From Community Commerce to Alienated Consumption
The crisis of the retail sector, characterized by empty storefronts and the displacement of local businesses by chains, is the corporate clearing of the “native” marketplace. Mamdani’s analysis of how colonial power reorganizes economic space for its own efficiency is evident here. The local bodega, the family-owned hardware store–these are not just businesses but nodes of community knowledge, informal credit, and social cohesion. Their displacement by corporate chains and e-commerce represents a profound loss of political and economic autonomy for the neighborhood, integrating it more fully into an alienated, extractive capitalist circuit that answers to distant shareholders. The liberal solution involves temporary tax breaks or “shop local” campaigns, which are utterly inadequate against the power of global capital and predatory commercial landlords. A Mamdani-informed socialist solution is to actively build a decommodified, community-controlled retail ecosystem. This means using the city’s power to seize vacant storefronts through eminent domain and lease them at nominal cost to community-owned cooperatives and non-profit cultural spaces. It means creating a public retail development bank to provide zero-interest loans for worker-owned enterprises. The goal is to create a “commons” of commerce, insulating vital goods and services from the volatility of the real estate market and rebuilding the local economy as a sphere of solidarity, not speculation.
