The Victory of Zohran Mamdani, his limits, the Labor Aristocracy, and its ideology

Like most people who hate capitalism in this country, I am happy that Zohran Mamdani has won in the Democratic primary for Mayor of New York City. He seems more left wing than Bernie was, and promises to freeze the rent, make buses fast and free, provide free childcare, raise the minimum wage to $30/hr, and arrest Benjamin Netanyahu to face trial at the International Criminal Court for charges of war crimes. But there’s a big catch that I don’t think a lot of people truly understand. Zohran Mamdani, in the best of worlds where we get everything that we want, cannot bring about socialism in New York. All he can do is redistribute the superprofits and superwages of imperialism, that is, the surplus value generated and transformed into low prices and above-average profits for U.S. multinational corporations. To preface, Mamdani is well-intentioned and his changes would be great for Americans, and this is not necessarily a critique of him, simply diagnosing his position in the global system. However, crucially, to achieve the aims he seeks, it requires the continued exploitation of workers in the Global South and their material production to furnish a better life for working class Americans.

Bear with me here. New York actually doesn’t produce much materially. All of the commodities flowing into places like New York, from berries, to phones, to concrete, and most clothes cannot be (as) profitably produced in the city because wages have grown to such a high level that it’s much more advantageous to import these commodities from elsewhere. Makes perfect sense. Because of this, the work done by almost every single man woman and child cannot be performed without consuming the commodities produced elsewhere. Therefore, they produce no material surplus value. However, when a cook transforms peas, carrots, or whatever, into a soufflé or something, there is some small value added (based on time) to the product, but exponentially more is added to the price. Those in design, marketing, police work, tech, etc., are paid not for items assembled, but instead for the profits that they open up with their labor. They produce no value, but allow for value to be produced. Without protecting property rights, capitalism could not function. Without designs, patents, and marketing, there would be no distinct product to buy or nobody would know about the product. This is the core distinction between productive and unproductive labor in Marxist thought.

In Global Capitalism, centers like New York, with heavy design, tech, finance, and retail centers, unproductive industry, constitute the vast majority of the economy. They simply could not survive without productive labor. At the same time, their labor power (wages) have an incredibly high composition of the price of commodities both at the beginning of the supply chain, finance and design, and at the end of the supply chain, in retail and distribution work. However, the vast majority of the value in a commodity, the labor power needed to materially produce, mine, refine, assemble it, comes not from New York, but from the Global South, where labor is underpriced. This contradiction between value and price undergirds the capitalist system and is vital to understand the value transfer inherent in it.

What this phenomenon does is transfer value from one country to another; it engages in imperialism. Look above this paragraph. I want you to understand the production and distribution of one commodity, an iPad. Because of the underpricing of labor in production of an iPad, the value produced by those workers who did everything to produce it was transformed into $572 of revenue (a form of price) per iPad. That is $572 that goes from all of those workers into your backpack where you keep your old ass 2010 iPad. Those same workers, making those same wages, will never be able to afford an iPad if priced at the same ratio. Apple will not target those workers for sale because they can reap a much higher profit from selling to Americans, who, because of their artificially high wages, create high profits. Capital must circulate to accumulate, and markets flow to where profits are highest.

This is why New York is still rich despite not making anything. The absolute value of New Yorker’s wages and capital flows allow for the highest possible profit margins for corporations. And this isn’t just iPads, it’s avocado toast, coffee, Louis Vuitton, steel beams, glass, and apartments. New York is nothing more than a mass market for monopoly capitalism. Capitalists themselves, the investors whose incomes wholly rely on profit income and capital gains, cannot consume the entire produce of the global economy, and thus create a partner in a labor aristocracy that can purchase all the goods that this systemic underpricing of global productive labor entails. This is why people in New York may, in absolute value terms, be the richest city on Earth, but its people remain so impoverished. The big companies, landlords, and billionaires tax wages far, far above the price of production and with scores of often useless or excessive amounts of commodities, in order to accumulate this unrealized value as profit for themselves. High wages in New York are good for business.

And it’s a weird situation, because the wages of New Yorkers are held up by this unequal exchange of value and price. In fact, the Global North as a whole, in a 2024 study, while constituting 20% of the world’s population net-appropriated $17,900,000,000,000 ($17.9 trillion), or 826 billion labor hours at $15/hr from the other 80% through this exact imperialist process. And in fact, as I discussed in my previous article on imperialism, Dr. Zak Cope, a Maoist sociologist and economist, calculated that there is a wage at which you appropriate this surplus value. In 2019, that amount was $25,920. The vast majority of Americans make above this amount, not because we are individually evil, but it is necessary for our survival given the mass amount of monopoly rents (again, this above average rate of profit) being charged on our wages.

