Keegan D. | Red Phoenix correspondent | Illinois–
Around the entire globe the contradictions inherent to the capitalist mode of production are sharpening and bringing the world further into a situation of crisis, and one case which serves as evidence of this reality is the budget crisis in Chicago, Illinois.
Far from the openly racist framing of reactionary media, Chicago is not a city of unique violence, crime, or racial warfare as many are led to believe. While the Trump administration and other fascists constantly make false claims that the city is experiencing a massive gang and immigrant related crime wave, to the point that Trump has threatened to send federal forces to the city, the reality is that Chicago is currently experiencing a drastic reduction in violent crimes.
Chicago is a beautiful city which in truth benefits from its cultural and ethnic diversity both economically and socially, and is also one of the most active centers for working-class resistance to capitalism in the United States, something which reactionary narratives attempt to hide. Chicago does also however have a host of real problems that affect everyday working people and which are made more difficult to solve by the narratives developed by the sensationalist capitalist media. Li
ke many other urban areas throughout the world, the working people of Chicago are facing unmanageable housing and rent costs, stagnant wages, crumbling infrastructure, and decreases in community investment. Public services and city government have been gutted through neoliberal austerity measures for decades, and private capital is constantly attempting to gentrify and destroy existing communities through “re-development” for a quick buck. Additionally, the cities seemingly well meaning “progressive” politicians have shown themselves to be either unable or unwilling to take the necessary steps to solve these issues.
Regardless of whatever policy half-measure is proposed by “progressives” to benefit working people, the market logic imposed by the structure of both the state and city government seems to ensure that said policies are set up to fail or are corrupted to benefit bourgeois oligarchs. For example, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson stated that the city’s finances had “reached a point of no return” as the city is set to run a $1.1 billion dollar deficit in 2026 unless more revenue for the city can be extracted from the city’s residents. Luckily, Mayor Johnson has continuously proposed to find the necessary revenue through the taxation of the wealthy and businesses through the use of either corporate or property taxes rather than from working people, however in response, capitalists have threatened to divest from the city if this were to happen, preventing City Council from approving such measures.
To solve the city’s budget problems, capitalists and their lobbyists are instead putting pressure on city officials to either make cuts to Chicago’s public services like transportation and education or extract the needed tax revenue from Chicago’s already struggling working class. As it stands today, without increases in resources and funding for social services like education and transportation they will decay further making the lives of everyday working people worse, and the capitalist proposal of cutting the budgets for these services further would only serve to accelerate the process of degradation which is already in motion.
First and foremost, a fact which is entirely ignored by the capitalist media is that this situation of a financial deficit in Chicago’s government is only possible because city and local governments are designed to operate under the logic of the capitalist market, which forces the city government to justify its spending based on an allotted monetary budget rather than the actual material capacity which the cities production could allow for in a non-capitalist setting. Secondly, the threat made by many capitalists that they would leave the city if Chicago’s city council were to collect the revenue from their wealth and property is only an effective threat so long as the working class is not organized and politically conscious enough to take over production themselves.
Chicago, one of America’s strongest centers of labor organizing activity, does not need to accept the demands of capital if its working class can organize itself into both a political and economic force able to manage its production through a common plan, unrestricted and outside of the confines of the market.
Mayor Johnson’s statement that the city has “reached a point of no return” is only true so long as the city and its governance is forced to be a servant of capitalists. Essentially, the correct way to understand Chicago’s current situation is that the city’s productive capabilities are currently being held for ransom by monopoly capitalists, and these capitalists are now demanding further cuts to services for Chicago’s working people in order for the market (and subsequently their control) to grow.
Yet in actuality the deeper hidden truth of this situation is that we do not have to pay this ransom or give into these demands if the working class is instead able to seize control. While the proposal for Chicago’s working class to seize and socialize the city’s economy is seemingly an extreme or radical solution, it is the only solution which protects the city from the putrid rot of today’s decaying capitalism. We both cannot let the capitalist class destroy Chicago’s social services which the working class depends on, or allow capitalists to destroy Chicago’s economy by uprooting it and bringing it elsewhere.
Again it must be restated that Chicago’s situation is not unique. The working class in urban centers across the globe are facing many of the same conditions at different rates of intensity and development as the windy city. Everywhere it can, capital is expanding at the expense of working people in a frantic attempt to continue surviving off exploitation. Much like Chicago, the solution to the growing beast of capitalism is revolutionary socialism.
The Red Phoenix 