At a press conference in the Bronx, Mamdani listed some of the onerous policies getting the axe. Bodega owners will no longer need a separate license to sell the same products outside the store – like fruit and flowers – as inside. Restaurants will no longer need a “superfluous” frozen dessert permit to sell ice-cream on top of the permit already required to sell food. Barber shops will no longer have to renew their permit every year, instead doing so every three years. Street fair vendor permit fees will be reduced, restaurant inspections will be sped up, and equipment registration fees will be eliminated for a year.
A corresponding executive order signed by Mamdani on Monday will also expand the NYC Best program, assigning each of the city’s 180,000 small businesses – which employ an estimated 1 million people – a case worker to help owners navigate the Big Apple’s sometimes byzantine bureaucracy.
I mean, small businesses are petite bourgeoisie. That’s just the definition of the term. That doesn’t mean they are an enemy of socialism and I don’t think that’s what the person you’re replying to was saying. Of course it would be ideal for small businesses to adopt a cooperative structure but it would be foolish to suddenly try and push that on existing small business owners. In the meantime it’s good to change policy to favor small business over corporations because it distributes wealth more evenly, enables greater social mobility, and fosters community.
In fact they are specifically called out in marxist theory as a “swing” class that can go either way as they their some attributes with workers and some with capitalists.
And I’m saying the 99% has been so compressed, those small business owners live like proletariat.