Hello everyone,

This is the final part of my conversation with Michael Steven Smith. Michael is an accomplished progressive lawyer and a former board member of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He is also co-host of the nationally broadcast Law and Disorder radio show, where he has interviewed some of the most prominent voices of the American left, including Chris Hedges, Daniel Ellsburg, and Democracy @ Work’s own Richard Wolff. Michael co-authored Who Killed Che? with his co-host Michael Ratner, and his latest book, From the Flag to the Cross: Fascism American Style, is highly recommended and available now from OR Books.

I encourage you to also read part 1 and part 2 if you haven’t already done so.

Isaiah Blum: Do you have any thoughts on the ways in which capitalism today is failing young people, and are you surprised at all by how it’s developed?

Michael Steven Smith: No. Debbie and I joined the DSA and we went to their last meeting three weeks ago in Sunset Park. There were 80 people at the meeting. The meeting a month before had only 40 people. We sat behind a white haired old guy. The three of us were the only people in the room our age. Everybody else was in their 20s and 30s. And I think that the reason for that is that there is really no future for young people here. Getting a job that pays you a decent amount so you can have a family, buy a home. It’s beyond anybody’s reach at this point, except for the ruling rich who can afford to send their kids to college. You go to college now, you get so much in debt, you pay it off for the rest of your working life. If you can get a job! See, I grew up in the 40s and the 50s. Getting work was never in question. It was easy to get a job. Not anymore. And I think that as a consequence of having a bleak outlook, people start asking bigger questions. And now the polls show that a majority of young people under the age of 25 call themselves socialists, which is remarkable, especially given the fact that the major media is controlled by corporations that don’t promote socialism. When Bernie Sanders tried to secure nomination for the Democratic Party, they made sure he didn’t get it. He would have won.

IB: I didn’t know he existed until I came to see him myself. I never saw him on the news. I never saw his speeches or his rallies amplified on any of the mainstream channels. The coverage they gave him compared to Trump or Hillary, it was like a drop in the bucket. I guess young people have become more politically and economically aware because they have to, given the situation. But do you think they’re historically aware in the sense that young people are learning the necessary lessons of the 1960s and the upheavals of that period, given the failures, the assassinations, the thwarted attempts at a better society? Do you think there’s a lesson from that period that young people really need to hold in mind as they move forward?

MSS: Well sure. I think the lesson of the civil rights movement, of the anti-war movement, of the feminist movement, the lesson of the movement for gay rights, the main lesson is that you need to be independently mobilized. The Vietnam War was stopped by the heroic sacrifice of the Vietnamese people - about three million Vietnamese were murdered by the United States - and by the growth of the anti-war movement in America. We started off in 1965 with a demonstration in Washington, DC, at the height of the Cold War. 20,000 people, it was extraordinary. 20,000 people got out to oppose America’s participation in the war against Vietnam. Well, by 1967 we had 500,000 people. Nixon was left cowering in the White House, peering out the window through a blind, scared to death.

IB: Yeah. He said, Henry, they’re gonna break through the barrier. They’re gonna get us.

MSS: I think the main factor in ending the war in Vietnam was the steadfastness of the Vietnamese people. But this was abetted by the mass anti-war movement in the United States, which was so large. We always advocated peaceful, large demonstrations. It was so large that it affected people way beyond the 500,000 that demonstrated. It affected the GIs themselves. So at the end of the war, the GIs refused to fight. They would march through the jungle paddies in Vietnam, and they’d see Vietnamese soldiers coming the other way. They’d both ignore each other. They were throwing fragmentation grenades into the tents of the officers, killing their own officers. There was a real rebellion amongst the GIs. And the mass demonstrations underlaid the support that was given to the GIs. So it ended the war. And that’s a lesson. The other lesson, of course, is the mass demonstrations in support of the civil rights movement. And I think that younger people can access that. There are more subtle lessons to learn about needing an independent labor movement, the betrayals of the Democratic Party, and why we can’t support the Democratic Party.

IB: You’ve seen masses of young people supporting Mamdani, and the crucial role they played in bringing him to power, and they have some reasons for being hopeful. They’ve got a young person in office, who identifies as a socialist, which is very heartening. But at the same time, he is a member of the Democratic Party, which is one half of the corporate duopoly that controls American politics. And almost everyone you interviewed in your book, from Richard Wolff to Chris Hedges to Margaret Kimberly, discusses the importance of a decisive break with the Democratic Party, which has been called the graveyard of progressive movements. So with that in mind, how hopeful should young people be about Mamdani and his political prospects, and what advice would you offer to them?

MSS: Mamdani isn’t exactly a Democrat: he’s a democratic socialist. He said that he ran for office as a democratic socialist, and that he’ll govern as a democratic socialist. He told Cuomo that he may not have experience, but he has integrity. He said, Mr. Cuomo, that’s something you don’t have. So I’m hoping that the logic of his position leads him to a more revolutionary socialist position, that the logic of what he’s trying to do, I hope, will cause him to rely on the 90,000 people that knocked on doors and set up tables and telephone banks to get him elected. Because that’s the only thing, ultimately, that’s gonna stop him from just making deals with other Democratic people, like the governor. I was disappointed that he didn’t keep that apparatus engaged. And I think that people who had illusions… I didn’t have any illusions about Obama, but people who did have illusions should have understood. And when Obama dissolved the support that he had, the organized support, they should have realized what he would do. And what he did was not good. So, I’m hopeful that the example that Mamdani set by getting elected will continue. I mean, there’s no question that he’s an extremely talented person and a charming person. His mother said, when they asked her how come he’s the way he is she said: he was marinated in love. And I hope that we see continued proof of that. I think the other example that people have in front of them now is the Minneapolis movement. It’s not a general strike. And it’s a mistake to call it that. But I think we have to educate people about what a general strike is. And that’s what Kshama Sawant is doing now, with her campaign for Congress in Seattle. A general strike’s going to involve unions and a conscious working class. It’s more than just stay at home from school, or not shopping: we’re not working. It’s consciously aimed at the whole profit system of the capitalist class and bringing it to a halt. And I’m hoping that people will come to understand that, and I think that that’s what could ultimately turn the situation around. You ask me before, am I pessimistic or optimistic. Well, wasn’t it Gramsci who said I’m a pessimist of the intellect, an optimist of the heart? Yeah. I think we have to do what we have to do. You’re an anti-fascist because that’s the right thing to do, not because you necessarily think you’re going to win. I’m not sure we’re gonna win. I think that Trump is a symptom of the disease. He’s not the disease. The disease is capitalism. And there’s always been a fascist current, and kernel, in American history, going all the way back, all the way back. The Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal, that was not a reflection of fact, that was an aspiration. Andrew Jackson put the Cherokee Indians on a forced march from North Carolina out to the West. The slaveowners thought, and there’s a tradition of this kind of thinking, that there’s a hierarchy. There are people on the bottom that are destined to work for the masters for the rest of their lives, and then there’s us. That was before the Civil War. Those people are still around. When Lincoln was killed, which is another turning point, like the assassination of Kennedy, those people got the wind in their sails. They destroyed reconstruction. Reconstruction lasted for, what, a dozen years or so? And black people were re-enslaved in a way. They were kept down like that for 100 years, until the civil rights movement. Aimé Césaire said that when you have an imperial structure abroad, it boomerangs, it comes back home. Chalmers Johnson, who was a veteran of the CIA, wrote four books about that. And we’re seeing now the boomerang effect. You can’t have imperialism abroad and democracy at home. You can’t have 1,180 billionaires at home and have democracy. The Supreme Court recently said that Trump could do what he wanted to, as long as he did it as an ‘official act’, and he’d be pardoned. The mission of the Nazis was to bring under control all independent sources of power. And they had a word for that, Gleichschaltung, which means bringing into line. The Nazis brought the labor movement into line, as you indicated. And then the media, and the communists and the socialists, and so on. And that’s what Trump is accomplishing. He hasn’t done it fully yet. He’s got the major media. He’s got the courts, not the lower courts so much, but the Supreme Court. He’s got the universities, he’s got the big law firms, and he’s consolidating his power. He hasn’t yet achieved that consolidation. But that’s the direction things are going in.

Isaiah Blum is Graduate of the New School, teacher and contributor with Democracy @ Work. he writes about economics, politics, history, culture and more. Follow him on Instagram @blumbergznews

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Hello everyone,

This is part 2 of my sit down with Michael Steven Smith. Michael is an accomplished progressive lawyer and a former board member of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He is also co-host of the nationally broadcast Law and Disorder radio show, where he has interviewed some of the most prominent voices of the American left, including Chris Hedges, Daniel Ellsburg, and Democracy @ Work’s own Richard Wolff. Michael co-authored Who Killed Che? with his co-host Michael Ratner, and his latest book, From the Flag to the Cross: Fascism American Style, is highly recommended and available now from OR Books.

If you haven’t done so already please read part 1 here:

Isaiah Blum: You mentioned to me previously this very important case that your nephew is involved with. Anything about it that you’d like to mention or are able to divulge, I’m sure everyone would love to hear.

Michael S. Smith: I heard most of this secondhand. Our nephew, Ben Elson, is one of the lead attorneys in the case. He’s a partner at the People’s Law Office, which is a law firm in Chicago. And he’s been working with, for years, Flint Taylor and Jeff Haas. They represented the estate of Fred Hampton, who was assassinated through the efforts of the Chicago Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. J. Edgar Hoover himself said that we must prevent the rise of a Black Messiah. And Fred Hampton was an extraordinary young man who fit that description. Hampton was a real student, he worked around the clock, really, he had a job at a factory, but he got up early and studied. And he was brilliant, and a great orator. And Hoover recognized that. So Hoover and the Chicago Police Department recruited a spy who actually gave them the layout of the apartment where Fred was living, and the spy drugged Fred. So Fred couldn’t be roused, and the cop shot something like 90 bullets into his place. And one bullet came out. So it was clearly an assassination. And they left the place open after they murdered him. So the whole neighborhood came and inspected it, and they saw the bullets coming in. So Jeff Haas and Flint Taylor had just started the people’s office, and they were engaged on a contingency basis by Fred Hampton’s mother to sue the Chicago Police Department and the FBI for the wrongful death of their son. They litigated the case for 13 years, and finally, the judge forced a settlement, and they got a monetary settlement for Mrs. Hampton, and their reputation as great litigators against police brutality, police abuse, was made manifest across the country.

When Malcolm X’s daughters retained Ben Crump, the well-known civil rights attorney, he brought in Flint and others from the People’s Office in on the case, because they suspected a pattern here, which I believe is true. The New York Police Department had a spy, just like the Chicago Police Department. They had a spy in the ranks of Malcolm X’s supporters. Malcolm X’s bodyguard was an NYPD police officer. When Malcolm X spoke at the Audubon ballroom in February when he was killed, the protectors that he had in the audience were all withdrawn. Malcolm was shot at numerous times, but what killed him was a shot from a sawed off shotgun, wielded by a Nation of Islam member from New Jersey named William Taylor. Taylor was also working for the New York Police Department. And when Taylor was identified and tried, they let him off. The other man that was tried served 18 years; Taylor never served a minute. Two years later, after they let him off, he was picked up for a bank robbery, and when somebody passed a note to the judge, they dismissed the charges. That’s something that the People’s Law Office is trying to litigate here. The problem that they face is that the case is 60 years old. So the defendants, the cops and the FBI, are raising a defensive statute of limitations. They say: it’s not fair to try us for something that’s 60 years old. We can’t defend ourselves. All the witnesses are dead or missing, and you have to dismiss the case. Our nephew, Ben, who wrote the response to the summary judgment by the New York City Police Department, said you can’t profit from your own wrong. You’re the reason that all this stuff has been covered up, and therefore, you can’t allege that you have the advantage of the statute of limitations having expired, because you were the ones that caused it to expire. The case is now in front of the judge, he hasn’t ruled yet. And I’m hoping, now that Mamdani has been elected, he will intercede with the police and help settle the case. One of the demands that the plaintiff’s attorneys are making, in the form of reparations, is that money be allocated to the New York City school system to teach about Malcolm X and what was done to him. Which is what’s been done in Chicago, and the police torture cases in Chicago. There was a lieutenant there named Burge, who tortured black suspects into falsely confessing crimes. And Flint and the People’s Law Office handled that case. And one of the settlements was for the Chicago Educational System to teach the truth about what the police did.

IB: You were telling me about this book about the assassinations of the 1960s. I’ve heard it’s an extraordinary book, and not just from you. It seems like it would be an especially relevant and compelling read in today’s atmosphere.

MSS: The book is called Martyrs to the Unspeakable by James W. Douglas. It’s the second volume. The first book he wrote was about the assassination of JFK, and it claims that the CIA, principally Alan Dulles, who had been the head of the CIA and was fired by Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs, was the organizer of the assassination of Kennedy. This book is broader than that, and it puts the assassination of Kennedy in context of what the American secret police state accomplished in killing Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. The assassination of Kennedy was a turning point in American history. Because Kennedy realized that the Cold War was a dead end. He was a cold warrior initially. And towards the end, he had tried to get the United States to withdraw from Vietnam and work with the Russians to end the Cold War. That’s what got him killed. Martin Luther King got himself murdered by the state for opposing the war in Vietnam.

IB: In some ways it’s a cautionary tale about trying to work from within the system. If you are trying to be a reformist within the system, the moment you question the parameters that have been set for you, what you can say, what you can’t say, what you can advocate for. You see how quickly these people are turned upon. I think it’s telling that these were all fairly young men when they were murdered. You often have young people at the forefront of progressive social movements, although typically quite a bit younger than those four men. It was true in much of the 1960s, the civil rights movement, May of 1968, the broad anti-Vietnam War movement. I think we’re seeing parallels to it today, especially with the protests and the encampments in response to the Gaza genocide. We’re seeing, I think, parallels to how young people took to the streets in the 60s. I guess it makes sense, because a lot of young people, quite rightly, I think, see the system as having failed them.

Isaiah Blum is Graduate of the New School, teacher and contributor with Democracy @ Work. he writes about economics, politics, history, culture and more. Follow him on Instagram @blumbergznews

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Last month, I sat down with Michael Steven Smith for a wide-ranging conversation. Democracy @ Work is pleased to present it here as a 3-part series. Michael is an accomplished progressive lawyer and a former board member of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He is also co-host of the nationally broadcast Law and Disorder radio show, where he has interviewed some of the most prominent voices of the American left, including Chris Hedges, Daniel Ellsburg, and Democracy @ Work’s own Richard Wolff. Michael co-authored Who Killed Che? with his co-host Michael Ratner, and his latest book, From the Flag to the Cross: Fascism American Style, is highly recommended and available now from OR Books.

Isaiah Blum: I’d like you to talk like a little bit about Law and Disorder radio, how you came to be involved in that, how your background positioned you to be involved in that..

Michael Steven Smith: Yeah. I started Law and Disorder Radio 21 years ago with Michael Ratner. He was then the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. And we recruited Heidi Boghosian, who was the Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild. Then we recruited Dalia Hashad, who was an Arab-American woman working for Amnesty International. And I went to the board meeting of WBAI, and I made a presentation - this was in 2004, after 9/11, and the Iraq war, and the Patriot Act – and I made a pitch about why we needed to explore the repercussions of all this stuff. And they thought that was a good idea. And then Bernard White who was the program director just put me on, me and Michael, and then Heidi. If you’d like, I can send you a list of all the guests we’ve had. It’s like a political/intellectual history of recent times. Everybody from Tariq Ali to Howard Zinn. Yesterday we interviewed Chris Hedges on Gaza, and on the current political situation. Next show is going to be on Cuba.

IB: I’ve been going through this book you co-wrote, and it’s a great book. The title is From the Flag to the Cross. I think it’s a great title, and I really like the approach of the book. You’ve got seven different left-wing figures, American figures. But very, very different voices. And I think it does a really interesting job showcasing what too often is not shown, which is that there’s a lot of intellectual diversity still on the left, and it’s a very broad and very wide-ranging political and intellectual tradition. Was it intentional that the different essays would be sourced from the most diverse voices possible?

