Public Power for a Desperate City: Planting Ecosocialism in the Ruins of New York
How I learned to organize in an age of perpetual disasters.
Photo by Marcus Lenk
As the Q train inched across the Manhattan Bridge, I looked out the window. Thick sheets of rain thrashed against glass, obscuring the gothic towers of the Brooklyn Bridge from view. Summer storms are typical for New York— short-lived downpours that drench the humid city before retreating into blue skies—but this one was different. It had lasted all day, and its ferocity far eclipsed anything I had ever seen. This was alien weather. It was 2019, and global carbon concentrations were at 409 ppm.
A few weeks prior, the city had been hit with a wave of blackouts, the worst in decades. First, power went out in Midtown. As the lights of Times Square went dark, hundreds of passengers became trapped in the subway for hours. An even larger outage two weeks later left over 30,000 people in Brooklyn without power. Over the summer, every single borough experienced at least one mass outage. Symptoms of deep neglect began to appear. First it was the vacant storefronts, then the subway crisis, then the blackouts. Sparkling towers along the waterfront herald the second Gilded Age, while the fundamental infrastructure of our city is crumbling into dust.
I came out of the subway in Queens. My shoes soaked in an overflowing gutter, I made it onto the bus towards my final destination: an elementary school auditorium. There, the New York City Democratic Socialists of America’s Ecosocialist Working Group were hosting a town hall for their Public Power campaign. Over one hundred people had come to the town hall to share their encounters with the incompetence and greed of privately-owned utilities. I learned that of the $1.2 billion our utility ConEd made in 2018, $800 million went to pay shareholders. They maintain these payouts by refusing to do necessary maintenance on the grid until something breaks, and it was this negligence that caused the blackouts in midtown. But the revelation that hit the hardest, which caused a feeling to well up in my gut that I haven’t been able to shake, was that a natural gas power peaker plant is located just blocks away from the school where I then taught, poisoning the air my students breathe.
Up until that point, I had only engaged with climate change through anxiety, spending hours doomscrolling through articles about rising temperatures and melting ice caps. At that town hall in Queens, however, I didn’t feel my usual anxiety. It was replaced with anger—and hope. For the first time, I understood that there was a viable political program that matched the scale of climate change, one that would reduce inequality and deal a powerful blow to the private companies that got us into this mess. I was hooked. Six months later, I was elected to the working group’s organizing committee.
For much of its history, the climate movement has been timid. Though the climate crisis threatens every lifeform on our planet, mainstream climate organizations often follow a strategy of compromise and pursue moderate solutions that fail to address the scope of the crisis. But in recent years, new groups have pushed ambitious and transformational goals into the national discourse. The biggest is the Green New Deal, championed by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the Sunrise Movement, which envisions massive public investment to decarbonize the economy as quickly as possible.
We similarly see the Public Power campaign as the centerpiece of a Green New Deal. Without public ownership of our energy system, we will not be able to decarbonize in time: private interests have too much to gain from a carbon economy. Our Public Power campaign envisions a complete public takeover of our energy grid and the creation of new democratic entities dedicated to democratizing, decarbonizing, decommodifying, and decolonizing our current system. It is a radical goal, one that if achieved will not only drastically decrease carbon emissions, but repair our failing electrical grid and lower energy bills in the process.
The genius of this approach is that it makes decarbonization politically popular by tying it to improved grid reliability and lower electricity costs. This policy bundle allows us to drastically expand our organizing base by centering the concerns of working-class and frontline communities, the people who have to deal with regular blackouts and crippling utility debt.
Public Power is currently advancing two bills in the New York State Legislature. The first bill would empower a preexisting public utility, the New York Power Authority (NYPA), to build out renewable energy at a breakneck pace, faster than private companies. The second would dissolve every private utility in New York State and establish public utilities with democratically-elected leadership in their place. Unconstrained by a profit motive, these bodies can rebuild the grid, lower rates, and decarbonize at lightning speed.
