Joshua Freeman is a Distinguished Professor of History at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He has written widely on American labour history. Folly reached out to him to speak about his Working-Class New York (2000), a book that enjoyed a burst of popularity during last summer’s election, and which will be reprinted with a new preface in April 2026. Topics covered include New York’s heyday of municipal social democracy, the political economy of the city and Trumpism, new immigrant groupings, and DSA’s prospects.
CHARLIE GOLDBERG: Many historians’ families in labor history specifically were enmeshed in leadership or labor struggles themselves. Was your family?
JOSHUA FREEMAN: My grandparents on my father’s side were both needle trades workers. My father’s father was a fur worker, what’s called a cutter. He’d cut the pelts into the shapes that make a fur coat. Per capita, the fur workers’ union probably had more communists than any other union in the United States. My father grew up in that world of left-wing, communist labor. Neither of my parents were organizationally involved with the left, and they were both upwardly mobile. My mother’s parents were what C. Wright Mills called the “lumpen-bourgeoisie”; they owned a tiny bodega. My mother was a social worker and my father was an industrial engineer. I studied science in college and only after I got out of college did I go back and study history as a graduate student. By the time I graduated in 1970 it was clear to me that the movement was deflating. It got me interested in the circumstances under which you have social disruption or social quiet. What was the social basis of this long period of conservative stability that I was born into? So I read some books and went to grad school.
CG: The “lumpenbourgeoisie” you mention is a group that seems to play a particularly important role in New York, in part because of what you characterize as the non-Fordist structure of political economy that develops in the city. But let’s jump back for a second. Can you run through why New York had such a prominent role in the history of the American left?
JF: New York City always had an unusually large left. It took a hit after the First Red Scare from 1919-1920. Out of that you get the Communist Party and Socialist Party. Then, of course, the Depression discredits and undermines the established authorities and creates an opening. The Communist Party begins to grow with its old Third Period policies, but only with the shift to the Popular Front in 1934 does it really succeed. The New Deal in New York doesn’t come through the Democratic Party, but through a split in New York between Roosevelt’s anti-Tammany wing of the Democratic Party and the Tammany-aligned faction. Tammany Hall still dominated the Democratic Party in Manhattan and didn’t support the New Deal. So you get the oddity of a Republican mayor, LaGuardia, aligned with the left, becoming the vehicle for the New Deal in New York. That’s an auspicious set of circumstances for the growth of a broad Popular Front. Another animating force behind the Popular Front is the rapid expansion of the labor movement. In New York, the industrial structure is different. Most other big cities have Fordist industry, but in New York the industrial structure is different; more oriented to small-scale, flexible industry. As a result, the exact dynamics in different sectors are critical, even though - as elsewhere - you get the creation of the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations]. Even within the New York AFL [American Federation of Labor], there are some strong left-wing tendencies from the beginning. That vibrant labor movement creates its own political vehicle, the American Labor Party (ALP), to be a second vehicle for the New Deal in New York. The Left is always pretty diverse: There’s the Communist Party and its allies, which is the biggest component, but you also have the Socialist Party, intellectual leftists—John Deweyites and so forth—and then this huge union movement.
CG: By the 1950s, the Popular Front grafted itself onto the Democratic Party. What allowed for the displacement of Tammany Hall?
JF: There’s already a split in the Democratic Party prior to the beginning of the Depression. You certainly have a wing of the Democratic Party, including part of Tammany that recognizes the importance of worker issues strictly pragmatically. They recognize workers are a substantial part of the electorate and it’s necessary to build coalitions with them. But the key moment is the inability of the Democratic Party under then-mayor Jimmy Walker to respond to the Depression. That worker-friendly faction of the party, including Roosevelt (then Governor of New York) is waiting in the wings. LaGuardia–a Republican progressive, a throwback to the Teddy Roosevelt-era progressive Republicans–wins for the first time in a three-way election precisely because of that split in the Democratic Party. LaGuardia himself is a quirk; The split in the Democratic Party creates an opening for LaGuardia, who’s allied with good government types which were always an element of the Republican Party. Once in office he has a relationship with Roosevelt. He has labor ties that go back to his early career: he had been a lawyer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and was a translator on Ellis Island. Nevertheless, he’s at the head of an oddball coalition that’s not stable. He couldn’t have gotten reelected in 1937 if it weren’t for the creation of the American Labor Party. Without their votes he couldn’t sustain a career strictly as a Republican. The American Labor Party enables the continuation of the LaGuardia administration for two more terms.
