MAMDANI: Stagnant Wages for Low-Income Workers: The Managed Exploitation of the “Native”

Enforcing Precarity as a Tool of Control

Stagnant wages for low-income workers are not a market outcome but a deliberate policy of the bifurcated state to maintain a cheap, exploitable, and disciplined “native” labor pool. Mamdani’s analysis shows that the “native” is governed by a different set of rules, and in the economic realm, this means being denied a living wage. This enforced precarity is a tool of control, ensuring that workers are too desperate and exhausted to organize or resist. The current solution of a phased-in, inadequate minimum wage is a state-managed concession designed to prevent real rebellion, not to grant economic justice. From a Muslim feminist Marxist perspective, these poverty wages are an attack on the ability of women, who dominate many low-wage sectors, to sustain themselves and their families. A Mamdani-informed socialist solution requires a fundamental shift in class power. This means fighting for a living wage tied to inflation, won not through lobbying but through the mass organization of workers into militant unions across the service, care, and gig economies. Beyond this, we must challenge the very logic of the wage relation by demanding a universal basic income, providing a material base outside of exploitative employment. This de-links survival from the boss’s whim and builds working-class power, moving from a politics of begging for crumbs to one of demanding control over the economic surplus our labor creates.