Our strategy centers on pressuring state lawmakers. Insider lobbying is not exactly a strong suit of DSA; instead, we build power in the constituencies of our target legislators. On a practical level, this means canvassing in communities affected by blackouts, doing mass call-ins to legislators, and holding town halls and rallies. Before committing to a tactic, we always ask if it would grow our campaign and our power. This means bringing new people to our campaign and plugging them into our organizing, rather than simply mobilizing pre-existing members. One of our target areas for our campaign is East Brooklyn, the part of the borough most-affected by mass blackouts. As our campaign canvasses the neighborhood and builds ties with community members and organizations, we expand our list of contacts. This aspect of our work is crucial: we cannot win without building real bases of support throughout the city. Our work in East Brooklyn builds on itself, as new organizers bring in new members, a campaign model that guarantees we are always growing.
We also build coalitions with allied organizations. One of our most fruitful collaborations has been with No NBK Pipeline, a coalition of groups trying to stop National Grid from building a fracked gas pipeline through working-class neighborhoods of color in Brooklyn. Many of the groups opposing the pipeline are also part of the Public Power coalition, and we have collaborated with them on a rally inside the lobby of National Grid’s Brooklyn office. Often resisting infrastructure projects can be a game of whack-a-mole for organizers: once they stop one fossil fuel project, another one is proposed somewhere else in its stead. With Public Power, by contrast, we can put a permanent stop to all fossil fuel projects geared towards electricity generation.
Through 2019 and early 2020, the campaign grew at a breakneck pace. We introduced our bills, formed a statewide coalition, and held town halls in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Meanwhile, NYC-DSA unveiled its slate for the upcoming 2020 primary elections. Five endorsed candidates ran, hoping to establish a socialist caucus in Albany for the first time since 1906. We needed allies on the inside in Albany who would advocate for our bills, speaking out in favor of them in hearings and on the floor, and getting other legislators to sign on as cosponsors. Electoral victories would be crucial to winning Public Power.
Then COVID hit. The near-term prospects for our campaign collapsed. The state legislature only met once that session, and their focus was exclusively on the pandemic. Any hope of advancing our bills or even just seeing each other was gone. Still, the work had to go on. The statewide coalition decided to call for a moratorium on utility shut-offs, and we were pleased to see that after a few days, Governor Cuomo enacted one. This was a huge victory: it kept millions of New Yorkers safe. It demonstrated that the constant threat of utility shut-offs was not a simple fact of the universe, but a policy choice—one that the state had the power to change for the better.
Those first two months, when through my window came the near-constant sound of sirens, were ones of frustration and stalemate. Just a month prior, we thought that Bernie Sanders would win the Democratic primary and usher in the era of a Green New Deal. Now his campaign was treading water, our city had shut down, and the prospects for our bills were dead. We all wanted to do something, but the avenues for action seemed closed.
On top of it all, we faced a membership dropoff. Members were scattered to the winds. People who had been getting more engaged dropped off and for some who weren’t in the city, it was hard to stay engaged. Members who worked for the city found themselves swamped with work and no longer able to organize.
There was also the grief and the fear. New York City was the center of the pandemic, and we lived in constant fear of our health system collapsing. Each morning I would look at the steadily rising case numbers, desperately hoping they’d plateau. It was hard to focus, let alone organize. Our working group tried our best in those first few months; we organized regular live streams connecting climate change with everything that was going on, pushed for a utility strike, and moved most of our organizing online. Still, it was inevitable that much of our organization would greatly diminish.
The winds shifted rapidly in late May, when the country exploded in uprisings after the murder of George Floyd. Our members were out in the streets nightly. Some of us marched and shouted, others monitored police scanners; still more set up infrastructure to help organizers in the streets. The fierce and brilliant work of the racial justice organizers who led the uprising showed us that political change didn’t have to wait for presidential campaigns or state legislative sessions. We needed to demand change on our own timeline, regardless of present circumstances. On a more human level, the protests were the first time we had actually seen each other since the pandemic began.
