What the hell is wrong with New York City?
That’s not a simple question to answer. NYC has been a hotbed for activism for centuries, and this tradition finds its most, let’s say interesting incarnation in the activism of the leftism of the second decade of this 21st century. In 2020, millions went to the streets in a repeat of the previous four years under the Trump presidency protesting in pink “pussy” hats and mobilizing to vote the geriatric Joe Biden into office. In 2021 the streets erupted with mass protests of millions for the death of George Floyd, resulting in a $13.7 Million settlement to Black Lives Matter and streets painted with BLM, even featuring Nancy Pelosi taking a knee in Kente cloth on Capitol Hill. In 2022, The Lenin statue found at 178 Norfolk St was lit up in blue and yellow as a protest against the Russian SMO against Ukraine as hundreds of billions of US tax payer dollars were pumped into the Washington backed Zelensky regime with the consent of young activists all over the city protesting so called “Russian imperialism”. In 2023 massive demonstrations once again flooded the streets as young activists protested against the Israeli genocide of Palestine over the October 7th retaliation by Hamas, and mass murder of their own by the IDF. Now in 2024 all the activist minded are gearing up to vote for Kamala Harris, who was right hand to Biden as he enabled the Israeli killing of 200,000 people, in the General Election later this year.
And yet, the trains are still shit, gas prices have steadily gone up, the price for a carton of eggs went from $4 to $8 in five years, and nobody can afford rent. On top of this, no comprehensive police reform has come to pass and the guy everyone voted for in 2020, Biden, enabled and armed Nazis in Ukraine and Israel. Now everyone is voting for his right hand? Make it make sense!
Why, after all that energy, has nothing happened? The answer is incredibly simple it’s almost laughable.
New York is the financial capital of the world. Wall Street is the financial hub by which the Nexus of Anglo-American imperialism plans its world agenda. That is the reason why there is such an abstract sense of “politics” in New York itself. It is literally the heart of the empire.
In 2011 thousand of people took to the street to camp and protest all over lower manhattan and their battle cry was simple, “We are the 99 percent!”. Libertarians arm in arm with Stalinists, college grads and retired cops, young and old, gentile and jew, woman and man, all taking their message directly to the real power behind the throne, the parasites on Wall Street.
“WE ARE THE NINETY NINE PERCENT!” A call so dangerous that main stream media, at the behest of their corporate backers, began systematically dividing us along cultural lines and weaponizing the same tactics used by the CIA in their dozens and dozens of coups and color revolutions all over the globe. Now it’s brother against brother, daughter against mother, father against son, young versus old, communities against communities, communities against themselves, and nobody can agree on anything except, in the case of NYC, to vote blue no matter who.
And so, the trains are still shit, gas prices have steadily gone up, the price for a carton of eggs went from $4 to $8 in five years, and nobody can afford rent.
What, if anything, has the American Left been doing all this time? Absolutely nothing. Thanks to the decades of estrangement from real working class politics, the “American Left” is now riddled with psychosis and delusions of some kind of perverse American exceptionalism. “America is uniquely bad”, there is nothing to be redeemed from the country as it is the foremost imperialist power of the time. Therefore, the whole project must be thrown into the dustbin of history! Now, the “left” of NYC has been largely co-opted to be compatible with the status quo they claim to be fighting. New York is a bastion of so called “Freedom”, but a freedom for what? For example, the pride parades that can trace back to the stone wall riot in 1969 have morphed into city wide marches full of naked people next to children sponsored by JP Morgan Chase. Now every store flies that dumbass pride flag that included trans and BIPOC colors in a stupid ass triangle on the side. It’s such an atomization of identities so abstracted from reality and the wholistic nature of being human that they make absolutely no sense and unite nobody but those already susceptible to radical individualism.
As Hegel said “Freedom is insight into necessity”, so what is it that New York City needs?
The pan-leftists, liberals, and activists will say rent reform, and higher taxes of the rich, or a higher minimum wage but what does that solve beyond further legitimizing the bloat of the city government. Hell, Mayor Adams has been extending his powers indefinitely to push through housing reforms.
Although not bad, all of this amounts to a mask of left culture war signifiers over what is ostensibly liberal bandaids.
None of this will fix the hole at the center of our City. None of this will bring about the material premises for a city that can actually thrive. These are simply copes to long standing illnesses that came about for the devastating long term results of deindustrialization in the late 20th and early 21st Century.
What then, is our necessity? People need food, homes, and jobs. What true freedom can we have without these things? What, truly then, is to be done?
NYC was once an industrial and shipping powerhouse, the ghosts of which can be seen in the industry city studio apartments that still bear the names of their former lives as factories. In DUMBO the warehouses that were once used to make industrial machinery are now restaurants and apartments for the wealthy. Lower Manhattan use to be full of light industry as well as being one of the busiest commercial ports in the world, shipping goods to every corner of the globe.
Now, after decades of moving industrial jobs across the globe to satiate the demands of higher profits of the financial district, it is now full of fake jobs and tax cattle who have no time to focus on politics proper, as well as anarchistic Brooklyn artist types who cannot even articulate correctly any sort of real politics because they are not grounded in the most basic reality of all: Production.
