Competing Imaginaries: Socialist Narratives in Contemporary New York City

Abstract

This thesis synthesizes existing scholarship with the perspectives of young, socialist-identifying New Yorkers to elucidate the mechanisms and limitations of American socialism under contemporary capitalism. I find my entry in the study of narratives, both unconscious and agentively told. I argue that socialism is polysemic and adopted as a positionality when it offers a narrative that maintains individual imaginaries as cohesive with personally observed contradictions within synecdoches of capitalism. “Capitalism,” in its totality, is only available for representation, and thus criticism, in its microcosms and mechanisms; not all structural appendages are equally opposable, and not all opposition is politicized. I elaborate on two mechanisms of contemporary leftist practice, consumption discretion and digital activism, which reaffirm the desirability of ideology and are qualified by more than just their potential political efficacy. I analyze two aspects of contemporary capitalism – digital capitalism and financialized private equity real estate – and focus on the ways those structures are affectively experienced in order to conceptualize political agency in the contemporary condition. Contemporary American socialism, with all its contradictions and limitations, fosters competing imaginaries of a better world; for my interlocutors, even limited imaginations are more habitable than resignation to the status quo.