MSS: Yes! These interviews, which we turned into book chapters, were all with people who I knew, with the exception of Bill Mullen. Diane Feeley was an old friend of mine. We worked together at Pathfinder Press in 1971 for four years. When the SWP disintegrated she joined an organization called Solidarity, which I support. I asked her to be an interviewee to talk about unions, and I asked her to recommend someone to talk about the peculiar oppression of black people, with the assumption that they would be in the vanguard of a coming anti-fascist struggle, since historically they always have been. And she recommended Bill Mullen. But the other six people are people I know. Chris Hedges had just gone out to Seattle and appeared in a rally for Kshama Sawant. And I watched that rally, and listened to what she had to say. So I reached out to her and asked her to be interviewed; she contributed the last chapter on what is to be done. I think that what inspired the idea of the book was the profound insight of Bertolt Brecht, that you can’t talk about fascism without talking about capitalism, from whence it comes. Every person we interviewed understood that. So Chris talked about White Christian nationalism as a core part of the whole fascist project. And he talked about how what we really need, ultimately, to stop this fascist transformation that’s going on, is a general strike. And Kshama talks about that at the end. So that bookends the book. As I mentioned we had Diane Feeley on Unions, Henry Giraux on education, Margaret Kimberly on the Black Struggle, Bill Mullen, who said you can’t rely on the courts, the courts are not gonna save us. And that’s true, because even when you get good decisions, and we’ve had a number of good decisions from the courts, you have to think about what Hitler said about the pope: “how many divisions does the pope have?” The courts cannot enforce their own rulings. They’ve got no divisions to do that. So while they ruled against Trump in a number of ways, they really just sit there when Trump ignores them.

IB: You talk about unions bookending the book, and indeed, there’s this thread running through all of those essays, this agreement that the main tool to fight any growing fascist movement is militant unions. And I think that’s certainly true. We know that when Hitler first came to power, his first order of business was to crush the German labor movement, completely destroy the independence of the unions, outlaw the communist and leftist parties.

MSS: Exactly. And that’s something that Rick Wolff explains in his chapter. Rick says that the German working class was pulverized by the First World War, then by the Depression and inflation. Meanwhile, the capitalist class sought in Hitler an agreement. Rick writes about this. The capitalist class would be supported by Hitler, and in turn they would support Hitler. That’s what happened. And there’s a parallel with what’s going on here in this country now. You can see it in the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, where Trump got money to do that from a number of corporations, whose names he plans to put up on a plaque in a new ballroom that he’s building. It shows the ties that he has to the capitalist class, irrespective of the vulgar project that he’s launched.

IB: Yeah, it’s much more openly transactional now, I think. The deal made between the Nazis and, you know, Krupp Steel and IG Farben, they really did make this kind of Faustian bargain, and at the same time a lot of these industrialists were quite anti-Semitic or even maybe fascistic in their thinking. But mainly, I think, a lot of them were sort of in that mandarin caste, this wealthy, cloistered-off-from-society class who, by their nature, were apolitical up until the point that they feared a response from a militant working class, a militant socialist party, a militant communist party. And that was what pushed these capitalists into the arms of the Nazis.

MSS: That’s precisely true. And a corner of the curtain has been revealed with the Epstein files, which shows you the nature of the capitalist class. After all, the people who made up the elite around Epstein are various segments of the ruling class in this country, and even around the world.

This concludes part 1 of this 3-part series. Join us next week for Michael’s unique insights into the $100 million lawsuit filed by Malcolm X’s family against the NYPD, FBI, and CIA, alleging complicity in the civil rights leader’s murder.

Isaiah Blum is a Graduate of the New School, teacher, and contributor with Democracy @ Work. He writes about economics, politics, history, culture, and more. Follow him on Instagram @blumbergznews

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Ask anyone, and they will tell you: rent is too high. For Generation Z, housing is a defining issue of their adulthood. While the housing crisis intensifies, my generation is entering adulthood and is being left to navigate a decaying capitalist system, a system that is slowly depriving us of the very foundation we need to build a future. Speaking for myself, as I take my first steps into adulthood, the path is blocked by the country’s terrible housing market with sky-rocketing rent and unattainable homes, and I don’t see myself having a quality of life anywhere close to my parents. The growth rate of rent has been drastic, especially when compared to the growth rate of income. From 1999 to 2022, rent has increased 135 percent while income has only increased by 77 percent. This has led to 6 out of 10 Zoomer renters becoming “rent-burdened.” Rent-burdened means spending more than the recommended 30% of monthly income on rent. The New York Times asked Zoomers how much they spend on rent and received answers being as high as 85% of renter’s income. Setting aside renting an apartment, homeownership is a mere fantasy for many today with more than half of Zoomers saying they would need to “win the lottery” to become a homeowner. In addition, many in their 20s are faced with other financial issues such as larger student loan debt and lower wages relative to their parents’ when they were their age. Because of these obstacles, around one-third of Zoomers live at home. The promise of owning a home and living the American dream has eroded as many Zoomers are faced with the reality of America’s decaying capitalist system.

In response to the economic crash during the Great Depression, led by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the government passed a set of policies and reforms called the New Deal to alleviate the populace from the ruptures of early 20th century industrial capitalism. The sharp rise of unemployment led to record levels of poverty and homelessness throughout the country. Many were forced to live in “Hoovervilles,” shantytowns made up of scrap material due to the inaccessibility of decent and affordable housing. Under FDR, the government responded to this crisis with the formation of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) as part of the New Deal. In essence, the reform allowed millions of Americans to purchase homes through “significantly lower down payments and interest rates” with the FHA handling mortgage insurance. In addition, the New Deal ushered in major investments in public housing with the formation of the Public Works Administration and United States Housing Authority. The administrations initiated the construction of over 50 public housing projects across the country for low-income families. After witnessing the misery that arose from unfettered capitalism and the prioritization of the profit motive, the U.S. government decided to prioritize the goal of decent and affordable housing for Americans through the American Housing Act of 1949. As a result, the rate of homeownership across the country rose considerably from 45.6% in the 1920s to 62.9% by the 1970s. However, the government’s actions were systemically racist; the programs restricted most Black families’ access to loans which contributed to the reinforcement of the racial wealth gap and institutionalized redlining.

As many entered adulthood throughout the mid-20th century, housing was positioned as a right every American deserved and for the most part attainable compared to generations before them. This sentiment was reinforced with the state’s involvement in ensuring affordable housing. However, a shift occurred in the 1970s as housing was seen less for its use and more for the value of its exchange. Regulation of the housing market began to erode leading to weakened controls and the elimination of interest rate caps on loans. This led to more profitable yet riskier opportunities for private firms. The process of financialization began; houses transformed into speculative financial assets and a medium to accrue wealth. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, neoliberalism began to emerge globally led by Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and in the United States by Ronald Reagan with his “Reaganomics”, leading to increased privatization and austerity measures.

During his presidency, Ronald Reagan dismantled New Deal programs and initiated many of neoliberal reforms that are still causing pain to so many of us today. On the issue of housing, these “reforms” slashed 80 percent of the funding intended for affordable housing, cutting the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s budget from $83.6 billion to under $40 billion leading to mass homelessness nationwide. In contrast, FDR ‘s New Deal significantly decreased homelessness with experts at the time predicting its eradication by the 1970s, but neoliberal policies completely undid these advancements with homelessness skyrocketing to 600,000 people by the late 1980s. For the first time since WWII, the country witnessed its first drop in home ownership rates seeing a significant decrease in the growth rate of home ownership.

After decades of living with the ramifications of deregulation and the gutting of the New Deal, the country’s perception of housing mutated homes into more of a monetizable and speculative commodity. By leaving housing to private hands and without strict regulation, a housing crisis was inevitable. Predatory lending practices for housing mortgages led to the infamous 2008 housing crisis which left many in financial ruin with many people’s homes being foreclosed. Marginalized communities tended to be the targets of these predatory lending practices. Black and Latino households were disproportionately affected by the crisis with both groups 47 percent and 45 percent more likely to foreclose than white households respectively. In addition, Black households lost 23 percent of their wealth compared to the 17 percent in white households from 2007 to 2009, but when white households saw a rise after the financial crisis, Black households still faced a decrease of an additional 17 percent from 2009 to 2011. In response to the financial crisis, the government favored corporations over collective welfare. Using $700 billion in taxpayer money, Congressional Democrats and Republicans introduced the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) which bailed out Wall Street while ignoring the people. With big banks and corporations saved, the following foreclosure crises affected millions of working class Americans and led to “global finance’s colonization of residential real estate.” With the depressed values of homes post-2008 financial crisis, private-equity groups and hedge funds spent $36 billion on more than 200,000 homes between 2011 to 2017 alone. In Los Angeles, for example, corporate landlords own 43 percent of all rental units in the city. The era of corporate landlords began. Today, the housing market is no longer focused on individuals purchasing homes for shelter but instead for investors to make profit. It gives rise to a system that generates a scenario where 14.9 million vacant homes exist nationwide while the country’s homelessness population is around 770,000. With the working class no longer able to afford to buy homes, the market became ripe for wealthy individuals and corporations to purchase large shares of the housing market. As a matter of fact, real-estate investors currently make up the highest share of homebuyers in the market. The mass displacement of homeowners following the crisis combined with the consolidation of housing by large corporations and individuals created a rental market where landlords could drastically increase prices. This has resulted in a cost-of-living crisis that poses immense challenges for my generation.

China & the Socialist Approach to Housing

Contrasting the United States, China’s home ownership rate stands at 90 percent. As a matter of fact, socialist countries consistently exceed home ownership rates when compared to Western capitalist countries like the United States even during its New Deal era. How is China able to accomplish such a feat? First and foremost, the government prioritizes the welfare of its citizens and social stability over the pursuit of profit. Before the founding of the People’s Republic of China, China suffered from severe housing crises such as supply shortages and substandard housing. The exploitative environment promoted speculative activities for profit leading to high levels of rent throughout China. After the revolution in 1949, the state responded to the issue by expropriating private property from large firms. Initially, market forces were allowed to operate under the regulation of the state alongside its commitment to prohibiting “speculation and profiteering activities in the housing and land market,” but by 1950, the Land Reform Act abolished the land market and prohibited the rent or sale of land. Rents remained on housing units but were restricted through rent controls. In addition to regulation, the socialist transformation had an additional long-term solution to the heavily private housing sector: state management. Under state management, the state provided affordable housing by controlling the rent, maintenance, and other day-to-day administrative tasks of housing units owned by landlords; while the state now received the rent, the landlords maintained ownership in name. The state gradually shifted housing from the ownership of the landlords to the public through a temporary compensation by the state of 20 to 40 percent of rent to the landlords. Eventually, this compensation was seen as complete by 1966; ownership of housing units transferred from landlords to the public sector. Socialism created the conditions for decent and affordable housing for the entire population. Housing was no longer seen as a speculative commodity but as a right every person deserved.

Even today after China’s market reforms and the privatization of its housing sector, China has retained its stance against housing as a speculative commodity. President Xi Jinping echoed this sentiment by stating, “​​Houses are built to be inhabited, not for speculation.” During China’s Reform period, the government recognized the problems that could arise from the reintroduction of a private housing sector such as units falling under the ownership of the few. To address potential problems, the privatization process saw state-owned housing units sold at low prices to existing tenants, transferring home ownership to those who already lived in the units. As many housing units fell into private hands, government regulation and programs allowed for affordable housing and the high home ownership rate of 90 percent. One initiative implemented was China’s two-tier public housing system consisting of Cheap Rental Housing (CRH) and Economic Comfortable Housing (ECH). The former provided housing with cheap rentals to the lowest income household, and the latter stimulated home ownership for low-to-middle income households. Over the years, multiple different types of public housing systems emerged, and the state has heavily invested in building and renovating millions of public housing units. Between 2021 and 2025, China has constructed and renovated 11 million housing units. In addition, the Housing Provident Fund acted as a support for people to afford homes after the privatization that occurred during the reforms. Workers are also given an option to save a portion of their income to the fund and have it matched by their employer. Because of the fund, homebuyers are able to afford the downpayment needed to purchase a home. Although China turned towards a mixed economy, the market remains guided by the state to center people rather than profit alone.

What is to be Done?

The housing crisis has worsened considerably in the United States, and anxiety pervades my generation. Today, many view homes as an investment and method of accumulating wealth. Whether it’s as an asset that could be sold later at a higher price or a unit that could be rented out to gain ‘passive income,’ housing exists as a speculative commodity rather than as human need. Zoomers find themselves in the middle of a precarious world that has internalized this detrimental perspective. We must rethink how we approach housing. By looking to the past and alternative systems of socialism, we can implement policies that prioritize the needs of the working people and build a new economic and social system. A system that doesn’t require more than half your income dedicated to rent. A system that invests in infrastructure and decent housing units. A system that provides and guarantees housing for all. A system that prioritizes people not profits. That system is socialism.

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The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once suggested that suicidal individuals may step back from the brink when “nature saves the life by allowing madness to enter, which then wraps its veil around the consciousness of that hopeless state.” Just as the crooked magistrate Villefort embraced insanity as a final refuge against his unbearable existence, so do today’s ruling elites embrace insane fantasies of global conquest and transformation, typified by the current imperialist war on Iran. As our globalized, financialized economy plunges into chaos and WWIII looms ever nearer, the instigators of this conflict have retreated into their own world of self-delusion and unreality. The twin evils described by Chris Hedges, ‘willful blindness and historical amnesia’, define the thinking of not just the international bourgeoisie, but more vulnerable elements of our diseased society, fearful and unwilling to accept the bleakness of their reality. This piece certainly owes a debt to Hedges, who has eloquently described time and again how magical thinking and the denial of reality pacify us, while war simultaneously unites us by pushing us all closer to collective madness and self-destruction.

The cabal running this war, chiefly Trump, Hegseth, and Rubio, all display varying degrees of derangement. Together they are tearing up the last remnants of the post-WWII order, on which America’s global political and economic hegemony is predicated. International law, the supremacy of the US dollar, the complex system of trade agreements and supply chains, are all completely subjugated to this mad drive to self-destruction. Trump has often mused, in public and in private, that he is not getting into heaven, that nothing glorious awaits him in the next life. He is therefore determined to do as much damage as he can in this one. This has mainly been achieved through the return to old-school imperialism that characterized the turn of the 20^th century: Trump and his crew have viciously besieged, attacked, and carved up Gaza and Venezuela, are repeating this process on a larger scale with Iran, and currently have Cuba in their crosshairs. The latter country is of particular interest to Rubio, who has salivated at the prospect of regime change in that tiny nation for decades. Hegseth’s recent public language is unambiguously fascist: everything is subjugated to the glory of the state, to destruction, to eliminating undesirable members of our species.

This fantasy of a rejuvenated US empire requires the rejection of reality, both within and outside of our borders. We no longer produce anything. The idea that we can peacefully out-compete China is ludicrous. We are not a shining city on the hill, nor are we a moral authority that can stand in judgment of any other country on the face of the planet. A majority of Americans are beset with the same problems: there are no jobs, no affordable housing, no affordable healthcare, public infrastructure is in shambles, police and immigration enforcement are militarized and completely unaccountable, our politicians and courts are bought and paid for by billionaires and corporate lobbyists. Trump won office twice because enough of his supporters believed, on some level, that he would offer some relief from these horrors. Instead, he offers endless scams and spectacle. For many of his most devoted and desperate supporters, this reality is too terrible to bear. Instead, they embrace the fantasy, because ultimately that is all Trump and his cronies have to offer them.

Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee offered some startling insights into the messianic delusions of our ruling class. Huckabee spoke of Israel’s ‘biblical right’ not just to the occupied territories but to large swaths of the Middle East. Huckabee’s evangelical fascism is no aberration; indeed, he speaks for large swaths of the US military apparatus. Since we launched our killing spree in Iran, hundreds of US service members have confirmed hearing this language from their superiors. One servicemember recalled how his commander “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and…specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the immanent return of Jesus Christ.” Every day international law and the rules of engagement are subverted to religious fanaticism. However, it is easy to see why these generals and military officials embrace these ludicrous fantasies: true acknowledgment of the horrors they are complicit in would drive any sane person to despair.

