Old socialism was simple. It came up from the ground. Built by people with tools, lunch pails, and punch clocks. People who knew what work was because they did it, every day, whether they felt like it or not.
That socialism understood the industrial world. It didn’t start with villains. It started with conditions. Wages. Hours. Overtime. Safety. It came out of mills, docks, shops, and lines. It didn’t need slogans because it had contracts. It didn’t need branding because it had unions.
The new socialism left that world behind, of course, this socialsm is built for the second Gilded Age.
For neo-socialists, it’s no longer about the industrial at all. The old figure was the robber baron. A villain, sure, but also a figure tied to industry. A person you could point to. A role you could name. He was connected to how power actually moved.
Now the figure is simpler. The billionaire. The billionaire. The billionaire. Repeated until it replaces thought. They say it more than Trump does.
On paper, the math works. Most Americans don’t make anywhere near a million dollars a year. Taxing millionaires and billionaires more makes sense. The author is fully in favor of that. No hedging. And no, it isn’t punishment. It’s long-overdue correction. For decades, the very top was insulated, sheltered, and indulged. Calling that out isn’t radical. It’s maintenance.
That’s not the argument.
The argument is what gets lost when taxation becomes the whole story. When the billionaire becomes a moral category instead of part of a structure. When a real figure gets flattened into a chant.
Yes, billionaires are real. Elon Musk owns factories, builds cars, moves metal, employs thousands. He’s not imaginary. But neo-socialism doesn’t want complexity. It wants shorthand. A clean silhouette you can organize feelings around without ever talking about work itself.
That’s the substitution.
Labor got replaced with identity. Wages got replaced with language. Organizing got replaced with performance. Politics turned theatrical. A slogan began carrying more weight than a contract.
And this all happens in an age obsessed with language.
An overeducated class built a circus around words and mistook it for progress. Same problems, new labels. Call the same old things by modern names and pretend something changed. It didn’t.
“Latinx” is the perfect example. A word invented by credentialed people, imposed from above, rejected by the people it was supposedly meant to describe. Language talking to itself. Same with the endless rebranding of poverty. “Food deserts.” Then “food insecurity.” Then “food challenges.” Different syllables. Same empty fridge.
Billionaire fits neatly into that language scheme. Not wrong. Incomplete by design. Say it often enough and it replaces analysis. The word does the work so nothing else has to.
That’s not progress. That’s substitution.
When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore a “Tax the Rich” gown to the Met Gala, she wasn’t standing anywhere near the common folk. She was surrounded by wealth, status, and people who treat politics as ambiance. That wasn’t outreach. It was insulation.
When Amazon workers in the tri-state were organizing a union, she was asked to come out and help. She never did. Maybe it didn’t look winnable. Maybe it wasn’t performative enough. Maybe it didn’t fit the moment. Whatever the reason, the campaign went forward without her and was won by a regular worker. No union résumé. No theory language. Just someone on the floor doing the work.
That result says more about modern liberalism than a hundred speeches. The people who talk the loudest about labor often show up the least when labor actually asks for help.
That same posture shows up nowhere more clearly than New York.
Twenty-five years ago, the city absorbed the hipster wave. It didn’t arrive as workers or builders. It arrived as spectators. People detached from the city’s history, industries, and pressures, yet convinced they understood it better than anyone who came before them. They didn’t blend in. They carved it up.
They became the most hated group ever to arrive in New York for simple reasons. In New York terms, they were assholes. And an asshole here has a specific meaning. Someone so removed from the place, its memory, and its work that they move through it like it’s a backdrop. The city becomes a prop. The people become scenery.
Fast-forward and that sensibility is now in power.
The current mayor didn’t win on a working-class groundswell. He won by assembling a new coalition. Educated, middle-class New Yorkers. Urban professionals. People fluent in progressive language and comfortable with abstraction. Socialism softened into something legible and safe for them.
Luck mattered too. He ran against two extremely weak candidates. In a low-expectation race, presentation beats substance. Every time.
Look at the presentation. Cultural capital stacked early. Entertainment. Academia. Connections. The Astoria apartment reads less like necessity than affect. The marriage to an artist fits the pattern.
