Is Mayor Katie Wilson Still a Socialist?

This story begins with Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposed $9.1 billion 2027-2028 budget. It matches estimated revenue with estimated expenditures. It is, in other words, a balanced budget. And the way she accomplished this feat has attracted attention from all quarters. Unlike Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s balanced budget, Wilson’s has no new taxes or tax increases. The rates for the JumpStart Payroll Expense tax, a progressive tax she helped design and went into effect on January 1, 2021, have been frozen.

In a KUOW interview with Wilson on Tuesday, reporters questioned why Wilson didn’t raise JumpStart to fill Seattle’s $175 million budget deficit but instead relied on cuts “somewhere in the range of one to 8% to a lot of departments, including the Department of Transportation, Office of Housing, Seattle Public Utilities.” Wilson’s answer? “We really believe in the power of government to make lives better, to make people’s lives better,” she said. “And I believe that the real foundation for that is trust in government, and also really responsible budgeting.”

By all appearances, this balancing act cannot be described as progressive. Indeed, it’s receiving high marks from Seattle’s business community, who see it as a sensible budget for a city that, according to mainstream media, does all that it can to ruin the business climate. Furthermore, evidence of leftist anti-realism is revealed by Seattle’s job market, which has contracted significantly while Bellevue’s and Tacoma’s have expanded (the former by a lot; the latter, a little). The scales have finally fallen from Katie Wilson progressive eyes (or her idealism).

Now, let’s put aside the fact that the tech sector as a whole is presently bleeding jobs (and so Seattle’s contraction has little to do with taxes). Let’s also put aside the fact that in our society, whether a balanced budget is mandatory or not, it’s frequently the left that worries about balancing budgets (in this regard, Katie Wilson is like the former mayor Mike McGinn, another progressive who was a budget hawk). The right, as is made evident by Republican presidents, and particularly the present one, don’t care about deficits if they result from tax cuts for the rich or accelerated military spending. Balancing the budget only matters when it concerns social spending.

Let’s also, and finally, put aside another fact: Deficits from social spending actually benefit the economy because members of the working class do not save or hoard or remove money from circulation by purchasing paper on capital markets, but, as all Keynesian economists well know, instead send what they earn or receive from the government right back into the economy. In the words of a great but underappreciated economic thinker, Billy Paul, workers and the poor “let the dollar circulate.”

What I want to focus on instead is something expressed in the headline for Wall Street Journal’s article on Wilson’s budget: “Seattle’s Mayor Ran as a Socialist. Then She Ran Into Reality.” This matter about her breaking with her socialist principles was brought up repeatedly by David Kroman in a recent KUOW interview with Wilson. Considering her budget, and its across-the-board cuts, and its increase in police spending, could she still consider herself a socialist? In the words of Kroman: “You have famously called yourself a socialist, but… frankly, this does not read as a socialist’s budget. So, are we witnessing a political evolution of Katie Wilson here?”

To be honest, the mayor’s response to this question was, at the end of the day, vague, though she did assert that she had “[a]bsolutely not” changed, that she was still a socialist. Nevertheless Wilson and her team prioritized “getting out of this cycle of annual budget shortfalls.” Kroman was not the only one to question her commitment to socialism. The WSJ reported that centrist Seattle City Council member Bob Kettle, a former cop and the current public safety committee chair said that Wilson “isn’t governing like a Democratic socialist” because she can’t. “The realities of sitting in the seat and doing the job, you have to deal with those realities, Kettle said.” (The late cultural theorist Mark Fisher called this kind of thinking “capitalist realism.”) Former socialist council member Kawant Sawant, appeared at a public hearing for the budget this week and excoriated Wilson, calling her a “self-described socialist” because “she delivered a budget that cuts public sector jobs and essential services and gives a shocking $68 million to the Seattle police.”

Sawant considers herself a “revolutionary socialist.” What does this mean? How is it different from being just a regular socialist? Though Sawant is famous for leading the way to higher local, regional, national wages, and relentlessly pushing for higher taxes on the incomes of billionaires and millionaires, goals of this nature are not actually revolutionary (which, in Sawant’s context, entails the complete transformation of society into something radically new—a society without capitalism). But high wages and progressive taxes are connected, ultimately, with what is called Ricardian Socialism.

And what’s the essence of this economic philosophy? It stems, weirdly enough, from the thought of an early 19th-century millionaire (today he would be a billionaire) and conservative David Ricardo, who insisted in his 1817 book On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation that labor is the source of value, not capital. Now, if you put one and one together, you realize that if labor creates value then labor, under capitalism, is being robbed of its wealth by the rich. What Ricardian Socialists want is not a revolution but a fair share of the capitalist pie. This is Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and even Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who is not anti-capitalist but anti-poverty, anti-low wages, and pro-affordability and the universalization of healthcare. If labor is the source of wealth, then it deserves more social benefits.

This is where things get interesting. Though Marx admired Ricardo and expanded this labor theory of value considerably, he made it clear in his later works that labor was not the historical subject of capitalism or value. Capital was all about capital. And so his books were mostly an analysis of this economic system: how it works, how it goes from booms to busts, how it transformed value, a social substance, into profits. Though there is not much in his books about socialism, he does, in his notes, collected as Grundrisse, see the future society that follows capitalism as one that takes advantage of capitalist technological innovation to increase, for workers, “disposable time.” Yes, Marx is all about that time, free time, time to develop your mind or your mastery of a guitar or turntables or knitting. This is not a joke. Marxist futurology privileges disposable time, time away from work.

Marx’s own words: “What capital adds is that it increases the surplus labour time of the mass by all the means of art and science, because its wealth consists directly in the appropriation of surplus labour time; since value directly its purpose, not use value. It is thus, despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce labour time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development.”

To be honest, I rarely hear socialists in positions of power or influence (revolutionary or not) mention disposable time, time that’s paid for in the basic income sense, time for an individual’s self-improvement or intellectual/artistic/creative growth. Indeed, the only person to bring it up recently is none other than the billionaire Jeff Bezos. A few days ago, he went on Fox News and, according to Forbes, “said he believes artificial intelligence could generate enough productivity gains to allow Americans to have a three-day workweek or rely on a single-income for the whole household—pushing back against fears that the technology could lead to large-scale job losses for American workers.” This is as pure as Marxist futurology gets.

Now, as to whether Bezos is serious about this or not, I will play it safe and go for the latter. As to whether Katie Wilson is a socialist or not, I can say for certain she is not a revolutionary socialist like Sawant. As for her being “a self-described socialist,” well this is the case with all socialists because there are no rituals or formal ceremonies that confirm or consecrate your allegiance to this political program. As for her proposed budget, no matter how you cut it, it’s a bit of a bummer.