Self-proclaimed socialist Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, has attempted to defend his radical leftist views by insisting that he is not a "communist."

Yet, in a recently resurfaced video, Mamdani explicitly called for the "abolition of private property" as a means to solve the purported problem of insufficient affordable housing for working-class people, Breitbart reported.

Notably, abolishing private property in all its forms is the key foundation upon which communism rests, as explained more than 170 years ago by the founders of that far-left, anti-capitalist ideology, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Mamdani called for the "abolition of private property"

In a resurfaced video that recently went viral on social media, Mamdani spoke in an interview about how to solve the problem of homeless, or "unhoused," people, if he were to be elected as NYC's mayor.

"My platform is that every single person should have housing, and I think faced with these two options, the system has hundreds of thousands of people unhoused, right? For what?" Mamdani said.

"If there was any system that could guarantee each person housing, whether you call it the abolition of private property, or you call it a statewide housing guarantee, it is preferable to what is going on right now," he continued.

Likely anticipating the political pushback his proposed solution would bring, the leftist mayoral candidate added, "People try to play 'gotcha' games about these kinds of things -- look, I care more about whether somebody has a home."

Zohran Mamdani says he'd be in favor of the "abolition of private property" pic.twitter.com/WRs6JEG5tv

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) July 17, 2025

The core tenet of communism

The "system" that Mamdani would find "preferable" to supposedly "guarantee" housing for everybody by abolishing private property is known as communism, which was first outlined by Marx and Engels in 1848.

In Chapter II of Marx's "Manifesto of the Communist Party," he listed 10 "measures" that would be necessary to attain the classless society he envisioned, the first of which was, "Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes."

Written around the same time, though published decades later, Engels further explained the concept in "The Principles of Communism," in which he wrote of what would be required to end capitalistic "competition" and impose a "new social order" on the people.

"Private property must, therefore, be abolished and in its place must come the common utilization of all instruments of production and the distribution of all products according to common agreement -- in a word, what is called the communal ownership of goods," Engels wrote.

He added, "In fact, the abolition of private property is, doubtless, the shortest and most significant way to characterize the revolution in the whole social order which has been made necessary by the development of industry -- and for this reason it is rightly advanced by communists as their main demand."

Though Mamdani has sought to deny the label of "communist" that some critics have rightly applied to him, those denials ring hollow when the radical would-be mayor is, quite literally, espousing the core tenet of communism, as written by Marx and Engels themselves.