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Zohran Mamdani is a political talent of a lifetime. This is best exemplified by the way he turned US politics back on its feet by coining affordability as a winning bread-and-butter issue. Now, everyone seems to care about affordability, from Kamala Harris to Donald Trump. The reason for this co-optation across the political establishment? When you focus on affordability as an isolated issue, it does not question the economy’s underlying power relations and preserves the anti-worker status quo. This threatens to make socialist majorities in New York City short-lived.
Mamdani’s campaign was proof, though, that socialist politics can build a popular coalition – uniting the working classes of small business owners, the self-employed and workers. These are people who make a living by working for themselves or others – driving, cooking, cleaning, building, taking orders – facing directly the existential economic pressures and unfreedom in capitalist markets. This is in stark contrast to people who wield economic power: making money by merely commanding others or owning capital.
By looking at past and present examples of socialist municipal governments from Europe, the Mamdani administration can find examples of local economic plans that successfully intertwined socialist politics with, and for, working-class organisations.
Against this dominating economic power, Mamdani’s organised the working classes. Building this popular coalition on a socialist platform has opened the historic opportunity of tipping the power balance in New York City towards the working classes long-term – but his proposed economic policies don’t quite hit the mark.
Sustainable economic change requires going beyond policies like taxation and affordable housing and addressing the root cause at hand: capitalist ownership. By looking at past and present examples of socialist municipal governments from Europe, the Mamdani administration can find examples of local economic plans that successfully intertwined socialist politics with, and for, working-class organisations that mobilised democratic majorities for socialists.
From Barcelona to Preston, we can see that labour unions, expanding public assets, and building up housing, producer, and worker cooperatives can all help challenge, and structurally transform, ownership in a city. These organisations democratise the economy, putting the working classes directly in control. By growing economic democracy, Mamdani’s platform could promote organisations that institutionalise his popular coalition and make New York City a place where socialist values – solidarity, cooperation, and collective decision-making – become a lived reality. Economic democracy is, thus, not only intrinsically desirable for socialists, but also a way of maintaining a socialist democratic majority.
The limits of Mamdani’s economic policy platform
Ironically, Mamdani’s most famous policies are doing very little to keep his popular coalition together. Both his tax and housing policies are preserving property relations in the city.
Taxing the rich is not wrong, though. It is unlikely that millionaires would give up New York City’s quality of life en masse, only because of a new 2 percent tax bracket. However, this is less clear for the planned tax on corporations – profits don’t care about the Guggenheim. Corporations can easily transfer their profits out of New York through engineering their balance sheets. The US itself harbours multiple tax havens – such as Delaware – that allow corporations to drive their tax burden in New York towards zero.
Mamdani’s planned services for his popular coalition misses to actively involve its members. This way, municipal services are actually depoliticising the working classes.
At the same time, Mamdani’s plans for expanding social housing must rely heavily on private corporations (admittedly under demanding social conditionality). This is because less than 1 percent of New York City’s land is both unused and owned by the municipality. Unless there is an aggressive public building campaign, New Yorkers will continue to depend on landlords making a profit at the cost of renters.
All the while, Mamdani’s planned services for his popular coalition misses to actively involve its members. Of course, that does not mean that the planned services are harmful: provision of toilets, legal support, and shelter against harsh weather for deliveristas, increased spending on administrative support for small businesses, and of course free buses. Still, they treat members of the popular coalition as mere recipients. This way, municipal services are actually depoliticising the working classes, instead of organising them.
Without organisations, there are no ways to overcome the tensions of Mamdani’s platform. On the one hand, the promised increase of the minimum wage and taxes (if they are not designed progressively) are hurting small businesses. On the other hand, the campaign promises of “cutting red tape” do not instil socialist ideas into the middle class. These policies maintain the atomisation of the working classes, instead of uniting them against megacorporations in the capitalist market economy.
Beacons of Municipal Socialism: Strategies & Achievements
Having capitalists in the driver’s seat of the economy is not fate, though. There has been much local experience around the world and throughout history of municipal governments pursuing bold socialist economic agendas. The common thread throughout the history of successful socialist and communist parties is: local government – and especially the party – needs to be interwoven with civil society. Mamdani’s platform can take inspiration and integrate some of these policies to grow deep roots for socialist majorities in New York City.
Barcelona
For ten years, the city was governed by the grassroots party Barcelona en Comú that fought to be an alternative to the political mainstream. The party built its political power through neighbourhood councils and public assemblies in the city’s squares. This created stable participatory organisations of local people, across classes, that could directly relay their concerns and be integrated into decision-making through the party. This emboldened the municipal government to initiate public ownership of key economic sectors and promote grassroots democratic economic organisations.
