My Egalitarian Refutation of the Pro-Capitalism Attack on NYC's Zohran Mamdani's Proposal to Have City Government Operate Grocery Stores

Mambani's failure to advocate egalitarian revolution and a consistent class framework makes him a sitting duck for an onslaught of pro-capitalism propaganda

The Oh-so-liberal Boston Globe (owned by the billionaire John Henry who also owns the Boston Red Sox baseball team) features a syndicated conservative columnist named Jeff Jacoby (pictured above) to “balance” the paper’s pro-capitalism propaganda. Jeff Jacoby helps me a lot! He makes it convenient for me to identify the lies (of omission, especially) that his kind of pro-capitalism propaganda relies on. I posted about Jacoby earlier here regarding his attempt to use the landing of the Mayflower Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts for that propaganda purpose.

Jeff Jacoby just recently used the occasion of NYC Mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani’s, proposed supermarket proposal to defend capitalism. Jacoby’s article at the Boston Globe may be behind a paywall for you, so I will quote from it here. Then I will show how it is one huge lie by omission.

Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, is a foe of capitalism who blames profit-seeking for the high price of groceries in his city. As befits a self-described “democratic socialist,” he proposes to solve the problem by giving government more power.

“I will create a network of city-owned grocery stores,” Mamdani says in a campaign video. “We will redirect city funds from corporate supermarkets to city-owned grocery stores whose mission is lower prices, not price gouging.” Because these stores will operate “without a profit motive or having to pay property taxes or rent,” he claims, they will be able to sell their products at wholesale prices. And just like that, shoppers in New York City will never have to worry about high grocery prices again.

Like many socialist nostrums, it’s a childish idea, one repeatedly debunked in the real world. Government-owned and operated supermarkets, after all, were the norm for decades in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe before the fall of the Iron Curtain, and more recently in countries like Cuba and Venezuela. Those stores, far from being models of affordable abundance, were notorious for empty shelves, long queues, and a depressing lack of variety.

Here’s what Jacoby omits to tell his readers.

The fact that grocery stores in Marxist-controlled nations (like the Soviet Union) controlled by Communist parties (like the Bolshevik Party) were awful and worse than stores in capitalist nations (yes, that is a fact) tells one absolutely nothing about what grocery stores in an egalitarian (i.e., neither a capitalist nor a Communist) nation would be like. NOTHING!

The Soviet Union (and its satellites) were indeed ugly because the Bolshevik Party was absolutely opposed to genuine democracy of, by and for ordinary people who valued no-rich-and-no-poor equality and mutual aid and fairness and truth (what I call egalitarian values.)

The Bolshevik Party under Lenin and then Stalin waged a war against good working class people. (Read about this in some detail here.) In doing so it reduced economic productivity, which is why its grocery stores had so little food available. I invite you to read more about this in detail in the section about the Soviet Union in my book about World War II online here.

In contrast to Communist regimes, egalitarian societies are genuinely democratic for the vast majority of people with egalitarian values, as I describe here. And guess what? Egalitarian societies—which are NOT capitalist societies—are MORE productive than the capitalist societies they replace, based on the experience of about half of Spain in 1936-9 which was an egalitarian society, and which I write about in some detail here. Please read that article about the Spanish experience to understand how Jeff Jacoby’s entire argument depends on his readers not knowing the fact that egalitarianism, NOT Communism, is the actual alternative to capitalism—the alternative that is both far more desirable than capitalism and able to be far more productive than capitalism.

What enables Jacoby, and many other pro-capitalist writers lately, to get away with his attack on Zohran Mamdani (who may or may not be as bad as Marxists in general are—I don’t know enough about him yet to say) is the fact that Zohran Mamdani does not advocate egalitarian revolution, as I discuss here.

Read here how you can help build the egalitarian revolutionary movement.