Zohran Mamdani and Partnership for NY: What will be their relationship?

In two weeks, Zohran Mamdani will be sworn in as mayor of New York. What are the perspectives for his administration? To answer that, in part we must understand the political strategy of the New York City bourgeoisie. For that an understanding of what distinguishes the New York City bourgeoisie is necessary.

What distinguishes the New York City bourgeoisie
For one thing, they are the center of international finance capital. This gives them a more sophisticated world view than most of the rest of their class. Also, although the New York City working class suffers from the same crisis that the rest of the US working class suffers from, it is still more concentrated, sophisticated, conscious, organized, and tougher than is the working class in much of the rest of the country. In other words, it brings more pressure to bear on the New York City capitalist class. Contrast the New York City working class with the working class of Silicon Valley and you can see the difference. In other words, the New York City working class has helped educate the New York City capitalist class.

All of this both necessitates and enables Zohran Mamdani to relate to the New York City bourgeoisie in a different way from how he would relate to the likes of Peter Thiel and the Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

“Partnership for New York City”
Mamdani’s relationship with the New York City bourgeoisie is defined by his relationship with Partnership for New York. The New York Times explained that this group is “a [New York] consortium of 350 members representing banks, law, firms, and corporations.” The very fact that they call themselves “partnership” shows where they are coming from: they understand that they cannot go it alone, that they have to draw into their orbit a major layer of the leadership of the working class, of course under their control.

There are two aspects to their concern about Mandani. The first is whether he will institute policies that will simply help New York City run more efficiently, or will he institute policies that will actually cut into profits in any major way? The second concern revolves around his strong opposition to the genocidal policies of a fundamentally important ally of theirs – Israel. We will consider the first concern of theirs in this article and will consider the second in a wider context in our follow-up article coming soon.

Patrick Gaspard and Sally Susman: Key players in NYC and Democratic Party politics. They symbolize the link between the Democrats and the working class.

Last July, the New York Times reported that Mamdani reached out to Partnership for New York for a meeting. Two important members of the partnership for New York are Patrick Gaspard and Sally Susman. Both are central to the mainstream leadership of the Democratic Party, with Gaspard actually being a director of the Democratic National Committee. He has been working with Mamdani for years. Susman, on the other hand, reached out to Mamdani once it became pretty clear that he was going to win the primary. The same New York Times article reports  “Susman has… become a valuable ally (to Mamdani), convening two intimate gatherings at Mamdani’s campaign office, this time at his request, for business leaders and tech investors eager to meet him…. Robert Wolfe, another partnership for New York City member, and a major fundraiser for the Democratic party, told me that he has been texting with the candidate, becoming an informal pulse check for the City’s finance and business community.” (Among other things, this shows how the Democratic Party is a nexus, a connecting point, between the capitalist class and any popular movement.)

An idea of what they are trying to accomplish can be seen in this interview with the president and CEO of Partnership for New York,  Kathy Wylde. He impressed Wylde, who said he is “a good listener… (who) knows the facts… (and has an) interest in removing barriers to creating housing, and working collaboratively with the banks to figure out how to finance housing in creative ways.”

Reading between the lines, it becomes clear that Wylde is not necessarily hostile to some of Mamdani’s reform plans, just so long as those plans are limited to simply making capitalism in New York City run more efficiently. For instance, she said “the business community basically totally shares the priorities of both affordable housing and affordable and accessible childcare… Employers in New York City  [do so] because [with] the high cost of living here, the high cost of rent, they’re paying 20%, 30% premiums on salaries for the same job in another location, so they’re very sensitive to the issue he is raising, and what they want to do is be on the table to help solve them.” Nor can they simply pick up and move to Salt Lake City or Dallas because they have a whole infrastructure in New York, including a political, social, cultural and physical infrastructure.

Homelessness in New York City. They want a “permanent solution”!

Wylde spoke about the concern the “business community” expressed to her over a comment that Mamdani had made opposing police sweeps of homeless encampments. Wylde said she was getting calls from her fellow capitalists asking “is this going to be [another] Los Angeles or Portland?” She talked with Mamdani and came away with this conclusion: “His position was ‘we want to make sure we find permanent solutions to homelessness and not just move people off of one site where they just go to another site and don’t have a solution.’ So I think once explained, it was not that ‘we’re going to put up with having encampments of homeless people around New York City.’ It’s that ‘we’re going to figure out a solution and work together to do that.’” She then went on to basically support his proposal for a department of community safety. She agreed that there are “larger problems that often involve mental illness and poverty. And there’s other ways that we’re going to solve these problems. So I think that was a smart way to approach it.” Of course, the issue of poverty cannot be resolved without raising wages, but from Wylde’s point of view the New York “business community” can fight that battle when they come to it.