Tammany, still, is not dead. It recovered in the 1940s. William O’Dwyer, (mayor from 1946-1950) is a very interesting character. He’s elected mayor to succeed LaGuardia as a liberal Democrat. When he’s elected in 1945, he’s nominated by both the ALP and the Democratic Party. The brains behind the field operation is the ALP, though. From Brooklyn, he’s not a Tammany guy, but not anti-Tammany either. By the time of his re-election in 1949, with the Cold War raging, he’s not ALP anymore. He’s straight Democratic. And that marks the beginning of the revival of Tammany, which goes on to control New York politics into the mid-1960s.
CG: Should we understand the ALP as a Communist front?
JF: It’s a complicated coalition. Not until its last couple years is it purely a vehicle of the Communist Party. In theory, communists were actually banned from joining. It’s created as an alliance in 1936 between Roosevelt’s advisors and the labor movement. His advisors realize that there are tons of workers who are not going to vote Democratic, no matter what: they’re anti-Tammany, they’re socialists, they just ain’t going to vote for Roosevelt. So they want a third ballot line. But it’s not just the CIO or the left in alliance with Roosevelt’s team. George Meany, who is the head of the AFL in New York State, endorses the American Labor Party. It’s a broad labor coalition. Within it there’s a lot of maneuvering. There are socialists, independent leftists, non-left labor people, and certainly lots of Communists. The Communists, however, are very good at organizing and communist-oriented unions tend to be more enthusiastic than non-communist unions, with the great exception of the garment unions: the ILGWU and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. The garment unions are the most important components of the ALP. Their members are Jewish workers and their families. The ILGWU and Amalgamated don’t have the same politics. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers doesn’t mind working with communists if it serves their interests; the ILGWU is stone-cold against it. That leads to a split in the American Labor Party when the ILGWU anti-communist crowd leaves and creates the Liberal Party. That, of course, increases the influence of the communists on the ALP.
CG: Why is the central divide in the union movement before 1945 between communist and anti-communist groupings? Is it rooted in the Jewish politics inherited from Europe?
JF: God wants to make a mess here on Earth, is why. There are splits going back to the early 20th century coming out of the Russian Revolution. Particularly among immigrant Jews you have Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, etc., and that manifests itself in the split in the Jewish left. But that plays out very concretely in the specific garment unions, of which there are at least four: the ILGWU (the biggest), the Amalgamated, the Furriers and the Hatters. Each of them has splits. In the Furriers, there’s actually dual, opposing unions for a while. The background of all this is the hostile environment for unionism in the 20s, and a series of very large and mostly unsuccessful strikes in the different sectors of the garment industry. Whichever side that wasn’t leading the strike would blame the leading side for the defeat. In the ILGWU, for whatever reason, there are internal divisions. Sidney Hillman – who leads the Amalgamated and comes from a Menshevik background in Europe – is the most adroit. David Dubinsky is always a bit more provincial. When he ends up heading the ILGWU he’s much more interested in internal control and much more willing to use internal repression to keep his rivals at bay.
CG: Communists, through this whole period, always embrace a more ambitious vision of the possibility of a working-class, union-led civic culture And alongside that came a much more ambitious attempt to create civic culture within the party and within unions themselves. But when they graft themselves onto American liberalism, they’re also sometimes forced by liberal unions to shut down their civic institutions. The Furriers, upon rejoining the CIO, are forced to shut down their summer camp in the Catskills.
JF: That’s true. When you’re moving forward into the Cold War era it’s a struggle for survival. Some of these groups don’t survive and the ones that do have to really hunker down. But it’s also changes in American culture and American ways of life. Yeah, the Furriers shut down their summer camp. The ILGWU keeps theirs going for another decade or two, but ultimately shuts it down too, because Jewish workers are a lot more prosperous and they don’t need to go to the Catskills to a summer camp. They go to Puerto Rico or Florida instead. The whole structure of American life is changing, and some of the institutions are no longer attuned to the daily circumstances of these constituencies.
CG: As I see it, post-war liberalism depended on these really tight civic institutions and constant interaction, even those that created the conditions for its demise.
JF: Circumstances change, the economy changes. My colleague Steve Fraser argued a solution to the labor question, in the form of tremendous consumer prosperity, emerges in the 40s and 50s. That this is the way an unequal, democratic society can be stabilized. It’s always a problem: How do you have democracy and inequality coexisting? Material abundance was a way of doing that. It didn’t last forever, but it changed the calculus. Not to be negative about it: working people’s lives improved tremendously in the 50s and 60s. What daily life looked like for a working person in New York dramatically changed for the better. It was both a period of left retreat and a moment of tremendous material advance and greater security for the working class.
