don’t convince anyone away from their socialist views—they only work to reinforce the view that the right is as knee-jerky and as hyperbolic as the left appears to be.

The running assumption from the right is that anyone who identifies as a socialist has a death wish for the West; that they are lazy and want free stuff at the expense of freedom and a healthy, thriving economy; and that they are essentially evil.

I can’t speak for Mamdani specifically, but as someone who identified as a socialist (sometimes as a Marxist, periodically as some version of anarchist) for most of their life, until maybe five or so years ago, I can tell you that my motivations were never nefarious. Stupid, perhaps. Uninformed, for sure. But evil? No.

I grew up working class—in a union family. Our class status was politicized from the time I was young. I was aware that my classmates had things I did not, and would have access to opportunities in life I would not be offered. Class, in places like Canada and America, is much more fluid than in third world countries, yes, but it still has a tremendous impact on how you operate in life—your expectations, your connections, your friends, your ability to build wealth and acquire property, your ability to save money and climb out of that paycheck to paycheck life. That is a fact I noted my middle and upper class friends and classmates seemed completely oblivious to, and yes, this embittered me.

In many ways, I wish I had not been given this message—in retrospect, I felt set up for failure in many ways, believing I would never own anything and never have access to a life of financial security. What was the point, even, of thinking about careers and credit scores and investments and saving money when it would never get me anywhere of note, thanks to the lack of wealth in my family. Nothing would be passed on to me, nothing would be inherited—I assumed I was destined to be on the poor end of the spectrum for life.

The truth is that the limitations of class are very real for most people, despite the fact that we have the freedom to escape. “Working hard” is important, but is unlikely to move me into that yacht life. That said, the glory of America is that, for some, it does. It is possible for people with nothing to become great success stories. We hear these stories often. The fact my family was a Marxist one, though, meant I didn’t hear these stories, and rather came to believe class was a permanent burden placed on me by the bourgeosie, and that the only way to upend this system was by replacing the capitalist system with socialist one.