Tax the Rich Campaigns Need Coalition Credits

By the Money on the Left Editorial Collective

As Zohran Mamdani and allied progressives turn a campaign victory into governing capacity, the primary weapons used against them will be fiscal. Centrist state legislators—already hostile to progressive tax policy—will be doubly pressured by a Trump White House threatening to impound funds and condition support for core institutions on political loyalty. In New York and other cities, Tax the Rich campaigns will likely escalate from letters and canvasses deliberately ignored by collaborationist lawmakers to protests and statehouse occupations met with brutal crackdowns. One trajectory is hopeful: the showdowns become a national, party-wide rally strong enough to keep Democrats from siding with governors like Kathy Hochul. Another outcome—one powerful actors are counting on—is coordinated non-cooperation: institutional co-governance withheld from progressives with the same dogmatic vigor Tea Party Republicans showed President Obama. Where does the movement go from there?

This accelerationist showdown politics is a fascistic continuation of the neoliberal “Shock Doctrine”: engineer a crisis, paralyze the public response, fracture democratic movements with half-measures for some. The trick works by organizing the political conversation around middle-class and billionaire bank accounts—and now routine threats of impoundment—instead of the existing capacities of everyday people. It tees up bottlenecks and headline spectacles meant to distract from a simple fact: the capacity to provision public life already exists in the workers, infrastructure, and institutions—the grassroots and member-driven organizations, unions, tenant groups, cultural partners, mutual-aid networks, and neighborhood branches—that made Mamdani’s win possible in the first place. When politics is reduced to pleading with mobile wealth, every concession looks like prudence and every defeat looks like inevitability.

Capacity is already here

Our cities do not lack capacity; they lack control over public credit at the very spot opponents have staged as the lever. Schools, clinics, transit systems, housing expertise, organizers, volunteers, mutual-aid supply chains—these exist already. What austerity politics withholds is the means to recognize and sustain participation in public life while we use that capacity.

That is why recruitment offers into punitive state functions matter. High salaries and student-debt forgiveness for enforcement deployments do not merely “fund jobs.” They decide who has time, stability, and standing—who belongs—much as private wealth does. So when we say that we can build without billionaire tax dollars, we are not saying that we can build without money. Money and payment are the difference between austere rationing from a defensive movement posture and a durable public that keeps people housed, fed, mobile, and engaged.

This is the same pressure point that Tax the Rich campaigns confront. Coalition credit does not replace that fight; it keeps participation pay-able while the fight is underway, so staged fiscal blockades do not stall the very public we are building.

We already run payments systems—just without payments

Coalitional politics already coordinates large volumes of labor and resources across organizations. Every canvass shift, child-care rota, jail-support thread, translation queue, rides list, venue hookup, design favor, spreadsheet of phone-bank leads, and shared pantry run is coordinated through informal credits: reputation, vouching, IOUs, and remembered favors. Our sign-up sheets are routing instructions; our Signal threads are clearing and settlement; our spreadsheets are shadow ledgers. This is not small. It is the logistics layer that keeps thousands of hours of organizing moving in New York every month.

But you cannot buy groceries with your reputation. The difference between a heroic but austere movement and a durable public is receivability—whether the credits people earn for real work can be used for the things that keep them in the fight: groceries, transit, childcare, dues, training, tools, and structured pathways into higher-stakes roles. That is what a payments system is, in essence: not suburban taxpayers’ approval, but the concrete list of where your credit is accepted and for what.

Layered credits for layered publics

The constituent parts of Mamdani’s coalition—neighborhood branches, unions, tenant groups, mutual-aid networks, libraries, and cultural partners—are the right places to grow a politics of insurgent credit that sustains participation through staged fiscal showdowns without disruption. We do not need one grand new currency. We need many credits that already exist, and coordinating infrastructures to help them scale. This is an intentional extension of how coalitions already work: groups give endorsements, share lists, trade rooms and volunteers, align calendars, and memorialize it in MOUs. Credits simply make that coordination legible and usable to participants.

