[Urban socialists blazed a path toward social democracy. Leftists
who want to reclaim this tradition face a whole new set of obstacles.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE WORLD THAT MUNICIPAL SOCIALISTS BUILT  
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Justin H. Vassallo
October 1, 2023
Dissent
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_ Urban socialists blazed a path toward social democracy. Leftists
who want to reclaim this tradition face a whole new set of obstacles.
_

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Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal
Socialism
Shelton Stromquist
Verso
ISBN: 9781839767777

In response to the widespread sense that progressives’ momentum in
Washington has plateaued—particularly since Republicans secured a
narrow House majority in the 2022 midterms—many on the left have
called for a renewed commitment to grassroots activism and local
representation. Indeed, 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. But
complacency, if not outright apathy and disengagement, tends to reign
when it comes to local politics; hopeful declarations of a
“municipalist moment
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have proved premature. Voter participation
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or near historical lows, testing the limits
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a strategy based on running left-wing insurgents against centrist
incumbents.

How can leftists who see promise at the local level transform cities
into sites of worker empowerment and social democratic
experimentation? In his panoramic new book, _Claiming the City: A
Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism_
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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 book is devoted primarily to 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. Stromquist explains how the
seemingly piecemeal reforms of worker-led “urban populism” in that
period laid the foundation for social citizenship and examines the
era’s contests over propertied power and public resources. He shows
how concrete demands for labor rights, publicly owned utilities and
recreation, social housing, working-class political representation,
proper sanitation and safe food, and home rule were echoed across the
industrializing world. This phenomenon marked the rise of what
Stromquist calls a “translocal” class consciousness, in which
advances toward municipal socialism did not reflect each case’s
unique circumstances but instead demonstrated a universal foundation
for social democracy.

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. A platform for public control of the
urban economy can build the social trust and popular enthusiasm
necessary to effect a greater transformation of society. By the same
token, any revival of municipal socialism must countervail
neoliberalism’s insidious power to condition urban populations to
accept a world in which cities are run by and for elites.
Stromquist’s lessons in solidarity and public power must be adapted
to contest the neoliberal ethos that still pervades urban life—to
reconceive our modes of relation and consumption, and our expectations
for the future.

 
“The most striking feature of labor and socialist politics at the
municipal level in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries,” Stromquist writes, “lay in the remarkable uniformity
of its _programmatic_ vision.” What could appear on the surface to
be narrow, cautious, and even discrete aims with no greater vision in
fact comprised a universal method to effect socioeconomic change and
achieve public representation. 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 evolution of European cities over several centuries already
pointed to the latent possibility of socialization. Guilds and nascent
business associations assumed public responsibilities such as toll
collection, the standardization of weights and measurements for trade,
and the upkeep of infrastructure for local markets and rudimentary
public health, enmeshing the haphazard growth of local government with
private interest. Cities’ market-making power, and the obligations
that sprung from maintaining the urban economy, lent credence to the
Marxist theory that capitalism was the stage of history that not only
preceded socialism but also unwittingly laid its basis. The dialectic
of development created new interest groups, new forms of
subordination, new sites of contentious politics, and new ideas about
public welfare.

In parts of Northern Europe, for example, the threat of food riots and
other protests prompted basic regulations to provide adequate staples
at bearable prices and measures to improve public sanitation. Yet the
commercial elite could not keep up with the rapid changes unleashed by
nineteenth-century industrialization. Mushrooming slums, rampant
pollution, and the growing ubiquity of wage labor precipitated a
demand for civic welfare that local elites largely resisted. Classical
liberal notions of improvement and progress had all but ensured reform
only occurred when it did not fundamentally threaten the political and
economic power of propertied interests.

The gulf between what the industrial city was and what it ought to be
catalyzed a new political approach within local branches of left-wing
parties. Rather than reducing socialism to parochial concerns, the
pursuit of local self-government was understood as a step toward
international solidarity. It stimulated concrete demands and
objectives that echoed from the north of England and cities across
Germany to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the epicenter of municipal socialism
in the United States.

Laborers in the industrial centers of Europe, North America,
Australia, and New Zealand understood capitalism as a production
process whose fruits were distributed radically unevenly. Generations
had suffered the environmental hazards of harsh dwellings and
exploitative work conditions. They also discerned that preferential
tax rates for business had inhibited the growth of social welfare.
Workers and socialists comprehended how legal and political systems
helped capital evade public accountability. Until the spread of
universal suffrage after the First World War, weighted voting systems
that favored property owners were a major obstacle for electoral
socialists in Europe. In the industrialized United States, where male
franchise was strongest, business groups and rural-dominated state
governments concocted measures to dampen city dwellers’ electoral
power.

