I'm not that tall. Oh man. My favorite basketball team, the New York Knicks, are in the finals, but I won't be joining them because, you know, accidents of birth.
So it's a privilege to be speaking in this building, and thank you to the Search Foundation, to our hosts for the opportunity. And particular thanks to Luke and Brian, who have been my chaperones throughout this tour.
So unless I've just been misinformed by a few of you in this crowd, Victorian Trades Hall is the oldest continuously operated trades hall in the world.
And even before it was constructed, as all of you here know, in 1856, the stonemasons and building workers in Melbourne downed their tools and marched for the 8-hour day: 8 hours of labor, 8 hours of recreation, and 8 hours of rest.
For a while, this city was the closest thing the 19th century had to a model of what an organized working class could wring out of capital. And I mention this not to flatter you, but because that slogan — eight, eight and eight — is still relevant today. It wasn't a basic reformist demand. It was a revolutionary claim about what a human life is for.
And I want to argue that the whole socialist project is in the end a fight over that question. Historically, our socialist movement can be said to have done three things within a broader workers' movement: one, give an agitative account of the crimes of capitalism and imperialism, to remind people about the daily realities of the system we're confronting.
Two, to give us a vision of a world after capitalism. And three, the part that set the socialist movement apart from our anarchist comrades was to provide a compelling and more plausible account of how to get from here to there.
I would actually argue that on the first question, agitation about the crimes of capitalism, the anarchists were often more compelling than us, but I want to focus on this last question to start with: of socialist strategy and transition, then touch on the need to actually have a compelling vision of what a socialism after capitalism could look like.
I want to make a few arguments tonight. I want to explain why social democracy is in an impasse it can never fully recover from. Two, paradoxically, why the collapse of reformist socialism has been a catastrophe even and especially for revolutionaries who have always stood to its left and kind of predicted its impasse.
Three, describe what a viable third way would look like. I realize now I should pick a different word than third way, so a viable third road, maybe. And why this third road cannot dodge the question of rupture, no matter how much we would like to.
Finally, I want to assert the technical viability of a socialism after capitalism, and why sketching out recipes for the cook shops of the future is actually a necessity for all of us struggling for a world beyond capitalism today.
There is a temptation when we look at the post-war social democratic golden age to treat it as a different sort of recipe. Sweden cooked this, Australia did a version of this, the Danes and the Austrians put their own twist on it. Strong unions, full employment, rising wages, welfare states.
We often look at that world that's still within living memory and naturally say, 'That worked. Let's get the chefs back in the kitchen.' And I'm pleased to inform you that that's the end of my cooking analogies.
That idea has a real power. The memory of post-war arrangements, nostalgia for aspects of the stability and dignity it afforded people, and the idea that the greed of bosses and the corruption of politicians are the reason why we today, as the saying goes, can't have nice things, has benefited our generation of the left significantly.
But for the cadre of our new left, it's worth thinking about the particular set of conditions in the 1950s and '60s that produced post-war social democracy: high economic growth and rapid productivity gains alongside it, strong, dense labor unions fighting for higher wages at the point of production and delivering votes for labor parties electorally.
Relatively closed national economies and limited capital mobility. Expanding industrial employment, which meant that the working class was being concentrated in large workplaces where it was easier to organize rather than scattered. And a favorable demographic structure: lots of working-age people and relatively few retirees, so the emerging welfare state was cheaper to fund.
These conditions papered over the central contradiction of social democracy. They allowed a movement that generally never challenged who owned the means of production to nonetheless, from a low base, radically transform the lives of working people and the trajectory of entire societies.
A worker in 1945 and that same worker's child in 1975 lived in almost different worlds, and social democracy could take much of the credit. For a while, the contradiction that you've empowered workers politically and on the shop floor, while leaving the power to direct investment and generate wealth in private hands, didn't overwhelm the system.
