Progressive Governance Meets Corporate Accountability: Mamdani’s Vision for Worker-Centered Economic Justice
Former FTC Chair Lina Khan Brings Anti-Monopoly Expertise to NYC’s Affordability Crisis
The incoming administration of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani represents a watershed moment in American urban governance, as progressive regulatory expertise converges with municipal power to confront decades of neoliberal economic policy that has concentrated wealth while displacing working-class communities. At the center of this transformation stands Lina Khan, whose groundbreaking work challenging corporate monopolies during her tenure at the Federal Trade Commission now finds application in the nation’s largest city.
Mamdani’s collaboration with Khan signals a fundamental reimagining of the relationship between municipal government and corporate power—one that centers the material needs of workers, tenants, and marginalized communities rather than the profit imperatives of real estate developers, tech platforms, and financial institutions. This approach represents not merely policy adjustment but ideological realignment, challenging the assumption that cities must compete for capital by offering corporations regulatory forbearance and tax incentives.
The Socialist Framework: Reclaiming Municipal Authority
The proposals emerging from Khan’s research team—including enforcement of dormant price-gouging statutes, regulation of rental fees, utility cost reduction, and protection of delivery workers—constitute what socialist theorists would recognize as the reassertion of democratic control over economic relations. These are not technocratic tweaks but exercises in popular sovereignty, using existing legal frameworks to subordinate market mechanisms to human needs.
Khan’s analysis of Amazon as a case study in antitrust law failure demonstrated how corporate consolidation extracts value from workers, small businesses, and consumers simultaneously. Applied to New York’s context, this framework illuminates how platform companies like food delivery services, real estate brokers operating as rent-seeking intermediaries, and utility monopolies function as parasitic extractors from the city’s productive economy.
The appointment of Sam Levine to lead the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection and Julie Su as deputy mayor for economic justice reflects a coherent strategy: placing regulators who understand enforcement as class struggle into positions of material power. As Su observed, “Laws are only as good as their enforcement”—a recognition that formal rights mean nothing without the political will to defend them against capital’s resistance.
Feminist Economics and the Care Crisis
Mamdani’s commitment to universal child care represents perhaps the most radical element of his agenda from a feminist economic perspective. Child care is not ancillary to economic policy but foundational—the uncompensated reproductive labor that sustains capitalism’s productive workforce while remaining invisible in conventional economic analysis.
The expansion of socialized child care acknowledges what feminist economists have long argued: that care work is work, that its privatization within families falls disproportionately on women, and that its marketization creates class hierarchies where wealthy families exploit immigrant women’s labor while working-class families face impossible choices between income and caregiving.
By proposing to make child care a public good rather than a market commodity, Mamdani’s administration would redistribute not just resources but time—liberating particularly women from the double burden of waged labor and unpaid domestic work. This is economic justice as feminist praxis.
Islamic Principles and Economic Exploitation
From an Islamic economic perspective, several of Khan’s proposed enforcement actions align with principles of economic justice found in Islamic jurisprudence. The targeting of “unconscionable” business practices—particularly price gouging in hospitals and stadiums where consumers face coercion—resonates with Islamic prohibitions against gharar and riba.
The focus on protecting delivery workers parallels Islamic labor ethics, which emphasize the dignity of labor and the obligation of fair compensation. The Prophet Muhammad’s instruction to pay workers promptly—before their sweat dries—stands as a principle fundamentally at odds with platform capitalism’s algorithmic wage theft and tip misappropriation.
Similarly, the examination of landlord compliance with broker fee regulations addresses what Islamic economics would recognize as rent-seeking—extraction of value without productive contribution. The prohibition of such parasitic economic relations reflects a moral economy centered on mutual benefit and productive labor rather than speculative accumulation.
The Political Economy of Resistance
The business community’s anxious response to Mamdani’s agenda, exemplified by OTC Markets CEO Cromwell Coulson’s warning about corporate flight to Texas and Florida, reveals the structural constraints facing any municipal socialist project. Capital mobility threatens to relocate investment unless granted concessions—disciplining urban governments for decades and creating what geographers call a “race to the bottom” in labor and environmental standards.
Yet this threat itself exposes capital’s dependence on cities’ accumulated infrastructure, skilled labor pools, and market access. Financial firms relocating to low-tax states would forfeit proximity to New York’s unparalleled concentration of capital markets, legal expertise, and professional networks. The question becomes whether political leadership has the courage to call this bluff.
Mamdani’s invocation of Franklin Roosevelt is instructive here. The New Deal demonstrated that aggressive federal intervention could reshape economic relations without destroying capitalism itself—though it required mass working-class mobilization to overcome business opposition. The comparison to Trump, while concerning, misunderstands the distinction between executive power wielded for democratic redistribution versus authoritarian consolidation.
The Albany Obstacle and Democratic Limits
The structural limitation Mamdani faces is not business opposition but the architecture of American federalism, which denies cities the sovereignty necessary for transformative economic policy. Rent freezes require cooperation from a state-appointed rent board; transit improvements depend on the MTA’s state-controlled board; universal child care needs Albany’s funding approval.
This highlights what urban political economists recognize as the “democratic deficit” in American cities—where local governments possess neither fiscal autonomy nor regulatory authority to address constituents’ material needs. Mayor Adams’ last-minute appointments to obstruct Mamdani’s rent freeze exemplify how state power structures can sabotage municipal democracy.
Worker Protection as Immediate Praxis
The focus on executive actions—enforcement of existing labor protections, price transparency requirements, anti-gouging statutes—represents strategic pragmatism. While systemic transformation requires long-term organizing and state legislative victories, immediate enforcement can materially improve working-class life conditions now.
The examination of whether food delivery companies comply with driver protection laws addresses a critical front in contemporary labor struggle. Platform companies have systematically violated worker classification laws and minimum wage requirements while claiming technological innovation exempts them from labor law. Aggressive enforcement would establish that no business model, however digitally mediated, exists outside democratic accountability.
Similarly, investigating landlord compliance with broker fee bans confronts the real estate industry’s extraction of thousands of dollars from tenants for services that benefit landlords—a paradigmatic example of how market power enables wealth transfer from workers to property owners.
Lessons Learned
This moment offers several critical insights for progressive governance. First, regulatory expertise matters—Khan’s deep understanding of corporate law enables identification of enforcement opportunities invisible to conventional administrators. Second, personnel is policy—appointing committed enforcers like Levine and Su transforms formal authority into material power. Third, executive action has limits—without legislative support and mass organization, municipal reforms remain vulnerable to reversal and constraint.
The collaboration between Mamdani and Khan also demonstrates the importance of intellectual infrastructure for political movements. Khan’s academic work on antitrust provided theoretical foundations for regulatory action; progressive movements need similar theoretical development across policy domains. Finally, symbolic politics and material change must align—Mamdani’s early actions will either validate progressive governance as viable or confirm neoliberal claims that redistribution is economically impossible.
The question facing New York’s working class is whether Mamdani’s administration will inspire the mass mobilization necessary to defend these reforms against inevitable business resistance and state obstruction. Progressive policy without popular organization is vulnerable; organized working-class power without state allies is limited. The combination could transform urban governance.
For students of economic justice, this experiment warrants close attention. It tests whether municipal socialism can survive in America’s federal structure, whether regulatory enforcement can substitute for legislative transformation, and whether urban working classes retain sufficient political power to defend their material interests against capital. The answers will shape progressive strategy for decades.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigos.