CG: Coming into the 1960s, John Lindsay’s election comes out of this moment of postwar affluence. Lindsay is inspired by elements of the New Left; at the same time, he’s firmly rooted in the corporate life of the city. And it’s with Lindsay that we get the first signs of racial backlash. What should we think about the relationship between these three elements of Lindsay’s tenure?
JF: Lindsay’s an interesting guy. In some ways, he’s the last manifestation of liberal Republicanism. He comes from this very elite background—not wealthy, but blue blood, Protestant, Upper East Side, Yale, handsome. His congressional district on the East Side used to be called the Silk Stocking District. Lindsay was a very strong backer of civil rights. Here’s an example: before the 15th Amendment gave the vote to black people, the 14th Amendment said you don’t have to give blacks the vote – but if you don’t, you have to reduce your congressional representation proportional to the number of male citizens you’re denying the vote to. Lindsay was part of the small group of people that actually tried to enforce the 14th Amendment prior to the passing of the Voting Rights Act in 1964. He comes in at a moment when the liberal Democratic Party under Wagner has run out of steam. Wagner and the Democrats don’t do a great job with racial politics. The New York economy is beginning to soften. Manufacturing is starting to trickle out, and corporate headquarters are moving in. The blue collar political formation is weak.
It creates an opening for Lindsay to come in as this new voice with something of a co-optation of some new left ideas. One of Lindsay’s campaign ideas was neighborhood city halls—these neighborhood offices where people could participate in, not just complain about, civic life. It’s an idea not all that different from some of the ideas in the Port Huron statement from SDS. So Lindsay comes in, and he’s unconnected to and somewhat contemptuous of the outer-borough unionized white working class, which is a Democratic identity. If he doesn’t look down his nose at them, blue-collar workers certainly think he does. Lindsay thinks the people who really need government assistance and intervention are non-whites—African Americans and Puerto Ricans who have been shut out of this system. He sees the unions, particularly municipal unions, as power brokers who serve special interests. He’s an early opponent of the war in Vietnam. It’s a break from this post-World War II liberal democratic formation. It corresponds to a change in the political economy of the city: the increasing importance of services and finance. His electoral base is always tenuous, but for a moment it triumphs.
CG: But it seems to me that Lindsay’s coalition would require a split within organized labor—not an institutional one, but at least significant defections among blue collar workers.
JF: Well, they do; through the Liberal Party. Lindsay never could have gotten re-elected in 1969 without them. He runs strictly on the Liberal Party ballot line. David Dubinsky is still there, and Max Rose, the head of the furriers, who’s the day-to-day political operative of the Liberal Party—they see the 1969 election, the re-election of Lindsay, as ‘the Stalingrad for civil rights’. The garment industry has shrunk enormously. The Liberal Party had become hollowed out. But still, there’s a significant group of white workers, as well as non-white workers, who on ideological grounds—back Lindsay. He barely wins a three-way race. It’s a three-way race. Republicans can only win in New York under weird special circumstances. Lindsay’s an example of that. Obviously, it doesn’t last very long. He decides to run for president, and the second Lindsay administration runs out of steam almost instantly.
CG: For them to describe it as a ‘Stalingrad of Civil Rights’ seems wild. The alternative was continued corruption, but not overtly racist Democratic administrations, right?
JF: I would put it a little stronger. Mario Procaccino, the Democrat he’s running against, is a backlash candidate. This is the beginning, not just in New York, but in Boston and other places, when backlash politics really is taking off and a sense of white grievance is beginning to boil up. That’s the real alternative to Lindsay at that moment. Things rapidly change post-fiscal crisis. The alternative happens in Philadelphia: Frank Rizzo, the police commissioner, becomes the mayor—a really thuggish anti-civil rights regime.
CG: Backlash is—this is something you can only say in retrospect—a foreshadowing of developments that occur later and accelerate with the fiscal crisis. It is clearly very central to American politics today, but it can’t really come into power on its own. It requires some huge transformations in political economy. You recognized that; 25 years ago you wrote a book and titled the last part “The Trump Era.”
JF: I lucked out on that one.
CG: Figures like Ross Barkan and John Ganz describing Trump as a figure of the outer boroughs. What do you think of this formulation of New York political economy post-fiscal crisis as contestation between the outer boroughs and Manhattan?
