More On The Alliance Between The Upper Class And Marx's Lumpenproletariat
As things have been falling out in the 21st century, it see3ms to me that Marx's Lumpenroletariat has expanded beyond street criminals and other traditional riff-raff to include the homeless, whose ranks have been swelled by the easy availability of addictive drugs; illegal migrants; and sexual deviants, who form a powewrful interest group. This certainly seems to be the group whose electoral power gave Zohran Mamdani the victory in New York's mayoral election, which the writer at the link says is a major defeat for the middle class:
It’s Election Day in New York, and Zohran Mamdani, the socialist assemblyman from Queens, is almost certainly going to be the next mayor. But on his home turf, residents are terrified of the policies he supports.
Among those policies is Local Law 97, which will require over 50,000 buildings to reduce emissions 40% by 2030 and 80% by 2050. For large buildings, full compliance requires full electrification and millions of dollars in renovations. The alternative is to pay hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in annual penalties.
. . . The law “is an existential threat for New York’s co-op and condo owners,” former New York Lieutenant Governor and Save NYC cofounder Betsy McCaughey said. “It will massively increase the costs for them to keep their home, while endangering the solvency of their homeowners’ associations. It may ultimately trap them from being able to sell their apartments as the market crashes and liens are placed against their developments for the unpaid conversion costs.”
. . . On the eve of the election, 150 Queens residents gathered in the courtyard of Glen Oaks Village to oppose Local Law 97. Undeterred by the chilly, overcast weather, they warned their fellow New Yorkers that the radical climate policy could force them out of their homes.
One of the speakers was Alicia Fernandez, the treasurer of a 726-unit apartment building in Mamdani’s state assembly district. “We had a full feasibility study done for our building, and the costs came to 60 million dollars for our 726 apartments. That is $60,000 per one-bedroom and over $125,000 for our three-bedroom units.”
Condo and co-op owners know that expenses like that mean assessments from the homeowners' association, which are burdensome enough just to maintain the building, leaving aside the cost of such extravagant upgrades. Past a certain point, if residents can't afford the assessments, they have to sell their units and move. But if assessments for environmental upgrades put the cost of units out of reach for potential buyers, it will be impossible for current owners to sell their units.
Glen Oaks, a middle-class apartment complex with 2,904 units and over 10,000 shareholders, is representative of the hundreds of thousands of residents facing this crisis. Bob Friedrich, the president of Glen Oaks, has been speaking out on behalf of his shareholders since Local Law 97 was first drafted in 2019.
“[Our buildings] remain the last stronghold of affordable middle-class homeownership,” said Friedrich, noting that Local Law 97 “threatens that affordability.”
The end game in this situation would likely be that, with the market for condo and co-op units destroyed, the homeowners' associations would be forced into bankruptcy, and in some way or other, the city would seize the units. At that point, the current owners would be forced out, and the city, Zohran Mamdani, mayor, would be in a position to redistribute the property, which would go to the Lumpenproletariat, his supporters. The problem there is that a great many of the co-op owners, while they might be sociologically "middle class", are actually unionized workers, part of the traditional working class. The link continues,
Like his ally, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Mamdani loves stoking conflict between the rich and the poor, the landlords and the tenants. He presents New York City as a town of the haves and have-nots, and that narrative has propelled him to the national spotlight.
But it’s an incomplete picture. While progressive politicians love to present New York City as a town of the ultra-rich and ultra-poor, there are several neighborhoods — many of them in the outer boroughs Mamdani represents — where a middle class has been able to thrive. Members of that middle class say that Local Law 97, and politicians like Mamdani, hurt them by misrepresenting their concerns and ignoring their existence.
This isn't a bug, it's a feature. It's relatred to the proposal to tax unrealized capital gains that surfaced during the 2024 presidential campaign.
While a “Kamala Harris unrealized capital gains tax” proposal made the rounds during the lead-up to the 2024 election, it was initially suggested by former President Biden. Vice President Harris signed off on the proposal, and it later became a discussion topic during her presidential campaign, although she did not publicly address it.
What are unrealized capital gains tax rates? The proposal would have imposed a 25% minimum income tax on unrealized capital gains for taxpayers with a net worth exceeding $100 million.
That might sound like it would impact only the very rich, but the amount it would raise would probably be trivial in comparison to total government spending. The inevitable solution would be to lower the net worth threshold until it hit the middle class, where in fact we see the big bonanza: home equity. Levying an unrealized capital gains tax on home equity would result in an enormous one-time tax bill for middle-class homeowners that would force a massive sale of homes to meet it.The reuslt would be a destruction of the middle-class housing market and the socialization of increasing swaths of real estate. The wealthy upper class would have devised ways to shelter themselves from this, while it wouid give the government the ability to redistribute residential real estate, which would in effect allow the government to award it to the underclass at the expense of the bankupted working and middle classes.
This is what the diagram at the top of this post omits: while the underclass is represented there as the bottom of the loser hierarchy, notice how the suburban and provincial middle class are both in a position of being squeezed out by those at the top of the diagonal winnmer-loser line-- but the diagram also creates an artificial distinction in a "diploma divide" between the middle and working classes, which as a practical matter is fast disappearing. College degrees are increaingly worthless.
The fact is that the traditional middle and working classes are merging, and they risk being squeezed out together between the financial elites, the professional class, and the underclass, an updated version of Marx's Lumpenproletariat. The ultimate problem is what Marx saw; the underclass is simply not a realiable ally, not of the working class, which Marx fully understood, nor in fact of any other class. This is the big mistake the upper class is making.
The upper class, or at least some of it, is still trying to bargain with the specter of a world proletarian revolution, or a more recent variation, the "helter skelter" race war. Via Fabian socialism, its strategy had been to temporize with the demands of the working class to forestall the revolution. The result of this policy over two centuries has been to create a de facto alliance between the middle and working classes. But at some point, the upper-class objective changed to temporizing with the Lumpenproletariat, an entirely different matter.
The Lumpenproletariat is not a reliable ally. This is the upper class's big mistake. The current leftists who affect a Marxist-Leninist outlook are simply not Marxists; they're agents of the upper class.