There was enough for higher wages, enough for profits, and enough for the welfare state on top of it. And then conditions changed dramatically. In advanced capitalist economies today, production is organized in global networks that are harder for national governments to control.
Financial capital is extraordinarily powerful and mobile, and it disciplines any government that frightens it, as it disciplined Mitterrand's France in 1983, and as bond markets today remind every finance minister.
Not to mention there are enormous technological sectors which continue to rapidly change economies in ways that are hard to anticipate. Beyond that, populations are aging. So the dependency ratio that made the welfare state cheaper has inverted.
Productivity growth has slowed, especially in Europe, which makes capital less willing to accept corporatist compromises. Relatedly, union density has collapsed across almost the entire advanced capitalist world.
And in a more globalized world, states compete even more with one another to attract investment, bidding down their own taxes and labor standards in the process. A government that walks into office today with a traditional social democratic program faces constraints that were much looser in the post-war period.
I'm convinced at a political level that a 1970 playbook can still be used to win elections in 2026, but I'm equally convinced that it's doomed to fail as a governing program. However, it's not just that the constraints are tighter. It's that social democracy has lost its social base.
The dense industrial working class that was the body of those parties has been thinned in its numbers and become more ideologically scattered. In this environment — an environment only really partially of their own creation — social democrats have had to expand their appeal to a less coherent social base.
Through these adaptations in parties across most of the capitalist world, social democratic parties are still viable as broad progressive electoral coalitions, but these coalitions are likely more apt to limit their program to ex-post redistribution through taxes and transfers than to the thing that actually made post-war social democracy revolutionary in its effects: the harnessing of investment and the pre-distributional shaping of the economy.
The obvious lack of moral fiber of some social democratic leaders has played a lesser role in reshaping social democracy into a pale imitation of itself than the economic crises of the 1970s. It became clear then that the old model could not continue and had to be changed.
On the right of social democracy, you saw a more headlong embrace of the new environment. I think of Tony Blair's New Labour, which accepted the Thatcherite settlement on labor markets and financial deregulation and embraced the rhetoric of flexible markets and welfare-to-work, while marrying these policies to defense of the existing welfare state institutions, or at least popular ones like the British National Health Service, and targeted redistribution to help those in the most extreme distress, like Blair's push against child poverty.
I've realized I was a little bit more favorable to Blair than I intended. So, you know, all scorn and bad things to Tony Blair.
From what I know of Australia's own history — and you comrades can correct me if I'm wrong, as I'm sure you will, one of my favorite parts of the culture of the left — the Accord was among the most relatively ambitious attempts to manage the crisis through a centralized bargain. Workers agreed to restrain their wage demands. In return, they were promised a social wage as compensation.
Of course, it never worked out as intended, or perhaps it did. But in the end you might have ended up with more consolations than some of your peers elsewhere, but you still had the same dose of financialization and deregulation of the economy and developments that made capital more mobile and labor weaker.
Compare these responses from the right, and maybe too generously I'll say the center of social democracy, with the road not taken. In 1970s Sweden, faced with declining investment and growing economic crisis, the LO trade union federation proposed to take a slice of profits each year and gradually transfer ownership of large firms to worker control funds.
A real bridge from social democracy towards socialism, paid for by the wage restraint that workers were already practicing in Sweden's system of centralized wage bargaining. This targeted both an economic crisis and the wider contradiction of social democracy itself by addressing the question of ownership of the means of production directly.
But ultimately the proposal was gutted not only because of strategic missteps and the opposition of capital, but because of the opposition of the Social Democratic Party leadership itself. They had not built the mass support for socialization of production, and even if they wanted to, which they did not, they couldn't mobilize anyone but the most class-conscious workers for the transformation of property relations.
A party that had not been built to manage capitalism in the interest of workers could not manage a transition to socialism. Today's social democrats, rather than debating greater social ownership, are struggling in a new social and economic environment to maintain even existing compromises they'd made with capital.
