Zohran Mamdani and the ugly rebirth of the socialism of fools

Two events have been referred to as a ‘day of celebration’ by Western leftists in recent years. There’s Zohran Mamdani’s storming to power in New York City, which radicals across the Anglo-American world hailed as a stirring victory for millennial socialism. The other? The mass murder of socialists on a kibbutz in Israel.

Perhaps it’s because I recently returned from a visit to Kibbutz Be’eri on the border with Gaza that the left’s gloating over the rise of ‘socialism’ in NYC has left me particularly cold. For here was a genial, tight community in the north of the Negev desert that was founded on genuinely collectivist principles. A ‘gathering’ – to give the English translation of ‘kibbutz’ – that emphasises collective ownership and community connection.

And yet when armed fascists invaded this kibbutz, this living, breathing exercise in ‘radical democracy’, some of the same people fawning over Mamdani called it ‘resistance’. The TikTok socialists of the wealthy West, for whom radicalism means little more than donning a keffiyeh and flirting with genderfluidity, made excuses for it. One even used the phrase ‘day of celebration’ to refer to the broader pogrom of which this slaughter of socialists was one part.

We need to talk about this – this fact that the left can celebrate both the electoral victory of a socialist in NYC and the slitting of socialists’ throats by tyrannical Islamists in the Jewish State. It tells us an unpalatable truth about what passes for ‘socialism’ in bourgeois circles today. It suggests this ‘socialism’ that’s taking the young of the credentialled classes by storm might be nothing more – and nothing less – than the socialism of fools.

Being in Be’eri was a sobering experience. And not only because the scars of Hamas’s fascistic onslaught were still visible. Bullet holes in walls. The blackened ruins of family homes that the invaders torched in order to smoke out the hiding Jews, whether for summary execution or kidnapping. No, it was also the fact that my visit coincided with feverish chatter among the Western commentariat about surging ‘millennial socialism’ in the US and the UK.

Mamdani was leaping ahead in the polls. Zack Polanski had started his push of Britain’s creaking old Green Party towards what some people call ‘socialism’ – though I would recommend they read Marx’s stinging critique of Malthus before they buy the idea that a nature-worshipping, growth-hating outfit like the Greens could ever be ‘socialist’.

And yet here I was in a town of true collective living, built on socialist ideals back in the 1940s, that is hated by these Western leftists. So hated that even the slaughter of its workers, its farmers, its children and its elderly by an avowedly racist and regressive army was insufficient to stir their sympathy. On the contrary, some in the West called their killers ‘martyrs’ and lauded the despotic savagery they visited on farmhands and migrant workers. Socialists celebrating the gunning down of working people? That requires analysis.

Be’eri was founded in 1946. Like other kibbutzim, it was built on left-wing principles. Ran Abramitzky, author of The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World, says the kibbutzim are among the modern era’s ‘most successful experiments in voluntary socialism’. These were collective farms founded by ‘Jewish immigrants [who] rejected capitalism and wanted to form a more socialist society’. In the early days, there was no private property in kibbutzim. People shared the fruits of their labour, which was primarily farming. They dined together, raised their kids together. Not for nothing were the kibbutzim like magnets for the youthful idealists of the West in the 1970s and 80s, vast numbers of whom trekked to these mini utopias to work and live. Indeed, at Be’eri I met Natasha Cohen, from South Africa, who came to the kibbutz in the 1980s, fell in love, and stayed.

The British-Iranian writer Potkin Azarmehr has said kibbutzim are that rarest thing – a ‘successful model of socialism’. For these were places free of the authoritarianism that too often attended socialist experiments in the 20th century. The driving force in these collective towns was not ‘compulsion’ but ‘idealism’, he writes. And it was the most grotesque betrayal, he says, when the ‘champagne socialists’ of the West cheered the apocalyptic violence inflicted on these towns founded on non-champagne socialist ideals.

One hundred and one civilians were murdered in Be’eri on 7 October 2023. That’s one in 10 of the population – a literal decimation of Jews. This included farmers in their fields. And peace activists like Vivian Silver, 74, who devoted her life to the cause of coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. And elderly people, those most likely to remember the left-wing values upon which their haven from the vagaries of capitalism was founded.

Like all kibbutzim, Be’eri has felt the pressures of privatisation. But it has held out more firmly than most. Largely thanks to its stunningly successful printing plant, which exploded from a kibbutz side hustle in the 1950s to a place which today prints the vast majority of Israel’s driver’s licenses and customs documents, Be’eri has developed the resources to withstand external dynamics. It maintained its communal lifestyle. All major decisions were put to a kibbutz vote. The kibbutzniks’ three meals a day, and even their homes and cars, were part provided by the collective. As Natasha’s husband, Gal, says: ‘We are proud of being old school.’ Be’eri persevered as one of those old Jewish ‘exercises in radical democracy’, as David Leach described kibbutzim in his book, Chasing Utopia: The Future of the Kibbutz in a Divided Israel.

And yet how did the socialists of our own upper middle classes respond to the attempted destruction of this radically democratic community? With indifference at best, glee at worst. ‘Glory to our martyrs’, said privileged American students in the days after those ‘martyrs’ butchered the inhabitants of a socialist community. ‘Long live the intifada’, they cried following this intifada that involved the massacre of collectivist farmers. ‘Globalise the intifada’, they wailed in the wake of this slaughter of peace activists and ageing leftists. Notably, that’s the rallying cry that nepo baby Zohran Mamdani has refused to condemn, a man who’s never farmed for anything other than likes on TikTok.

There is something seriously ridiculous about these Fisher-Price revolutionaries of the Ivy League sneering at the genuine grafters of a collective entity like Be’eri. Here we have people for whom ‘socialism’ means dying your hair a funny colour and buying bumpy fruit from Whole Foods looking down their noses at Jews who properly live out the ideals of voluntary socialism. In fact it’s worse than that – they actively celebrate the death of these people, fantasising that the murder of civilian collectivists by a racist army backed by the imperial theocrats of Iran is somehow a blow against ‘the system’. Their wrongness, not to mention their misanthropy, is astonishing.

Ask yourself: what has changed between the 1970s, when progressive Westerners flocked to the kibbutzim, and today, when ‘progressive’ Westerners hail the invasion and pillaging of the kibbutzim by armies of anti-Semites? It’s not the kibbutzim themselves. They remain attempts to live differently. No, it’s the West’s own notion of what’s ‘progressive’. Where once our young idealists saw in Zionism a plucky project of post-colonial nation-building valiantly withstanding the incursions of powerful Arab armies, now they see Zionism as a settler-colonial pox that those powerful armies have a duty to violently excise from the Holy Land. The Western left’s journey from love for kibbutzniks to an inhuman disregard for their mass murder by racists is a story of our moral decline, not Israel’s.

A ‘socialism’ that cheers the coming to power of a son of eye-watering privilege but shrugs its shoulders over the ruthless execution of octogenarian leftists is a foolish socialism indeed. That’s what we are witnessing: the ugly rebirth of the socialism of fools. Where once that twisted species of socialism held Jews responsible for the ills of capitalism, now its Israelophobic heir holds the Jewish nation responsible for the ills of the entire world. To such an extent that even that nation’s farmers and pensioners are seen as fair game for barbarism. Dehumanisation is the fuel of this ‘socialism’ that has such a frenzied obsession with one small country.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.