When new elected officials were sworn in last week and began work in Albany, New York state has a total of eight Socialists in its Assembly and Senate — more Socialist representation than any other state in the country and more than New York has seen in over a century .
This year, the legislative group calling itself the Socialists in Office has ambitious plans, building on recent legislative gains by the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA).
The newcomers are Kristen Gonzalez, a 27-year-old Queens-born tech worker and community organizer, on the state Senate, and Sarahana Shrestha, a Nepali immigrant and climate activist in the Hudson Valley, on the assembly.
Shrestha and Gonzalez will join an existing roster of six socialists, all of whom have been endorsed by NYC-DSA. They have pledged to work closely with the organization – and each other – to align legislative priorities with the organization’s campaigns.
The six socialist lawmakers who made up the DSA’s roster are relatively new to the government. North Brooklyn’s Julia Salazar was elected to the state Senate in 2018 — the same year Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won an angry victory over the longtime leader of the Queens Democratic Party, and a cabal of conservative Democrats was ousted by the state government’s progressives. Jabari Brisport was elected to the Senate from Central Brooklyn in 2020, and that same year Marcela Mitaynes of Sunset Park, Emily Gallagher of Greenpoint, Zohran Mamdani of Astoria and Phara Souffrant Forrest of Crown Heights joined the assembly.
For a small group of neophytes, the socialists have punched above their weight. Each has their own specific legislative successes: in 2019, for example, Salazar played a pivotal role in the largest expansion of renters’ rights in decades, and in 2021 Souffrant Forrest introduced — and passed — probation reform legislation. Their biggest victory as a group came in 2021, when the DSA, in coalition with other organizations, ran a grassroots “tax the rich” campaign. At a time when many New Yorkers were facing drastic budget cuts, lawmakers managed to save many vital public services from the austerity ax.
This time the socialist list – and the DSA – want to get bigger. With the 2021 Tax the Rich campaign, “we stopped the era of austerity,” said Harrison Carpenter-Neuhaus, spokesman for NYC-DSA’s Tax the Rich campaign. “Now we fight for an era of plenty.”
Socialist elected officials — backed by members bringing in neighbors and knocking on doors to persuade neighbors to pressure their peers — aim to tax the rich again, this time to rake in $40 billion in new revenue to fund an exciting array of much-needed public goods. When asked about the priorities for the year this week, Gonzalez told me, “As part of the Socialist faction in office, our priority is to materially improve the conditions of the working class.”
To that end, the Socialists are pushing for huge investments in mass transit to increase frequency and fund necessary repairs and make buses free. A robust organizing campaign around a series of bills called “Fix the MTA” is already bringing in people who have never been involved with DSA before.
While this campaign focuses on the city, Shrestha is also working to bring more public transportation to the Hudson Valley. When I met her this week, she told me that gas prices are one of the top concerns in her district and her constituents, particularly seniors, have expressed a keen interest in public transport as a solution. Local transport in the area is currently unreliable and doesn’t reach most people at all: “Me, for example,” she laughs. “I would love to be able to take it to work.”
This year’s Tax the Rich proceeds would also fund a New Deal for CUNY and SUNY, the public universities of New York City and the state, respectively, making them tuition-free; universal child care (a particular priority for Brisport, which has worked with organizers and legislators across the state to champion this essential service that benefits parents around the world); and social housing modeled on the Vienna system, which is one of the most enduring and successful in history.
In the face of the climate crisis and unsustainably high energy bills for many New Yorkers, the Socialists are also urgently working to get a growing coalition to pass the Build Public Renewables Act, which he says would publicly fund renewable energy and begin laying political and economic fundamentals for public ownership of all utilities.
Socialist elected officials are also working to pass the Good Cause Eviction — a much-needed law that protects renters from losing their homes without good reason — and the New York Health Act, which will create a single-payer health care system in the state would. The latter is an uphill climb, particularly in the face of opposition from major public sector unions, but the idea continues to enjoy legislative and public support
The growing strength of the socialists is taking place in an alarmingly larger context. New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, is pounding the working class with austerity measures, and his scaremongering on urban crime has helped suburban Republicans win big.
The state’s Democratic Party leader Jay Jacobs, more interested in attacking leftists than waging serious campaigns against Republicans, is inexplicably still busy, even after presiding over a gruesome midterm scenario in which New York is the only blue state was suffering from the predicted red wave this year. And Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul is so uninspiring that she nearly lost her liberal-to-moderate constituency to a Republican to Trump’s right.
After Gov. Hochul’s lackluster speech this week, the eight elected Socialist state officials released a statement, accusing them of not using their muscles to tax the wealthy and attend to real human needs, but instead “unfunded half.” Measures and non-solutions”. While Hochul maintained that housing was a “human right” and that climate change was the “greatest threat facing our planet,” socialist lawmakers noted that she had no plans to protect renters or create enough housing for working people, nor did she “to commit the revenues or propose the policies needed to recover the energy from the fossil fuel companies.”
As mainstream New York Democrats continue to thrash and deteriorate, battling far-right Republicans, they will create both obstacles and opportunities for socialists. On the one hand, centrist Democrats seem more resistant to compromise with the left, often focusing more on fighting socialists than defeating republicans. But focusing on the problems of the socialists – who, Gonzalez says, are concerned with the material conditions of the working class – might help with the latter as well. Build Public Renewables, for example, is more popular with the public than Governor. Turnout for Shrestha helped Democrat Pat Ryan beat a Republican in a close race for a congressional seat in an overlapping district.
In our conversation, Shrestha pointed out that “affordability isn’t just a Republican issue.” Democrats have allowed Republicans to make the cost of living a talking point. Although the struggle to meet life’s basic necessities – from gas and eggs to rent, college tuition and childcare – is politically more important than any other issue and a matter of survival for millions, neither major party has a real answer.
For socialists, a key part of the answer is socializing the provision of basic human needs: transit, education, health care, childcare, housing, and more. In the short term, when the economy as a whole is under pressure, cost-of-living problems can be alleviated by wealth redistribution: bosses force workers to pay better and tax the rich to socialize as many necessary goods and services as politically possible.
That’s why Shrestha won in the Hudson Valley by explaining how public ownership of utilities – and, in the short term, publicly funded renewable energy – could lower ordinary people’s energy bills while addressing the climate crisis, and that rich people and businesses can afford it could pay for it. This campaign was a model for making politics and shows a way forward for NYC-DSA this year, even in the context of a Republican resurgence.
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