Credits already appear everywhere. Think of these as existing “credits,” even when unnamed: ratios, patterns, and arrangements of obligation, responsibility, and inclusion.

• Organizing — credit-like arrangements of obligation and responsibility: canvassing, translation, running meetings, childcare, strike support.
  
• Service and care — credit-like patterns of mutual provision and inclusion: hours in mutual-aid kitchens, co-op groceries, cultural events, trainings.
  
• Civic access — credit-like arrangements of public inclusion: transit passes, library admissions, course slots, public fee waivers, utility discounts.
  

Read through a flat lens of “volunteerism,” these credit forms are misdescribed as charity or good will and their politics is disavowed. In practice they are entangled from the start with the official infrastructures people need to survive—transit agencies, schools, libraries, utilities—and with the circuits of paid work and the for-profit institutions that dominate food, housing, and care. In the dominant policy script, the boundary makes one sphere look like “volunteering” and the other like “the economy.” When a mass movement elects a mayor to create municipal grocery stores, that boundary shows itself as a designed limiter—meant to keep movements from going big until a mythic “tomorrow.” Naming these arrangements as credit, and making them receivable across partners and agencies now, refuses that delay. It turns the boundary from a horizon we wait on into a configuration we can reorganize together.

That simple act is solidarity and recognition. It says: your work, your time, your commitments count beyond your immediate circle. It is also how we recognize siloed efforts as part of a shared public infrastructure. And when we see our time, effort, and commitments as gestures that reach beyond the room, we can align them with what is happening elsewhere now. Work in one locale choreographs recognition and use in another. That readiness to meet one another is the seed of coalition: what you do here moves something there. Small actions scale up into shared capacity without asking anyone to abandon local priorities.

This is also how social causality works in practice, even when coalition is disavowed or treated as a fleeting event. The daycare shift that frees a canvasser’s evening, the translation that unlocks a meeting, the room booking that anchors a training—each is already shaping what becomes possible down the line and across town. They are remote from the start—addressed to people you may never meet and to moments you will not occupy. These are already credit infrastructures—ratios and arrangements of obligation, responsibility, and acceptance. Credits do not invent them; they further name, steady, and make them receivable where life happens. Once that is acknowledged, the line between “inside” and “outside” politics looks arbitrary. If a city library accepts campaign-issued credits for after-school programs, or a union local honors them for training sessions, then credits stop being a mutual-aid side hustle and become part of the public itself. Power maps shift because coordination is happening through channels that choke-point politics cannot fully control.

During a fiscal blackout or manufactured crisis, receivability lets organizers, caregivers, translators, and trainees keep moving through rooms, rides, childcare, and trainings now, with partners settling in kind or in dollars later. That is how the coalition holds its form instead of shrinking.

Public responsibility, not private money

Some will ask whether these credits are just another private money scheme. They are not—because the premise is different. Both cryptocurrency culture and the Wall-Street-backed fiscal choke-point politics of the Democratic establishment share a deeper story: money as a pre-political emanation of a private world—white families, founders, and “entrepreneurs”—that stands outside obligation and instructs public life from above. That settler-colonial fantasy treats credit as something private actors bestow, and government as a bookkeeper for their decisions.

We reject that. Money is a public responsibility. It names, coordinates, and sustains the capacities people already build together. Our approach is accountable where life is actually organized—schools, unions, libraries, clinics, transit, tenant groups, and campaigns—and it is governed in public.

Framed this way, a coalition credit system is the coalition’s way to carry through when fiscal crises are staged as political discipline.

Call for Printing (CFP)

Turning from argument to practice, we invite every part of the New York coalition that made this victory possible—neighborhood branches, unions, tenant unions, mutual-aid networks, cultural partners, public programs, and campaigns—to begin issuing and receiving their own coalition credits, coordinated where useful and federated where necessary. The aim is simple: make participation pay-able across the coalition now, so staged fiscal showdowns do not interrupt the public we are already building.

What Money on the Left can do

As an editorial collective, Money on the Left will direct our capacity to create reporting, toolkits, and convening power to projects that follow the ethical and political principles outlined below. We will profile pilots; publish template kits (receivability menus, credit designs, privacy policies, aggregate dashboards); host brief clinics with organizers and public partners; and help align shared measures so successes are visible and copyable.

