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The error was the election of Mamdani as mayor.
John Reed was one of the foremost left-wing leaders during America’s early 20th-century Progressive Era and had much in common with today’s Democratic Socialists.John Silas “Jack” Reed was a Zohran Mamdani of his era. Both rose in left-wing American politics in their late twenties and early thirties, embraced socialism, and framed politics through class struggle and oppressor/oppressed themes. Both believed America’s political and capitalist systems had to be radically transformed -- or dismantled -- for working-class liberation. Were he alive today, Reed would likely see eye to eye with the NYC mayor....As correspondent for the socialist magazine The Masses, in August 1917 Reed sailed to Russia and supportively covered the Bolshevik insurgency, publishing what he saw in a book, Ten Days That Shook the World, which Lenin “unreservedly” recommended in its preface as “a truthful and most vivid exposition” of the first successful communist revolution.4 More confirmed in his views than ever, Reed naively wrote that after the Bolshevik coup “one hundred and sixty millions [sic] of the world’s most oppressed peoples suddenly achieved liberty.” After returning to the U.S., in 1919 he co-founded the Communist Labor Party of America, the predecessor to the Communist Party USA.If you don’t have time to deep dive into Jack Reed’s involvement in early 20th-century American political radicalism, stream the 1981 epic film Reds, produced, directed, co-written, and starring Warren Beatty as Reed with a stellar cast featuring Jack Nicholson as radical labor advocate and playwright Eugene O’Neill and Maureen Stapleton as anarcho-feminist Emma Goldman. Beatty tells Reed’s political story around his loosely committed and rocky romance with his wife, feminist artist Louise Bryant, portrayed by the late Diane Keaton. I saw the three-hour, twenty-minute picture as a young political science and Russian studies major and was struck by its attention to detail, accurate sets, and captivating character portrayals of radicals during the Progressive Era, down to Reed’s Proudhon-quote “Property is Theft” sign hanging on his apartment door.