So that's the bind. The left is still able to summon electoral victories through social democratic rhetoric, but the social depth of our winning coalitions is far thinner and the scope for governance within capitalism is even more narrow than before. Simply willing ourselves back to 1970 is not a viable strategy.
Some of you in the room might be saying, you know, this isn't my problem. I never was and maybe never will be a social democrat. But the decline of reformist socialism has been a catastrophe for revolutionary socialism as well.
For most of the 20th century, revolutionaries regarded the reformist leaders — the trade union bureaucrats, the parliamentary socialists, the precinct captains of left parties — as obstacles to a more radical politics. People who would lead workers up to the edge of a decisive moment of truth with capitalist power and then flinch or sell out. And there was truth in that, of course.
However, look at the universe that those reformist parties and unions helped create. They politicized workers. They took people from a myriad of different backgrounds and gave them an identity as subjective members of a class based on their objective position in the economy.
They built and maintained institutions in which that identity lived: the unions, the cooperatives, the worker societies, the labor press, halls like this one. They trained organizers and taught people how to run meetings, how to take a collection, how to hold a picket, how to deliver an oration, and they did this on a mass scale touching the lives of millions.
The revolutionary left emerged from the same soil of the workers' movement as the reformist left, but even after splits rendered it a minority, it still fed from the same mass politics that the reformists often led. A communist party could go out and recruit the most militant, the most class-conscious workers precisely because there were millions of organized workers to recruit from.
Though these parties aimed for more than this, at the very least they were skimming the most advanced layer off the top of a movement the mass reformist politics was largely responsible for maintaining. Capitalism itself produced the worker as an objective category, as a condition of exploitation that we aim to abolish.
But the worker as a political subject was built deliberately through institutions, and as we know far too well in these bleak times, mass class politics is not a guaranteed feature of politics under capitalism.
When union membership collapsed, when the labor parties drifted and weakened, when the working class associations long captured by reformists closed their doors, workers did not of course become more revolutionary. Deprived of these institutions that had made them a class, they instead became more politically disengaged, individualized, and sometimes more nationalist or xenophobic, or at the very least more cynical about politics of any kind.
The school of socialism, the idea which even sharp critics of reformism like Rosa Luxemburg held — the idea that the daily struggle over wages and hours and conditions educates a working class, develops its capabilities, teaches it its own power — now seems closed.
If collective action is too difficult or dangerous or doesn't seem viable to people, and most workers only experience work and individual cost-of-living struggles, not coordinated struggles over wages and housing and shop-floor democracy, then the appeals of the revolutionary left have even less daily resonance.
I dwell on this because it has a strategic implication. There is no shortcut around the patient rebuilding of a mass working-class organization and identity.
The revolutionary trying to create a radical breakthrough from today's low level of politicization, and the nostalgic social democrat who wants to fire up their 1974 Falcon — I was told that was a popular brand in these parts then, please correct me if I'm wrong — right away, will both find themselves in want of a class agent and an organizing climate that will only exist if we build it.
The third road — I have to edit as I go on now — is not a zombie social democracy, and it is not a pure opposition. It is a democratic socialism whose purpose is not to stably administer capitalism in the workers' interests, because we've seen that the conditions for stable administration have largely evaporated.
But that aims to push along the axes of democratization and socialization. To use every position it wins, every reform it passes, every institution it builds to expand the democratic capabilities of working people and expand the sphere of social ownership.
And to do this through mass parties that thousands and millions of ordinary people can actually join and shape, that are nonetheless programmatically committed to socialism as an openly articulated destination and as a daily practice.
This openness and the programmatic commitment to socialism have to go hand in hand. A party that is open and has no destination becomes a progressive catch-all organization that drifts wherever the electoral winds blow.
A party that has a destination but is closed, with tight membership standards or some of the old structures of democratic centralism, will find it harder to both build and eventually merge with a wider workers' movement.