And those $650 boots at the inauguration? Let’s be clear. Those were not working boots. They were an unconscious statement against themselves. That ain’t struggle, but distance. Honestly, it’s wrong for me to pick on her shoes, and I admit it. However, being an artist, says it all. Those are the most distant from New York history, and every day reality. So, unlike the big spender of city money, the wife of DeBlasio, perhaps Rama Sawaf Duwaji, Yrian-born will enhance things. I hope. I’m still bruised by the forced displacement out of Williamsburg, my home, and the nationality, religion, or or origin of someone doesn’t mean anything. Except when I would meet people who had just moved from, let’s say, Houston, Texas, and on a level of relationship to the great city, they were prunes.
The mayor once styled himself as an aspiring rapper. That says origins. Image-first. Audience-aware. Raised around performance, notably, Mississippi Burning. Not the kind of life where failure costs you a job or your health and future.
The same performance runs through the movement.
When AOC says “my mother cleaned toilets,” it’s shorthand. There’s a difference between cleaning a couple of toilets even, a day, and hauling other people’s mess for 8 hours straight, day in and day out, year after year. i mean i picked other people’s dog shit before i cut their lawns, in weatlhy suburbs. Big fuckin deal, when i sucked done so much toxic shit, for wages, andi shooting the worst sites in America. Big deal. Plenty of people do that work full-time. No applause. No branding. No identity built around it. They just worked.
Posing as a “Bronx girl” doesn’t make it real either. Especially when it turns into performance, like challenging Donald Trump with a line meant for cameras. That wasn’t toughness. That was theater.
Trump doesn’t trade in lines. He uses power. He uses leverage. He pushes through institutions, money, and force. Posturing doesn’t slow that down. It just exposes who’s acting and who isn’t.
That’s the problem. This isn’t solidarity. It’s staging.
Culture followed the same arc.
Woody Guthrie sang for workers. That line ran through the folk explosion of the 1960s. Songs about labor, war, displacement, dignity. Later on, that tradition didn’t vanish, but it shrank. It became a niche. A very small one.
Tracy Chapman lived there. She wrote about working life, leaving town, stalled motion, quiet pressure. No glamour. No slogans. Just people trying to move forward and knowing the cost. Later so did Everlast’s What It’s Like. like i said it’s a niche. So is this site.
And yet even something that marginal still broke through. Fast Car, born in that narrow lane, came roaring back years later when a country star turned it into a massive hit. Same story. Same bones. Different audience.
Meanwhile, the music business consolidated. Six musicians reached billionaire status. Wealth like that doesn’t come from protest songs. It comes from scale, branding, and time. Only one was a baby boomer, with a now, rare social band, and that’s interesting. I’m not talking about liking your disliking persons music here.
It wasn’t Bruce Springsteen’s fault he became fabulously rich. Records sold. Tickets sold. Years stacked up. What mattered was responsibility. Three-hour shows. Sweat on the floor. Night after night. He understood scale not as vanity but as reach. He used the money to carry the message further. Would Woodie Guthrie, Leadbelly, etc., embrace digital? yeah, it’s reach and for a niche artist that’s the opportunity to reach a much longer audience. Some entertainers like to convince and entertain the masses.
Look at the others and the pattern is obvious. Glamour. Excess. Consumption as aspiration. The rebellion ends. The lifestyle begins.
That contrast matters. It shows the difference between staying rooted and drifting upward. Between documentation and display.
Neo-socialism isn’t really about the working class anymore, but It’s too much about signaling, status, and moral performance. It talks endlessly about billionaires while saying almost nothing about work. Labor was the foundation. They pulled it out. What’s left looks radical, sounds righteous, and never quite makes it onto the factory floor, the Amazon warehouses, or Starbucks, who has a growing union “problem” but it’s certainly not like the generational facory floor where people stayed all their lives, and their children did as well.
Not to mention the strong relationship between art and gentrification as it shows the show perfectly. Williamsburg Brooklyn, where artist and professional media people were attracted to the cheap rent, which didn’t matter because somebody else was paying their way anyways, then they proceeded to ignore one of the most historic working in class neighborhoods in America, and, literally destroy it, by popularizing it. I’m not saying that Mandami is a part of that, he got here at a very early age and experienced the city. I am saying that the same people that gentrified Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and, a host of other neighborhoods, grew up to be tremendous supporters of him, since he was wise enogh to include middle class professionals, who, in New York, might as well be poor according to the expenses.
It is possible to find very reasonable rent and maintenance for apartments in co-ops. It’s well outside of what trends.
I’m also saying that that’s how people outside the poor and working class join a movement in the digital age of disruption and reinvention, and not the organizing, gaining consensus, instituting change that is not talked about much these days. That’s work, not a performance, clever speech writing or banquet-hopping.
Neo-socialism. Still socialism. Different class.