Let’s take this back to Mamdani. Again, I like the guy. But, he has to realize that all he can do is redistribute the unpaid value of Filipino, Angolan, Haitian, or Columbian, etc. workers in order to create decent lives for New Yorkers. In effect, it is their suffering as a working class in factories that subsidizes what would be paradise in New York. New Yorkers would keep a greater share of the profits of this imperialism through unequal exchange, and thus would be bourgeois. Sure, Mamdani can arrest Netanyahu, doing the anti-imperialist movement a service by targeting a weak point in the just fight for national liberation against genocide and settler-colonialism. But, can he go and mandate that everyone in the global supply chain that does business in New York pay the global average wage and mandate that New Yorkers are paid the same? Absolutely not. New York would collapse without the world’s working class, defined as those workers who have their surplus value produced taken by capitalists, not just factory workers, but peasants, small producers, miners, owner-operator farmers.

Companies in the United States fight every year for a higher and higher share of your wages, wages supplemented again by imperialism, the geographical transfer of value. Banks fight over it by increasing the cost of housing through ridiculous mortgages and rent prices, healthcare companies by increasing the price of medicine and “private insurance,” and food companies screw you at the grocery store. But, like in Sweden and Norway, if we were to nationalize major industry, heavily regulate business, put power in worker’s hands in councils, and provide everything everyone needed on the structure of this system, we would be doing nothing to liberate the entire working class, but instead to liberate our own wage earners. We would be making them whole partners in imperialism. This would be a “national” socialism, a socialism for the United States as I have previously described.

Zohran Mamdani, to conclude, and democratic socialists like them are well-intentioned. Limiting the power of the capitalists in the United States is a good thing. But in no way does his policies get us closer to national self determination and socialism. The world and its markets will still be in the stranglehold of the United States, Western Europe, Japan, and the settler-colonies, and the rest of the world’s population will have to pay. But, fundamentally, we will not be making progress in the destruction of monopoly capitalism and the remittance of unpaid wages, let alone control of labor value, socialism towards communism, to the workers of the Global South that furnish our existence. In order to achieve socialism, it is the countries of the Global South that we must support rising up against ourselves. It is these countries, from Palestine to Burkina Faso, that must make lives for us difficult in order to secure their own freedom. It’s not Mamdani’s fault that he can only redistribute the superprofits of imperialism, and I don’t blame him, nor should anyone else, but he’s doing the best that he can in the position that he is in. Americans can only struggle against monopoly rent by billionaires, not capitalism-imperialism itself, and on the former, he would be great, while being a net-zero on the latter.

The task of socialists in the United States is to materially support these national liberation and socialist struggles, led by Red China and the BRICS countries. Building an alternative world market, and taking away from the monopsony of the United States and Europe as a destination of world goods is a step forward. Countries like Mexico and Bolivia today, who are nationalizing their resources, raising their wages, and finding different destination markets to accumulate capital to raise wages globally are doing good work because they are limiting the superprofits of imperialism. Their so-called social democratic governments, a name smeared by Marxists, despite not carrying the banner of Lenin, are themselves revolutionary because they are working to end imperialism and secure a future for their oppressed people. Imperialism must first be smashed before revolutionary change towards a stateless, classless, moneyless society can take place. Unfortunately, in this process, Americans will have to give up their luxuries and consumption. Unfortunately wages will have to fall, the dollar cannot remain dominant, and we won’t be able to live as well as we did, but at least the world will be free to determine its own path rather than follow our whims as imperial/market hegemon. Only once imperialism is smashed and America becomes a surplus-value producing society once more can socialism take place.

There is thus a great difference between socialist internationalism and national socialist ideology. National socialism would commit itself to ignoring the necessity of breaking the chains of imperialism to construct socialism, and instead build socialism in one country off the backs of the rest of them. Because of this, and because of the labor aristocracy generally, internationalist Marxists will not initially gain popular support in the West. Therefore, our task is to stick together in building strong, be it small, organizations that can grow ties with the masses of the American people on anti-monopolist struggle while injecting international awareness and political education to siphon material support for the world struggle against imperialism. We must be the most educated, competent, militant, principled, and have the strongest internal organization to eventually lead the West to revolution once imperialism has no choice but to come home. This is something we are seeing now with the national oppression of Chicano and undocumented immigrants, and thus the imperative is on organization. Building a tight communist organization to act as a spider web to connect struggles for community control of the police, anti-monopolist labor struggles, anti-imperialist solidarity, climate action, women’s and LGBTQ+ rights, is absolutely imperative, though difficult.