The Democratic Party is willfully self-deluding, ignorant of history, and living on castles in the air. They appear poised to take back both houses of Congress in November, but what good is that when the barely-contested party leadership supports the war? Many Democratic lawmakers who have voiced opposition to the war have emphasized its illegality, or more precisely that it was ‘launched without congressional approval.’ This language is highly calculated: they know that the vast majority of their voters are against the war, but their most influential voters (donors) are for it, and therefore they have to thread the needle carefully. Well-meaning Democratic voters will insist on the necessity of victory in November, yet they delude themselves regarding the party’s actual ability or desire to block the machinery of war. Prominent Democratic lawmakers continue to nurse destructive, retrograde fantasies. Cory Booker has publicly expressed his hope that Republican lawmakers will soon ‘find their backbone’ and recant their unqualified support for Trump. Josh Shapiro imagines Democratic voters, after two and half years of live-streamed genocide, will soon regain their generally favorable perception of Israel. Many of the lawmakers that have expressed concern about the future of democracy still remain unwilling or unable to face political reality: they respond by retreating to an imagined reality they find more congenial.

The failures of capitalism are directly impacting rulers and subjects alike. The US is intentionally wrecking the petrodollar system that has prevailed for over half a century. The sanctions on Russian oil, which we insisted were necessary in spite of the massive inflation they fueled in Europe and America, are being lifted out of desperation to lower oil costs. We’re trying to bully our allies to help force the Strait of Hormuz open militarily, never mind the fact that we spend more on our Navy than all other NATO countries combined. As always, the working class will foot the bill for the titanic military budgets that fund these monstrosities.

The working class, along with many young people and the millions living in impoverished countries, are unable to live under any comforting illusions. Revolutionary social change is, for them, a matter of existential necessity. They know that they will not be saved by the promises of politicians, by our moribund court system, or through the noblesse oblige of billionaires who regard them as cattle. They know what it means to pay the price for the suicidal, delusional actions of the ruling class. Through militant organization, civil disobedience, and mass strikes, there remains a chance that these heinous, murderous acts can be halted.

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A few weeks ago Zohran Mamdani announced that his administration would resume a policy of homeless encampment sweeps. The decision marks a reversal from Mamdani’s promise last December to end this longstanding practice, describing it as cruel and ineffective. It is likely that the political pressure on Mamdani to reverse himself mounted after 18 New Yorkers were found dead following heavy snowfall, 13 of whom succumbed to hypothermia. Mamdani has pledged that despite resuming the policy, its execution will be far more humane than former Mayor Eric Adams’ militaristic approach.

It is clear that there is nothing to gain from reviving Adams’ cruel approach to the homelessness crisis, which included the destruction and theft of personal possessions, involuntary hospitalizations, and a general failure to connect homeless people to permanent housing. Unsurprisingly, the right-wing press lambasted Mamdani’s initial plan to abandon this policy. This salvo of criticism was led, predictably, by the Murdoch-owned New York Post, which appears to be dedicating all of its time and resources to attacking every word, deed, and thought coming from the mayor’s direction. The Post’s Judge Glock claimed that “those sleeping outside have the option to get inside. They just don’t want to take it.” By this logic, one could conclude that the recent victims of hypothermia found death preferable to seeking shelter. Twisted as it is, this reasoning expresses the class loyalty of the Post’s writers, who believe the poor and unhoused bear full responsibility for their own misery.

When Mamdani initially announced that he was suspending the policy of encampment sweeps, he claimed that his new Department of Community Safety would handle the homeless crisis by employing social workers, who would then be tasked with convincing the homeless to seek supportive housing or shelters. The mayor’s young allies on the left have expressed significant disappointment at his about-face. NYC-DSA published a resolution opposing Mamdani’s decision to reintroduce these sweeps. The authors cited a 2025 study in The Gothamist which found that between January 2024 and June 2025 over 4,100 homeless encampment sweeps were conducted, all without a single person being successfully moved into permanent housing. The resolution goes on to argue that, because sweeps carry an implicit threat of force and humiliation, they are far less likely to result in homeless people becoming more trusting of DHS outreach workers.

NYC-DSA claimed that the mayor was squandering the goodwill generated by his earlier opposition to a cruel policy, goodwill that led to indications of early success in connecting homeless New Yorkers with lifesaving services. This notion is supported by an op-ed published almost immediately before Mamdani announced the resumption of sweeps. “Before individuals can be effectively offered shelter,” it read, “they must be met where they are with supportive resources.” The authors claimed that Mamdani did just this, coordinating closely with first responders while increasing the supply of crucial amenities, such as warming centers and heated buses. These facts stand in stark contrast with the far-right’s caricature of a mayor who is unprepared and helpless under pressure.

These measures were indeed a demonstration of the mayor’s sensitivity to the indignities facing the poor and underprivileged, but NYC-DSA and others with similar leanings may find (correctly) that these are ultimately half-measures. They offer a band-aid that is clearly preferable to punishing and terrorizing the homeless, but ultimately does little or nothing to address the social and institutional problems that lead to homelessness in New York. While Mamdani did backtrack on this key promise, he can make up some lost ground by doing what he does best: focusing on the larger picture. Stressing the affordability crisis, the rising prices of groceries, the lack of affordable health care, the chronically underfunded and decaying public infrastructure all help to demonstrate to the public the factors that regularly drive people into poverty and homelessness. The grisly image of New Yorkers freezing to death in the streets can ultimately speak to the importance of housing as a human right, and the desperate need for affordable housing for Americans of all economic strata. Another step in the right direction would be to exclude the NYPD as much as possible, if not entirely, from these sweeping operations. This January, New York experienced its lowest homicide rate on record. Mamdani can point to this as proof that it’s not necessary to constantly brutalize the poor in order to keep crime rates down.

The far-right City Journal, which functions as a slightly more erudite counterpart to the New York Post, damned Mamdani with faint praise in light of his rediscovering the ‘common sense’ policy of encampment sweeps. Their commentary on Mamdani’s reversal was built around the assumption that positive structural change is impossible, that pulling millions out of poverty is inherently destructive, all written in a chiding tone. However, there was a kernel of truth contained in this commentary: when the author suggested that if Mamdani “abandons his principles – as he may be accused of doing, if he walks back more promises – there won’t be much left for anyone to like.” Indeed, Mamdani’s promises of transformative change galvanized disillusioned progressives who sweated blood to deliver him a victory in the primary and general elections. However, the DSA and its affiliates have been vocal about their disappointment with his backtracking. There have already been several notable instances of this: failing to aggressively recommit to public housing, endorsing the pro-austerity Governor Kathy Hochul, and retaining the Zionist billionaire heiress Jessica Tisch as NYPD Chief. The larger this list grows, the more Mamdani runs the risk of alienating his most devoted supporters. Progressives in New York, including the staff of Democracy @ Work, will continue to observe whether or not this administration can follow through on its promises of transformative change.

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Spring might be around the corner, but there are lessons to be learned from the recent blizzard in New York City. Just over a week ago, the city was pummeled by a second consecutive snow storm for 2026. The reaction to the first January storm, both from the city and its constituents, was predictable: uneven clearing, near-nuclear piles of trash and dog shit, and no shortage of videos portraying the frozen hellscape that New York City had become. While the record low temperatures didn’t help, the reality is that the city in its entirety failed to adjust to the realities of the snow. The second storm was completely different.

It began with city hall. Understanding the failures of the first attempt, Mayor Mamdani and his team issued a call for paid and voluntary snow shovelers. Using his savvy social media skills in combination with an economic carrot, hundreds answered. I didn’t sign up for the paid gig, but this time around I was inspired to clear a small path across the street, and was happy to see delivery workers using it. If you live in the city, the results were immediately apparent: between the paid labor and prepared volunteers, whole stretches of sidewalk completely clear, including the curb cuts at intersections that usually turn into frozen salt lagoons.

The call was simple, but the effects were profound. Not only was the city a unsightly mess during the first storm, but it was downright hazardous. If you have any mobility issues, let alone a serious disability, things become completely untenable. But even for folks without these challenges, one wrong step could lead to a serious injury. That’s why treating the snow as a universal problem benefits all. Curb cuts, those miniature ramps at the intersection of each pedestrian crossing, function in the same way. Known as “universal design,” the idea that designing for the most marginalized among us actually ends up benefiting everyone. If you ever carried your luggage or groceries around, you know how helpful these things are.

The response to the latest storm wasn’t perfect, but it was remarkably better. And as I walked around the city, I was struck with a rare feeling these days: hope. While removing snow can be pretty physical work, at the end of the day it’s a pretty easy gig, especially for younger folks. And while clearing entire blocks is daunting, the aggregation of individuals clearing small stretches in front of their buildings creates a profound add on effect. But all it takes is one absent owner to hurt an entire block.

The whole situation is a good parallel for so many of the problems we’re facing today. If you’ve spent any time in New York, you know a similar issue is the trash. We all seem to be waiting for the city to solve the problem, but the reality is if each building did just a little bit better, the city would benefit enormously. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating for individuals to solve large scale problems alone, and I still expect government to a play a large role in these issues. One only need to look at Barcelona or many other European city to understand the importance of municipal functionality. And I have to give Eric Adams this one win from his administration: it turns out making people put trash in bins goes a long way. But mass-mobilizations, even for things as mundane as snow, can help build a sense of solidarity that might translate elsewhere.

Which leads me to architecture. What was my discipline doing during the snow storm? If you thought offices were being gracious and allowing their employees to work from home during a travel ban, you’d be wrong. Instead many were called in to serve not the city, but their employers. No part of me is surprised, but it’s worth highlighting because it’s another example of how my profession continues to operate in a world where the most important thing is a very specific kind of work, narrowly defined as designing buildings for private clients. Never mind that the work can very easily be done remotely - the “butts in seats” mentality is particularly strong in architecture, so much so that many offices believe it’s worth risking their employees health to come in person and work in front a computer rather than doing it from home.

This form of individualism isn’t unique to architecture. But it’s important to name it as such, because forcing your employees to come into work during a blizzard to toil at your behest shows both an utter lack of respect for them and a lack of interest for their ability to help the city more broadly. In other words, running business as usual cuts off opportunities to join in the collective progress we’re starting to make. How can we address the deep roots of this rugged individualism though?

Besides the usual criticisms and accountability, I’d love to see a broader fix: compulsory national service. And I mean something beyond our limited imagination of only military service. I’ll never forget the first time I heard of the idea, which was shared over dinner with my Professor while studying abroad in college. We were all discussing our futures with each other and I had mentioned that I was interested in AmeriCorps. His ear perked up, and he quickly responded: “I think national service should be mandatory!” At the time I thought it was an insane idea, but I now realize he was onto something.

My eventual experience with AmeriCorps the following year in New Orleans changed my life. I not only got to experience a city I had never been to and work with some of the most passionate and hardworking people I’d ever met, but I was invited into the homes of strangers that I certainly never would have stepped foot into before. I learned the importance of hard work, service, and leadership, but what has really stuck with me is the meals I shared with families after we rebuilt their homes. It was a gracious act that played an integral role in the healing process after Hurricane Katrina.

Now imagine this experience translated country wide. With such division, it’s hard to argue this wouldn’t go a long way to bring folks together. But more importantly, it might build a new form of solidarity not seen since the days of the New Deal. Think scores of young people in the spirit of the Civilian Conservation Corps cleaning shorelines, restoring wetlands, and replanting forests; picking up trash, serving meals, or visiting nursing homes. Maybe most importantly, getting offline, meeting their neighbors, and shifting from an economy of “productivity” to one of care. And ultimately, living the experience of what socialism actually means: meeting everyone’s needs and moving towards a world without scarcity.

Our problems today are too big to solve on our own, or wait for someone else to do it. But I think there’s a hunger for meaningful work like this. When Mamdani won, he issued a call: “we can’t wait for government to work, we have to make government work.” It’s stuck with me. While picking trash or shoveling snow might seem small, the act has the potential to build a new form of mundane solidarity that could translate to much bigger things.

So who’s ready to pick up their shovel and get work?

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Mayor Zohran Mamdani proposed several measures last week intended to reconcile New York’s $5.4 billion budget shortfall, or to use the mayor’s preferred phrase, the Adams Budget Crisis. Mamdani detailed how the former mayor systematically understated the operating costs of key city departments, ballooning New York’s budget deficit. To address this massive funding shortfall, Mamdani has called for New York Governor Kathy Hochul to enact a two percent income tax increase on New Yorkers making over one million dollars a year. Should this measure fail to pass, Mamdani’s backup plan would constitute a 9.5% increase in property taxes, while the city “would also take $980 million from its Rainy Day Fund and $229 million from the Retiree Health Benefits Trust.” So far, Governor Hochul has roundly rejected calls for an income tax increase on the wealthiest New Yorkers.

Mamdani was careful to refer to his proposed property tax as a ‘last resort’, insisting that “we are going to utilize every single option to ensure [this] does not come to pass.” His repeated use of the word ‘crisis’ also seems to have been quite deliberate. In recent history only two New York mayors drew from NYC’s reserves to fund the government: Michael Bloomberg during the 2008 financial crisis and Bill DeBlasio during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mamandi is effectively highlighting how historically drastic such a measure would be in contrast to the simpler, more effective option of a slight tax increase on New York’s wealthiest.

Much of the blowback from this press conference was focused on the proposed 9.5% property tax hike. Drop Site News has suggested that that’s no accident, claiming Mamdani’s political and media opponents prefer to narrowly focus on defeating this measure in order to avoid any discussion of a state-level income tax increase. Naturally, they fear that such discussion will lend too much political legitimacy to the notion of taxing millionaires and billionaires.

That isn’t to say that all the criticism directed towards this tax increase is in bad faith. If the property tax takes the form of a blanket increase, it would largely favor the rich while disproportionately targeting black and hispanic families, many of whom have owned small properties in New York for over a decade. According to Kate Willet, however, Mamdani has proposed a property tax reform bill to effectively address this iniquity. Some economists have warned that property owners will respond to the tax by passing the costs on to their tenants. This risks driving up rents for average New Yorkers, which would be a major political blow to the mayor who campaigned on greater affordability and freezing the rent for all stabilized tenants. Fortunately for Mamdani, six of the nine members of the Rent Guidelines Board will be his appointees, which at least in theory will make it easier for him to follow through on such a major campaign promise.

New York City has been required by law to balance its budget (i.e. ensure that government spending does not exceed revenue) every year since 1975. This law was introduced in the context of the fiscal crisis that brought the city to the brink of financial ruin, as well as stagflation and an oil embargo that were bringing an end to America’s post-war economic boom. New York’s wide-reaching network of government programs and social services found itself under threat when private banks, who had hitherto furnished massive loans to finance these programs, suddenly refused to extend any new credit to the city government. City and state governments responded by ramming through austerity programs, slashing funding for education and healthcare while cutting jobs and benefits for thousands of public-sector employees.

The budget crisis facing New York today, much like the economic crisis it faced in 1975, is of a political as well as economic nature. Even in the 70s when New York’s finances were in turmoil, economic necessity did not dictate the slashing of government programs, benefit cuts for municipal programs, and a massive reduction in social spending on schools and hospitals. Wall Street leaders, and their counterparts in Washington DC, such as Treasury Secretary William Simon and chief economic advisor Alan Greenspan, were fed up with deficit spending in response to the economic downturn. As Michael Beaya Reagan correctly observed, New York was facing “a classic Keynesian crisis – economic depression and market failure – but with austerity as the proposed policy solution.” As the American ruling class shifted rightward, the working class was made to shoulder the burden of New York’s economic recovery.

Now Mamdani is assuring New Yorkers that he will solve this crisis “without balancing the budget on the backs of working people.” Wisely, he has framed this current crisis within the political backdrop of a conflict between city and state. Early on in the press conference, he described how former Governor Cuomo “extracted our City’s resources” to create “a stunning fiscal imbalance” in which “New Yorkers contribute 54.5 percent of state revenue and receive only 40.5 percent back.” The implication is clear: New York’s suburbs and outer regions must begin paying their fair share of taxes, as New York City has furnished a disproportionate amount of state revenue for decades.These structural imbalances between New York regions, which extend to the balanced budget law (New York State is still allowed to engage in deficit spending, unlike NYC), are useful facts that help Mamdani craft a compelling narrative: without bold systemic change, the hardest-working, worst-paid members of our city will face an ever-eroding quality of life.

