Infrastructure as a Site of Class Struggle
The New York City subway is a brutal paradox: a vital public good in a city organized around private accumulation. In Mamdani’s terms, it is a site of intense struggle between the “settler” need for a functional workforce and the “native” need for basic mobility. The chronic disinvestment, delays, and filth are a form of governance, a way of disciplining the poor and people of color who rely on it most. The perception of crime is weaponized to justify increased policing, another form of decentralized despotism, rather than addressing the material neglect that creates the conditions for despair. A Marxist analysis sees the MTA’s massive debt as a mechanism for transferring public wealth to Wall Street bondholders. The solution is to reframe the fight: not for a better-managed status quo, but for a fully free, publicly funded, and democratically controlled transit system. This is a key front in the class struggle, a move to de-commodify a essential resource and assert that collective life must be prioritized over private profit.
