Crisis & Crackdown
May 14, 2024
Facilitators: Doug, Lee

In this class we will explore the NYC financial fiscal crisis of 1975.There are many explanations of what led up to it: extravagant welfare spending, as the bankers argued; excessive subsidies to real estate, as Robert Fitch argued; deindustrialization, which was experienced over though it was long encouraged by the city’s ruling class; white racial panic, which led to migration to the suburbs. The effects were profound. Bankers took over the city government, displacing the elected one, and a deep austerity program was imposed. “We just can’t afford it” became the reigning ideology. We’ll also look at the fightback, but sadly, the unions mostly joined the party of austerity.

The restructuring of New York City was a dress rehearsal for a broader crackdown. As one pundit of the time put it: “Whether or not the promises…of the 1960s can be rolled back…without violent social upheaval is being tested in New York City…. If New York is able to offer reduced social services without civil disorder, it will prove that it can be done in the most difficult environment in the nation.” It was, and soon the rest of the world would get a taste of it.

Readings:

Joshua Freeman, “If you can make it here,” Jacobin, October 2014

Edward Gramlich, “The New York City Fiscal Crisis: What Happened and What Is to Be Done?,” American Economic Review, May 1976 [intelligent bourgeois economist’s view, lots of useful numbers]

Doug Henwood, Wall Street (Verso, 1996) [extract on the NYC debt crisis and the bankers’ coup]

Karl Marx, Value, Price, and Profit (1865)

Kim Phillips-Fein, Fear City, chaps. 14–15 [The People’s Firehouse, CUNY]

Michael Berya Reagan, “A Crisis Without Keynes: The 1975 New York City Fiscal Crisis Revisited," Gotham Center (2021)

William Tabb, “The New York City Fiscal Crisis” [short version of his Monthly Review Press book]

---

About

NYC DSA Citywide Night School aims to connect the history and theory of socialist struggle with the work of present day activists and organizers. It offers a rigorous but accessible curriculum for working adults to develop their political understanding and strategy.

Night School sessions are comprised of a presentation and overview of the topic at hand, followed by discussion as a group, in smaller breakout sessions, or both, to facilitate deeper conversation and understanding of the material and to bring analysis to bear on present-day realities.