JF: Well, the idea that you’ve got to make it in Manhattan is a trope that goes way before that. Alfred Kazin and a million others are writing about getting across the Brooklyn Bridge. Trump is a variant of that. He comes from a well-off German immigrant background. His father, Fred makes his money primarily by building for this upward-ascending working class and the lower middle class, and does a lot of it by taking advantage of federal and other public programs. He’s a guy who’s figured out how to make money off the New Deal era and the rise of the labor movement. Donald Trump, however, is contemptuous of this world of six-story red brick apartment buildings that his father is building. He wants to make it in Manhattan. And the fiscal crisis creates an opportunity, given the desperation of city leaders for anything that looks like development. He’s a bottom feeder. He’s able to take advantage of fiscal-crisis induced deflation and the depopulation of New York. He also has this brash, slightly chip-on-the-shoulder, outer-borough thing going on, which he’s now gotten in this pathological, exaggerated way as president. In New York economic life, Trump is never one of the big boys—they’re an entirely different breed with power and assets way beyond anything he had. But they’re mostly operating on a very ethereal plane; their money isn’t even made in New York. That’s why Trump is the face of post-fiscal crisis New York.
CG: It’s interesting that a figure like Trump emerges out of what you call non-Fordism, and that neoliberalism comes into shape earliest in a city with an industrial structure completely distinct from the rest of the U.S. Why do you think that is?
JF: Neoliberalism’s energy comes from the top down, and this comes from entities that are really not dependent anymore on the industrial economy—finance particularly, and associated business services. If anything, they’re now beginning to make money on gutting the industrial economy. It’s the beginning of shareholder value: you buy these things, you milk them for all their worth, and you shut it down. Somehow, you manage to make money by disinvesting. Of course, New York is a great center for that—not necessarily the on-site sites of disinvestment, but the centers of control for disinvestment. William Simon, Ford’s Treasury Secretary, comes out of the New York finance industry. He’s heavily involved in selling bonds for New York City. He’s very much at the cutting edge of that kind of radical conservatism we call neoliberalism. And he’s a big player in the fiscal crisis. A lot of these people move very quickly from the fiscal crisis to the restructuring of Chrysler when it goes bankrupt.
CG: Ok, so we get past the fiscal crisis in the late ‘70s. You write about New York as a hybrid social-democratic state. Unions and employers are providing semi-public goods: hospitals, social halls, even nightclubs. Do these institutions disappear with austerity?
JF: Yes and no. Labor plays a critical role in establishing all these institutions, but a lot of these institutions then take a life of their own. The tremendous rise of Blue Cross, for example, has to do with labor negotiating contracts with employers that provide hospital insurance that comes through Blue Cross. Now Blue Cross is its own interest group, and it’s mostly for-profit. They’ve changed their name in most places. So the institutional arrangements remain. If I was writing that book today, I would put a little bit greater stress on the resilience of a lot of these things in spite of the fiscal crisis. You still have a big public hospital system. You still have a comparatively cheap transit system. You still have a mantra about affordable housing, even if you don’t actually have affordable housing. The ability to have new advances in welfare provision is almost completely shut down, yes, but something like the City University hasn’t disappeared. It’s thriving these days. These things prove surprisingly resilient, even in the face of these enormous political and fiscal challenges.
CG: One of my macabre interests is the U.S. left in the 1980s and the 1990s, which in New York manages against all odds to maintain some coherence. In 1981, for example, the left ran Frank Barbaro for mayor - and he achieved a respectable, albeit small, result in the general election.
JF: The established unions, particularly the municipal unions, had mixed feelings. They didn’t like Ed Koch. Koch is the face of the post-fiscal crisis regime. But they also need things from him. They decide to support him, and they have considerable electoral resources. There’s still enough people from the world of the American Labor Party floating around that you could construct something like a coalition. Barbaro doesn’t win, but he gets 36% or something in the primary. There were lots of voters who think this old world coalition was more attuned to their needs and their culture than this new post-fiscal crisis world. In retrospect, it’s just one little high point before our much larger one today. There were a lot of people like Barbaro hanging around the labor movement, people who came out of the Communist Party and came out of the American Labor Party. Maurice Isserman wrote that the largest left-wing group in America in the 50s and 60s were ex-Communists who still basically thought the same way, but had lost all interest in the Soviet Union. They’re anti-Stalinist, but they’re basically still that Communist Popular Front world.
