New York City’s congestion pricing plan went into effect on January 5. Most cars will now pay $9 to enter the busiest part of Manhattan, with trucks paying up to $21.

The plan aims to reduce traffic, raise funds to invest in the city’s public transit system, and improve air quality.

Manhattan is one of the most gridlocked places in the world, making its streets unsafe for pedestrians and cyclists, slowing emergency vehicles, and contributing to the city’s abysmal air quality. New York’s subway is the most comprehensive in America, but it’s expensive, decaying, inefficient, and trains are constantly delayed or rerouted. Some areas of the city aren’t served by the subway at all.

Because of this sorry state of affairs, some transit and environmental activists have advocated for congestion pricing.

Revolutionary communists sympathize with the intent of these activists—the dire need for improved transit is clear to anyone who lives in or visits New York. However, we reject the idea that individual workers driving into Manhattan are to blame for traffic and poor air quality and should be made to pay for these improvements.

If we really want to overhaul New York’s crumbling transit infrastructure, we need to start by putting the blame where it belongs—on the capitalists and their politicians—and organize a fight to make them pay for it.

Artificial scarcity

Capitalist politicians say they want to improve the situation, but in order to pay for it, they claim they have to increase taxes, cut social spending, or both. Their perfidious propaganda says resources are scarce, so any improvement for one section of the working class must be paid for by a different section of the workers.

The truth is that there’s plenty of money to go around in the nation’s financial capital. But under capitalism, these resources are in the hands of the ruling class, who hoard them in their onshore and offshore bank accounts or speculate on the market to increase or protect their profits.

The capitalists and their hangers on divide the working class to fight over crumbs, while sitting on billions themselves. There are 110 billionaires living in New York City alone, with a combined net worth of $694 billion.

In contrast, 44% of the 118,000 New Yorkers who drive into Manhattan for work make less than $65,000 per year. The majority of those making more than $65,000 are workers or small business owners who are making a fraction of the amount raked in by Wall Street and the billionaires.

Why should these workers be forced to pay for improvements to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), instead of the capitalists who have criminally underfunded the system for decades and whose wealth could completely overhaul the system?

A bonanza for bankers

Not only are the billionaires not paying for these improvements, they are set to profit from congestion pricing. The capitalist politicians say it will raise $15 billion to fund projects for the MTA, but the fine print is more complicated.

The tolls are only expected to generate around $500 million a year. This $500 million will then be paid to banks as brokerage fees for issuing $15 billion worth of municipal bonds. Banks and other financial institutions will purchase those bonds from the city, and revenue from these bond sales would fund MTA projects. Eventually, the bond holders will be paid back with interest, using money generated from future tolling.

What does this mean? Over time, the plan will funnel billions in banking fees and interest from workers to Wall Street.

Culture war

The ruling class used divide-and-rule tactics to push through congestion pricing, framing the issue along “left vs. right” culture war lines, rather than on class lines.

In addition to local activist groups, liberal socialists like the New York City DSA and Jacobin magazine have been among the most vocal proponents of congestion pricing. After New York Governor Kathy Hochul temporarily paused the plan last June, Jacobin urged her to reverse course:

“Hochul’s U-turn will significantly set back the cause of improving air quality and urban space in New York … It leaves a billion-dollar-plus hole in the MTA’s annual budget as aging trains and infrastructure hit reliability and capacity limits.”

Another Jacobin article says, “New York’s congestion pricing program would have charged the many higher-earning commuters who drive into Lower Manhattan for work, making the program highly progressive.”

These statements reveal the petty-bourgeois ideology of the Jacobin “left.” They put the blame for poor air quality and MTA’s lack of funding on individual “higher-earning” workers, rather than where it belongs—on the capitalist class and system as a whole.

With the soft left claiming the tax is “progressive,” the door is left wide open for reactionaries to drum up support on the issue.

The rightwing New York Post has published dozens of sensationalist articles ridiculing the plan as an unfair attack on ordinary New Yorkers. Headlines include: “These NYC politicians, including Eric Adams, supported the congestion toll—but they don’t have to pay it: ‘How convenient’” and “NYC congestion pricing debacle is already slamming average Joes—thanks, Gov. Hochul!”

Of course, the reactionaries have no plan to fix the MTA, but they can leverage the liberal left’s anti-worker stance to pose as the real voice of New York’s working class.

If the issue were fought along class lines—placing the blame squarely on the billionaires, bosses, and their politicians, and mobilizing the whole working class to make them pay for infrastructure improvements that would help all working New Yorkers—the right wing wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.

Make the bosses pay!

Rather than accepting capitalist propaganda about scarce resources and forcing workers to pay tolls that end up in the pockets of finance capital, communists advocate a class struggle approach to fighting for reforms.

A working-class offensive, including strikes and mass demonstrations, is the only way to force the ruling class to end the regressive congestion pricing policy and take the money needed to improve the transit system from the banks and billionaires instead.

A fight along these lines will take a serious campaign of political agitation and organization, starting with the transit and other city-worker unions, who could appeal to the rest of New York’s working class to join in a struggle to improve transit for all. Winning this fight would require a militant leadership with a clear understanding of class-struggle tactics—which is exactly what the Revolutionary Communists of America is building.