Since the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that brought Vladimir Lenin to power in Russia, every communist system has ultimately failed. From Russia to North Korea, Laos, Cuba, Cambodia, Eastern Europe, and China, communism promised to make everyone equal but, in effect, made nearly everyone equally poor, except for a handful of wealthy party cadres at the top.

To maintain this unnatural system of collectivization, every communist country became a totalitarian dictatorship. In order for the Communist Party to remain in power, restrictions on normal freedoms, such as freedom of speech, assembly, the press, religion, and political affiliation, were enforced by secret police, coupled with centrally controlled courts, prisons, and gulags.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ 1848 Communist Manifesto laid out ten measures for abolishing capitalism. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 book The Road to Serfdom argued that even well-intentioned central economic planning tends to erode political liberty and personal freedom. In 1958, W. Cleon Skousen published The Naked Communist, which included a list of 45 goals he said represented a communist strategy for the gradual takeover of the United States. On January 10, 1963, Rep. A. S. Herlong Jr. of Florida read the list into the Congressional Record.

Across the United States, there are examples of nearly every one of these steps toward communism. California and New York are the most obvious examples, but the militant left, the extreme left, and Democratic Socialists are pushing similar policies at the state and federal levels.

They also include organized ideological movements capturing the leadership of core public institutions, coalition networks linking avowedly socialist organizations to mainstream advocacy groups, federal proposals to nationalize parts of strategic industries, the political normalization of these ideas beyond the socialist fringe, and the rebranding of confiscation, nationalization, and seizure under administrative or otherwise benign-sounding terminology.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, appointed a RentMamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, appointed a RentMON Guidelines Board that approved a rent freeze covering roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments.

The City Council, with the backing of his administration, is advancing legislation to revive the “Third Party Transfer” program. Under the proposal, the city could take ownership of buildings from landlords with code violations and unpaid taxes and transfer the deeds to nonprofit organizations or tenant groups it determines are better suited to manage the properties.

California also has rent controls at the local level. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Monica, Berkeley, West Hollywood, and numerous other cities each enforce their own rent-control ordinances.

Nationwide, approximately 182 municipalities have some form of rent control: 99 in New Jersey, 63 in New York, 18 in California, plus Washington, D.C., Takoma Park, Maryland, and a handful of cities in Maine and Minnesota. More recent industry estimates place the total at more than 300 city and county governments, using a broader definition of rent-control policies.

New York City’s push to permanently transfer ownership of buildings from landlords is not unique, although the legal mechanisms vary significantly by jurisdiction. New Jersey has its own legal pathway under the Abandoned Properties Rehabilitation Act of 2004 and the Multi-family Housing Preservation and Receivership Act of 2003. Under these laws, a municipality may petition a court for possession of a neglected property. If the owner or lienholder fails to rehabilitate it, a judge may transfer possession to the municipality or to a designated nonprofit or developer.

Baltimore operates a similar initiative, known as “Vacants to Value.” Under that program, the new owner of a rehabilitated property receives full legal title rather than temporary custodianship, making Baltimore’s approach closer in effect to New York City’s ownership-transfer model than to a traditional receivership program.

Mamdani has also moved forward on a signature campaign promise to open city-owned grocery stores, selling goods at below cost, despite a documented record of similar efforts failing elsewhere in the country.

Baldwin, Florida, opened a city-run grocery store in 2019 after its last private grocery closed. The store struggled to break even and shut down in 2024. In Erie, Kansas, the city council purchased the town’s only grocery store in 2020. It posted only one profitable month in 2022, and after years of losses the city leased it to a private operator in 2024. St. Paul, Kansas, purchased a failing grocery store under similar circumstances and likewise turned to private management rather than continue operating it directly.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson pursued a feasibility study for a city-owned grocery store in 2023. However, after business groups raised concerns about the city’s lack of grocery industry expertise, Chicago declined to seek state funding and abandoned the proposal.