CG: Soon after you mentioned that the movement for reforming SEIU 1199 – the famous, largely black, left-wing healthcare union – in the 90s was Communist-led. Is that the party itself? Or is it ex-Communists?
JF: Both, actually. 1199 was one of the left-wing unions that had managed to survive and grow by breaking with the Communist Party’s organization, and becoming very flexible. There were still some pockets in New York of actual Communist party types, and one of the projects they took on was hospital unionization. Columbia Presbyterian, uptown on 168th Street, was one of the last big hospitals to be unionized, and a lot of communists were involved in that campaign. So you actually had a new influx at this very late date of actual communists into 1199. Then when all the 1199 splits happened, and the Rebuild the Union Movement began, there were ex-communist, communist, communist-thinking folks all in there together. The inner history of that’s never been written.
CG: At the same time, it’s in the 70s that you see the New America movement and the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. They had a contentious relationship with parts of the New Left. Do they play a significant role when it comes to New York union politics, analogous to the ex-communists and the CPUSA, in this period?
JF: I’ll tell you a funny anecdote. Back in April, Jacobin asked me to write an article about LaGuardia. It was just when Mamdani was beginning to take off, and suddenly people were thinking that this guy might become mayor. I began the piece by saying that Mamdani would be the first socialist that New York’s ever had as mayor, even if the closest thing we ever had was LaGuardia. Then the editor says that David Dinkins (mayor from 1990-1993) was in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)? The fact I’d completely forgotten this is not coincidental. It meant nothing to belong to these organizations. It was a way of telling yourself and others, “I’m a good person.” It had zero to do with your day-to-day political life, and didn’t commit you to anything. Today, DSA has a million campaigns about rent and childcare. There was none of that. There was a little bit of a networking aspect to it, if anything.
CG: Nowadays DSA is only about 13,000 people in New York, and New York City’s population has grown since the 30s. Back then the Communist Party had a membership in New York of maybe 30,000? At the same time the CPUSA doesn’t seem to have had the political heft that DSA has. It could mobilize many more people, but it was competing in a much denser environment of social contestation. There are neighborhood Democratic Party committees and unions organizing on the political stage. It struggled to consistently elect the same number of people that DSA is electing to office. Why is DSA more electorally successful?
JF: I half-agree with you. The culture of the city was much more left then than now, and the party was a very different entity than DSA in its capacity to mobilize. It had a network of associated and affiliated organizations much bigger than anything DSA has. It penetrated intellectual and cultural life; it penetrated the labor movement. It did work electorally. It elected two members of the city council, but that’s not their main thrust. Their main thrust was through the ALP or the Democratic Party. On one hand, you’re absolutely right. It was an environment with many rival institutions threaded through daily life. On the other hand, it was effective in penetrating a lot of other institutions and having its own front organizations.
CG: But do you think DSA is only so successful because there are no comparable rivals in the city?
JF: There’s something to what you said. If you look at America nationally, as communal life disintegrated by the late 20th century, you’ve got labor and evangelical churches. There’s not much else that can mobilize a field operation of people. And in New York the evangelical churches don’t matter that much. In New York the unions themselves had tremendous capacity, and that’s somewhat diminished in the last few decades. Then the Working Families Party was founded in 1998, which for a while was an electoral juggernaut but is also nowadays greatly diminished. To some extent DSA success comes from moving into the vacuum of institutional resources and capacities of both the labor movement and the Working Families Party. But only to some extent. There’s a huge ideological and cultural component here. People are just fed up. They live in a world that doesn’t work. When you get a Bernie Sanders or an AOC or a Mamdani, who very plainly says the obvious—what you’ve got doesn’t work and doesn’t serve your interests, and, in fact serves someone else’s interests at your expense—people go, “huh”. It’s the failures of the current society and the ineptitude of political leadership outside that world to address these issues. People have got a problem with housing affordability, crime, whatever it might be. DSA takes advantage of that, too. So yes, there’s a vacuum, but more importantly progressive politicians today seem like a break with the past. People go “I don’t know what socialism is, but it’s not this crap we have to live with now.”
CG: One of the worries within DSA is that even a candidate that comes out of the DSA cadre like Mamdani gets elected to office and eventually distances himself from the organization. Do you see this as a risk, especially in comparison to leaders in the 1940s and 1950s, who were so much more dependent on unions and parties?