Principles of coalitional responsibility (our coalition standard)

(This is our endorsement standard for complementary credits. It defines responsibility as coalitional, public, and open-ended—rather than a closed, sovereign enclosure accountable only to itself.)

1. Coalitional responsibility, not sovereign enclosure
   Credits are commitments to a wider public supported in coalition. Issuance and acceptance are accountable to relationships across organizations and agencies, not only to a membership’s pre-defined ends.
   
2. Responsibility to full participation (the full-employment principle)
   Every issuer has a duty to open real ways to earn credits—especially for undervalued labor (care, language access, accessibility, logistics)—and to pair earning with pathways into responsibility (facilitation, training, strategy roles).
   
3. Responsibility to recognize others (bounded cross-coalition receivability)
   Each issuer provides a clear pathway to receive credits from trusted partners that meet a published threshold of coalitional trust and solidarity. Recognition is bounded and menu-defined (what is accepted, where, and in what amounts) and is periodically reviewed in public.
   
4. Structured paths to enfranchisement as an issuing authority
   There is a transparent route for new groups to become issuers: mentorship or co-issuance periods, capacity checks tied to real infrastructure, defined caps while ramping, and clear criteria for advancing to full issuer status.
   
5. Duties and accountability that come with enfranchisement
   Issuers steward capacity (do not over-promise), publish aggregate issuance and redemption by program, participate in monthly clearing, honor grievance and appeal processes, and accept time-bound suspension or revocation if they violate standards.
   
6. Privacy as public trust
   Individuals’ balances and transactions remain private by default. Public oversight operates through aggregates and due-process audits for suspected misuse. Privacy is not a perk; it is how coalitions extend trust without control or surveillance.
   
7. Tied to real infrastructure and needs
   Receivability menus must map to concrete capacities—passes, rooms, classes, childcare, groceries, trainings—and be adjusted regularly to meet demonstrated needs, with special attention to reducing participation barriers.

We are not making up a new world; we are taking responsibility for this one. Credits formalize the recognition already circulating in our movements and make it usable where people live, learn, travel, care, and govern.

Technology and design: many paths up the same mountain

Democracy has always involved design problems—ballots, mail-in envelopes, early vote windows—different tools serving the same civic function. Credit is the same way. There is no need to worship a platform; choose what is practical and accessible for your members and partners.

Tool options (examples, from low to higher tech):

• Paper cards with serial numbers and short expiries
  
• Stamp books or tear-off chits
  
• SMS or voice codes for basic phones
  
• QR badges on printable cards
  
• Prepaid or closed-loop cards for specific partners
  
• Simple web ledger (individuals see their own balances; the public sees only aggregates)

Designing according our Principles of Coalitional Responsibility

• Keep balances private by default; publish simple public totals so scale is visible
  
• Use posted receivability menus (limit by use and amount, not surveillance)
  
• Ensure offline operation so tables and doorways work when the network does not
  
• Make replacement easy when something is lost
  
• Set a regular cadence to settle books across partners (compare ledgers and receipts; clear modest imbalances in kind or small dollars)

The point is not technology for its own sake; it is fit, access, and flexibility in service of the shared principles above. With that posture in mind, we turn to the case study.

Case study: “A Million Doors to a Million Votes” (what it proposes)

In “A Million Doors to a Million Votes: NYC-DSA’s Plan for a Mamdani Mandate,” Álvaro López lays out how NYC-DSA can convert a primary win into governing capacity. The piece frames the next phase as both a mass field operation and a neighborhood-level infrastructure that protects and implements a Mamdani administration. It aims to widen the coalition and electorate; keep a train-the-trainers field machine running past Election Day; turn neighborhood branches into “Little Local City Halls” for everyday access to services, rollouts, and mobilization; build standing co-governance tables for real, regular access to decision-making; pursue a broad public mandate in November; pair inside/outside tactics against coordinated opposition; and retrofit the organization’s finances and operations to match a governing coalition rather than a single campaign.

