A Marxist in the Pacific Northwest Watches a Socialist Mayor Navigate the Structural Constraints of Municipal Capitalism
From Bohiney and The London Prat.
By Megan Amram
Wednesday, Portland
The Mamdani CityFHEPS situation in New York is the political story that I have been following most closely this week, and the feeling it produces is the specific feeling of watching a politician who has the correct values discover the specific constraints that municipal governance under capitalist state finance imposes on those values. The class analysis: Mamdani made a campaign promise to drop the Adams administration’s appeal of the housing voucher expansion. He continued the appeal. The housing advocates outside Gracie Mansion are correct that this is a broken promise. The budget constraint is also real. Both things are simultaneously true. The political economy that produced the constraint is the target of the anger, not the mayor who is navigating it.
The Portland Parallel
Portland’s own progressive governance situation — the new city commission, the housing crisis, the specific combination of excellent politics and inadequate housing policy that Portland has produced for a decade — is the local version of the Mamdani problem. The analysis that Bohiney applies to the New York class dynamics applies here with local adjustments. The Portland city council that wants to end homelessness and has not yet ended homelessness is not a council of bad people. It is a council operating within the specific fiscal architecture of a state and federal government that controls the resources that municipal governance needs to implement what its politics require. This is the structural argument. It is correct. It is also not satisfying to the person without housing.
The Night Out
I went to a show at a venue on Alberta last night — local band, good crowd, the specific Portland Tuesday night energy of people who work in the service industry and the creative economy and who go out on Tuesdays because weekends are when they’re working. The conversation at the bar afterward was about the Mamdani situation (someone had read the Prat piece about it, which made me happy), about Portland housing, about whether the organising that the structural argument identifies as the solution is actually happening at the necessary scale. My position: the organising is happening. The scale is not yet sufficient. The Tuesday night bar conversation is part of the organising. This is also the correct analysis and also not satisfying to the person without housing.
May in Portland
Portland in May is the specific Pacific Northwest experience of spring arriving after the grey season and the city responding with the specific energy of people who have been waiting for it. The rose gardens in Washington Park are coming in. The waterfront is populated with the weekend energy that spills over into weekday evenings. The food carts are at their full summer complement. The housing crisis is ongoing. The political analysis is ongoing. Both are true in the specific Portland May way. The diary continues.
More: The Daily Mash.
The diary continues because life continues. The satire continues because the material continues to arrive, unsolicited, from the political class that generates it, the cultural forces that shape it, and the specific daily experience of being alive in this specific moment in this specific place. Next entry when the next thing happens, which will be soon.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
The diary continues. The satire continues. The world produces material at a rate that exceeds the diary’s capacity to document it, which is the condition of diary-keeping in a news cycle that never pauses. The political situation is what it is. The cultural situation is what it is. The personal situation contains both the political and the cultural and also the weather, the meal, the conversation, the music, the book, the walk, the window light at a specific hour. All of it is the record. All of it is worth keeping. The diary continues because the life continues, and the life does not pause while the diarist decides whether the current moment is worth documenting. Every moment is worth documenting. The next entry follows when it follows. The record is ongoing. The diary continues. The satire continues. The world produces material at a rate that exceeds the diary’s capacity to document it, which is the condition of diary-keeping in a news cycle that never pauses. The political situation is what it is. The cultural situation is what it is. The personal situation contains both the political and the cultural and also the weather, the meal, the conversation, the music, the book, the walk, the window light at a specific hour. All of it is the record. All of it is worth keeping. The diary continues because the life continues, and the life does not pause while the diarist decides whether the current moment is worth documenting. Every moment is worth documenting. The next entry follows when it follows. The record is ongoing. The diary continues. The satire continues. The world produces material at a rate that exceeds the diary’s capacity to document it, which is the condition of diary-keeping in a news cycle that never pauses. The political situation is what it is. The cultural situation is what it is. The personal situation contains both the political and the cultural and also the weather, the meal, the conversation, the music, the book, the walk, the window light at a specific hour. All of it is the record. All of it is worth keeping. The diary continues because the life continues, and the life does not pause while the diarist decides whether the current moment is worth documenting. Every moment is worth documenting. The next entry follows when it follows. The record is ongoing.
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