As Mao says,

Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution. The basic reason why all previous revolutionary struggles in China achieved so little was their failure to unite with real friends in order to attack real enemies. A revolutionary party is the guide of the masses, and no revolution ever succeeds when the revolutionary party leads them astray. To ensure that we will definitely achieve success in our revolution and will not lead the masses astray, we must pay attention to uniting with our real friends in order to attack our real enemies. To distinguish real friends from real enemies, we must make a general analysis of the economic status of the various classes in Chinese society and of their respective attitudes towards the revolution

This system is called monopoly capitalism, but it is interchangeable with the word imperialism, as it is the domination of (many) nations by others. This is the domination of the Global South by the Global North. These countries are forced to be poor and have stagnant wages while rich countries grow their absolute value of wealth exponentially. As trade is centered around the U.S. dollar, its inflation means nothing for our status as the core market, but inflation elsewhere means devastation as labor is either being further undervalued or it becomes uncompetitive and investment moves elsewhere. Imperialism, too, has created an aristocracy of labor in the Global North to consume the commodities produced in the Global South and has kept it underdeveloped by stealing hours of its labor that could be used for national development. Wealth begets wealth and poverty begets poverty.

The Limits of Consciousness in the Global Labor Aristocracy

I used this term previously, the labor aristocracy, without precisely defining what it means. This is that group of wage earners who net appropriate surplus value from other workers by virtue of their geographical location in the global capitalist system. Just because I, austin, am a worker in the United States instead of the Congo, I make infinitely more money in my wages. An hour of my wages can buy infinitely more of the goods the Congolese worker produces. Whereas the Congolese worker would have to work lifetimes in order to buy the Tesla their labor ultimately played a large part in producing.

Notably, America does have a proletariat, a class that does not net-appropriate global surplus value in their wages. These are illegal immigrants, a large portion of the Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic population, and a smaller stratum of the white population whose wages are below the wage at which no surplus value is created. and what Marxists may categorize as the lumpenproletariat, those who must perform illegal wage labor in illegal enterprises, such as sex workers or in the production of the drug trade. These people run our factories, farm our much of our crops, do our low-cost construction work, and do produce surplus value in their labor and serve as an underclass, but whose families constitute at most 20% of the U.S. population. When I say Americans, I am not referring to these Americans, not disrespectfully either as most of these groups, such as the Black belt or the Chicano nation, constitute oppressed nations in the borders of the United States by predominantly white Anglo-Saxon Americans. Their struggle must be upheld and fought for, and do not exist as a working class chair for Americans to sit upon.

Like I just said above, Americans benefit from monopoly capitalism. They are not exploited, have their surplus value taken, but they are oppressed by the monopoly capitalists which tax their wages with ridiculously high prices, stupid infrastructure, violence in the form of needless poverty, and a structural lack of democracy. In short, Americans are oppressed by monopolies, but benefit from capitalism. This middle position (the origins of the word, middle class) gives them a petty bourgeois consciousness. This explains a lot about American culture, which has its roots in the class structure of the society.

The petty bourgeois in pre-monopoly capitalist society were predominantly the small business owners, small artisans, professionals, blacksmiths, etc. They are defined by producing value themselves, but also appropriating a profit by setting prices, employing labor, etc.. In industrial capitalism, this group of people were notoriously in ruthless competition with big capitalists, industrialists, etc., who were in a brutal class struggle to kick them out of the market. So the petty-bourgeois character was anti-monopolist, but also reformist and pro-capitalist. They wanted a more advantageous life for themselves where they didn’t have to rely on their own labor as much, could succeed in the market, and so on. They also were incredibly afraid of being restored back to the status of proletarian, where they would have to sell their labor power to someone else for wages and be deprived of accumulation of other’s surplus labor value. In some way, their feet were in both proletarian and capitalist camps.

I think Americans as a whole show most of those attributes. We are highly individualistic, we believe in the “American dream,” of running one’s own business or making more money than one’s parents. Most of us dread being viewed as poor and impoverished, and much of our incomes are spent on artificial status symbols, like cars, makeup, designer clothes, etc. In fact, structurally we are built for it. As a component of our wages, again the cost of reproducing our labor, includes the costs for a car, apartment of our own (rather than with family), monopoly rents on essential goods, and the costs of a certain basket of market commodities at elevated prices. While we are oppressed by monopolies, we still retain vast privileges in the forms of commodity consumption that workers in the Global South could not dream of. More than anything, at risk of saying “more” any more times, We. Always. Want. More.