López’s plan already names the political infrastructures that must keep running if Albany withholds revenue or Washington impounds funds. Coalition credits give the coalition continuity under pressure—these rooms stay open.

From a complementary-currency perspective, the plan’s constraint is that it ultimately totals DSA’s capacity as dues + volunteer hours. Dues are the non-government analog to taxes—important, but still organized around revenue permission—and volunteer labor, read through a flat lens of “service,” remains bounded by people’s unpaid time. That pairing undercounts the real logistics already moving through the coalition (care, translation, transit, rooms, training) and leaves participation exposed to the very bottlenecks opponents stage: when money is tight or burnout rises, capacity shrinks. In practice, this risks treating enthusiasm as the main fuel and dues as the only meter, rather than making participation pay-able across the rooms the memo builds.

Case study: translating the memo into coalition credit (“Roses” for NYC-DSA)

Within the NYC-DSA context, the coalition credit can take a name that fits the organization’s iconography and history: Roses—a nod to DSA’s rose and to “bread and roses.” Here, the rose is not deferred as leisure after labor. It becomes participatory infrastructure, a way to provision the bread and invite people into responsibility at the same time. The name is specific to the DSA pilot; the principles are general.

Translating the memo into Roses (one possible sketch)
Turn “Little Local City Halls” into issuing and accepting locales with a short, public receivability menu (transit, childcare, rooms, trainings, and a modest grocery line via partners). Let the mass field earn-as-you-organize and advance-as-you-learn, with Roses opening pathways into responsibility (facilitation, spokesperson preparation, strategy rooms). Run co-governance as logistics—a simple monthly check-in that tallies aggregate issuance/redemption and settles leftover imbalances in kind or small dollars. Pair the mandate push with continuity planning so participation does not stall under pressure. Recast the dues drive as an inclusion drive, allowing Roses to cover a defined share of dues for undervalued labor while widening who can stay in the work.

Most importantly, a coalition-credit layer lets expenditure come before “taxation.” Partners provide rooms, care, transit, and trainings first; credits are retired at use. What changes for dues is their function. Instead of serving mainly as a direct financing stream for a small slice of on-the-books activity, dues become a way to make organizational credits desirable and to retire them. If members can satisfy a defined share of dues in credits—and those credits are earned through undervalued labor and paired with pathways into responsibility—then dues policy helps distribute work more fairly and lowers barriers to participation for working-class members. Month to month, remaining imbalances are settled through reciprocal acceptance, in-kind capacity swaps, or small dollar transfers (dues/donations). This reverses the choke-point logic and lets the coalition go bigger when needed, while keeping issuance aligned with real capacity through simple public totals and regular check-ins. 

How it could work
Branches and partners issue Roses for defined uses they can already provision (rooms, childcare, transit support, trainings, groceries via co-ops). Members earn Roses for undervalued labor and use them where a posted menu says they are accepted. Most redemption is in kind at the point of use; a periodic check-in reconciles leftovers through reciprocal acceptance, capacity swaps, or small dollar transfers (dues/donations). Individual use stays private; only aggregate totals are published. That is enough for the coalition to keep its rhythm during a fiscal blackout—or when one is threatened.

Coalition credits during a fiscal blackout

If Albany triggers a fiscal blackout on Monday, field still runs because canvassers use credits for transit that night; parents attend trainings because childcare is payable in credits; translators keep meetings accessible; branches book rooms with partners who accept credits for a portion of fees. On Friday, the coalition tallies aggregates and schedules settlement in kind or dollars. The rhythm holds; the showdown does not become a shutdown—and the coalition’s continuity demonstrates a model for city government to emulate and support.

Coalition credits here, Blue Bonds there

Coalition credits work in tandem with another fiscal strategy for city and state governments we have called Blue Bonds—a Money on the Left proposal to politicize municipal debt issuance without inventing a new medium of payment. Blue Bonds are ordinary municipal or state bonds issued for dollars, but placed and held differently: small-denomination subscriptions for residents and workers, anchor orders from public-sector pensions and union funds, and distribution through public-facing portals and community finance partners. The goal is to reconstitute the investor base so funding for transit, housing, food, care, and education depends less on ratings agencies and Wall Street gatekeepers, especially under federal hostility.