The party emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis. The national government imposed austerity policies, with disastrous consequences: closing businesses, unemployment, and evictions. In response, protesters started occupying city squares of Barcelona, ultimately resulting in the founding of Barcelona en Comú, both a political movement and a party. They politically organised whole swaths of the city: setting up open neighbourhood assemblies to create the political programme, and establishing issue-based neighbourhood commissions that guide elected representatives. When Barcelona en Comú won the municipal elections in 2015, they confronted monopolistic corporations that charged excessive prices through establishing a sustainable public energy company and putting water supply back into the hand of the city. Moreover, the city took on digital platforms through permanently banning new tourist accommodations and aggressively pursuing delinquent property owners – estimated to have saved almost ten thousand homes for renters. The municipal government also expanded the democratisation of the economy through allocating public land to grassroots community projects and channelling public procurement to local cooperatives.
Preston, UK
Until today, the left-wing of the British Labour party coins the municipal economic plan of Preston, bolstering a stable majority for the party in the city council. The key driver of this success is bringing working-class people into the political fold through cooperatives – a lived economic democracy. The council further builds shared wealth and economic dynamism through channelling public spending and credit to local businesses.
Preston launched such a demanding agenda under adverse economic conditions. The neoliberal agenda of Margaret Thatcher had deindustrialised the North of England, destroying its very economic base. To counter-act the loss of economic resources, the city of Preston launched an ongoing programme of community wealth-building in 2011, which the local left-wing of the Labour Party transformed into a project for municipal socialism.
The council used this to promote economic democracy: it established a public institution, which funds, consults, and links up worker cooperatives. The city actively integrates cooperatives into the supply chain, going as far as setting up cooperatives in sectors that do not yet exist locally. Even municipal assets get actively democratised as the city transferred public housing to a housing cooperative in which tenants self-manage their buildings. In coordination with the city, the cooperative is buying up vacant properties to renovate and transform them into social housing. To finance this economic expansion, the municipal government relies on local resources by advising the pension fund to invest in local businesses and by coordinating with a regional credit cooperative to provide funding to local businesses and cooperatives.
Red Vienna
The social-democratic party has been forming the municipal government of Vienna for over one hundred years (with a violent interruption during Austria’s fascist period). And until now, Vienna is the biggest property owner in Europe, offering non-profit housing to 50 percent of its citizens. The key political reason for the persistence of this extraordinary public ownership is that the city provides non-profit housing not only to people most in need, but to everyone. That way residents of various classes – and political leverage – have a stake in continued high-quality public ownership and control. At the same time, the sheer weight of public and cooperative ownership anchors rent prices on a lower level for everyone in the housing market.
The dominance of the social-democrats and their campaign for public ownership have deep historical roots. At the end of World War I, the emerging protest, strike and council movement was led by members of the social-democratic party, which subsequently won the municipal election. To finance demanding public initiatives, the social democrats introduced the Breitner taxes: a series of luxury taxes on the consumption of the rich, combined with an anti-speculative property tax and a progressive construction tax through which urban mansions finance social housing. The local government moved aggressively forward with its social housing plans. This reached from expropriating vacant buildings to constructing whole blocks of social housing, containing social services provided by the city government such as nursing, medical care, schools, gas, water, and energy as well as consumer cooperatives. As the profit motive was suspended, rent in the social housing of the 1930s did not exceed 4 percent of an average worker’s wage!
The most impressive project was the massive modernist Karl-Marx-Hof that contained sport facilities, lecture rooms, and a library. For the Austro-Marxists, fostering revolutionary culture through sports clubs, education and art was key to bringing about an emancipated working class in the midst of the social-democratic party. This can bring broad sections of society together and under the banner of socialism. Social housing was not only reserved for the poorest households – it was meant to serve maids and artists alike.
Emilia-Romagna
The region of Emilia-Romagna is the heartland of Italian social-democracy, socialism and communism. The respective left-wing parties have been dominating municipal and regional governments for way over a century (again, except for the fascist period). The key reason for socialist political hegemony in the region is that these parties were well-networked in worker organisations, reaching from labour unions and cooperatives to cultural centres. The parties’ economic plans put workers and small businesses front and centre through producer and worker cooperatives.
This model was particularly sophisticated during the communist governments that attained continuous democratic majorities for almost 50 years. The popularity of the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) was rooted in the successful anti-fascist partisan war that liberated the region from fascism. After that, the PCI’s credibility diffused its cadres in all organisations of the working classes, mobilising them for worker-centred economic plans. The party’s local governments actively developed the cooperative sector: construction cooperatives built cost-effective social and affordable housing on municipal land, consumer cooperatives made a large variety of products available to worker households, and producer cooperatives allowed small businesses to compete successfully against monopolistic corporations from the Italian North.