We decided to reassess our long-term strategy and campaign. I began holding weekly strategy discussions with another member and fellow teacher to chart a new course for us. We assigned weekly homework--questions that would guide our discussions—and found that running a strategy meeting was not unlike leading a class discussion. Strategy must be decided collectively and democratically. This isn’t just the ethical way to run things: democratic decision-making is key for getting an entire organization to commit to a strategy. This meant that running strategy meetings openly and efficiently was of utmost importance. The classroom had prepared us well for it.
Those meetings weren’t easy, especially in the beginning, when our working group had to frankly discuss our successes and failures. But in doing so, we grappled with a level of specificity that we weren’t used to. Our goals were lofty, and actually achieving them requires a campaign plan that concretely lists out everything necessary to win. We had not been planning with enough specificity to accurately assess ourselves. As an organization, we were doing a lot. We were active members of two coalitions, held regular town halls and events, phonebanked and canvassed weekly, but we found that our event attendance didn’t always meet expectations and that our most active members felt overwhelmed and unsupported. We had made a splash and pushed public power into the limelight, but lacked the capacity to build the power to win.
Our organization relied too much on a small group of people doing a wide variety of work. I served as a representative on coalition calls, lobbied legislators, and planned events. The workload of most of our members was equally fragmented. We came out of those conversations with a new working group structure, one where every member would know what committee they were in and who ran each committee, as well as a formalized campaign plan with concrete goals and deadlines.
In late August, Tropical Storm Isaias blew through New York City, Long Island, and Westchester. The private utilities insisted that they had everything under control. They were wrong. Though the storm was not the worst we had seen, the Con Ed service area experienced a historic string of storm-related blackouts, second only to those caused by Hurricane Sandy. On Long Island things were even worse. Their utility, PSEG, found itself completely unequipped to manage a sprawling crisis. The night after Isaias hit, Illapa, one of our members, took the train out to Flatbush where residents had lost power for over 9 hours to film and interview people there. The predominantly Carribean neighborhood also felt the brunt of the 2019 blackouts. “Why are we always in the dark?” asks a woman in one of the videos.
A week later, we canvassed East Flatbush. There, I met a man who lost his power for over a week. He was a diabetic and had asthma. For him, the blackout caused a health crisis. Without a working fridge, his insulin went bad, and he had to borrow some from his aunt. He spent his nights in his car, his window cracked to prevent carbon monoxide poisoning. $400 worth of seafood in his fridge went bad. He had been planning a lobster bake.
Our lifestyles and livelihoods rely on access to uninterrupted electricity. It’s terrifying to realize that the people tasked with providing it are not prepared to do so. I’ve spoken to hundreds of people about public power. There’s something incredible about watching someone learn that regular blackouts are not a fact of life, but a choice made by people who value profit over the lives of working class people, mainly of color. An anger emerges that, when channeled into organizing, becomes the root of change.
New York sits on a knife’s edge. The pandemic has brought into stark relief forty years of neoliberal and austerity politics that have devastated the city and the state as a whole. Meanwhile, progressive groups have rapidly accumulated power, forcing establishment Democrats to make larger and larger concessions in order to protect their positions. The Invest in Our New York Campaign, a broad coalition of progressive groups in which New York State DSA chapters are heavily involved, has put enormous pressure on state legislators to tax the rich. This kind of united front on the budget would have been unheard of just a year ago, and demonstrates the newfound power of progressive groups, especially NYC-DSA. There is also incredible pressure on New York State to act on climate. In 2019, Governor Cuomo signed the Climate and Community Investment Act, which aims to wean the state off of fossil fuels by 2050, but New York has a terrible habit of setting ambitious climate goals and completely disregarding them.
This is the situation in which the Public Power Campaign finds itself as it heads into the legislative session. The neoliberal ideology that has driven state politics for years is running out of steam. If we want to meet our climate goals, we will have to do something bold. These conditions are favorable for us, but they do not negate the need for smart organizing. After one of the hardest years in half a century, the Ecosocialist working group has emerged stronger and more organized. We have every hope that we will win this year. If the trials of the past year’s organizing taught me anything, it’s that even if we don’t, we will come out stronger still.
Daniel Goulden is a writer, teacher, and organizer living in Brooklyn NY. He is a member of the organizing committee of NYC-DSA’s Ecosocialist Working Group.
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