Blue Bonds are deliberately national-politics friendly. To cautious audiences, they read as familiar “borrowing.” To a coalition already practicing public credit through organizing, they read as democratic control of the buy-side—who holds the bonds, on what terms, and to what public purpose. Figures like Mamdani can pursue a Blue Bonds drive now within existing law and disclosure rules, while narrating it as a community subscription to the city’s future.

Coalition credits shape the horizon for Blue Bonds in two ways. First, they surface concrete pipelines—rooms, routes, trainings, childcare, kitchens, and clinics—that make bond use legible and urgent to everyday subscribers. Second, they organize the constituency that will buy and hold the debt: union locals, tenant unions, co-ops, cultural institutions, and small savers who already coordinate through credits. In practice the two tracks can move in parallel: coalition credits keep participation pay-able during fiscal showdowns; a Blue Bonds drive democratizes the dollar side of public finance by anchoring ownership with residents, unions, public pensions, and mission-driven institutions. Together they reduce veto power over public investment and align financing with the people building the city.

Stakes for Tax the Rich

Right now, Tax the Rich campaigns that lack insurgent credit infrastructure are organized around a choke point constructed and enforced by the enemy: state-controlled revenue and the threat of impoundment. A coalitional strategy treats finance and credit not as a single fix or a strict sequence but as overlapping layers that operate together:

• Coalition credits keep participation pay-able inside the movement and across partners during a fiscal blackout.
  
• Agency receivability extends that continuity into public programs by accepting a defined share of credits for defined uses.
  
• Blue Bonds do not act as a complementary currency; they democratize the dollar side of public finance by shifting ownership to residents, unions, and public pensions—including national small savers and cross-state pension solidarity—reducing gatekeeper vetoes.

These layers can start in any order and reinforce one another. If a city moves first with Blue Bonds, coalition credits become lived on-ramps for community engagement and political backing. If coalition credits move first, they generate partners, practices, and evidence that strengthen a public bond constituency. Agencies can pilot both at once by posting narrow receivability menus while bond subscriptions gather. In every configuration, the campaign holds two fronts: it pushes the revenue demand and it operates a governable provisioning network that keeps rooms, rides, childcare, trainings, and pathways into responsibility open. If Albany concedes, additional resources flow into a system already working. If Albany stonewalls, the public sees that capital flight is an empty threat because the people, the infrastructure, and the organizing are here—and there is already a way to pay and a way to borrow without handing Wall Street a veto.

Call to organizations and campaigns

We invite neighborhood branches, WFP affiliates, unions, tenant unions, mutual-aid networks, cultural partners, and chapters to formalize the credits you already use informally and to connect them across partners and agencies. Begin with modest, concrete steps that fit local capacity:

• Map the work that already earns trust (care shifts, translation, logistics, training) and publish a minimal receivability menu (transit, rooms, childcare, trainings, a small grocery line through partners).
  
• Pair earning with pathways into responsibility so credits open access to facilitation, spokesperson preparation, and strategy roles.
  
• Keep individual use private; publish simple public totals and regular check-ins; settle leftover imbalances through reciprocal acceptance, capacity swaps, or small dollars.
  
• Invite one public partner to accept a defined share for a defined use; document what works; share the pattern so others can copy it.

Money on the Left stands ready to support this work. We can convene briefings and co-design sessions; help draft receivability menus, pilot MOUs, and privacy policies; publish case notes and templates; host clinics with organizers and public partners; and coordinate shared measures so successes are visible and portable. Projects that follow the principles of coalitional responsibility outlined above will be prioritized for reporting, toolkits, and ongoing advising.

By 2027, New York could have a base that already lives the alternative: public capacity organized as public credit, embedded in daily life, with municipal and state partners joining where they can and following where the coalition has shown the way. The aim is not to wait for capital to return or permission to be granted. It is to recognize that we are already building the world we need—and to make that work payable.