If Zohran Mamdani wins the election as mayor of New York City, many on the American Left will see his victory as a stepping stone to democratic socialism. Many on the American Right will fear that the Left is correct.

Yet both sides will be wrong. An article published by Politico this week suggests that the candidate’s policies have been successfully enacted elsewhere, arguing that “embracing Mamdani’s Left-wing populism wouldn’t make America socialist.” Indeed, his proposals and base resemble those of a neoliberal Democrat — a Left-wing neoliberal, perhaps, but a neoliberal nonetheless.

Real socialism is not on the ballot in New York City, and pure free-market capitalism is impossible. The problem with capitalism is that what is logical for individual businesses is collectively destructive for the system as a whole. It is in the interest of each business to get the highest price for its goods or services while paying its workers as little as possible. But if every business does this, then aggregate demand will collapse, because most workers will be paid too little to buy the goods or services that businesses are selling.

Modern industrial capitalist systems have dealt with the problem of underpaid workers in two ways. One is to minimise their number by compelling employers to adequately pay employees, thanks to methods including organised labour, a high minimum wage, and central bank policies which don’t mechanically punish wage increases in the name of fighting inflation. Paid adequately, workers should be able to afford housing, groceries, and transportation costs, while those out of employment are covered by universal contributory social insurance. In a high-wage/low-welfare system like that of the New Deal era, only a few unfortunates depend on public welfare to survive.

Unfortunately, a new system has emerged in Western democracies over the last half-century, brought about by neoliberal leaders from Ronald Reagan to Tony Blair. The high-wage/low-welfare system, resting on the power of organised labour, has been replaced by a low-wage/high-welfare system in which the power of workers to demand higher pay has been weakened. Under neoliberalism, the government allows employers to pay poverty wages and volunteers to “top up” the inadequate private wage with a “social wage”, so that the combined sum prevents hunger and homelessness.

The social wage can take the form of subsidies for individuals to purchase goods they cannot otherwise afford. But it can also take the form of public housing, free bus fares, and the public grocery stores in the variant of neoliberal redistributionism proposed by Mamdani.

While landlords and private grocery chains in New York might be hurt by Mamdanismo, cheap-labour employers can only benefit from an increase in the social-wage share of a worker’s total income. The greater the number of goods and services either subsidised or provided directly by the state, the lower the wage that an employer needs to pay for a worker to make ends meet.

A decade ago, many on the Left recognised this in denouncing Walmart for urging some of its underpaid workers to go on welfare. The real problem in New York and other big, expensive cities is not that prices are too high and must be compensated by greater redistribution from taxpayers to underpaid workers. Instead, it is that many New York employers are unwilling to pay their employees enough to live in the city without being dependent on welfare, whether cash or in-kind.

Mamdani’s agenda includes a $30-an-hour minimum wage, but New York City can’t impose that without the permission of the state legislature. Most of the rest of his agenda, instead of raising wages or empowering organised labour, involves making taxpayers pick up the bill for public goods and services to keep workers out of destitution — and indirectly to enable employers to pay inadequate wages.

Public options have replaced the individual subsidies favoured by Reaganites and Clintonites, but this is still cheap-labour neoliberalism. The costs of employing low-wage workers are socialised by taxpayers, while the benefits go to the employer and also to consumers in the form of low prices.

Needless to say, this is not a pro-worker agenda, and working-class New Yorkers who prefer well-paid jobs to a synthesis of low wages and public charity have noticed. In the Democratic primary, Andrew Cuomo won more votes than Mamdani among both the working class and the rich, as well as among black New Yorkers. Mamdani’s base is the same as that of conventional Democrats: young, college-educated professionals and immigrants who compete with native New Yorkers for jobs and housing.

The red banner of the coming revolution, with a closer glance, turns out to be a very pale shade of pink. Open the matryoshka doll of Zohran Mamdani, and nestled inside you won’t find Lenin, Marx, and Engels. Instead, it’s Biden, Obama, and Clinton.