It is probably time to unpack the word ‘communism’. Zohran Mamdani has been elected Mayor of New York, and he is labelled ‘communist’ by Fox News and others. Is that the right label? And making this even more urgent is an apparent ignorance of the meaning of ‘communism’ among those born after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I discovered this one night at Sky News when I was waiting to go into the studio for a panel show, when one of the other panellists (a young woman – very intelligent, politically smart) turned and asked: ‘What does “communism” mean?’ I am supported in this observation by Charles C.W. Cooke, senior editor at National Review who recently wrote that ‘Apparently, we still need to explain why Communism is wrong.’ Here is the official definition of communism from the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘A theory that advocates the abolition of private ownership, all property being vested in the community, and the organisation of labour for the common benefit of all members….’ Strictly accurate, I suppose, but somehow it misses the mark. That’s because of the triumphant march of Marxism through our institutions (especially, and most alarmingly, the education sector). Whenever ‘Identity Politics’ is being promoted it is the social analysis of Karl Marx that you are hearing. Marx divided society into only two groups: the oppressors and the oppressed. Herbert Marcuse and others popularised this by applying this ‘cultural Marxism’ to minority groups in society, based on race, sexual orientation or whatever – and ‘Identity Politics’ was born. The key is to understand that Marxism and communism are identical. It’s not possible to be a Marxist without also (knowingly or unknowingly) being a communist. When Karl Marx (and his good mate Friedrich Engels) wrote a summary of Marx’s thinking they called it The Communist Manifesto. They didn’t call it The Socialist Manifesto or The Marxist Manifesto. They called it ‘Communist’ because that is what it is. All the Marxists parading through our institutions are communists. And despite the cautious technical language used by the Oxford, at its heart communism simply means ‘the pursuit of a command-and-control form of government’.  It is what we see in Communist China – an autocratic command-and-control form of government. And what we have seen around the supposedly democratic world has been a swing towards command-and-control government (using the levers of Covid, climate change and social engineering). In other words, using my definition, there has been a massive swing in the Western world in recent decades to a communist form of government.