The abstractness of the politics is on purpose, to distract from the gaping whole at the center of the city itself, the need to reground ourselves in material reality. The people who already are integral to production, the farmers, miners, and industrial workers in upstate NY, as well as the proletarians that live in the outskirts of the city, already grasp this contradiction. New Yorkers from the city don’t know shit. They’re too wrapped up in nonsense that doesn’t matter to engage in the real reproduction of America. The city produces antihuman lumpen elements that wave red banners and call themselves socialists, and even communists, but do not have the class character of being legitimate American Communists! Not only this, but they actively disdain the working class people who produce real material things because they do not conform to the Langley New left radical individualism that prioritizes identity and “power hierarchies” over actual class struggle.
It is our task as Communists to re-ground New York City to return it to its material premises, which thus wipes away this abstract politics and re-introduces real historically left-wing politics, real Communism back to the heart of the empire. As Dr. Ernesto “Che” Guevara once saiid, “I envy you. You North Americans are very lucky. You are fighting the most important fight of all—you live in the belly of the beast.”
This entails re-industrialization, to bring the real jobs back, to give people real wages, to develop real industries that aren’t simply cycling surplus like the service sector or financial parasitism that dominates the current “economy”. This also entails the wiping of debt and the seizure of Wall Street by the people to be used to finance schemes to produce real wealth grounded in material production. The people of NYC want a stake in the city they live in. Nobody has a sense of permanence. Everyone is too busy trying to pay rent, get food on the table, or even find stable housing. We need something that can ground us with the very streets upon which we live our everyday lives. We need re-industrialization, tax code reform, and honest to God land reform that seizes the private holdings of multinational corporations buying up all the apartment buildings and land, and gives it back to the people who live there. We the People need to take back our city from the Wall Street elites and ground it in something real, the production of real goods, and the building of real homes, and real communities.
Without a full re-industrialization effort, New York City will simply be what it is now, the freedom to do everything and drown in debt. The freedom to watch the stock market go up and your taxes go higher. The freedom to have homeless people sitting outside empty apartments. The freedom to sit in half an hour long train delays to get to an overpriced office building working 9-5 on a bullshit job pushing pencils. The freedom to go home and spend $80 on food delivery because there are no options for fresh food nearby.
The everyday people of this city, those unheard by local officials and are routinely ignored and bullied into silence by their occupying armies and bloated bureaucracy, establish their own community farms, their own unions, their own churches, their own municipal organizations to better their communities in whatever way they can. These vestiges of the industrial era, these community grown associations are what the Communists proper of the American Communist Party aim to partner with. These are the everyday people who yearn for a city that actually produces something, whether it be industry or the movement of goods, and most of all, good citizens whom will be worthy of the mantle of this American Republic. Is it a wonder then, that the MAGA controlled Staten Island was the first in the nation to create an Amazon Union?
This is not impossible to imagine, there is already great examples of this type of phenomena in the cities of the Great bastion of Communism in the East, the People’s Republic of China! Cities like Shenzhen, Chengdu, Wuhan, Chongqing, and all of the Chinese tier one cities are all great examples of cities grounded in the real material reproduction of the people while being modern, clean, and efficient on every level, whether it be transport, governance, or industry, as well as being drop dead gorgeous. But in Chinese standards, we are not even a tier three city and that is devastating when we are supposedly one of the richest cities on Earth.
Obviously, we can’t just look to China as our sole model, we have our own independent circumstances and the material reality is different but even tho the particulars are expressed differently, the universal remains the same. The city is grounded in the material premises of its own reproduction, which are in the countryside, and New York City yearns for the country!
Coming back down from a trip upstate we had the pleasure of meeting a farmer who runs a private animal sanctuary. Off a small town road he bought a farm that could trace its settlement back to the 1800s, and he saw in it the potential for something real, the true American dream. Before this, he had worked for thirty years in construction in the city building hotels and started his own business and retired early to devote his life to his family. He talked about never wanting to go back to the city, having found true happiness here in a field with his goats, horses, birds, and dogs. This was never his intention, but after some extenuating circumstances he found himself called upon to take care of animals that could not take care of themselves, growing his own hay and building out the 12 acres of land single-handedly to create something sustainable and starting businesses to better his community.
What he found was something that grounded him in the work that he did. The soil itself gave rise to his want of work, and for once in his life he had a true stake in how he was living and reproducing his own livelihood. This dream is not something he alone feels. The millions of people that inhabit NYC feel it in our bones.
The farmer mentioned a woman who had come up from the city who, unbeknownst to him, had been dealing with severe mental health issues. Later, she called him and told him that that hour at the farm petting the animals and talking to him had given her more hope and stability than any medication or therapy had done for her in years.
The people yearn for the farms, the people yearn to have a true stake in the way they live their lives, the people yearn for their livelihoods to be grounded in something real. It is not the mystery it seems to Professional pundits as to why these recent generations suffer from higher rates of mental illness. It is very clear that the political and economic powers that be, controlled by rent seeking Anglo-American capital which concentrates itself in Wall Street, placing their interests in maintaining their own hegemony above the interests of the common people in general have produced this mass crisis and deliberately exploited this alienation to create the troubled lumpen elements among the young and activist minded who seek nothing but to destroy.
We as the New York City Branch of the New York Chapter of the AMERICAN COMMUNIST PARTY seek to point the way forward. Right now, NYC is searching for its soul, all the people run around as headless chickens debating policies that don’t matter beyond treating symptoms. At the very core of our being as a City, we are searching for “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of happiness.” What we need now is a comprehensive program of redevelopment on every level and to rip from the imperialists the notion that we cannot have more than simply the rat race to live, eat, pay rent, and die. We refuse to be tax cattle, we want to BUILD! We want to GROW! We want to LIVE!