Sometimes things go backward and forward at the same time. New York City held its first Labor Day parade the same year the Chinese Exclusion Act was enacted. Restricting immigration was all the rage. Robber barons were robbing and monopolists were monopolizing. The Wild West was making outlaws famous – and dead. And yet at the same time, people were starting organizations to aid immigrants and stop discrimination against them. Women were organizing for social reform.
It was the Gilded Age. There was what we call an economic depression, what people then called a financial ‘panic.’ For labor, things sucked. And yet, there was New York City, ahead of the curve, celebrating Labor Day. The reforms that would eventually erupt in response to the Gilded Age were some time off, but things were percolating.
New York City, like most of America, was full of contradictions back then. The most obscene wealth. The most obscene poverty. The worst robber barons. The most dedicated reformers. The first Labor Day parade.
Socialism?
And here we are today, with New York City ahead of the curve again, electing someone who calls himself a Democratic Socialist. “Socialist” itself is an odd word these days since people that accuse others of being socialists seem to have no idea what the word means. On the other hand, people who identify themselves as socialist seem to have no idea what the word means. Mamdani explained that to him it means policies that promote the dignity of human beings. This explanation is evocative, broad, vague, impossible to interpret really, and yet probably quite real to him. A desire for labor, or the working folks of the city, to have dignity does seem to animate his policy positions to a degree that had New York’s elite clutching their proverbial pearls.
And, to be fair, to call Mamdani’s various detractors anti-dignity would be a perfect summation. They don’t believe in dignity at all, not for themselves and certainly not for others. To be even fairer, American discourse has been dignity-free for quite some time.
Be that as it may, talking about socialism is becoming the order of the day in the US. That’s partly because the world’s current neoliberal non-socialist economic order is impressive in many ways. It is staggeringly inefficient in delivering desirable outcomes and staggeringly efficient in delivering undesirable ones. It presides over the most gargantuan misallocation of resources the planet has ever seen. And it has an attendant inequality distribution that makes the medieval era seem like a communist paradise. It’s irrational, depressingly predictable, and yet prone to crash and crisis. Capital accumulation by billionaires and wanna-be trillionaires is so out of control that ordinary humans can’t and don’t wrap that their minds around it.
In that sense, calling oneself a socialist of any sort is perhaps just an announcement of ‘yay labor and fuck the billionaires’ sentiment. The billionaires certainly interpreted that way. Billionaires are the sort of people who fuck other people for a living and therefore are sensitive to the desire of others to fuck them back. Sorry, that’s wrong. I meant hyper-sensitive.
Profits Over People is a Feature, not a bug
Some people, by no means all, are ahead of the curve along with New York City. The mayor’s race that elected Mamdani drew international attention. Angry young people are using the phrase that this or that corporation ‘put profits over people’ with distressing regularity.
What they don’t seem to realize quite yet, or are only slowly copping to, is that the entire last half-century of neoliberal capitalism has been precisely designed to put profits over people. Profits over human life. Profits over the survival of humanity. The system is working as designed – on purpose.
It’s like the Gilded Age. The monopolists are furiously monopolizing. The robbers are robbing. The shooters are shooting. Private equity and excessive profit-seeking investment are fucking up everything on the planet that can be fucked up. Immigration is once again a big fat fucking racist issue.
And yet the seeds of reform are being planted. Organizers are trying to organize. Hopers are hoping. People are pissed. And New York City (and Seattle too!) elected a Democratic Socialist as mayor.
I give it another 12 years before the nation as a whole officially recognizes the importance of tilting the goddamn system back toward the working class and away from the um, uh, parasite class. Many of the states will have undertaken some of their own reforms by then.
I never thought I’d hear such widespread anti-capitalism in my lifetime.
But then I never thought I’d be living through another Gilded Age. It’s fairly obvious that something has to be done to mitigate the worst effects of the current global forms of capitalism. And, given the unknown but potentially cataclysmic effects of AI on the economic system, perhaps those who use the term ‘late-stage’ capitalism are correct.
Maybe Mamdani is simply an extremely pleasant harbinger of a coming post-capitalist system that might have free buses but will undoubtedly have new and exciting problems of its own. Maybe in 20 years or so we’ll all be able to say ‘I got 99 problems but neoliberal late-stage capitalism ain’t one.’
What Happens Next for Labor?
What happens next in the pro-labor world I don’t know. I see calls for strikes or general strikes these days. Maybe the laboring classes will give themselves a holiday. The impact of such a ‘holiday’ will depend on the extent to which it spreads throughout the country. And of course on the extent to which various elements of the natural constituency of labor can stop arguing with each other. If they can.
(Hint: the billionaire class is doing some laboring of its own. It’s laboring mighty hard to make sure the laboring classes never stop arguing with each other. Ha ha ha.)
The thing about Mamdani is that he has made advocating for labor fun.
Fun. He’s charismatic. And full of smiles and jokes. Charismatic.
This makes him an extremely poor fit with today’s Democratic party (which he also belongs to), which has decided that having a fun and charismatic leader like Barack Obama was such a terrible experience that it had to go full Hillary Clinton instead. Current old Democrats burst into allergic sneezing fits when they see charisma and youth in their ranks and give both a stern talking to while working behind the scenes to have the young and charismatic politically assassinated. (Cough – David Hogg.)
But Mamdani’s right. Being pro-worker can be fun. And young. And the kind of thing that makes people actually want to celebrate.
And Mamdani is also right that things can be better for New York’s laboring population – but only truly if America’s work culture changes. It can change. It changed after the Gilded Age. It changed under the New Deal. The culture can change and change dramatically. But right now, it has a long way to go.
Right now, only 7% of Americans take two-week vacations. Contrast that with European work culture. American work culture seems designed to make Americans both submissive and full of hate. It’s worked spectacularly well so far!
Industry Lobbying to Destroy American Labor
The key to changing American work culture, though, is breaking the stranglehold of lobbying influence that industry has in American politics at the local, state, and federal levels. Mamdani cannot do that by himself. American labor could do that, but first Americans would need to understand that they can and they should. Right now, very few understand either – thanks, you guessed it, due to the influence of industry lobbying. Sigh. In other words, American labor needs to get pretty fed up.
Workers in the American South and in small towns and rural areas often have the least access to the kind of information that would let them know how much industry lobbying controls their lives. That lack of access is due to, um, industry lobbying.
Of course, some people, maybe a third of people in these information desert areas seek out knowledge in books, libraries, magazines, international and city newspapers and so on. These folks are not wedded to the regressive traditions of their environments. They approve of and even advocate change that benefits labor and thumbs its nose at the wealthy.
In the meantime, things will continue to go backward and forward at the same time. Americans who have been brainwashed into believing that they are worth something to society as a consumer and very little to society as labor will continue to consume. What they can. As their hopes for a better life slowly and quickly fade.
And yet people like Mamdani, and places like New York City, who are ahead of the curve, will continue to push for reform, for a better world for working people. And when those people, whoever they are, score a win it will be something worth celebrating.
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