We need both: a broad, welcoming mass party with a clear socialist horizon, as well as a party with a socialist transition program written into its program and in its public declarations.
This isn't a novel proposition, but it is different from the left populist approach that is now dominant on the global left. Whether we build new socialist parties or transform existing parties into mass socialist parties depends on the country, of course, in which we're organizing.
But it does little good to uncritically build catch-all parties just committed to a more pure form of social democracy. Our socialist parties must win reforms that materially improve people's lives, obviously. Because if we can't do that, it's safe to say that no one will trust us in our ability to accomplish anything else.
But we should prioritize reforms partly by a second criteria: Do they expand the democratic capabilities of working people? And do they connect to more radical socialist transformations that we hope to see in the future?
We must pursue reforms that strengthen and democratize unions, build cooperatives and democratic public institutions to rebuild the working-class infrastructure we've lost over the last few decades. We should, at the same time, steadily increase, through government, the sphere of social ownership and democratic control. And we must deliberately create constituencies with a material interest in preserving these gains and pushing further.
Welfare state capitalism can't be our final destination, but at every turn and at every level of governance, socialists will be confronted by a contradiction we must figure out how to overcome: our reliance on the accumulation of private capital to fund the state and provide productive employment for workers.
We might even want to hit the brakes ourselves. Nothing, after all, could be less desirable than a program that produces a socialism that goes too far for capitalism, but not enough for socialism, for a true democratization of the economy.
The broad strategy of what an older tradition called non-reformist reforms — reforms measured not only by the good they do today, but by whether they shift the balance of power and open the door to tomorrow — still seems like our best path out of the bind. But such a strategy only makes sense if we foreground our ultimate destination of socialism.
Today, there's almost no growing left party — I would actually say there is no growing left party, from Die Linke in Germany to La France Insoumise — that systematically articulates socialism as a theory and a practice.
When confronted by the structural dilemma of social democracy in our age, there's no reason to believe that these parties, much less even the Greens in places like here in Australia or in Great Britain, will pursue a program much different from today's ruling Labour parties.
It's worth acknowledging that in practice non-reformist reforms have themselves been used as rhetorical cover for a more comfortable gradualism that we should reject on a few different grounds.
For one, even if there is a social democratic road toward a post-capitalist socialism, even if the relatively patient sequence that I just described is the right one, we can't get around the question of rupture. At some point in that sequence, there has to be a definitive break with capitalist property relations, a point at which the decisive productive wealth of a society passes out of private hands.
You can't reach the abolition of class by an indefinite series of small adjustments trying to tilt the playing field against capital. At some point there needs to be a big change that requires popular support and extra-parliamentary mobilization to bring about, and this change would obviously happen at considerable risk to the stability of any democratic socialist government.
The old image — and we can find this in the old text from the left wing of social democracy, from the Gramscian traditions of left Eurocommunism — is of the workers' movement slowly surrounding the fortress of capital. You dig your trenches, you build your moats, you build your siege engines, you encircle the citadel with your counter-institutions. And then one day, the war position is won and the fortress falls.
The problem with that analogy is that the fortress is not standing still. Capital isn't a castle, it's a dynamic foe. While we're patiently digging our trenches, it's restructuring production, it's moving offshore, it's automating our most militant trade union sectors, it's capturing our institutions, it's splitting our coalition, and it's changing the very ground in which we're organizing.
The longer the transition to socialism is drawn out, the stronger the capitalist counteroffensive will be and the more exhausted the workers' movement will be. And in the context of exhaustion and the need to institutionalize victories, the greater the pressures of bureaucratization will be.
I want to briefly touch on this question of bureaucratization because I think it's easy in certain traditions to treat it as simply a moral failing or a story of good radicals kind of going soft or, you know, bad leaders who sell out of a struggle that could be won.
But more often than not, the process comes out of something necessary: the need to consolidate a victory, to make a gain permanent, to institutionalize the lessons of struggle so they don't have to be relearned by the next generation. We obviously can't keep our militants mobilized forever at kind of frantic levels.