However, if New York is to meaningfully challenge Albany, it will require open conflict with Governor Hochul, who has steadfastly refused to raise income taxes. It is not clear whether Mamdani will mobilize his supporters to bring the fight to the governor’s office, but the early signs have not been heartening. Mamdani endorsed the unpopular Hochul for re-election two weeks ago, despite her opposition to taxing the wealthy and her encouraging hospitals to hire scabs during the recent Nurses’ strike. This is not the first time Mamdani has defended a servant of the billionaire class. He knows that pragmatism is required for his political survival. Still, Mamdani and his team must remember, as thousands of their supporters surely do, that class warfare dominates every aspect of political life in this country. If they are unwilling to put up a fight, the capitalists will unhesitatingly crush any prospect for social reform, to say nothing of the growing socialist movement in America.

In any case, don’t expect a quick resolution to the budget problem. The new fiscal year begins on July 1; the standoff between city and state is likely to come down to the wire. New Yorkers who want a hand in determining their city’s future must monitor this situation as closely as possible. Democracy @ Work will provide regular, detailed updates on this process throughout the coming weeks and months.

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As a 23-year-old economics graduate student, I have attempted to examine the society I find myself in and its constant crises. I write this article from the perspective of a Gen-Z individual who has grown up during a turbulent period in US politics. Additionally, this article serves as a Gen-Z perspective to my professor Richard Wolff’s recent article, “Trump, Politics and a Declining US Capitalism in 2026”. In this article Professor Wolff sketches a timeline of American politics,the decline of US capitalism, the rise of MAGA and the resurgence of Socialism ushered in by the Bernie Sanders’ led progressive wing of the Democratic Party.”.

For many, the idea of the United States as the greatest world power and the promised land of dreams is slowly deteriorating. The illusion has faded away for many within the country and throughout the world and has been especially noticeable among my generation. From the 2008 Financial Crisis to COVID-19, those my age have consistently lived through historical moments of crisis. Although the promises of the American Dream, such as securing a well-paying job after graduating from college and owning a home, were formative in our early years, the reality of growing up in this country shattered this fantasy and ushered in a state of disillusionment for us. .

Whether they are on the Left or the Right, Gen-Z has lost faith in the neoliberal establishment. According to a 2025 Harvard Poll, only 13% of people between 18 and 29 years old believe the country is headed in the right direction. This dissatisfaction is consistent regardless of which party holds the presidency. The same source shows that this rate was only 18% at a comparable time in Biden’s presidency and later dropped to 9%, coinciding with Biden’s handling of the genocide in Gaza. In addition, only 16% and 17% of youth have a positive outlook on the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively. This rejection of the two-party establishment signified a shift to more radical and reactionary views arising due to the experiences of Gen-Z.

For many older Zoomers, the burden the Great Recession brought to our families during the early years of our lives was the first major crisis that cemented itself in many of our formative memories. Our parents were laid off, and we witnessed the stress that accompanied it. Furthermore, the 2010s saw the rise of the backlash against the neoliberal order. During the 1970s, the Keynesian era of US economics was brought to an end and replaced with a system that emphasized deregulation, privatization, and free trade. This newly minted system of governance became known as neoliberalism and created a more interconnected global economy where multinational industries outsourced their labor to the Global South. This shift was planned and orchestrated by conservatives thought leaders who produced position papers, white papers and editorials to serve as guidebooks to the post Keynesian/Neoliberal era. The most important of these works was the “Powell Memo”.

The “Powell Memo” helped shape the political playing field of a new era. Written in 1971 by corporate attorney Lewis F. Powell Jr., just before he joined the Supreme Court, the memo served as a strategic blueprint for Corporate America’s push to expand its political power. It was, in essence, the ownership class’s response to a series of working-class and progressive victories in civil rights, labor rights, and consumer protection during the 1960s.

One catalyst for this corporate backlash was Ralph Nader’s 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed, which exposed safety failures in the automobile industry. The public reaction was swift and consequential, leading to stronger federal regulation, including the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act and the creation of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. For corporate leaders, these reforms represented significant setbacks.

Simultaneously, the success of the March on Washington led by Martin Luther King Jr., signaled a broader political shift. This led to the passage of both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, expanding the social contract to include the historically marginalized. The expansion of Civil Rights, Union strength and growing consumer advocacy movements further challenged corporate dominance. To many business leaders, this wave of reform and grassroots mobilization resembled a “countercultural” uprising that threatened the foundations of corporate authority.

The Powell Memo called for a more aggressive and coordinated corporate/business class response. After joining the Supreme Court, Justice Lewis Powell played a role in shaping a legal environment more receptive to corporate influence in politics. Over the 1970s and 1980s, restrictions on corporate political spending were gradually weakened, laying the intellectual and legal groundwork for what would later be recognized as neoliberalism.

This conservative reaction was not limited to the United States. Working-class movements and demands for social reform were global phenomena, and they were met with similar counteroffensives abroad. In the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher’s government (1979–1990) advanced sweeping privatization and enacted anti-union legislation that prioritized corporate interests. In the United States, Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 marked a parallel shift. His administration, working closely with corporate leaders and allied members of Congress, oversaw deregulation and weakened regulatory agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission.

Corporate money grew increasingly prominent in politics under the banner of protecting corporate “free speech,” and economic power became more concentrated as mergers and monopolization accelerated.

While neoliberalism created significant GDP growth in the US economy throughout the 80s and 90s, the negatives began to surface for a majority of people in the 2000s. Many people began to realize that the growth was disproportional, with many losing their jobs to cheaper labor abroad and being left behind in the global capitalist economy. With the era of social welfare programs and government intervention of Keynesian economics dissolved, there was nothing to support the now precarious US working class.

My generation saw how our parents and families were directly being harmed by the current system and our politicians, and we began to worry about our own futures. In 2016, we saw the rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Two figures produced by the failures of neoliberalism. Both of whom structured their campaigns around the system’s failures. Sanders’s platform positioned him as a social democrat who hoped to implement major social programs, such as Medicare-For-All, and increased government intervention in the economy. On the other hand, Trump’s platform positions him as a far-right populist with policies such as returning jobs to the US, cracking down on immigration, and ‘Making America Great Again,’ all while maintaining traditional GOP priorities such as increasing tax cuts for the wealthy, increased military spending, etc. For many, both candidates represented change from the current system and heavily resonated with Gen-Z, greatly influencing the future of many people in my generation.

When looking at Sanders’s policies, you can see that he was clearly inspired by the Scandinavian model and the Keynesian/New Deal era economics, yet Sanders described himself as a socialist (a democratic socialist to be more precise). There was no call to overthrow the capitalist system and usher in a communist state or whatever Republicans painted him to be during the 2016 campaign or when he ran again in 2020. He was a candidate who mostly called for basic reforms and programs that many nations already implemented. Nevertheless, young people began to associate the term ‘socialism’ with change from the current capitalist system. They saw the vision of a new system where people no longer needed to struggle for basic needs. A new system where people had livable wages, affordable housing, and free and universal healthcare. A new system that called out the issues of systemic racism and protected immigrants. A new system that addressed the discrimination of sex, gender, and orientation. These glimmers of hope were squashed for many when the Democratic Party prevented a self-described socialist from being their candidate in both 2016 and 2020.

Alongside the failure of the 2020 Bernie Campaign, the Black Lives Matter movement played a pivotal role in the development. Gen-Z witnessed the systemic and lethal violence of the state and the injustices that the capitalist system perpetuates. The murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor showed many in Gen-Z the superficial responses from the Democratic Party that only reinforced the injustice of police brutality and state-sanctioned violence. Recently, the violence that the United States enacts on its own people has been expanded with the increase in ICE activity. In addition, Gen-Z is witnessing the violence the United States orchestrates abroad. The most recent example has been the genocide in Gaza that has been defended and funded by both the Biden and Trump administrations. Any form of resistance from the youth, such as the encampments, has been met with state repression. As basic necessities have become more unaffordable and promises made unattainable in the US, Gen-Z has criticized how billions of dollars are spent on the imperialist machine. Many have gone beyond the social democrat demands of Bernie Sanders. Many are now demanding socialism and the complete dismantling of capitalism and imperialism.

Socialism has become a dominant ideology within Gen-Z. Within the Democrat party, young people have shifted towards more radical politics, with 47% of young Democrats supporting socialism as of 2025. This is an increase from the 41% in 2020. In contrast, support for capitalism among young Democrats has decreased from 39% in 2020 to 25% in 2025. The next generation of the Democratic base has shattered the neoliberal establishment. The Democratic Party establishment has decayed into obsolescence and is still grasping onto a false reality that current US conditions are still the same as those of the 1990s and 2000s. Young people have grown up in a world that only experienced the negatives of neoliberalism and the turbulence of late-stage capitalism, and many believe socialism to be the only viable path forward.

On the other hand, many among my generation have vehemently been opposed to socialism while still being against the current establishment. Donald Trump and his MAGA movement have reconfigured the entire Republican Party with a far-right populist platform. Around 53% of young Republicans support the MAGA movement, revealing a shift to the populist rhetoric over the establishment. What differs the MAGA movement from the establishment is that it acknowledged that problems existed with neoliberalism, unlike the Republican and Democratic establishments. Although, rather than criticizing the failures and contradictions of the capitalist system, the MAGA movement and the rest of the far-right have blamed the miseries of decaying neoliberalism and capitalism on oppressed groups such as immigrants, women, Muslims, and Black and Brown people. By shifting the blame onto these groups that lack protection and equal rights in the eyes of the state, the billionaire ruling class is able to split the working class while maintaining capitalism and preventing meaningful systemic change. The harmful rhetoric has been effective in exploiting the feelings of alienation and discontent that many young people experience and in reinforcing the hatred within privileged groups.

In addition to Trump and the MAGA movement, the internet and social media played a pivotal role in the rise of the far-right among Gen-Z. From large online media outlets funded by fracking billionaires, such as the Daily Wire and PragerU, to individual content creators, such as Sneako and Andrew Tate, who recently partied to Kanye’s song “Heil Hitler” in Miami, social media has played a role in pushing many young people even further right and adopting an openly fascist ideology. Most of this type of content is far-right propaganda funded by billionaires or venal attempts to be contrarian by purposely spouting controversial and ‘edgy’ remarks. These accounts have garnered millions of followers and subscribers across many platforms. In addition to platforms such as YouTube and Facebook, the far-right has created its own spaces with platforms, such as Kick and Rumble, which have relocated many young people to echo chambers of far-right content.

The shift to both radical and reactionary politics marks a significant turning point in US politics. In the early 20th century, capitalism had reached a similar breaking point, which eventually culminated in the Great Depression that began in 1929. During the first quarter of the 20th century, capitalist crises positioned the populace to situation we may find familiar, one where the masses have become disillusioned with the status quo and adopted either radical or reactionary politics. Two ideologies were prominent during this period: socialism and fascism. Nations such as the Soviet Union adopted the former while Germany and Italy implemented the latter. This isn’t to conflate the two opposing ideologies. While socialism is a progressive response to the contradictions and inequalities of capitalism, fascism is a reactionary ideology that defends capital and the interests of the upper class through violence, racism, bigotry, and ultranationalism as a response to growing anti-capitalist sentiment among the masses. It is a destructive defense mechanism implemented by capitalists to preserve the decaying system of capitalism. A violent lashing out from the ruling class to extinguish the working-class socialist movement. Rosa Luxemburg’s The Juinus Pamphlet quotes Friedrich Engels saying, “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” While capitalism was able to temporarily preserve itself with Keynesian economics during the 20th century, the system once again fell into crisis due to capitalism’s inherent contradictions. Today, many in my generation are completely disillusioned with the current system and believe that it finds itself at this crossroads. With moments of crisis becoming more prevalent, the next generation demands change.

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Businessman and culture warrior Elon Musk recently attacked the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming The Odyssey. Why anyone should be concerned about casting one of the most beautiful and talented women in show business as Helen is a mystery to me. If I had to guess, however, it probably has something to do with Musk’s troubling racial views (and yes, the “authenticity” claim is nonsense; The Odyssey is a work of fiction, one he almost certainly never bothered to read). Still, I found the timing of Musk’s complaint fascinating and even a bit serendipitous; in recent weeks, I’ve come to think of Musk and Nolan as kindred spirits, ideologically united in many ways.

It might not be a stretch to say that Christopher Nolan is the Elon Musk of filmmakers. Nolan shares many of Musk’s quirks and insecurities: fear of the poor, unwashed masses; a dismissive attitude towards women; the complete absence of a sense of humor; and an insatiable hunger to be admired, to be taken seriously. Like Musk, Nolan relies on hype and a cult of personality to dominate the industry, perhaps because on some level he realizes he’s hawking an immensely costly and inferior product. Nolan and Musk share a toxic messiah complex, a notion that they are revolutionizing both their respective fields and perhaps how we function as a human beings. Their ideas are of course delusions of grandeur, signs of our empire’s slow but inexorable decline.

Nolan’s creative output, like Musk’s, has always reflected an instinctual conservatism. The Dark Knight’s only saving grace, Heath Ledger’s scenery-chewing Joker, is an exponent of Nolan’s reactionary worldview: a terrorist who destroys for the sake of it, who cannot be reasoned with and who must be dealt with through extrajudicial means. The Dark Knight Rises parodied the Occupy movement through the grotesque figure of Bane, threatening to give Gotham City “back to you…the people.” Like the best propaganda, these symbolic characters activate unconscious feelings among viewers in a kind of subliminal political messaging. These messages, which promote unthinking patriotism, unconditional respect for authority, and reification of the status quo, have also been laundered through the enormously influential Marvel behemoth and other anti-art movie franchises.

Much like Musk, Nolan often tries to exhibit his sophistication and literacy. These attempts lay bare the flimsiness of his intellectual pretensions. One of the most embarrassing instances of this occurs in Oppenheimer, when the titular character is quizzed by fellow leftists on his knowledge of Marxism. The exchange goes:

OPPENHEIMER: I’ve read Das Kapital. All three volumes. Does that count?

CHEVALIER: That would make you better read than most Party members.

OPPENHEIMER: It’s turgid stuff, but there’s some thinking… ‘Ownership is theft.’

TATLOCK: ‘Property is theft.’

OPPENHEIMER: Sorry, I read it in the original German.

Oppenheimer’s performative behavior, as Nolan writes it, not only echoes Musk’s posturing in general, it is, amazingly, almost identical to Musk’s (almost certainly false) claim that he himself has read all three volumes of Capital in the original German! What is perhaps most revealing is that the phrase ‘property is theft’ is not only entirely absent from Capital, but it didn’t originate with Marx at all. In fact, Marx actually ridicules the phrase (originated by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) in a scathing rebuttal to Proudhon’s anarchist socialism. The fact that this glaring inaccuracy passed through the film’s enormous production team unnoticed implies another shared trait of Nolan and Musk: the need to be surrounded by a clique of yes-men, unable or unwilling to point out the flaws in the great genius’s work.

Nolan appears to be as mystified by women as he is by philosophy. His fundamental conservatism rears its head whenever he depicts women striking out from the roles they are appointed to by society, and like Musk, Nolan often reduces women in his films to fetishized objects or dangerous Others. The communist Jean Tatlock falls into depression and commits suicide, a fate that is shared by Marion Cotillard’s Mal, the femme fatale of Inception. When Nolan tries to say something meaningful about human relationships, he usually ends up predictably reifying the nuclear family as the cornerstone of a healthy society, the final end and highest aim of human existence, as the bland, pretentious Interstellar testifies. Nolan reaches for profundity, but leaves us only with soppy cliches about how love and family transcend all temporal and spatial boundaries.

Nolan and Musk’s shared obsession with the colonization of space provides a window into their intellectual limitations and narcissistic tendencies. While both seem aware of the impending ecological disaster facing humanity, they seem to regard it as a foregone conclusion, without even trying to meaningfully articulate its true causes or potential solutions. One might still argue that Musk’s massive investment in electric vehicles indicates that he is genuinely concerned about the impact of carbon emissions on the atmosphere., but if this were true, why would he be systematically destroying every regulatory mechanism governing the use of fossil fuels, or argue that underpopulation is somehow a greater threat to our survival than climate change? The horrific rotating space station at the end of Interstellar is reminiscent of Musk’s dystopian visions of our post-Earth existence. Neither man offers a compelling answer for how the free market is going to bring about a fully automated, post-scarcity society in outer space, and yet we are expected to enthusiastically greet the prospect of abandoning mother Earth for the fantasy of interplanetary colonization, leaving all of the social structures that promote waste and inequality intact.

