What does it augur to have a socialist mayor of New York City? The basic tenets of Zohran Mamdani’s election platform are, of course, directed at reducing inequality in the most unequal city in the nation: free childcare and buses, frozen rents, and more subsidized housing are all steps in that direction. But sabotage from Washington and resistance from state and local lawmakers and economic elites will all put limits to how far and how fast we can go.
Beyond the economic sphere, however, the city should have a freer hand in empowering the working class — against employers, to be sure, but also by allowing it to participate in the daily administration of the city. Gabriel Hetland and Bhaskar Sunkara have written about the need for popular assemblies, not just as a tactic to fend off capital, but because a basic tenet of socialist strategy should be “to increase the capacity of workers to collectively shape the decisions that shape their lives.” But building assemblies that are both truly democratic and wield institutional and economic power from scratch will take time.
In the meantime, there is another reform aimed at increasing working-class participation in government that the Mamdani administration can begin to put into place immediately: the replacement of antagonistic bargaining with its own workforce and their unions by a model based on consultation and collaboration to improve work, workplaces, and the provision of city services. This is a big piece of what socialism in practice should look like: combining some amount of necessary top-down organization with the opportunity for workers themselves to have meaningful input into how work is organized and services are delivered.
It is a well-worn trope on the Left, but a true one nonetheless, that the best experts on how to do the work better and more efficiently, and how to make the workplace more enjoyable, are the workers themselves. The vast majority of municipal workers — there are hundreds of…
Auteur: Marc Kagan