The problem is that the very apparatus built to defend yesterday's victories develops an interest in not risking that victory on tomorrow's kind of totally uncertain demands. The party machine that protects a gain will begin to ossify around it.
And then even the radical trade union leadership that delivered a contract through a strike eventually grows comfortable administering that contract. You know, I actually don't have a real answer to this problem other than we should understand it, anticipate it, not moralize around it, and then build in kind of the pressure to keep momentum in our struggle for socialism.
But what this means broadly is that we need two things at once in productive tension. We need a free extra-parliamentary class movement: tenant organizations, workplace committees, struggles against oppression, and other institutions of a politicized working class.
And we need a democratic socialist party that generally aims to govern while governing on a basis of a clear socialist program, an explicit program of transition.
If that all sounds fanciful, it's because we're very far away from socialism. I don't want to pretend otherwise, even if you would let me. But the distance between where we stand and the society I'm describing is obviously enormous. It's not one or two good election cycles away.
But even when sort of being aware of this present weakness and our relative lack of rootedness in the class itself, we have no honest choice but to keep rupture in view.
If what we want is merely a more humane capitalism, then fine. Of course, we can lower our sights and join the center-left and hopefully keep the far right at bay. Should be, you know, not the worst of all possible worlds.
But if we actually believe in our bones, not just in a kinder society, but in a society that rids itself of exploitation and oppression, then a humanized capitalism can't be our destination.
And if we can't shake that belief in socialism, we have to refuse both the dead end of nostalgic social democracy and the dead end of sectarian politics and try to construct a mass socialist politics of governance, transition, and rupture.
Which brings me to the last and most important thing, because everything I've just said about strategy assumes something we're no longer entitled to assume, which is that the people we're trying to win over will actually believe that a socialism could work.
The lesson of the 20th century told many people, not through just capitalist propaganda alone, but through real historical experience, that the disparate varieties of socialism had failed in one way or another.
Social democracy ground to a halt. It hit the contradiction we discussed earlier: the standoff between an empowered labor movement and a capitalist class that still controlled investment. And when growth slowed, Social Democrats felt they had no choice but to beat a retreat.
Centrally planned state socialism, for its part, collapsed far more dramatically. And it didn't collapse only because of political repression or the arms race or Western subversion. It collapsed because on its own terms it could not deliver the goods.
Any radical democratic socialist party that is serious has to reckon with these failures, and not just at the political level, but at the economic one as well. The administrative planning of state socialism failed for two key reasons.
The first was calculation. Gosplan, the Soviet planning agency, was responsible for coordinating an economy that included almost 50,000 factories, 26,000 construction enterprises, 47,000 farming units, 260,000 service establishments, and more than 1 million retail shops, producing some 12 million distinct products, each of which required the right inputs from the right suppliers at the right locations and at the right timelines, with supply chains stretching across 11 time zones.
This meant billions of variables rising into the trillions once you extend the planning horizon across time. The information needed to fully plan a complex economy does not exist in any form that any central authority can gather, no matter what kind of computing power was behind it.
As a result, though the Soviet system was billed and once boasted itself about being a system of rational scientific mastery over the economy, it was really a system caught in a perpetual struggle to keep up with the economy.
Plans were built on incomplete information, revised constantly through bureaucratic bargaining, and patched together by countless informal exchanges, favors, barter, and workarounds that operated alongside the official system. It's actually impossible to imagine the Soviet Union functioning as long as it did without this secret market and without the world market.
These arrangements helped keep the economy running, but they did not solve the underlying problem. Planners still lacked information needed to coordinate production efficiently across the system as a whole. The result was recurring shortages, surpluses of unwanted goods, and a host of inefficiencies that ran throughout the economy.
