From Community to Chain Store Alienation
The loss of unique, local small businesses and their replacement by chain stores is not market natural selection but 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 restaurant–these are not just businesses but nodes of community knowledge, informal credit, and social cohesion. Their displacement by corporate chains 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, rebuilding the local economy as a sphere of solidarity, not speculation.