Americans have a hyper-consumption culture to the point where most people’s personalities are defined not by the production of art, music, but instead by which TV shows, music, art they consume. Americans are often not incentivized to learn valuable skills like marking art, like home repair, basic car repair, cooking, because they can either buy it, contract someone to do it for them, buy a machine from the store, or go to a restaurant to eat. This is fundamentally petty-bourgeois. Americans, frankly, don’t give a shit about other Americans in a way unrivaled by the rest of the world. Skin color, national origin, gender, and social stratification and even differing interests divide American society into the tiniest of petty atoms. Just an anecdote, when I lived in Russia, and when I visited Hungary, two countries in the semiperiphery of the world system, average people in those countries knew everything about U.S. politics, and could have serious political discussions about capitalism, communism, and other countries, etc., when Americans don’t even know that Africa is a continent, let alone the politics happening there.

This may be a stretch, but I feel as if this social development of American lack of global consciousness (distinct from class consciousness) comes from the fact we are in the labor aristocracy. It doesn’t matter who produced my shirt, though it says it was made in Honduras, I have a shirt. Whereas those producing these shirts, who sew a graphic tee in a language that’s not their own, obviously for a market outside of their country, will develop a different global awareness than the average American. Most TV shows, movies, are centered around America, Europe, or some orientalism of every other place on Earth. When your country’s politics are determined by another’s you will likely learn about that country.

Americans can’t truly understand the poverty of workers in Dhaka, whose shacks are filled with the dangerous chemicals used in the production of H&M clothing that Americans buy. Our idea of poverty comes from photos, videos, its portrayal in movies, and it retains no meaning because we see it so much, yet never experience it. Violence, state violence in particular is not something we experience either, but is a regular occurrence for those anti-imperialists, and the countless countries in civil wars over political power, but remains absent here because of an overwhelming trend of reformism.

Americans have too much unrealized potential to lose by going to prison, and thus college students who can have full careers in finance, sales, banking, in a professional engineer job with high salaries and great benefits never fully sacrifice anything beyond a performative protest for Palestine. In the Global South, college students often spark violent revolutionary movements, but here the only spark we give is the flash of a camera, because here, we can succeed. The petty bourgeois can always find a job in their field as every major center of intellectual property, the biggest research labs, most important universities, most important positions in the most important firms, are here. And thus, we never truly have to understand the class struggle in the way the proletariat does. At best, we can only think to reform capitalism, elect a Democrat, or buy one less coffee to make our lives a little easier rather than to transform our own productive relations.

In sum, Americans cannot develop anything beyond an anti-monopolist political consciousness. At best, the American left can look like Zohran, redistributing the profits of imperialism as we see fit. I somewhat regret being involved in union organizing because for every dollar we raised the wage at Homegrown was another dollar of unrealized surplus value we had to take away from the Honduran, Mexican, and Californian underpaid farm labor that subsidized it. Because we are only oppressed by monopolies and billionaires, our struggles are fundamentally limited to reformism. Sure, we can redistribute the trillions of dollars in the American economy to buy us free healthcare, college, housing, but this would be the wealth that belongs to all of the nations and workers that America has to oppress to afford these luxuries. Americans cannot even see the privilege they have. We will never be revolutionary because the revolution would never benefit us. At best we can redistribute profits rationally to meet our working class needs, at worst we can become MAGA and patriotic, and cheer on the subjugation of the world’s people under our boot.

However, with education and understanding, Americans may be able to dedicate their lives to anti-imperialism, not out of material necessity, but out of guilt. That’s what makes those people on the streets now throwing down for the lives of undocumented immigrants and Palestinians admirable, and especially those who give their lives for the revolutionary movement so beautifully. These are truly internationalists, a goal we must all aspire to be, class traitors. 99+% of Americans haven’t even heard the names Arghiri Emmanuel or Samir Amin, let alone studied the Marxist classics. Even if you did, you don’t have to care, your life in the United States could be easier that way. I know personally, scores of “Marxists” who now go and get their cozy job, live their cozy life, having done nothing but be a parasite on the world’s people. It’s infinitely more disgusting to me to know and do wrong rather than not know and do wrong.

You, the reader. Now that you know this is how the world works, what are you going to do about it? The systematic exploitation of billions, how it happens, and what you can do are now known to you. The question is whether you will be a good person and aid the revolution that will save humanity from not only this system, and the fact American overconsumption will bring about climate catastrophe (unmentioned, but heavily implied so far), or will you go about willfully ignorant, or simply ignorant about the system.

i personally can’t.

austin

P.s. I haven’t written much recently because I’m actually working on a book right now about this exact subject and the evolution of the labor aristocracy over time and its correlation with the decline of U.S. working class radicalism. The research required is fucking immense. If anyone reads this and wants to help me, I don’t pay, but I would appreciate it.