The second core problem revolved around incentives. Every manager knew next year's targets depended on this year's reported output, so they lowballed their capacity,
hoarded labor and materials, and lied. Weak firms were never allowed to fail. The soft budget constraint, as the Hungarian economist Janos Kornai named it, they were never allowed to fail because failure meant unemployment and broken supply chains, so inefficiency was never punished and never weeded out. The result was a tremendous waste of human labor and resources and a social economy that did not meet people's social needs.
I've already discussed the impasse of social democracy, one that the Polish socialist Michal Kalecki saw coming back in the 1940s. He pointed out that genuine sustained full employment is politically unstable under capitalism, not economically impossible, but politically unstable. Because when workers no longer fear unemployment, the discipline of the labor market evaporates. The balance of power on the shop floor tilts towards workers. Profits get squeezed, and the capitalist class, which still controls investment, eventually responds to restore discipline and find a route towards renewed profitability.
This is more or less the story of the 1970s. And combined with the rational interests of workers in preserving their employment and thus the profitability of capitalist firms where they work, this is the social democratic impasse in a nutshell. You can't reform your way around this problem while leaving investment in private hands. Simply, if you're a socialist, there's no going back to either model.
The dream of running a whole modern economy by administrative planning cannot and should not be revived. And the dream of transforming capitalism while leaving its owners in command of investment will run into the same wall every time, or likely ground even before those structural limits. Now, if there are problems with the two models of socialism that emerged out of the workers' movement of the 19th century, out of this common wellspring of the parties of the Second International, then we have to start discussing what an alternative would look like.
There's no fixed model, obviously, of what a feasible socialism would look like. But together with my colleague Mike Beggs, who's at the University of Sydney, and Ben Burgess, I have a forthcoming book, The Blueprint, that gets into some of these in depth. Like a good socialist, I'll just tell you some of the ideas. I won't make you buy the book.
For a while, when Jacobin was extremely unsuccessful as a publication early on, I would actually seed the torrents for Jacobin and contribute to its bootlegging, you know, to create some buzz, you know, not for any deep belief in, you know, the sort of free economy or whatever, but a socialism of the 21st century has to do two things at once that sound contradictory.
It has to abolish market dependence, that condition in which your very survival hinges on succeeding in the market, while preserving markets as a tool for coordinating a complex economy. We need some markets, but we don't need any capitalists, and we want to harness those markets without being mastered by them.
In practice, this means decommodifying the basic infrastructure of human life. Things like health, education, transport, energy, housing, and telecommunication. These should not be rationed by price, but should be provided as a matter of need, because organizing them through profit-seeking firms is both less just and often, relatedly, less efficient.
And then, in the broader economy of goods and services, of ordinary goods and services, markets, I would argue, can be great tools for socialism, with prices carrying information about what's scarce and what's wanted. But the firms in that economy, in that market sector, must be controlled by people who work in them, not by outside shareholders or private capitalists.
Governance should attach to participation, not to financial stake, and membership in a firm should be akin to membership in a political community, with voice and vote, which can't be bought and sold. The post-tax surplus those labor-managed firms generate is controlled by people who produce it. But investment is not left to individual firms and is instead socialized.
This is done through a system of public banks accountable to a democratic state that holds society's productive wealth in common and lends it out productively. Now, I've used the word productively two too many times in that sentence. If you had a system with worker ownership and not worker control, among other problems, you would have to deal with distortions arising from workers seeking out capital-intensive sectors with the highest dividends to work.
The job market would be a different sort of lottery. No one would want to work in the state sector or work in a daycare clinic or something like that. In this version of socialism, though, the firms are still given extensive autonomy within regulated markets. Inefficient firms are allowed to fail by being out-competed by their peers as a key feature of this system, because meeting people's needs with goods and services effectively is a good thing.
And at a more philosophical level, wasting human labor power through inefficiency is something egalitarians should refuse to tolerate. To help further keep a socialist system both highly productive and egalitarian, we could use wage benchmarks and rates defined by occupation that establish a floor reflecting collective priorities about dignity and skill and contribution, rather than letting local bargaining power set the price of a human hour.
