The World Municipal Socialists Built

“sparking the revival of municipal democracy is one of the left’s most urgent priorities. Cities can and should provide meaningful avenues for pursuing our collective welfare.”

“In his panoramic new book, Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism, labor historian Shelton Stromquist offers an invigorating portrait of an era that many socialists have recently rediscovered in hopes of finding a model for radical local politics today.”

“the period stretching from the 1880s to the 1920s, when unprecedented global flows of capital and labor gave rise to the notion that cities are foundational to a socialist future.”

“Just as the workers of the Second Industrial Revolution connected their immediate challenges to an international countermovement against oligarchy, today’s multiracial working class can conceive its battles against chronic insecurity and corporate domination as part of a global struggle for democracy.”

“Municipal socialists had a keen understanding of capitalist accumulation and development. Inspired by Marx, they “prescribed a shift from a local capitalist marketplace to a collectivist world of consumption and public ownership, mediated by local government.””

“This meant coalescing the demands of trade unions and protests over dangerous living conditions into a legislative agenda that could mobilize working-class support for an expansive role for government—an important departure from the orthodox Marxist view that the bourgeois state could not be reformed.”

“the pursuit of local self-government was understood as a step toward international solidarity.”

“Municipalists’ demands on behalf of the everyday welfare of workers and their families fostered an “ethical” socialism greater than the sum of its policy and legal victories.”

Commentator’s Note: But this ethics need durable social forms to ensure its persistence. Otherwise, the purpose of “everyday welfare” too easily devolves into populism.

“Using organizing strategies derived from the trade union movement, they were committed to spreading socialist literature, agitating in the streets, and linking different industrial sectors in common cause.”

“In addition to demanding an eight-hour day, trade union agreements for city-contracted projects, public works on behalf of working families, public agencies to inspect food quality and manage sanitation, environmental protection, business closures on the weekend, free meals for children, unemployment relief, rent control, and other types of market regulation, municipal socialists fought tirelessly for public ownership.”

“Candidates for office, party activists, trade unionists, and socialist journalists developed proposals for public baths, laundries, and hospitals; public slaughterhouses, bakeries, general markets, and cooperatives; and, perhaps with the greatest success, municipal-owned utilities.”

“municipal socialism envisioned economic and human development unfettered by the discretion of private enterprise.”

“While the achievements of municipal socialism, culminating in the social housing of 1920s Red Vienna, are viewed primarily as a European phenomenon by most observers, the trials and scattered successes of American socialists also stand out in Stromquist’s account.”

“municipal socialism promised a more transparent and emancipatory government. The goal was to convert industrialism into collective welfare—to master technology and the new forms of interconnectedness it generated and use them to increase public wealth.”

“Turn-of-the-century municipal socialists also intuited, perhaps better than anyone, the arguments about regulated yet broad-based economic growth that would define left-Keynesianism from the 1930s through the 1970s. They grasped the potential of a mixed economy rooted in decommodified spheres of public provision.”

“Municipal socialists understood, moreover, that improvements to public health—including labor regulations, safe housing, infrastructure, transportation, clean public facilities, abundant recreation, and raising food and water quality—were integral to redistributive development.”

“As the best elements of New Deal liberalism later proved, laws designed to reduce privation stemming from public safety failures, preventable workplace accidents, and disease all contributed to labor’s rising share of national income, just as union rights and progressive taxation did.”

“The types of cooperative and public ownership advocated by Stromquist’s protagonists are difficult to expand upon due, in part, to the present global division of labor, the relentless push for labor flexibility by big and small businesses alike, and the normalization of just-in-time consumerism.”

“The advent of factory life and mass production enabled a specific, visceral kind of class politics; deindustrialization and automation have fragmented the working class while perniciously normalizing both old and new forms of exploitation.”

“municipal socialism relied on bonds and networks that globalization and technological change have sundered.”

“While the infrastructure of the industrial age once sparked dreams of an emancipatory form of development that could be harnessed by the working class, the high-tech knowledge economy has often reinforced the decline of associational life.”

“while many cities have retained a complex system of public administration under neoliberalism, there are few grand projects and initiatives to serve the public interest, let alone measures that actually deliver economic security to urban workers.”

“municipal socialism must reclaim its ambitious vision of urban development. The emphasis must be on fighting for more public goods, services, and spaces, not just more progressive taxation to fund existing city services and more regulations to meet climate targets.”

“municipal socialism is more than an ethic or fulcrum for organizing—it is a means of securing investment and redefining the public interest.”

“Its revivalists must persuade ordinary people of what can be gained from democratic control of economic life.”