All this begs the question as to how these fairly mediocre men have achieved such enormous success. I would argue that it rests on their shrewd understanding of markets and consumer behavior. Both men know how to manipulate public reactions in order to maximize their successes. Despite being weighed down by some fairly unprofitable companies, Musk has often used his erratic behavior to manipulate the stock market in his favor. He has also used his massive following to influence political outcomes that favor his economic class, resulting in lucrative government contracts or massive tax cuts for the super-rich. Every Nolan production since The Dark Knight has been accompanied with an increasingly elaborate PR campaign, including deliberate reveals of the A-list casts and hints of new technical feats. The success of Oppenheimer and the likely success of his forthcoming The Odyssey hinge largely on this fetishistic hyping of technological innovations. However, the Barbenheimer phenomenon was more gracefully orchestrated than any shot in Oppenheimer. As for The Odyssey, despite Nolan’s pursuit of no-expenses-spared authenticity, the film’s first trailer seems to be visually flat and dreary, hardly distinguishable from AI.

Lacking a healthy economic foundation from which to grow, our artistic and cultural output has been hollowed out in the name of the profit motive. Musk’s actions and personal interests (or lack thereof) provide a window into the decadence of our system. Every film of Nolan’s testifies to this decadence: they are products of a film industry that is oligopolistic and increasingly resembles a monopoly, fears any sort of artistic risk or provocation that could alienate consumers, and indeed views the constituent pieces of every aesthetic experience as mere numbers on a balance sheet. Nolan, like Musk, may view himself as the future of his industry, raising the possibilities of art and life to new heights; in reality he is another capitalist whose actions are dictated mainly by the interests of his class.

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The massive protests that have rocked Tehran and other major cities in Iran have received significant attention in the mainstream press (although some actually dispute this fact). In Iran, mass discontent with the Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime, spurred largely by inflation and rising costs of living (sound familiar?) has given rise to widespread civil disobedience, as well as instances of armed violence among protestors. The mainstream media, when not openly agitating for regime change, has responded by accusing the left of hypocrisy and inaction: after all the demonstrations for Gaza, why aren’t young people coming out in droves to protest the mass killings orchestrated by the IRGC?

On the surface there may be some validity to these claims. It is evident that young people aren’t taking to the streets in large numbers as they were throughout the first year of the Gaza genocide, and no encampments have sprung up on college campuses. This has led several mainstream commentators, from Piers Morgan to the Atlantic magazine, to suggest that the Gaza protests were not an outraged response to mass killings, but were actually motivated by something else. Others closer to the fringe have claimed that the IDF targeted mainly terrorists, while the Iranian regime, in a couple of days, mowed down 30-40,000 innocent protestors.

It would be hypocrisy to condemn the genocide in Gaza while turning a blind eye to such carnage in Iran. One distinction, however, must be made clear: the mass murder in Gaza was live-streamed (despite the Israeli regime’s war on journalists) for over 2 years, while the assertion of 30,000+ dead in Iran has virtually no evidence supporting it. The initial figures, cross-referenced by health professionals in various Iranian hospitals, suggested a few thousand people had been killed in protests. The number grew when two anonymous sources reportedly told CBS News (which recently lost any credibility it once had) that the number is at least 12,000 and may be as high as 20,000. The 30,000 number apparently originated with the International Centre for Human Rights, a pro-Israel Canadian shell group that has been agitating for regime change in Iran for several years. Regime change proponents promptly forgot about the existence of this organization when a more legitimate source, in this case TIME, repeated the 30,000+ figure. However, the main source for their reporting was Dr. Amir Parasta, an eye surgeon with close ties to Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last Shah of Iran and America’s chosen puppet in the event of regime change. TIME has acknowledged that they can provide no independent verification or more direct evidence of these deaths, a statement echoed both by The Guardian and Iran International.

While I find it hard to believe that the death toll in Iran is anywhere near that high, I can’t dismiss the possibility that those numbers are close to the truth. In its report TIME mentioned that one of the only historical precedents for these massacres is Babi Yar, when Nazi forces killed nearly 34,000 Jewish Ukrainians in the span of only two days. The scale of that horror continues to boggle the mind, and it is remarkable how well that historical record has been preserved, despite the Nazis’ extensive efforts to conceal the crime. While 21^st-century Tehran is not 20^th-century Kyiv, it remains difficult for many people to comprehend such slaughter in such a short timespan (one of the reasons Holocaust deniers are still able to dupe listeners), and the Iranian regime is an extremely cloistered and repressive one, where the flow of information is kept under tight control. When a hated authoritarian government feels itself cornered and desperate, it usually lashes out with horrific violence. One should not underestimate what this regime is capable of, especially when they have already admitted to murdering thousands of civilians.

Sadly, a few self-described leftists seem to reject this fact entirely. It is not enough to suggest the possibility that Western media has inflated the death toll; instead, they engage in apologetics for the IRGC, claiming that they are only responding to violent provocations from the CIA and Mossad. While there is evidence that those agencies have infiltrated certain protests, suggesting that they are the main reason for the IRGC’s violent response is ludicrous. This kind of denialism not only plays directly into the hands of the regime, but it is an enormous gift for right-wingers and interventionists who accuse the left of selective outrage and performative activism.

It is now up to the left to articulate the difference between performative activism and activism based around tangible, actionable goals. It is necessary for them to do this in order to defend themselves from charges of hypocrisy. The Gaza protests, at their best, were marked by three characteristics: recognizing the nature of the problem, articulating why it directly concerned Americans, and offering a set of concrete demands that were both popular and achievable. If we apply these characteristics to the Gaza genocide and the mass killings in Iran, we see how quickly comparisons between the two fall apart.

In both cases, we have governments massacring innocent civilians: in the case of Gaza, all civilians are demonized by our elected officials as terrorists, potential terrorists, or terrorist supporters, while Iran’s victims are made up only of courageous freedom fighters. In the case of Gaza, federal and local governments, our universities, and various other institutions were investing in or directly funding a nation committing war crimes on a daily basis. There are many hawks and neocons who today dismiss the idea of international law, but even if you ignore this, such arms transfers were also in violation of US law. Conversely, our government and institutions are not providing Iran with any real financial or military support.

The objectives of the Gaza protests were for the most part clear: divestment from Israeli institutions complicit in war crimes, a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, and a complete arms embargo imposed on Israel. This is where the biggest contradictions become clear: what demands should the left bring to its protests against the Iranian regime? The implication, from many of the left’s critics, is that we must vigorously demand that our government intervene militarily in Iran, decapitate the Ayatollah’s leadership, and re-install the monarchy under the Shah. By almost any possible metric, regime change in Iran would be a catastrophe. In our multipolar 21^st century world, Iran is a crucial flashpoint between the United States and its rivals Russia and China. Not only is Iran the third-largest oil producer in the world, it also borders the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway through which 20% of the world’s oil and natural gas shipments pass. An emboldened US and Israel, now dominating the Middle East, would encourage greater bellicosity from Russia and China. The Russians would now have an easier time ignoring our hypocritical warnings about territorial sovereignty while the Chinese would accelerate their preparations to take control of Taiwan and the South China Sea. All of these potential developments would greatly heighten tensions among these nuclear-armed superpowers.

War in Iran remains deeply unpopular with the American public. Many of us remember the multi-trillion dollar disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan, the destruction of Libya, Syria, and Yemen, the destabilization in the Middle East that led to a rise in terrorism, and the suspension of civil liberties and the explosion of the mass surveillance state. Putting all that aside, we must ask if the idea of a US invasion of Iran is in any way popular with the Iranian people. Let’s not forget that in 1953 Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister was overthrown by the US and UK, who installed the Shah. Would it be rational or dignified for Iranians to embrace the same puppet leader foisted upon them by the same imperialist government? It’s true that certain factions among the protestors are seeking a return of the Shah, but do we have any reason to believe these are the majority?

I think that the left could make two reasonable demands of the US government with regard to Iran: an end to the crushing sanctions that have wrecked Iran’s economy, and to use the tools of international law to ensure that the criminals within the Iranian state are held accountable. Ironically, it seems that these are the measures that the left’s critics most staunchly oppose. They have always shown approval when US sanctions decimated the lives of ordinary Iranians, just like they did to Cubans and Venezuelans. They have mocked and derided the idea of international law as the United States ran roughshod over it, most damningly during the war in Gaza. Since they have always endorsed US-imposed cruelty via soft power or direct military intervention, who are these critics to accuse the left or anyone else of cruelty?

Nurses have been on strike. Over the last couple of years, writers have fought Hollywood and won. Now, journalists are being fired by the hundreds, and architects are speaking up and walking out. Are these the signs of a long-awaited professional populist uprising, or merely temporary dissatisfaction? Economic trends point to something more permanent; have professional workers finally had enough?

I’d like to think the answer to the question is a tepid but growing “yes.” My industry, architecture, has been rocked by a series of scandals that hopefully threaten to upend the status quo as we know it. While conversations around labor, including a handful of successful union campaigns, have been going on for the past few years, the most recent public turmoil began this past January when the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) issued a complaint against prominent New York architectural firm Snøhetta. In 2023, after a failed election, the firm (allegedly) retaliated by firing eight workers who were involved in the union campaign. While there will be a trial this summer, emails from firm leaders paint a damning picture of an office desperate to rid its staff of any pro-union sympathies:

Now it’s up to me to design some prophylaxis against any such future efforts. The last three months has been like the “conditioned-reflex therapy” scene at the end of “A Clockwork Orange”, listening to overloud Beethoven, peering into the neon kaleidoscope of human nature with my eyes tweezed open! I’m astonished by the diversity of detachments from reality the iPhone generation has gleaned from the recently digitized, remote industrial manufacturing of reality our erstwhile art has, at scale, become.

It’s a frankly disturbing - but unfortunately all-too-common - portrayal of what bosses really think of their workers whose hours of unpaid labor contribute to their grand visions. The irony hasn’t been lost on workers who observed that their Norwegian (the firm is named after a famous mountain in Norway) counterparts are represented by an industry-wide union.

Across the pond, another trade union group, The Section of Architectural Workers (SAW) led a demonstration against more mass firings, this time at BIG architects. Bjarke Ingels, prominently featured on programs like 60 minutes, has been something of a “rock star” in the architecture world since the early 2000s. Worshiped at universities and publications throughout the industry, the wunderkind created a small, flashy practice based on pretty graphics and transformed it into a global corporation. Perhaps flying a bit too close to the sun, a recent project based in Saudi Arabia was canceled, creating a pretext for the eventual firing of dozens of workers. SAW has demanded that with over 50% representation of BIG’s workforce, the company sit down and finally negotiate a contract. Recent clips of Ingels espousing the ability of AI to replace hundreds of workers have only accelerated the sense of urgency by these unionized workers.

Back here in the States, news that several prominent architecture firms were gladly competing to design the next “Donald J. Trump” terminal at Dulles International Airport in Washington DC caused an outcry among many at a time when the administration has been blatantly disregarding the rights of Americans and chasing baffling economic policies that are actively tanking the economy. For me, it’s a sign that our leaders have no answers, and the only solutions can come from workers.

Are these the latest indications that professionals like architects have had enough? It certainly seems like something is brewing. While conversations around the problematic nature of glorifying the “creative genius” have been happening for years, these recent stories speak to something different: workers aren’t just complaining, they are taking action. Those in health care and education have plenty of experience in this arena, but the fact that “prestige” industries like architecture are following suit might point to a shakier foundation in the workforce.

There’s a wide recognition that the economy, at least in the United States, is being propped up by “slop” spending, a depressing combination of AI, sports gambling, and crypto speculation. Based on the shallow array of Super Bowl ads this year, the estimation seems accurate. Outside of these sectors, there is little growth. If you’re an architect, that means the bread-and-butter industries of housing and commercial aren’t bringing in the same work they used to. Unless you’re working on local government projects or AI data centers, the data point to a slowdown across sectors and regions. And there’s plenty of signs of an imminent stock market collapse, which of course would only make things worse.

While workers in other unionized industries have been attuned to these realities for decades, it looks like professionals might be finally coming around to the fact that the economy is structurally rigged against them too. For the sake of their own livelihoods, and the built environment around us, let’s hope they take action before it’s too late.

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Recently on his podcast, California Governor Gavin Newsom interviewed Ben Shapiro at length. Shapiro, a failed screenwriter turned crypto-fascist ideologue (with the help of billionaire cash) gained notoriety at a young age when the New York Times referred to him as the cool kid’s philosopher. Today his boy-genius brand appears to be losing its potency, and not just because he recently turned 42. Because he is a mouthpiece for billionaires and enjoys close ties to several heads of the Israeli state, his views are increasingly at odds with the average American, whether they come from the left, right, or center. Recently, Shapiro has had to face increasing challenges from the far-right, perhaps a first in his career. While he remains a devout apologist for Israel’s apartheid and flagrant war crimes, this position has been challenged (mostly for terrible reasons) by several prominent conservatives. These include his former colleague Candace Owens, as well Tucker Carlson and the ‘groyper’ incel Nick Fuentes. The latter’s open embrace of fascism has already begun to displace Shapiro’s stale neoconservatism as the guiding ideology of the Republican Party mainstream. The assassination of Charlie Kirk appears to have only intensified these divisions, while Shapiro’s audience has been shrinking for some time now.

Although he is a shill for some of the worst people on the planet, one is almost tempted to feel bad for Ben Shapiro. Although he is a millionaire with a cushy job and access to powerful people, he never really looks happy (if you don’t believe me, just check the internet). Does he realize, on some level, that he sold his soul to the devil? Or is the loss of his Hollywood fantasies too painful for him to come to terms with? Shapiro seems most content when he’s reviewing movies on Daily Wire, or discussing Broadway musicals or classical music. One really wishes that he could’ve made this his full-time job: this would mean a more fulfilling career for Ben Shapiro and a great deal less fascist poison coursing through our airwaves for the rest of us.

Shapiro’s MO during debates is quite a good one for someone of his intellectual abilities: he talks at such a rapid pace, jumping from topic to topic while giving the opponent little time for refutation, that his arguments appear to contain more substance than they actually do. The best example of this during his interview with Newsom was when the two discussed individual and institutional investors buying up housing stock. Shapiro first attempted to minimize the problem by suggesting that these actions only made up a tiny percent of home purchases in the United States. He went on to suggest that wealthy investors, be they corporate institutions or individuals, have actually made the price of housing less expensive.

There is almost too much that’s ridiculous here to properly unpack, but let’s focus on a few key points. Shapiro says that the percentage of corporate purchases of real estate in California is “exorbitantly low” before Newsom interjects that this is only relative to the situation in other states. It is likely that Shapiro didn’t expect this level of pushback given Newsom’s relaxed, amiable tone throughout the conversation, but this does cause him to concede that in other areas of the country there is “pretty significant” corporate ownership of housing.This is a massive understatement. As I noted in an earlier post, “Wealthy investors purchased more than 30 percent of all single-family homes sold in Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona” in the year 2021, “while MetLife has projected that corporations and private equity firms could own as much as 40 percent of all single-family rentals by the year 2030.” It is no accident that billionaire investors are making real estate purchases outside of New York and California: after all, why purchase immensely expensive property in densely populated areas when they can be acquired for a song elsewhere?

Shapiro is suggesting that by increasing the supply of housing available to rent, wealthy investors are creating a more competitive market and thereby a general decline in prices. For this to be true, he’d have to ignore all the evidence that shows that these buyers directly collude with each other to limit competition in order to raise rents, which many have done to a dramatic extent. Shapiro’s entire argument is actually devoid of historical and institutional context. How did it come about that many Americans are struggling to rent homes, let alone buy them? If corporations are making housing cheaper, why is it that so many Americans continue to struggle with the high cost of living? Shapiro’s analysis seems stuck in the post-War ‘Golden Age’ of capitalism, which I’ve explored in my earlier analysis of housing in the 21^st century.