This obviously has some echoes in the old system of centralized wage fixing and in the operative effects of centralized wage bargaining in Sweden at the height of social democracy. Wage minimums create stability for worker managers since they're not entirely dependent on dividends from firm profits, and also serves to push the firms onto a high road of development.
A group of worker managers who want to get ahead can't do it by pushing themselves below benchmarks to gain market share. So instead they have to innovate, retrain, reorganize, and find areas to invest in. The economy is steered then towards rewarding technological advances and new production techniques rather than sweating out cheap labor.
Of course, the point of all that productivity is not productivity for its own sake. The point of a dynamic socialist economy is to convert that dynamic economy into shorter hours, longer lives, and more time outside production. In other words, it would remove exploitation and domination from our economic activity and then use that economic activity to produce more freedom for people to decide how to spend the one life that they have.
The workers who marched in the city in the 1850s were not asking for a marginally better deal. When they demanded the 8-hour day, they were asserting that a worker is not merely an instrument of production, but a full human being entitled to all that life had to offer. That demand is the whole of socialism in miniature. It is the demand that people be authors of their lives rather than tools in someone else's accumulation.
We are very far from socialism. But what we cannot do and survive as a socialist movement worth its name is lower our horizon to adapt to our present weakness. Thank you.
Well, first of all, again, thank you for having me here. When I first came to Melbourne, when was this? 2017, 2018? I don't remember. But after basically a 20, 25-hour plane ride, because I actually did Charlotte to New York to Abu Dhabi to Sydney to Melbourne, and someone looked at my itinerary and it was the worst they've ever seen. The very first place I was brought was here. And so I think it is a world, it should be a world heritage site.
Sounds like a good Nation article. Maybe we get advocated for it to get support across the Atlantic Pacific. But yeah, I do hope that when we think about the goal of the trade union movement, I think we also have to just think about the different sort of trade union movements we have and what we're trying to build, because every single compromise made by the trade union movement has been a rational compromise.
So I think it's on us, for those of us on the left who want to have socialism, who want to have a more radical movement. Part of it is creating the alternatives that allow, in the conditions, more leftward paths. And also just in general, making collective action a more viable option for workers. Because if you're a worker struggling to get by in an era of generally weak union organizing, collective action is not the most rational way to get by.
The rational way to get by might be your kinship networks, might be turning to your family, your immigrant community, it might be taking a second job, it might be, you know, doing all sorts of stuff. I think if we start from the starting point that there's not a problem with the consciousness of workers, and we start with the starting point of the conditions that make it not particularly rational at all times to fight back, then I think we have a much clearer mission about recreating these infrastructures of dissent, which obviously this hall and your work is an important part of.
Though I do hope we will have trade unions under socialism, but for the public sector, you know, it might be unnecessary where there's worker-owned and worker-managed firms. So hopefully that won't take 150 years, but, you know, people are living longer and longer every day. Like, I'm, you know, I'm, as soon as I get back to the US, I already have a whole diet plan because I've been fed too much in this country.
So what's interesting about Zohran Mamdani is that he's actually a socialist. And I mean this in the sense that, of course, there's many great national figures in the US, some of whom are members of the Democratic Socialists of America, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib. There's a lot of people who are part of our movement, are generally committed to a more just country.
But they came across the Democratic Socialists of America when they were running for office or thinking about running for office, and we provided a volunteer corps for some of their campaigns, and also they broadly affiliate with the tradition because they're so fed up with the way the Democratic Party operates. And of course I welcome all those people in the Democratic Socialists of America, and particularly our prominent politicians.
Often when there's sectarian arguments about, you know, AOC did this or that, you know, and she's not responding to party discipline, I often think that this is the equivalent of the most famous athlete in the world just deciding to wear your brand's jersey. Like LeBron James all of a sudden deciding to wear Reebok, and Reebok getting really angry at it, like, we don't have a contract with him.
