MAMDANI: Home Rule vs. State Control: The Metropolitan vs. The Settler Sovereign

The Limits of Local Power in a Colonial Structure

The constant struggle between New York City and the state government in Albany over control of schools, taxes, and transit is a classic conflict between the metropolitan and the sovereign in a colonial structure. Mamdani’s analysis of indirect rule helps us see that while the city government manages the day-to-day affairs of the “natives,” true sovereign power–the power to tax, to legislate on education, to control major infrastructure–often rests with the distant capital, which represents the broader interests of the “settler” class (upstate landowners, suburbanites, state-wide corporate interests). This arrangement ensures that the radical potential of the city’s majority-minority population is always checked by a whiter, more conservative state government. The liberal solution is to lobby for more “home rule” power, a plea to the sovereign for a slightly longer leash. A Mamdani-informed socialist solution is to build power that renders this colonial structure irrelevant. This means organizing a metropolitan-wide class struggle that unites the city’s working class with allies in upstate and suburban communities around shared demands like a state-wide single-payer healthcare and a millionaires’ tax. It means building such formidable grassroots power–through city-wide rent strikes, transit occupations, and independent political organization–that the city can effectively defy the sovereign state and create facts on the ground, forcing a constitutional crisis that exposes and breaks the colonial relationship.