Maduro and Mamdani: Two Collectivists Check Into Public Housing

(Daily Signal)—Welcome to 2026, the year we fight collectivism. And we’re already seeing early signs that we’ll have to wage this fight not just overseas but also right here at home.

The new year has been packed with news. Fortunately, it augurs well for those who want to fight collectivism, i.e., the government appropriation of private property to turn it over to “collective” ownership under state control.

In quick succession last week, we saw two collectivists move into public housing in New York. The first was Zohran Mamdani, who took up digs at Gracie Mansion, NYC’s mayoral residence, on New Year’s Day. Three days later, former Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro moved into the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, after a well-publicized extraction from Caracas.

These two different stories are tied at the hip. Mamdani could have learned a lot from Venezuela’s own experience with collectivism, as well as that of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, and countless other dark and sad societies that are politically repressive and economic basket cases.

The problem with collectivism is simple. Because the government lacks a profit motive, and government officials are spending other people’s money, finite resources that might have been put to profitable use are mismanaged or even misappropriated, and thus wasted, to the detriment of society.

In the first volume of Capital, first published in 1867, Karl Marx wrote that by acting collectively, individuals would cooperate to create “a new power, namely, the collective power of masses.”

Only that “new power” just never materializes. Instead, we always get penury and repression. As Marx himself recognized, “All combined labor on a large scale requires, more or less, a directing authority.” That authority is the state, which, because it owns all the means of production, also owns the media and can quash dissent.

Venezuela itself is Exhibit A of the problems with collectivism and a command economy. It has the world’s largest proven oil reserves, over 300 billion barrels. Its oil production, however, is less than one million barrels a day, about one-fourth what it produced in 1970.

The United States, with reserves one-sixth the size of Venezuela’s, produces almost 14 times more output per day.

Yes, sanctions against Venezuela because of Maduro’s repressive tactics against his people have not helped Venezuela sell its oil. But mostly it has been mismanagement, a lack of investment, and outright corruption—dysfunctions that always accompany collectivism.

Venezuelan reserves, you see, are mostly in the heavy crude of the Orinoco Belt, and extraction and refining present a problem. As this very good Washington Examiner primer explains, U.S. firms such as Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and ConocoPhillips used to be present, either by controlling some oil fields outright or through joint ventures with Petroleos de Venezuela (PdVSA).

Maduro’s dictator predecessor, Hugo Chávez, nationalized the oil industry in 2007, forcing these firms to renegotiate contracts that had given PdVSA control. The American oil companies left and sued Chávez. They won, but Chávez stopped making payments. Venezuela now owes foreign companies about $25 billion.

PdVSA became, in the words of the Treasury Department, “a vehicle for corruption. A variety of schemes have been designed to embezzle billions of dollars from PdVSA for the personal gain of corrupt Venezuelan officials and businessmen.” Oil revenues also propped up U.S. enemies, such as the Cuban regime.

This is why President Donald Trump says that Venezuela stole American oil. Venezuela needs to get the oil flowing again to repay creditors and restart the economy. Oil production would fund needed repairs to other key economic sectors, such as mining (Venezuela also has a lot of gold).

This is why administration officials think that a political transition, perhaps to the popular leader Maria Corina Machado if she wins a free and fair election, may have to wait until the next stage of the evolution underway in Venezuela.

Mismanagement, underinvestment, corruption — these are the handmaidens of collectivism. Collectivism is precisely how Venezuela, once rich, became pauperized.

But Mamdani has chosen to ignore these lessons. Instead, he’s intent on collectivizing one of New York City’s main assets, its skyline, by forcing landlords to sell their property to the city, which would then run it.

In one of the most chilling lines in an inaugural speech replete with scary messaging, he said, “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

Mamdani has chosen, moreover, to revive the Office to Protect Tenants. Its appointed director, self-avowed communist Cea Weaver, has said she will use the city’s regulation and taxation powers to put the screws to landlords so tightly that they will have no choice but to sell their property to the city.

“For centuries, we’ve really treated property as an individualized good, and not a collective good,” she said not too long ago, “and we are gonna transition into treating it as a collective good, and towards a model of shared equity, will require that we think about it differently, and it will mean that families, especially white families, but some POC families who are homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have.”

Weaver has said much worse, such as “People like home ownership because they like control, which is rooted in a racist and classist society.” But luckily, we have a free internet now, and an evolving media landscape that is no longer under the monopoly control of the Left, which will allow us to be vigilant about this and point out what is taking place.

Hopefully, it will keep Mamdani, Weaver, and their ilk in check—and prevent them from doing to the Big Apple what collectivism did to Venezuela.