Shapiro is mainly a businessperson: in his single-minded pursuit of success, he has compromised several principles he once claimed to possess. One expects businesspeople to be transactional and opportunistic, but it is galling to see this same pattern of behavior from 2028 Presidential hopeful Newsom. Nearing the end of his final term as governor, Newsom appears desperate to appeal to the widest possible demographic range in order to shore up his electoral prospects. Evidently, he believes that the best way to do this is through relentless pandering. For liberal proponents of academic freedom, Newsom has shared performative photos of himself sipping lattes and reading “banned” books. For black and working-class voters, Newsom appeared on the ALL THE SMOKE podcast to spin tales about his supposed rough-and-tumble background. For Democratic stalwarts who are sick of the “when they go low, we go high” posturing, Newsom has taken to aping Trump’s all-caps style of tweeting, complete with thumbnails of cringeworthy AI slop.

When pressed by Shapiro to take firm positions on two key issues, Newsom offered cowardly answers that displayed his complete lack of fitness to serve as the nominee of a major political party. Shapiro, an anti-Arab racist who has publicly called for the ethnic cleansing of the occupied Palestinian territories, asked Newsom his opinion on the genocide charge (essentially demanding a repudiation). Newsom replied: “I don’t share that opinion as it relates to genocide. I do not agree with that notion. I’m also crystal clear on my love for Israel.” The governor apparently agrees more with this anti-Muslim activist than with the 77% of Democratic voters who believe Israel is guilty of genocide. The authoritative reports by Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and several prominent Israeli historians and human rights experts, as well as Holocaust survivors, do not merit a mention from Newsom or Shapiro.

Perhaps even more appalling were Newsom’s double-dealing comments on ICE. Shapiro attacked Newsom’s press office for referring to ICE operations as “state-sponsored terrorism,” to which Newsom appeared remorseful, muttering “yeah, I think that’s fair.” This capitulation is especially appalling coming less than a week after the state murder of Renee Good by ICE agents. Days later, Newsom appeared to reverse himself once again, referring to the recently-fired Border Patrol agent as “Gestapo Greg” immediately following the murder of Alex Pretti. The flip-flopping and pandering are endless.

This discussion is emblematic of America’s desolate media landscape. The form it had existed in has changed, since podcasts and TikTok reels are more watched, and probably more trusted, than most of the mainstream news networks. The content, however, calls to mind an old idea expressed by Noam Chomsky: “the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” One such acceptable public debate happening in today’s political sphere took place between a slick conservative (Newsom) and an arch-reactionary (Shapiro). Naturally, Americans who feel little or no affinity for these cynical grifters will feel like there is no place for them in the political and media mainstream. Hopefully this will lead them to seek out alternative news sources who will not filter out or shy away from reporting on the uncomfortable social and political truths about where this country is really headed.

In 1917, Lenin wrote the following about the legacy of revolutionaries: “After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.” Malcolm X is still often depicted as an angry, violent demagogue, but since those who have besmirched his name like to ignore the root causes of that anger, he is nonetheless rendered a ‘harmless icon,’ full of righteous fury about nothing in particular. The histrionic Cory Booker has recently performed this same operation on Angela Davis, who during her most productive years represented a political project entirely antithetical to Booker’s. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy has been sanitized to the point of being unrecognizable while his image has been endlessly commodified. It is ironic that Charlie Kirk, perhaps more than the average liberal, helped to bring King’s socialism back into focus in recent years. Kirk’s red-baiting, racist portrait of King’s legacy doesn’t do King many favors, but it may serve as a good reminder, for those willing to hear it, that MLK was a radical, not just a reformer.

In his lifetime and today, Malcolm X was despised for his radicalism. One of the greatest lies we are told about Dr. King is that he preached a message completely antithetical to that of Malcolm X, but King’s condolence letter to Betty Shabazz exposes this fraud:

While we did not always see eye to eye on methods to solve the race problem, I always had a deep affection for Malcolm and felt that he had a great ability to put his finger on the existence and root of the problem.

By the end of his life, Malcolm X’s radicalism had expanded in scope (he was in open sympathy with anti-colonial movements abroad and anti-capitalist movements at home) while reaching out, for the first time, to the mainstream of the Civil Rights Movement. At the end of his life, Dr. King criticized capitalism and American imperialism with greater openness than ever before, while also denouncing our culture of anti-communism as “irrational” and unscientific.

In the years since King’s death, his radicalism has been carefully scrubbed from the historical record; the nonthreatening, nonconfrontational version of King discussed in polite society bears more relation to Barack Obama than the real thing. Malcolm X, who lived his whole life as a radical, was eulogized in derisive terms by several major newspapers, and his death went unacknowledged by President Johnson and all other Western heads of state. For all the talk about “revolutionizing the conservative movement,” Charlie Kirk was no radical: he championed the right of white men and billionaires to dominate society, which ultimately amounts to championing the status quo. This friendliness to power, completely opposed to anything that can be meaningfully called radical, explains why numerous public figures rushed to mourn him and express condolences to his family, hypocritically claiming that ‘violence has no place in American politics.’

In high school classrooms and hallways today, it’s not uncommon to find inspirational posters of Malcolm X (at least in blue states), usually bearing this quote: “Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.” This in itself is a subtle but nonetheless insidious act of defanging his radicalism. While a strong student in his adolescent years, when Malcolm X entered prison he was by his own description coarse and borderline illiterate. He stalked his prison cell like a caged animal and cursed God to such a degree that his fellow inmates gave him the nickname ‘Satan.’ He did not begin his adult education until his brother Reginald introduced him to the Nation of Islam and the teachings of Elijah Muhammad. This prison visit was the pivotal moment of his life: for the first time, he was provided with a convincing explanation for his suffering and an outlet for his anger and defiance. From then on he read voraciously, but not as an end in itself. He looked to Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, and Harriet Beecher Stowe to understand the political and historic roots of black suffering, as well as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer in order to grasp the white man’s ideological justifications for dominating and enslaving ‘inferior’ races. Malcolm X’s education was his passport to a very particular future, one that sought the collapse of white power structures and the black man’s reclamation of his destiny.

Of course, ominous suggestions of a violent reckoning among races don’t exactly make great material for inspirational classroom posters. But when a man is shorn of his character and beliefs to make his message appear less dark and unsettling, what remains? The third chapter of Malcolm X’s autobiography, entitled ‘Mascot,’ recounts the unease and alienation that the teenage Malcolm felt as the only black student at his school. While apparently popular among his classmates, Malcolm X always felt that this was because his blackness made him a fascinating and exotic object, and that he was not truly accepted for the content of his character. When Malcolm’s legacy and message are entirely excluded from the public sphere, excepting images of his familiar grin or the slightly less friendly photo of him carrying a carbine rifle, we are tacitly reviving the same fetishization and dehumanization that his classmates engaged in over 80 years ago.

Against his will, Malcolm X was reduced to a ‘mascot’ in the eyes of white America before he began the long, agonizing process of reclaiming his identity and pride. If he were alive today, it seems beyond question that he would be horrified by black leaders who have willingly taken up the mantle of mascot. In 2011, Dr. Cornel West referred to then-president Barack Obama as “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black muppet of corporate plutocrats.” Obama, as has been pointed out by others, had no ideology, no great convictions beyond his ambition; not only was he open about this, he made a virtue of it. Billionaires, warmongers, and corporatists naturally embraced Obama, as they now do with figures like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Jasmine Crockett. These politicians, as opposed to sell-out activists like Bayard Rustin or Angela Davis, never had any ambition but to be used by the rich and powerful, providing a phony progressive cover to actions that are cannibalizing our society and destroying our planet.

Charlie Kirk, in his own way, is undergoing a similar process of being turned into a mascot. His widow Erika has compared him to Vice President J.D. Vance, evidently doing her part to clear the runway for the latter’s 2028 presidential campaign. Liberal America’s favorite pundit Ezra Klein has transformed Kirk into a tolerant champion of free speech, someone who was “doing politics the right way.” Donald Trump loudly declared Kirk to have been “loved and admired by ALL, especially me,” which even to him must have sounded a bit over-the-top. Various mainstream figures have characterized Kirk as principled, charismatic, and broad-minded, when the evidence we have available shows that he was nothing of the sort.

A perpetual task for the left is to avoid reducing all historical figures, from Malcolm X or Charlie Kirk, to slogans or caricatures. It has become far too easy for the left to deify figures like Marx, Che Guevara, or Huey Newton while ignoring their very human shortcomings and complexities. It is just as wrong to think of Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman, or even Henry Kissinger, as pure evil, despite how much we may disagree with them; historically, socialists have found their ideas worth engaging with and even instructive, despite disagreeing with the political conclusions that follow from them. Charlie Kirk may not have been terribly complex, publicly or privately, but we should at least try to understand what complexity was there, especially if we are against falsifying the historical record. Kirk’s martyrdom, as we have seen, is intensifying the violent forces that are thriving in Trump’s authoritarian regime. We must also firmly remind ourselves that martyrdom, when weaponized by the left, has led to immense suffering. Let today’s progressive leaders be honest about Malcolm X’s radicalism as well as Charlie Kirk’s fascism. Even if we lose, at least it will be possible to say that the truth was on our side.

On a night back in 2019, the late-night pundit and self-described comedian Bill Maher was having a conversation with his good pal Ann Coulter. When Maher isn’t sweet-talking the ladies, he often is haranguing them, and this is what he did when their conversation turned to the subject of Donald Trump, who was then serving his first term as President. Maher opined that Trump was actually insufficiently jingoistic and pro-America, and that many of his supporters, Coulter included, were merely feigning their chest-thumping patriotism. Exhibit A was Trump’s foreign policy in Latin America, which Maher excoriated for being unacceptably dovish. “It’s our backyard!” whined Maher moments before invoking the Monroe Doctrine. “And you’re the patriot??” And now that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has been kidnapped and extradited to the United States, it appears as if Maher has finally gotten his wish. Let’s hope that Maher’s other wishes finally come true in the New Year, because heaven knows he’s suffered long enough.

While Maher’s coarseness isn’t terribly surprising, what might be less obvious is the fact that he is ultimately speaking for both sides of America’s political and media landscape. He remains a darling in liberal circles because, at the end of the day, he is a spokesperson for the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Maher, a self-described ‘9/11 liberal’, has spent as much time criticizing Muslim members of congress as he has conservative politicians who aspire to remove them entirely from public life (a position now adopted by the Republican mainstream). He also adores jokes about the genocide of Arab children (said genocide being initiated and abetted by the Democratic mainstream). Like some Democrats, he was initially tolerant of Bernie Sanders’ two major attempts to revitalize the party’s failed brand. This tolerance turned to bitterness and hatred upon realizing that Sanders’ mass of supporters represented an unacceptable threat to his wealth and privilege. These days, rich folks like Maher, Democrat or Republican, never mention any social democratic ideas or policies without connecting them with third-world slums, Stalin, breadlines, etc. Bill Maher’s political MO, minus the lame jokes, is not at all out of step with that of the Democratic Party.

The Democrats have brought us to this moment. If they have not directly carried out Maduro’s abduction, in flagrant violation of the UN Charter and the US Constitution, they have provided an indispensable political cover for Trump and his cronies, one that a true opposition party would never have facilitated. When Marco Rubio, the arch-warmonger and regime change proponent, was nominated by Trump to be Secretary of State, all 47 Democratic senators voted to confirm him to the position. While some Democratic senators may have tactical disagreements with Rubio, they share the same overarching objectives: the containment of Russia by fighting them “to the last Ukrainian,” and the end of a dominant China, through armed global conflict if necessary. The Democrats are always willing to prove their patriotism by providing ever-ballooning budgets to the Pentagon, a leech on the planet that has never passed an audit, while Americans are starving on the street.

The Democrats have colluded in the destruction of international law and territorial sovereignty. They sat back (or laughed) while Barack Obama destroyed Libya, paving the way for Libyan slave markets and a sharp rise in global terrorism. As Israel committed assault after assault on the people of Gaza while building illegal settlements in the West Bank, Obama responded with the time-honored bromide “Israel has the right to defend itself.” When Obama failed to close Guantanamo Bay and continued the strangling blockades on Cuba and North Korea (leading to thousands of civilian deaths in each case), the rest of his party cheered and applauded all the way. As for Maduro himself, Obama absurdly characterized his regime as a threat to our national security, pushing through additional rounds of punishing sanctions. Of course, sanctions always hit the poorest members of society hardest, and no one understands this better than policymakers and heads of state imposing those very sanctions.

The fact that Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi remain in power is an unmistakable sign of American democracy’s terminal decay. This is the same party leadership who presided over the disastrous War on Terror, oversaw the suspension of habeus corpus and the adoption of torture as state policy, and insisted we “look to the future” every time accountability for war criminals was suggested. The anemic statements they have made, along with those of the zombified House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries, are nothing more than lip service. They did not lift a finger when Trump, Rubio, and War Secretary Hegseth murdered scores of unarmed fishermen who they claimed, sans evidence, were Venezuelan drug traffickers/narco-terrorists. Don’t expect any genuine opposition from this bunch, unless a sternly-worded letter counts as opposition.

Is any Democrat taking a strong line against the illegal coup and destruction of Venezuela? Only the usual suspects, who are hopelessly outnumbered in Congress, not to mention deliberately marginalized by their own party. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s statement was stronger than others she’s made in the field of foreign policy, but its defects are telling. AOC described Trump’s actions as illegal and immoral, true, but added that they originated as attempts to distract from his domestic failures, chiefly the cost-of-living crisis and the Epstein debacle. This statement bears no fundamental difference with that of Pete Buttigieg, who declared that Trump decided to “launch a war for regime change abroad” because he is “failing on the economy and losing his grip on power at home.” Buttigieg’s statement is probably the more hypocritical of the two, given his unambiguously pro-war, pro-regime change politics. However, his statement, much like AOC’s, reeks with the arrogant language of our empire. This invasion and kidnapping is expressly described as Trump’s doing - as if these moves don’t have broad support among the country’s political elite. This kind of scapegoating papers over the complicity of both the Democrats and the GOP, who are unabashedly in favor of regime change. It’s also insulting to suggest n that a new foreign adventure is needed to distract from domestic failures when most Americans are already opposed to new foreign wars and understand that their declining quality of life stems in part from their tax dollars being systematically looted to feed the war machine.

A few weeks before Maduro’s kidnapping, Mayor Mamdani described Maduro as an oppressive dictator, an enemy of independent political expression and individual freedom. It reminded me of Bernie Sanders’ condemnation of Maduro during the 2020 Democratic primary as a “vicious tyrant.” These statements lay bare the chauvinism of America’s liberal left. It is possible to speak truthfully about Maduro’s abuses of power, the crackdowns on free expression, and the corruption of his government while at the same time acknowledging imperialism’s role in shaping that state of affairs. Failing to do so makes international solidarity with aspiring socialist movements impossible. Perhaps Mamdani remembers when Sanders was excoriated by the mainstream press for daring to suggest that Castro’s government improved the quality of education in Cuba, and now does not want to endure similar red-baiting. Regardless, this defensive stance indicates an unwillingness to stand up to his own party. Their hostility to anything connected with socialism, their disdain for international law and territorial sovereignty, their racist and patriarchal attitude towards the third world, and their naked support for imperial aggression have all helped manufacture consent for this latest war. The Democrats brought us to this moment and they, like Trump and the GOP, ought to at least own up to it.

This week NYC began a new chapter with the inauguration of Zohran Mamdani. New Yorkers waved a long awaited farewell to the disastrous tenure of Eric Adams and gleefully ushered in Mamdani, with a massive crowd braving hangovers and cold weather to witness the historical moment.

Part of what makes Mamdani’s full-press approach so exciting is his embrace of not just a government that works for all, but a government that has an expanded role to play in people’s lives. It’s a stark change in political rhetoric from the decades of austerity language that has gripped both political parties in the United States since Regan.

At the core of this expansion is an embrace of the “new” values of collectivism and solidarity, values found in organizing and activism but dormant in major politics for some time. Calling on his fellow New Yorkers to shed identities given to them by toxic ideologies, Mamdani sounded like a politician of the past and future:

“And if for too long these communities have existed as distinct from one another, we will draw this city closer together. We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. If our campaign demonstrated that the people of New York yearn for solidarity, then let this government foster it. Because no matter what you eat, what language you speak, how you pray, or where you come from, the words that most define us are the two we all share: New Yorkers.”

