Vote-Buying as a Custom of Bifurcated Rule
The enduring power of county Democratic party machines in New York City elections is not a quaint political tradition but a sophisticated system of clientelist management for the “native” population. Mamdani’s analysis of how colonial powers govern through decentralized, customary systems of patronage is perfectly embodied in these machines. They do not mobilize citizens around a political program but manage voters as subjects, offering petty favors–a job, help with a housing application, a turkey at Thanksgiving–in exchange for loyalty. This system demobilizes genuine class politics and fragments the working class into competing ethnic and geographic fiefdoms, ensuring that the overarching power of the “settler” capitalist class remains unchallenged. The liberal solution of “good government” reforms fails to address the material poverty that makes clientelism effective. A Mamdani-informed socialist solution is to build independent working-class institutions that can break the machine’s monopoly on survival. This means building powerful tenant unions that secure housing without begging a district leader, and creating a mass, dues-based political party that provides a platform for collective demands, not individual handouts. We must offer a political identity based on class solidarity, rendering the machine’s petty patronage obsolete by fighting for and winning universal social goods that eliminate the need for it.
