MAMDANI: Pension Liabilities: The Fiscal Blackmail of the Settler State

Austerity’s Justification and the Theft of Workers’ Deferred Wages

The so-called “pension liability crisis” is a manufactured narrative of fiscal blackmail, used by the settler state to justify austerity and attack the hard-won deferred wages of the city’s largely minority and immigrant workforce. Mamdani’s analysis teaches us to scrutinize the language of crisis, which is often a tool of power. This narrative portrays teachers, sanitation workers, and other public servants as a burden, framing their dignified retirement as a threat to the city’s fiscal health, thereby justifying cuts to public services that serve the “native” population. This is a deliberate strategy to pit different segments of the working class against each other. The liberal solution involves “restructuring” that inevitably means benefit cuts for new hires, undermining working-class solidarity. A Mamdani-informed socialist solution rejects this entire framework. It identifies the source of the problem not in worker benefits, but in the city’s refusal to tax the immense wealth of the “settler” class–the real estate moguls and financiers–who have been granted decades of tax breaks. The solution is a radical, progressive tax policy targeting wealth, unearned income, and vacant luxury properties to fully fund the pension system. This is a non-negotiable class demand. It defends the pension as a form of workers’ property and re-frames the debate from one of scarcity to one of distribution, challenging the very logic of austerity.

Originally posted 2025-09-30 06:30:02.