While Mamdani’s work is political, it’s a message that every part of this country desperately needs to hear, and no more so than my discipline, that of design.

Unrest in Design

If communities have existed “as distinct from one another,” then designers have somehow managed to survive as individuals in their own silos.

Survive is a generous term: unrest has been growing in many design disciplines as young workers face the realities of stagnating wages, long working hours, and crippling student loan debt, all bundled within ideology that sees them suffering alone attempting to make it through the path of rugged individualism. To the surprise of many, it’s not working. But a new generation is turning to an old collectivist political project to turn the tide, that of unionization.

In the video game industry, workers have successfully organized large studios that produce some of the biggest games. Apple workers, while not technically designers themselves, but are integral to the process of getting products into the hands of consumers, have also organized a store. And countless in adjacent “creative” fields like museum workers have come together to emphasize their role in shaping spaces for art.

In the architecture industry, I’ve been involved in the small but growing effort. We’ve unionized two offices and are organizing several others. This is all remarkable given the hostility (and illegality) the first effort faced. But across all these industries we still face stubborn resistance. While we need to continue to push to organize offices, we also need to address the root of this anathema to collectivism.

I’ve explored the class-based reasons for this in my book The Labor of Architecture, but the place where individualism is baked is within the university. If we want to build a significant spirit of collectivism within the profession, we have to build its foundations in the studio first.

Design and Individualism

Everything about design education is individualistic.

From their very first days, students are taught to discover their inner creativity. According to their professors, this is something unique to them and thus requires endless hours of exploration to discover and foster. While their peers are undergoing the same process, each one does it differently from the other. In other words, no two “creative processes” are alike.

Project assignments reinforce this notion. Though they might be designing a building that many others will inhabit, for example, or a chair that countless individuals will sit in, the design process that occurs over a semester is largely completed on their own. Yes, they will bounce ideas off their peers, and get feedback from Professors and critics in the form of jury critiques, but the majority of the student’s time is spent alone at the desk.

There is certainly something beautiful about this education. It is deeply humanistic and treats each student as an individual with something worth contributing to the world. In the words of Paulo Freire, it is a “dialogical” education, meaning it is a kind of learning built around the thinking and speaking of the student, not the teacher. There’s no doubt that more disciplines should borrow elements of this, as we cede more and more territory every year to deterministic technological thinking in the so-called STEM majors. But just like any other ideology, when the tenants of such thinking are overly emphasized, they become less inspirational and more rigid.

As I explore in LOA, these “ethics” become easily manipulated within the workplace. Taught that fostering creativity means working on as many iterations for as long as possible, students think of their jobs less as work and more as a vocation. Because what they do has “vision” and “creativity” behind it, these students are blind to the fact that they have left the world of free intellectual pursuit and have entered a world of exploitation. And while all wage-workers are exploited, since they must produce enough value for their boss in order to cover their cost as well as generate a profit, designers are additionally exploited in the sense that their creativity is seen as an endless resource.

While most designers, even principals that own firms, don’t make much money relative to other professions like tech, law, or finance, creativity becomes a form of capital that is utilized to gain coveted teaching positions, speaking gigs, and fellowships. Though the designs might be siphoned from their workforce, the notoriety of them is the exclusive domain of the owner. Countless designers will never receive any credit for the hours they contribute to a project; a meager paycheck and the joy of doing work you love has to be enough.

The ease at which creativity is exploited should give us serious pause. Interestingly, Historian Samuel W. Franklin goes so far as to say that the idea of creativity is completely invented. As I wrote in another post, Franklin shows that while the term “creative” has existed for a long time, the term “creativity” was a trait invented by psychologists and other industry types in reaction to the apparent conformism of the rising USSR in the 1950s. For these researchers, it was an ideological tool necessary to develop in individuals so that their entrepreneurial spirit could defeat the collectivism of communism.

It’s an American story through and through: the promises of humanistic education subverted by the ideological machinations of politicians and elites. But as Zohran Mamdani has shown, a new generation is ready to approach collective life a bit less cynically.

From Mamdani to Morris

Just like NYC has turned a new page, it’s time for design to do the same. Riding a long history of creative identity, built on a craft-guild system and an artistic use of drawing and model making, the realities of 21st century professional practice, and the broader political economy, necessitate a new vision for design.

The computer is at the center of the seismic shift within design industries. Erasing all of the qualities above within a span of a few decades, the deteriorating conditions that designers find themselves in are not just a product of capital, as Harry Braverman observed some decades before, but ever-evolving technology. Though they are still educated in an outdated form, designers should face reality. By accepting the degradation of their working conditions at the hands of capital and technology, they can reorient design education to not just meet, but challenge the ill-effects of these forces.

As Mamdani has reached into the past by referencing the words of FDR and Fiorello La Guardia, we have our own figures to draw from. Most notably, 19th century designer William Morris, an avowed Socialist like Mamdani, can give designers a precedent for collectivist principles within a notoriously individualistic pursuit. In a lecture given to the Hampstead Liberal Club in 1884, Morris spoke about the challenges and opportunities of reframing our aspirations from work based on exploitation to work based on pleasure, aspirations that are first developed in education:

Due education… concerns itself in finding out what different people are fit for, and helping them along the road which they are inclined to take… for the development of individual capacities would be of all things chiefly aimed at by education instead, as now, the subordination of all capacities to the great end of “money-making” for oneself - or one’s master.

Here Morris emphasizes the importance of a humanist education, while romanticizing the effects of individualization, and correctly calls-out the problem of identifying with “money-making” values. However, he goes so far as to claim that “the amount of talent, and even genius, which the present system crushes, and which would be drawn out by such a system, would make our daily work easy and interesting.” It’s understandable that Morris would seek to liberate the individual in a time of mass suffering at the hands of capital, but 150 years later he couldn’t have predicted capitalist ideology’s sneaky ability to absorb these humanistic goals into a form of blind individualism that heralds the genius while continuing the exploitation. In order for Morris’s prediction to come true, we need to pursue the merits of individuals but more strongly balanced with those of collectivism.

Rethinking Design Education through Socialism

Though much of his vision was attached to making handicraft practice more accessible, an unrealistic goal for designers today, Morris was equally concerned with democratizing design. In another lecture to the Trades Guild of Learning given in 1877, Morris criticizes bourgeois culture for lauding the figures who commissioned buildings while neglecting those who made them a reality:

Nor must you forget that when men say popes, kings, and empowers built such and such buildings, it is a mere way of speaking. You look in your history books to see who built Westminster Abbey, who built St Sophia at Constantinople, and they tell you Henry III, Justinian the Emperor. Did they? Or, rather, men like you and me, handicrafts men, who have left no names behind them, nothing but their work?

Here we have a principle that could be directly translated into design education: in addition to teaching the “great men” who did not build, but funded and compelled our great architectural works, we might teach about the ordinary people who made such buildings a possibility. As Morris says we do not know their names, but we know a lot about the circumstances they lived in, particularly the brutal exploitation they faced while working on the great works. Teaching about the struggles of these individuals is key, in addition to the cause of them: physical and economic subjugation. A history that is expanded, coupled with collective design studios and building technology classes that require on-site construction work taught by laborers, would go a long way to push back against the ideology of capitalist-individualism.

Such a vision might finally get us to a place of socialized design and socialized design labor, where “worthy work carries with it the hope of pleasure in rest, the hope of the pleasure in using what it makes, and the hope of pleasure in our daily creative skill.” Notice Morris does not use the noun “creativity,” but the adjective form; here our labor is something that carries us to more just and beautiful environments, and more enjoyable and plentiful lives.

What makes Morris such a profound thinker is his insightful critique of the working conditions of his time, but also his continual emphasis on human flourishing. Design education today has an extremely narrow view of human flourishing, namely producing future firm owners. For example, in architecture and interior design programs throughout the US, “professional practice” courses teach content exclusively around what it means to own an office. The same aspiration is can be found in countless design programs that give lecture spots and teaching position to owners, saving only scant adjunct positions for the occasional worker. This lack of imagination not only perpetuates an ideology that dominates every part of the education, but also produces future workers who don’t value their own labor in the way Morris challenges them to. Instead of asking what a successful career as a worker might mean, and the solidarity with other working class groups that might come with it, young designers are forced to become, in the words of John Steinbeck, “temporarily embarrassed” firm owners, waiting for a day that never comes for most of them.

If we continue down the same outdated mode of design education, our work risks being “worthless.. mere toiling to live, that we may live to toil.” I’m instead hopeful that the new generation of designers, much like Mamdani and the millions that voted for him, are ready to embrace collectivism not just to better their own careers, but to bring flourishing to the built environment around them. The choice is clear: we can continue to toil as individuals, or flourish as a collective.

Quotes from William Morris were taken from a collection of his essays and lectures, Useful Work versus Useless Toil. A full archive of his works can be found in the William Morris Archive.

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What is one to make of Mamdani’s bizarre meeting with the President, where the subject of fascism was discussed so lightly? Some have argued that this meeting was a tactical victory for Mamdani, a show of both pragmatism and strategic brilliance that eroded his opponent’s defenses. Still the question remains: what was said behind closed doors that could make Donald Trump, the thuggish custodian of America’s ruling class, appear so charmed by a rising socialist?

At the press conference that followed their half-hour meeting, they offered some potentially revealing words:

TRUMP: And he just retained a great police commissioner, I believe, right?

MAMDANI: Yes, we did. Commissioner Tisch.

TRUMP: If the newspapers are correct?

MAMDANI: That one they’re correct about.

TRUMP: He, uh, he retained, I think somebody that is a good friend of some people in my family, of Ivanka, and they say she’s really good, really competent and he just retained her. So that’s a good sign.

Mamdani’s team had announced his intention to retain Jessica Tisch as Police Commissioner before the general election was held, and he has publicly reaffirmed this pledge several times over the following days. Tisch was appointed to her post last December by the corrupt and clownish Eric Adams. She is an heiress of the billionaire Tisch family, which spent over $1.2 million to prevent Mamdani’s election. It is therefore hard to doubt the president’s claim that the Tisches and the Trumps, two enormously wealthy real estate families, enjoy close ties of friendship. With an estimated family fortune of $10 billion, the Tisches own the Loews Corporation, which owns and operates the Loews Regency Hotel, a favorite of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Considering Mamdani achieved over a million votes by embracing the rhetoric of sweeping structural change, it is puzzling that he would retain such a crucial appointee of a hated outgoing administration, especially given Adams’ heavy-handedness in policing matters and friendliness towards President Trump.

The Tisches are fervent Zionists who view Mamdani’s support for Palestinian rights as dangerously antisemitic. Tisch’s brother recently referred to Mamdani as an ‘enemy’ of Jewish people at a charity dinner. Tisch herself recently spoke at a benefit for the Anti-Defamation League. In recent years the ADL has waved away instances of genuine antisemitism while indicating that its greatest concern is denouncing any criticism of the Israeli government and its genocidal war in Gaza as anti-Jewish. At this event, Tisch intentionally conflated anti-genocide protests in New York with antisemitism, while describing campus protests as “despicable” displays of intolerance and Jew-hatred. Tisch also gushed with praise for ADL director Jonathan Greenblatt, who has falsely denounced Mamdani as an antisemite and to this day maintains a vicious smear campaign against the Mayor-elect.

Since his election, Mamdani has defended his decision to retain Tisch, referring to her as a “change agent” who has helped root out corruption and inefficiency within the NYPD. Setting aside this one-sided portrayal of her tenure, one must ask: could Mamdani not have appointed a commissioner with a less troubling background, and with views that are not wildly out of step with the Democratic party’s base? There is no reason to believe that Tisch is the only qualified candidate for this job, or that a billionaire Zionist will act in a way that is at all representative of Mamdani’s base.

In fact, what is perhaps most disturbing about the decision, and Mamdani’s obstinance, is that it comes off as a slap in the face to wide swaths of his supporters. As Mehdi Hasan correctly noted in his interview with Mamdani, Tisch’s policies threaten some of New York’s most vulnerable residents, particularly Muslims, student protestors, and immigrants. These groups include many voters who aggressively organized and canvassed for Mamdani, who are sick of the brutality and mass surveillance they faced from the NYPD during Eric Adams’ administration. How can one hope for a truly progressive mayorship by building bridges with the appointee of a reactionary one?

In one especially memorable portion of his victory speech, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani made the following statement: “If there is any way to terrify a despot,” he said of President Donald Trump, “it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.” To the hostile ruling class that opposes him, and to the pearl-clutching Democratic party stalwarts who refused to endorse him, this was not mere empty rhetoric: Trump, like the rest of the billionaire class that controls most of the planet’s wealth and resources, is a symptom of a highly militarized, financialized capitalist society. They naturally fear the overthrow of the conditions of this society and throw millions of dollars at any threat to them that arises. However, much to their relief, and much to the concern of the rest of us, there appears to be a growing likelihood that Mamdani’s words are in fact just empty rhetoric.

There were multiple instances after Mamdani’s primary victory last summer when he backtracked on his principled criticism of Israel. This appeasement has only appeared to alienate his supporters while his opponents attacked him more vigorously than ever. If these concessions were limited to his foreign policy, they could perhaps be tolerated: however, his recent cozying up to right-wing Democrats and real estate lobbyists suggests a disturbing trend. Perhaps Mamdani wants to convince his opponents, Trump included, that beneath the fiery rhetoric he is highly susceptible to the influence of establishment figures. These underhanded dealings bring to mind Joe Biden’s infamous remark to his donors: “Nothing will fundamentally change.” It is too soon to tell if Mamdani’s mayorship will be defined by capitulation to the status quo; however, it’s not too soon to be deeply concerned about his current trajectory.

Zohran Mamdani’s improbable mayoral campaign has quickly begun the work of transitioning to the new administration, a process that feels excruciatingly long given the current one. Last week his team announced a robust transition cohort that included a stacked roster of progressive heavyweights, technocratic stalwarts, and renowned community activists.

We should be enthusiastic that players such as Lina Kahn made the list, indicating that the administration will be aggressive towards capital reforms. Political activists like Waleed Shahid bring both progressive ideology and experience with past campaigns for AOC and Bernie, while the likes of Maria Torres-Springer give reassurance to those who have concerns about Mamdani’s experience. A transgender Rabbi also made the list, underscoring the diverse coalition that made the future administration possible.

While we can feel encouraged by the list above, one key group was left off the list: architects. Central to Mamdani’s platform was a rent freeze and robust housing program; one would think architects might have something useful to say about the future of the built environment. Examining the list more closely, however, we see a list of stakeholders who largely determine what the city looks like, while those designers who have concerns that are equally, if not more, important to housing are missing.

Among those on the Committee on Housing, we see: professors, preachers, non-profit leaders, community activists, lawyers, real estate agents, and least surprisingly, developers. In this regard the list perfectly reflects the needs of capital (law, policy, and money) while giving some needed space to grassroots movements who will see change within their neighborhoods.

On the one hand, the list is a perfectly reasonable one from Mamdani’s team, with some important amendments from past administrations; thankfully we see more progressive advocates and leaders, fewer hucksters and future criminals. On the other hand, it is a list that still lives in the past, with the direction of the physical city being determined by the struggle between capital, technocrats, and community members. While these stakeholders don’t always sort neatly on one side of the “YIMBY vs NIMBY” argument, they do comprise the full picture of a neoliberal housing development strategy. This usually falls into a typical pattern: the city will issue RFPs (Request for Proposal), developers might pair with a nonprofit in response (especially when it comes to affordable housing), and community organizations will line-up in favor or opposition to the plan. Should there be enough resistance from a group, lawyers will dutifully step in to gum up the process and make no one happy, while enriching themselves. The result is some “affordable” housing and many more market-rate units.

What I’m describing is a well-worn pattern we have become all too accustomed to. However, in a moment of optimism, we can still believe that Mamdani has a plan to work within this system while lowering some of the barriers to deliver a record number of affordable housing through increased supply. Given the result of the successful propositions that were also on the ballot, which will largely speed up the development of housing, this seems at least plausible.

So why should we be concerned? Missing in this traditional neoliberal framework is the role of design. Of course all of the future housing built during the Mamdani administration will include architects and other design consultants, as it is required by law. But there’s a difference between simply being involved and directly shaping the process.

