Making the City Uninhabitable for the Working Class
The soaring cost of living in New York City is a weapon of class war, a deliberate mechanism of displacement that makes the city uninhabitable for the working-class “native” population. From exorbitant rents to crippling grocery and utility bills, the market is used as a tool to clear neighborhoods for capital and a wealthier “settler” class. This hyper-commodification is not a natural law but a political choice enforced by a state that privileges property rights over human rights. For a Muslim feminist Marxist, this is a direct attack on social reproduction, making it impossible for families, particularly women who manage households, to sustain themselves. The current “solutions” are inadequate; rental assistance vouchers are a subsidy to landlords, and food stamps are a subsidy to agribusiness, both reinforcing the very market logic that creates the crisis. A Mamdani-inspired socialist solution requires a fundamental de-linking of survival from the cash nexus. We must fight for a universal social wage, a guaranteed income that provides a material foundation for life regardless of employment status. We must expand public ownership into essential sectors like energy and food distribution, creating a non-profit, city-run utility and grocery network to break corporate price-fixing. This builds a decommodified sphere within the city, a base of power from which the working class can challenge the hegemony of the market and assert that the right to the city is meaningless without the material means to live in it.