Contrast this with the approach of the Peter Thiel’s of America. They actually support policies that will lead to utter chaos, because they believe that out of chaos will arise actual fascism, and this will enable them to dominate all of US society and in fact the planet. The Kathy Wylde’s of US capitalism – which is to say the New York City bourgeoisie – believe that fascism is neither necessary nor possible, nor is there even an advantage to instituting it. Therefore, they favor regulating capitalism to a certain extent in order to help it function more smoothly. Her hope is to guide Mamdani towards limiting his reforms towards simply better regulation of capitalism and away from any reforms that make the capitalists fork over some of their profits.

Housing and “affordability”
The issue of affordable housing is a key example. According to Wylde, one important barrier to housing affordability is the high cost of insurance. She complained about “the large settlements and claims that come out of our courts” and advocated among other things getting rid of no-fault insurance. In other words, she advocated limiting the liability of landlords whose unsafe conditions could lead to property damage or even loss of life. She also claimed that when Mamdani talked about freezing the rent, her understanding was that that means “we have to reform property taxes and reduce impositions.” Impositions are the various fees and taxes that property owners must pay, such as transfer fees, utility fees, etc. So this would mean shifting some city administrative costs away from the property owners and onto the New York City population as a whole. In other words, if lowering the rent means lowering the massive profits of the real estate industry, there is going to be a clash between the New York City bourgeoisie and the Mamdani Movement. The same holds true on the issue of property taxes, although Wylde seemed to indicate there could be a little ground for a few concessions on that issue.

Wylde also indicated concern over the issue of Mamdani’s opposition to Israel.

There will be enormous organized pressures on Mamdani on both scores: the first will be on the Mamdani administration itself – that it must move in the direction of just better regulation of capitalism and away from actually making the capitalists pay for the crisis of their own system. To be more specific, what Wylde and Partnership for New York are proposing is to lower rents by lowering environmental regulations, eliminating property fees (“impositions”), lowering liability of the property owners for unsafe or unhealthy conditions. In other words, shift some of the burden away from renters directly and onto working class tax payers and the environment. That is no solution whatsoever.

The majority of the Mamdani Movement will understand that that cannot work and will oppose it. However, a majority that is not clear on what is happening and is not clearly organized will almost always lose to a minority, such as Partnership for New York, which is clear, organized, and well financed. That is why working class-oriented socialists within the Mamdani Movement have to start clarifying and organizing around this issue. As Oaklandsocialist has pointed out in previous articles the independent-minded and working class oriented youth in and around Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) can organize to reach out to rank and file workers, including rank and file union members to, first of all, explore their common grounds – hear what issues workers are facing on the job and also inside their unions, and how a movement can be built to resist the pressures of New York’s “business community” and also how to help rank and file union members organize to put their unions in the forefront of any struggle.This includes both the struggle against Trump and the struggle against the pressures of the wolves in sheep’s clothing like Kathy Wylde. They will run into some headwinds in such efforts, but these headwinds can be overcome with persistence and clarity.

A socialist program for housing
At the end of the day, it must be recognized that housing for profit has failed the working class and the poor, just as has health care for profit. Neither is provided to satisfy a human need; it’s profit and profit alone that drives their provision. The more the real estate interests’ profits are cut, the more they will go on capital strike and stop building or improving housing. What is needed is a crash program for the construction of publicly owned and controlled housing. The commercial office vacancy rate in New York City hovers between 20-23%. This is a massive resource that could be put to use for public housing, and with a mass movement behind it the city can seize it under eminent domain. Much of real estate development is financed by money launderers, including Russian oligarchs, corrupt authoritarian government dictators around the world, and the drug cartels. Those properties can and should be seized anyway. Those steps would be an important start in financing worker and tenant planned and controlled public housing.

Oaklandsocialist notes: We have carried multiple articles on Mamdani and the movement he has sparked. These articles have focused on his program for reforms and what are the pressures for and opposed to these reforms, and how those opposition pressures can be overcome. We have left to the side the issue of Mamdani’s role in the wider socialist movement, including his position (and in some cases a lack of a position so far) on wider international issues. That article is coming next. Subscribe to Oaklandsocialist to be sure not to miss it. Subscriptions are free and your information won’t be passed on to others. Also see “Zohran Mamdani has won a victory, now beware the corporate wolves in sheeps’ clothing!“

Zohran Mamdani and Partnership for NY: What will be their relationship?