When the general public sees new buildings in the city that they are not especially happy with, a common response is to blame the architect; just look at any comments on a typical new building press release. But if you’re familiar with the arcane process of developing and building a building in New York City, you know that many of these decisions are entirely out of the hand of the architect.

While there are a small number of architects that pursue out of touch designs, most start with simple but noble aspirations, such as ample amenities, sustainable materials, elegant massing, and so on. But through a Kafkaesque process called “value engineering,” the design is slowly chiseled away until it only loosely resembles the original ambition of the architect. This process is nothing more than another manifestation of the valuing of capital above all else; in order to make a profit, things that “don’t matter” like aesthetics, quality materials, and sustainable design are quickly eliminated, with only bare-bone technical requirements remaining. City regulations and guidelines buffer some of this, but this is yet another arena the architect plays a minimal part in shaping. When we look around the city, this is the reality we should reflect on.

As I wrote in a recent article, now is the moment for architects to take stock of the Mamdani moment and decide whether they want part of it. Currently, they are on the outside looking in; maybe more work will come their way, but it will largely be determined by developers, government officials, and activists before even an invitation for work is sent their way. This means that architects will be responding primarily to the desires of the groups above, while forgoing many aesthetic or quality of life concerns. It is these concepts that, while difficult to put a dollar amount on, benefit those who will use the space the most.

For example, many architects might prefer one or two fewer units of housing per floor to make the rest more liveable, or a generous outdoor space to give families a reprieve from the chaos of the city. The need for profit always takes precedence, however, and the incentive for developers is to squeeze as many units as possible into a building. While we need more raw units of housing, we also need more quality housing, and pursuing profit only increases supply. Mamdani has also stressed the importance of affordable childcare, but what good is it if families can’t find adequate space to live in? This is only one example of how capital wins over other more human concerns.

Architects certainly deserve more than their share of the blame for being in this position. Instead of embracing the growing but small unionization effort, many continue to follow tired patterns of navel gazing, hosting irrelevant panels, meaningless award shows, and unpaid competitions. Ineffective groups like the AIA (American Institute of Architects) only represent the narrow interests of owners, neglecting the importance of democratic workplaces in shaping the profession. Our current building process reflects this inward facing, pro-owner mentality.

What architects have not yet grasped is that in order to have a seat at the table, it is necessary to have political influence, which only comes through organizing for power. That’s why developers and community activist groups are included, and notably, one of the most union-dense sectors in the city, the construction industry. Carlina Rivera, former City Council Member and current President of New York State Affiliation for Inexpensive Housing, represents a trade-based coalition of over 350 developers and builders. Her inclusion on the Housing Committee is a prime example of the power of organizing.

If architects took organizing more seriously, they would have a far better chance in not only shaping a Committee on Housing, but grasping levers of power throughout the entire building process. Time and time again we see groups who are highly organized see their interests reflected in the political process, and there’s no reason architects couldn’t achieve the same. Currently, however, they are content to embrace a passive form of client service disguised as misunderstood artistry, with decision making within each practice centered in owners and principals. It’s time to move on from this identity and build a more potent one based on the democratic organization of workers through unions. With such a democratic movement, architects could not only organize better for their interests, but do so in a way that reflects the values of collectivism, not individualism.

Architects might have missed the window on the transition committee, but there are potentially eight years of housing development coming. We need not only a city we can afford, but a city we can admire, and thrive in. Will architects meet the moment?

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In the final days of New York’s Mayoral Election, Andrew Cuomo’s team amplified its Muslim-baiting to such an extreme that the resulting backlash may have overshadowed a few significant points of contention between the establishment Democrat and Zohran Mamdani. For instance, in the campaign’s closing weeks, few noticed as Cuomo repeatedly knocked Mamdani for the latter’s commitment to decriminalize prostitution - a proposal supported by a majority of New Yorkers. Cuomo’s Twitter account described this proposal as “a gift to traffickers, gangs & organized crime” while bragging about the ex-governor’s role in defeating the Stop Violence in the Sex Trades Act.

This bill, if passed, “would decriminalize sex work in the state, while upholding felony anti-trafficking statutes to hold people who seek to buy sex from minors accountable.” Additionally, it would “allow sex workers to apply for criminal record relief/expungement” for past convictions. The formulation of this legislation has several glaring defects: the anti-trafficking stance and focus on ‘protecting minors’ give credence to many conservative biases that dominate the discourse surrounding sex work. Furthermore, the process of ‘applying for criminal record relief’ implies a bureaucratic nightmare that places a heavy burden on those whose criminal guilt should have already been absolved by the state.

The forces that drive Americans to a career in sex work are usually of an economic rather than a directly violent nature. This is a major reason why the “human trafficking” narrative surrounding sex work has been attacked by major advocates for legalization and unionization. Liberal-minded legislators, including many radical feminists and socialists, view sex work as exploitative to an intolerable degree, and the legislation they support tends to reflect their overriding disapproval of the profession. “Not only does this narrative ignore the underlying structural components that might compel someone to voluntarily participate in sex work,” reads one recent, highly informative report, “but the hypocrisy of the binary is also revealed when sex workers and trafficking survivors alike continue to face arrest and entanglement in the criminal legal system.”

“Street-based sex workers have limited job opportunities outside of sex work, and almost no access to employment that offers a living wage,” according to a valuable study by Juhu Thukral & Melissa Ditmore. This same study found waitressing to be the most common job among New York sex workers, followed by various service-industry jobs, retail sales, and receptionist positions. Respondents who held skilled positions as hair stylists or EMTs cited a lack of sufficient income from this work as their main reason for becoming sex workers.

It is often assumed that many women who enter into sex work do so as the result of coercion. However, it is rarely suggested that this is the coercion of American capitalism, which fosters instability and desperation among its working class. Instead, we often hear about the coercion imposed by pimps and human traffickers, the wrongdoings of a few nefarious individuals taking advantage of our free and open society. The victims of these individuals are presented in monolithic terms: helpless, devoid of agency, pliable and submissive, and thus in need of “saving.” The language of Cuomo’s campaign is wholly ripped from this playbook. His innuendos about the “Bad Old Days of Time Square” represent not just a cartoonishly simplified version of New York’s history, but a form of fearmongering that is implicitly directed against racial minorities and poor people.

The language deployed in these discussions often intentionally conflates sex work with trafficking. This piece from The Times describes how “the New York police failed to respond to the brazen sex trade” around Roosevelt Avenue while operating on the assumption that armed enforcers are required for a situation in which sex is being sold. This leading language is also employed by New York police, who justify squashing the livelihoods of entire communities of sex workers by claiming that they are eradicating trafficking networks that weak helpless women have been sold into.

New York has recently seen widespread targeting of sex workers by the city government and police. Last fall Mayor Eric Adams unveiled Operation Restore Roosevelt, “a 90-day effort to dismantle the sex trafficking rings in the area” which entailed “200 police officers and 50 state troopers…deployed to the streets on the first day of the operation.” This initiative drew condemnation from those who have long criticized Adams’ militaristic, heavy-handed solutions to nonviolent offenses. While arrests for prostitution have declined in recent years, the police still find other ways to impose criminal penalties upon those who buy or sell sexual services, for instance by arresting individuals for unlicensed massage acts or for loitering. Due to the illegal nature of their work, New York sex workers are effectively always on the run from the police, finding themselves “repeatedly going in and out of the court system, spending nights at Rikers Island or in court pens at enormous expense, and coming back out only to face the same situation, with no lasting change or benefit to prostitutes or the surrounding community.” Sex workers have little to no recourse when they are victims of a crime. They have frequently been “told by the police that their complaints would not be accepted, that this is what they should expect, and that they deserve all that they get.”

Transgender women have notably been a major target in the NYPD’s crackdown on sex work, and are only recently beginning to find some legal relief. The same is true of migrant sex workers who, according to the aforementioned piece from The Times, “are often recruited outside city shelters, where groups of migrant families in legal limbo are sent after they cross the border and are triaged to sanctuary cities such as New York.” Raids on massage parlors have disproportionately affected immigrant businessmen and women. According to a report from Decriminalizing Sex Work (DSW), “arrests of Asian individuals charged with unlicensed massage and prostitution increased by 2700%” between the years 2012 and 2016, with Chinese and Korean immigrant women constituting the vast majority of those arrested. Racial and gender biases continue to dominate these arrests. In 2019, 98% of arrests for prostitution were women, while 91% were people of color. Additionally, over the last decade “90% of arrests for patronizing a prostitute in the 3rd degree were Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) despite the fact that national studies report between 80-85% of sex buyers are white men.” New York legislators’ pretense of tolerance towards minority groups such as sex workers and migrants is exposed via these statistics, which show numerous vulnerable populations trapped under the heel of state-sanctioned repression and dehumanization.

Mayor-elect Mamdani has claimed on numerous occasions, and again in his acceptance speech, that he intends to be a mayor for all New Yorkers, be they black, white, Jewish, Muslim, “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas” or “Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses.” One can only hope that these promises of diversity and inclusion extend to sex workers, who hitherto have gone unmentioned by him in public. I hope that this exclusion is a calculated one stemming from political prudence and good intentions. For the most part, Mamdani’s hopeful inclusivity stood in sharp contrast to Cuomo’s highly negative campaign. Seeing the malice directed towards sex workers from Cuomo’s camp, it would have been nice to see Mamdani step forward as a clear ally. Still, under a Mamdani administration, there is a chance that some progress might be made to advance sex workers’ rights. Along with his support for decriminalization, Mamdani’s emphasis on affordability has resonated with thousands of working class New Yorkers. This undoubtedly includes beleaguered sex workers, who see some chance of their economic situation improving. Under a Cuomo administration, there would be no such chance.

In part 1 of this review, I explained that Charlie Chaplin expressed regret at having made The Great Dictator, claiming that such a project would’ve been unthinkable if he’d had any knowledge of the atrocities that had occurred at Auschwitz. The history of cinema appears to have vindicated Chaplin on this score: the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup and Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be, both riotously funny anti-Nazi films, were, like Chaplin’s film, finished well before reports of the extermination camps appeared in American newspapers. In contrast, many post-WWII films that have tried to skewer Nazism, including Life is Beautiful, Inglourious Basterds, and Jojo Rabbit, have been startlingly unfunny and generally repugnant. Made with full historical knowledge of the Nazi holocaust, these works all downplay or trivialize the horrors of genocide, swinging back and forth between gruesome violence (played for laughs) and sickly-sweet sentimentality.

Unlike Chaplin, the creators of these works failed to grasp the particular social and material conditions that gave rise to the Third Reich. While the superficial ridiculousness of the Nazis may merit contemptuous laughter, comedy writers have often struggled to reconcile Hitler’s buffoonery with the systematic and unique methods that made it possible to wage a genocidal world war. This is because they largely neglect the fact that Nazism represented a terminal crisis of global capitalism, with the system’s numerous contradictions having reached an unprecedented level of cruel absurdity. While many historians, journalists, and political theorists have echoed this view on the origins of Nazism, it has often been conveniently ignored by Hollywood. Following the McCarthyist period and widespread purges of left-wing figures in the entertainment industry, American films have tended to rewrite the history of WWII, absolving the capitalist system of the decisive role it played in the rise of the Third Reich. Chaplin bowed to no such pressure, even after the political tides affecting American culture shifted under his feet.

In The Great Dictator, the unholy marriage between industrial capitalism and the fascist state is satirized in one underrated but richly complex scene. Propaganda minister Garbitsch visits Dictator Hynkel (Chaplin) in his office and informs him that, due to mass unrest among Tomanian workers, part of the munitions budget has been reappropriated to build prison camps. The blackly funny exchange continues thus:

HYNKEL: What do they dissent about?

GARBITSCH: The working hours. The cut in wages. Chiefly, the synthetic food – the quality of the sawdust in the bread.

HYNKEL: What more do they want? It’s from the finest lumber our mills can supply.

These few lines contain profound and disturbing historical truths. The Nazis led a massive assault on the German working class when they rose to power. Independent unions were banned, the right to strike and collective bargaining were outlawed, and communists & socialists of all kinds were murdered or imprisoned. The Nazis, striking at the heart of Europe’s labor movement, were doing the bidding of Germany’s financial and political elite. These influential capitalists, fearful of the international socialist movement (Germany’s leftist parties were growing in popularity, and the Russian Revolution had recently shaken the foundations of global capitalism) entered a Faustian pact with the Nazis. The chemical plant IG Farben, Krupp Steel, and the coal industrialist Emil Kirdorf all provided crucial financial support to the Nazis in order to ensure the domination and subjugation of the German working class. The exchange that follows this is similarly revealing:

GARBITSCH: The people are overworked. They need diversion.

HYNKEL: The people? Bah!

GARBITSCH: We might go a little further with the Jews. Burn down some of their houses. Spectacular assault on the ghetto might prove diverting.

The scapegoating of Jews, more than just a product of Hitler’s ideologically-driven racial hatred, was another valuable service Nazism rendered on behalf of the German and European bourgeoisie. The age of imperialism and advanced industrial capitalism had brought about enormous advances in art, culture, and technology. At the same time, this seemingly limitless growth was accompanied by unprecedented levels of destruction. The First World War, launched in the name of economic and colonial expansion, produced a maimed, immiserated German working class. This was a decisive factor in the growing popularity of socialist and communist parties throughout Europe. The Nazis’ propaganda addressed the very real suffering and privation of the workers, and in doing so was able to peel away crucial support from the socialist and communist parties. At the same time, they deliberately falsified the cause of this suffering. By placing the blame squarely on Jews and pacifists, the Nazis made it possible for the agents of capitalism and imperialism to maintain their control over the world. Hynkel and Garbitsch exemplify those tactics in this very exchange: when the people get angry, misdirect their anger towards a scapegoat, then attack that scapegoat viciously.

Hynkel soon asserts his desire to invade the neighboring country of Osterlich, but there’s a snag: they lack the operating capital to launch the invasion, and no banker is willing to offer a loan. However, there is one possible exception: Epstein, a Jew. Obtaining this loan might be difficult, says Garbitsch, “in view of our policy towards his people.” Hynkel immediately agrees to a change in this policy…at least until the loan has been acquired. This is another example of how the Nazis were driven by far more than fanatical Jew-hatred. Like any force that is ruthless in its quest for power, the Nazis needed to make concessions and compromises in order to achieve their aims. This exchange also shows how little the Nazis valued ideological consistency, and helps debunk the absurd notion that ‘the Nazis were socialists’ in any meaningful sense. While the Nazis made limited attempts to exert state control over German enterprise, their regime never seriously threatened capitalism, as it never could’ve risen to and remained in power without the economic support of German capitalists.

The rousing speech at the film’s conclusion has been interpreted by some as an attack on capitalism itself, although this remains a contentious topic. “Although Chaplin intended a humanitarian message,” writes biographer Jeffrey Vance, “many critics at the time found the speech evocative of communist rhetoric and ideology.” Chaplin declares that “the people have the power to create machines, the power to create happiness…let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security.” Also notable is his call “to do away with national barriers! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.” According to Vance, the filmmaker was evasive when asked about the communist undertones of this speech. Chaplin referred to it as his opportunity to “make a curtain speech: ‘say ladies and gentlemen, there’s a tragedy going on.’ That’s all I wanted to do, metaphorically.”

Chaplin, who had made an anti-Nazi film at a time when America was officially neutral in WWII, soon found himself accused of insufficient patriotism by the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Chaplin denied the committee’s accusations of communism, but he openly denounced their attack on artistic freedom and refused to ‘name names’ of fellow film workers. In 1952, following a trip to London, his re-entry permit to the US was revoked by the United States Attorney General. Aware of the political motivation behind his persecution, Chaplin elected to remain in Europe, and did not return to the United States for nearly 25 years.

Despite the artistic censorship imposed at the onset of the Cold War, Chaplin continued to attack capitalism in his films. Monsieur Verdoux pointed to the profit motive and the irrational market as the driving forces behind social violence, while A King in New York lambasted the McCarthyist witch trials. Looking back, we can see disturbing parallels between Chaplin’s time and ours: government meddling in the creative process, a return of blacklisting, and a list of ‘taboo’ topics that must be shunned. The artistic courage needed to challenge these repressive forces is, sadly, in short supply. Our best filmmakers ought to look to Chaplin for inspiration and guidance.