With Zohran, though, he really was a DSA organizer. He was politicized by the organization. He was involved with some of our campaigns. He helped organize actually failed campaigns. Maybe he wasn't that good as an organizer, but he was where he was miscast, I think ultimately. I mean, he engaged in political education. If you listen to that talk, which I hope he does not have time for, I'm sure he would recognize glories and non-reformist reforms. Like, that's his level of background.
But ultimately he's going to have to govern as a social democrat. Obviously the campaign around affordability has produced thousands of new members to DSA. By the end of the year we might have 16, 17,000 members of a socialist organization in one city. Obviously a very big city, but one city. He still comes to membership meetings.
Obviously there's a level of performance to it. And these are, you know, closed meetings. I won't get into the nature of his interventions, but he stands in stack, which I always find nice. You know, normally we let him go to the middle of the stack, but he'll at least stand for 20 minutes waiting to talk. You know, there's still that level of his connection to an organization at a deep, deep level. But ultimately his program is a program of progressive governance.
First thing we did, we did, you know, the social movement did when taking office in New York was we figured out a way to balance the budget without cutting services. We found ways to find funding for affordable child care. We're finding ways to build more public housing units in ways that are relatively controversial. Actually, mirror maybe some of the debates about how you use public land and the role of kind of mixed development in which we're creating more public housing units than existed before, but there's also going to be some private development on that land, you know, which I think has parallels to some debates here.
I have chatted with, in the context of an interview, not my social life, for better or worse, with a housing developer who joked that the socialists are actually probably the lesser evil for him now. He realized only after being vehemently against Zohran Mamdani, because the Cuomo coalition and the conservative Democrats' coalition were small homeowners in South Brooklyn and Staten Island that refused any development or up-zoning, whereas like we're reasonable with housing construction and it's better to kind of give a chunk of this housing to affordable housing or whatever than to just not be able to build.
So these are all essentially good social democratic governance. And I think that the way Zohran is often criticized is in a very like moralistic way. Like he's not using the same rhetoric that he used to use on Israel-Palestine. He didn't fire the police commissioner. He didn't do this or that. And like it's almost at the level of like is he staying pure at a moral level?
What I would actually rather push him on is, is he doing things that cost nothing but indicate a difference between socialist governance and progressive governance? So, obviously our base, our Democratic Socialist base in New York City is generally just young workers and young white-collar workers disproportionately. But in a place like Jackson Heights, Queens, we have hundreds and hundreds of very politicized like taxi drivers and other blue-collar workers mixing in with this kind of younger base.
Can Zohran call a constituent assembly in that area? And can that be relatively unstructured other than the topic of discussion being, 'How can we mobilize to help Zohran fulfill his affordability agenda?' What would it mean to kind of further institutionalize these popular assemblies? On what basis should they be organized? Perhaps there could be some organized by different trades and so on.
What can we do at the level of the city to encourage the creation of worker cooperatives? We have already a city small business administration that can offer close to prime interest rates for certain enterprises. Could we not offer those rates to people forming worker cooperatives? Could we not advocate in bankruptcy for workers to have the right of first refusal when firms are being restructured?
Zohran has actually recently, in the last week or so, spoken at, you know, he keeps going to these radical tenant protests and he's threatening landlords who have racked up thousands and thousands of dollars in fines to the city that if they don't fix their ways and serve their tenants, their buildings could be expropriated. To me, that is a different type of rhetoric and governance and does point to something different from good center-left governance to something more radical.
But I think where I differ from some of my fellow radical socialists is that I think there's a real importance in the good center-left governance. You know, I worry about things like capital flight from the city. I think about, you know, the tax base of the city and the delicate balancing act that Zohran has to do. And again, I do think as we pursue a radical politics of transition and eventually rupture at the national level, we have to be wary of all these questions and dilemmas.