Besides low prices and high productivity, raising living standards required also increasing wages. Therefore, the PCI coordinated with labour unions to target factories of monopolistic corporations. Instead of capital going to the North in search of profits, it increased the wages and boosted workers’ income, rippling through the local economy. The PCI functioned as the nervous system for this regional economic planning. Both the central association of cooperatives and the main labour unions were stacked with communists, who brought popular concerns to the party and, in turn, implemented the overarching regional economic plan. These were mass organisations of the middle class and workers, as well as channels for communist culture such as organising anti-fascist protests, bringing people to festivals of the communist world, and practising economic democracy.
How Mamdani could build worker power
With the promised economic policies, Mamdani’s platform already targets the crucial parts of a popular coalition. Historical experiences demonstrate that it needs to go one step further – actively creating and integrating organisations that channel socialist values, democratise the economy and grow to bring in more and more people.
The driving force for this could be labour unions. Mamdani’s worker policy offers the chance to integrate them structurally into his economic initiatives, which can both grow the unions and create permanent links between his socialist vision and New York City’s workers. His proposals for deliveristas could be the first stepping stone. With the planned establishment of municipal legal support, Mamdani could offer shared offices with labour union lawyers, thereby relieving workload for labour unions, while creating a point of contact for them with (yet) non-unionized workers. This could also work with the planned infrastructure for deliveristas, such as shelters against bad weather. If these are run by labour unions, they have the opportunity – much more so than city hall – to communicate and demonstrate the values of worker solidarity.
A socialist economic plan needs to attack capitalist ownership in the city to democratise the economy. And we have strong instruments for that.
It is much harder to proliferate these socialist values among small business owners. Instead of spending more public money on city hall providing one-to-one support, Mamdani could facilitate the creation of consortia and cooperatives – for instance, a Bodega producer cooperative. These would actually reduce the administrative overhead for participating small businesses and practice democratic co-determination among owners. Such a producer cooperative could also be a point of contact for city hall to guarantee good prices for working people. This could be combined with the promotion of consumer cooperatives. For example, areas that have no members of the Bodega producer cooperative would be good fits to establish consumer cooperatives – keeping consumer prices low and avoiding harmful rivalries.
At the same time, the municipality should create genuine competition on the housing market. An aggressive expansion of affordable housing should not rely on private corporations; they are a political and economic risk, as they greatly benefit from anti-socialist politics. This stands in dramatic contrast to housing cooperatives, which do not just follow the essential interest of keeping rents low, but are also a vehicle to organise and politicise the residents across classes. Moreover, due to the explicit neutrality of public institutions, housing cooperatives are better able to display socialist culture.
Of course, culture alone does not change anything about the staggering financialization, and thus cost, of the market that housing cooperatives would face. There are two – possibly complementary – strategies for municipal government. On the one hand, it could implement more aggressive regulation that makes landlordism and land speculation unattractive, combining the current rent freeze with high taxes on landowners and landlords. A targeted squeeze in property prices would make a public buy-out of New York City’s land and real estate – creating conditions for affordable housing for everyone.
On the other hand, the municipal government could collaborate with a credit cooperative that is financially backed by municipal bonds and borrows heavily on financial markets to expand its real estate portfolio. At the same time, these publicly backed bonds are secure assets for financial players, which could create some limited buy-in from New York City’s financial industry to the socialist offensive for housing. That way, credit cooperatives would slowly bring New York City’s land back under democratic management.
A combination of an aggressive with an incremental strategy could be the most effective. As real estate prices dwindle – as they should –, financial institutions would not be fatally destabilised, as they can “swap” these assets with secure bonds from credit cooperatives. Such a refined economic approach would expand a socialist economy in New York City, without creating too much political turmoil in the city’s finance sector.
So far, Mamdani’s economic platform promises to redistribute some benefits from megacorporations and the rich towards the working classes. But examples from previous and current socialist municipalities demonstrate that we can be bolder than that. A socialist economic plan needs to attack capitalist ownership in the city to democratise the economy. And we have strong instruments for that: public ownership, labour unions, and various types of cooperatives. It needs strategic finesse and a principled vision to find the right combination of instruments for a sustainable economic democracy.
This is not a socialist pie in the sky (and wanting to eat it too), but a necessity for political survival. A popular coalition of the working classes is an essential foundation of democratic majorities for socialists. And we can be sure that not every voter of Mamdani’s coalition is a committed socialist. Economic democracy is a way to make the working classes experience the benefits of socialism: solidarity, mutual aid, and democratic management of the economy. It also creates sustainable organisations that would be the channels to mobilise a popular coalition for future campaigns. Redistribution cannot do that. Therefore, challenging capitalist ownership and democratising the economy are essential for a socialist New York City.