The retreat from uniform law enforcement is another step toward achieving what Lenin described in The State and Revolution (1917), rather than what Marx outlined in The Communist Manifesto. Here, “retreat” refers to state and local governments declining to enforce, or cooperate with the enforcement of, federal law.

Applied to the current pattern, jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction defiance of federal authority could be viewed as a similar preparatory phase: weakening the enforcement power of the existing federal government at the state and local levels before consolidating authority in its place.

States with statewide sanctuary laws are clearly departing from, or directly confronting, federal immigration enforcement policy. These include California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington. Depending on the source, Maine, Maryland, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Utah, and Minnesota are also included.

Notable sanctuary cities and counties include Chicago and Cook County, Illinois; Denver and Boulder, Colorado; Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, and Amherst, Massachusetts; and Washington, D.C.

New York’s Local Cops, Local Crimes Act, passed May 2026, bars local police from 287(g) cooperation agreements with ICE and prohibits even informal cooperation, taking effect August 25, 2026. California’s California Values Act, SB 54, in force since 2017, does the same statewide. On bail, other jurisdictions moved in the same direction well before California’s 2026 ruling: Illinois became the first state to fully eliminate cash bail under its 2023 Pretrial Fairness Act, New Jersey virtually eliminated cash bail in 2017 in favor of a risk-assessment system, and New York, New Mexico, Alaska, and Washington, D.C. have each enacted their own versions.

California’s 2026 state supreme court ruling, called “seismic” by the Marshall Project, bars judges from setting bail at an amount a defendant can prove is financially impossible to pay, joining that broader multi-state trend rather than originating it.

California leads the nation in direct wealth confiscation. The One-Time Wealth Tax for State-Funded Health Care Programs Initiative, certified for the November 2026 ballot, would impose a one-time 5 percent tax on the entire net worth of any California billionaire, retroactive to a January 1, 2026 snapshot. At least six billionaires relocated ahead of the cutoff, while others are spending heavily to defeat it instead. CalCare, a single-payer proposal, failed in committee again in April 2026, though 86 percent of California Democrats support it.

This tax model is spreading. Virginia legislators, under new Governor Abigail Spanberger’s Democratic-controlled government, have proposed a 10 percent top bracket on income over $1 million and a state-level investment-income tax, though both remain in committee without her formal endorsement. At least ten states are exploring wealth or exit taxes, including Washington and Michigan. Earlier California bills would have taxed former residents for up to ten years after departure, though both died.

On education, DSA publishes its own strategy document, “Why Socialists Should Become Teachers,” instructing members to join NEA and AFT affiliates and “organize from within.” The NEA elected new leadership in July 2026 including UTLA president Cecily Myart-Cruz, a 2019 DSA convention keynote speaker. A Defending Education investigation found education officials with DSA ties in at least 15 states.

The pattern extends into street-level civil society, with documented ties that vary in strength by organization. Antifa was designated a domestic terrorist organization in September 2025. The government’s designation describes it as a “militarist, anarchist enterprise,” a lineage historically distinct from Marxist-Leninist communism.

BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors said on camera in 2015, “We are trained Marxists,” although she left the organization’s leadership in 2021. InfluenceWatch reports that the Sunrise Movement co-organized a 2020 activist training with the Democratic Socialists of America’s Afrosocialist caucus. Semafor also reported that Sunrise’s internal strategy materials describe a plan culminating in “political revolution” and a “new system” by 2032.

The coalition network extends beyond individual organizations. InfluenceWatch identifies the Democratic Socialists of America as a member of both the “ICE Out for Good Coalition” and the October 2025 “No Kings” protest coalition, alongside organizations including Indivisible, the ACLU, the American Federation of Teachers, the Human Rights Campaign, Planned Parenthood, and MoveOn.

Similar ideas have also reached the Senate floor. Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would impose a one-time 50 percent stock tax on major AI companies and direct an estimated $7 trillion into a government-controlled fund. The proposal is unlikely to pass the Republican-controlled Congress, but California Gov. Gavin Newsom, while opposing his own state’s wealth tax, has proposed a national billionaire tax and a federal public equity fund.