JF: That’s a work-in-progress. When it comes to addressing this, DSA is both naive and sophisticated. They created this entity called the Socialist in Office Committee (SiO) in the New York state legislature. That was a way to try to develop some way where you, report back to and are accountable to DSA. On the other hand, you have to recognize that it’s not DSA members who provide the majority of votes that got these people elected. The vast majority of votes come from non-DSA members. So how do you balance that? The city council in New York, and other DSA chapters, have experimented with SiO committees. Mamdani no doubt thinks “I was elected by the people of New York and that’s who I have to ultimately be responsible to”. But he is a real DSAer and he’s sensitive to these issues. There’s some tension within the New York DSA chapter on these issues. Mamdani got himself very involved in the issue of whether there should be primary challenges to other Democrats. There’s been some pushback against his decisions. The majority of the chapter certainly backs him, but there are voices that go other directions too. It’s just the very beginning of this. It’s a new situation, not just for DSA, but really for the left, for the first time in 78 years or something like that, where the left is significant enough to actually even have to think about questions like this.
CG: Sometimes it feels like we’re seeing the inklings of some sort of mass formation or organization - and sometimes it feels like we are definitely not looking at that. Do you think there’s a possibility for DSA to break out of its particular social base in New York City? It’s not a particularly wealthy base, but it’s also not rooted in the poor in the way you describe in your book the way the left used to be. The people who showed up, for example, to [socialist representative] Vito Marcantonio’s funeral; how their only real unifying factor was their poverty. Is there a possibility for a socialist organization to root itself in that way today?
JF: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. There are several dimensions to look at. One is actual DSA membership, and in the near term, no. But people who identify with DSA electeds like AOC or Mamdani - yes, that’s certainly a huge working class base in purely electoral terms. Then there’s something in between: DSA-sponsored campaigns, particularly in housing. That does get more people involved who might not otherwise want to join DSA, either because of their belief systems or just because they don’t have time. They might live in a rent-controlled building, and they’re having problems with the landlord, and then some DSA-affiliated housing group shows up–and they get involved through that. And not just in their own building! They might go to Albany on the bus to lobby for the bill. Some of that’s already happening. There’s also some DSA members trying to do things within the municipal unions. They’re probably going to make the most progress in the unions that have the same kind of profile as DSA itself does: the teachers and maybe the more professional types of city employees: social workers, city planners.
CG: Near the end of your book, these new immigrant communities—Chinese, African, Eastern European, South Asiantions popula in places like Jackson Heights—come into the picture. The Mamdani coalition was not possible without these new immigrant communities. To what degree are these new groups comparable to the white ethnic communities that decided the elections of the 30s and 40s?
JF: The occupational industrial profile is different—very much in the service industries, healthcare, home care, childcare, the low end of transportation, car services, taxi driving, warehousing, the non-unionized side of construction. These sectors are very big employers, to the extent that the city couldn’t operate without that social group. But I’m not so sure how much difference that makes, really, given that the typical industrial employer from, let’s say, 1920, wasn’t some giant company, it was a small outfit. There was always a diffusion of employment. To some extent, these groups are highly organized. They’re just not organized in ways that are visible if you’re not in these groups. They all have organizations similar to what Jews would call landsmanshaften, associations of people from the same town, area, village. They have religious institutions. They have business self-help groups. They have schools. They’re very organized communities, but they are not linked into the structures of electoral politics, the labor movement, other reform organizations.
Mamdani was brilliant in organizing these groups. A lot of this was the non-DSA part of this campaign that surprised me, his ability to mobilize Muslim voters and South Asian voters who were not groups that voted in large numbers and did this time. It was really important to his victory. The percentage of the New York population that’s foreign born is getting close to its peak 120 years ago. And the quandaries for the powers that be are not that dissimilar from that period. It’s the same problems of Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives. The people that run New York turned out to be clueless about this huge, vast swath of New York City residents. And so you’re back to this dilemma about how do you have a formally democratic system in a society of astronomical economic inequality? Their answer was to panic. Even people like Michael Bloomberg, who is a very rational guy, threw $5 million at Cuomo in the last week. He was pouring his money down the toilet. They’ve kind of calmed down and now they’ve got the co-optation system geared up.
CG: Yeah, it’s especially interesting because these new migrant groups for a while seemed like they might be especially resistant to organizing because of the occupational work they took up: in logistics, as delivery drivers, or as taxi drivers. These are jobs designed to be impossible to organize.
JF: Yeah, but they’re being organized electorally. And there is some effort to organize them within labor relations, although that stuff is really slow, and legally it’s very complicated because they’re contractors.
CG: Yes. It’s really the frontier of organizing today. Well, this was really insightful. Thank you very much for your time.