Prominent orthodox Marxists such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky
set their sights on revolution and rejected reformism, believing local
socialist offices would compromise with business interests and
undermine the discipline of parliamentary wings. Municipal socialists
like Germany’s Hugo Lindemann, by contrast, understood the right to
vote as crucial to improving the working class’s material
conditions. Socialism was the logical end of republican
self-government and vice versa. Though male-dominated, numerous female
suffragists populated their ranks, reinforcing local socialist and
laborite parties’ determination to actually govern. For municipal
socialists, seizing even a portion of public administration could
translate abstract appeals to worker solidarity into significant
material and social change.

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. 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. Such efforts were
symbiotic with the cultivation of working-class culture: fostering
empowerment and solidarity transformed subjugated workers into a
collective force. In the industrial north of England, Stromquist
writes, the municipalist movement sparked a contagious joy that spread
throughout “a range of new forums,” including athletic clubs,
labor churches, musical endeavors, and other forms of community
organization. Stromquist likens this activity, particularly in the
churches, to a “spiritual awakening” that manifested socialist
progress in every facet of daily life.

This communitarian spirit, underpinned by what we would now call
mutual aid, did not diminish municipal socialists’ drive to extract
concessions from business and exercise political power. 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. This decentralized approach to challenging
capital’s prerogatives over key components of city business departed
from the bureaucratic tendencies, persistent orthodoxy, and
parliamentary focus of national left parties.

At its core, municipal socialism envisioned economic and human
development unfettered by the discretion of private enterprise. By
proposing specific kinds of public ownership, and by using the law to
raise wages and living standards wherever possible, municipal
socialism augured a potential transformation in class relations. While
its demands and initiatives did not threaten to extinguish class
society as such, promulgating the idea that public ownership was
feasible and superior to capitalism generated expectations of city
government that spread beyond the ranks of local socialists. The
definition of the public good was no longer to be determined by
business elites and their allies; city government itself could be an
instrument to raise class consciousness among workers and make good on
the promise of popular democracy.

 
_Claiming the City_ elevates a number of lesser-known working-class
activists, both men and women, some of whom would otherwise be lost to
the archives that Stromquist mines. 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. He favorably compares their
efforts to those of their seemingly more left-wing counterparts in
Europe, homing in on their repeated efforts to realign party politics
in American cities along class lines. They challenged the axis of
business associations and state government conservatives determined to
quell labor insurgencies and use so-called good government measures to
blunt workers’ influence. Like the Populists who combined statist
and cooperative economic ideas with biracial organizing, they offered
a tantalizing—if never fully realized—contrast to the sectional
conflict that national Republicans and Democrats exploited, which had
foiled class solidarities between native laborers and newer
immigrants, Northerners and Southerners, and white and black workers.

There were other impediments to success, both within the U.S.
socialist movement and the party system. Though black socialists such
as A. Philip Randolph were influential voices within the movement,
Stromquist writes that, overall, “the class-based
‘color-blindness’ of American socialists—the unwillingness of
many to take seriously the special burdens of race faced by working
people of color—conveniently fit Americans’ resistance to the idea
of ‘social equality’ and the wider myopia of socialists worldwide
on matters of race.” Meanwhile, the practice of fusionism, which in
the 1890s formalized the alliance between Populists and the Democratic
Party in federal elections, could just as easily be deployed by local
Democratic and Republican elites to frustrate socialist campaigns in
municipal elections.

By contrast, political entrepreneurs discontented with party machines
could sometimes serve the municipalist agenda. Stromquist places
Detroit’s Hazen Pingree
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and Toledo’s Samuel Jones [[link removed]],
both highly unconventional Republicans, along with Democrat Tom
Johnson
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of Cleveland, within the orbit of municipal socialism. While these
mayors did not have pronounced ideologies and had been successful
businessmen, their stated goals were in many respects the same as
socialist Victor Berger’s in Milwaukee. All three advanced what
might be called an urban model of populist developmentalism, with
municipal ownership of key utilities as well as ample public spaces
for working-class families at the center. Their convictions and
explicit courtship of urban labor—far less mediated by the backroom
deals and traditional emphasis on religion and ethnicity in urban
machine politics—foreshadowed the big tent, labor-driven politics of
future left-liberal coalitions, from the New Deal to Bernie
Sanders’s presidential campaigns.

In an era of machine politics and ward-based paternalism, 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. In effect, urban social democracy could be the proving
ground for a more fully developed market socialism.

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. The less workers and their children were at the mercy of
their employers and private charity, the greater their share of
economic power. 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.

 
These trailblazing efforts to build the socialist city—largely
forgotten in the United States in the postwar era and in Western
Europe with the end of the Cold War—should encourage contemporary
activists who are determined to pass rent control, build public
housing, organize delivery workers
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leaders like Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. Those who are increasingly
skeptical of electoral politics and reformism, however, may struggle
to fully relate the legacies that Stromquist documents to the present.
Part of this is due to the fact that the New Deal order subsumed the
spirit of municipal socialism; many reforms that sprang from it or
were devised in response to the political competition it posed are
typically attributed to New Deal Democrats and a handful of
progressive Republicans. Over time, co-optation of the municipalist
agenda obfuscated its historical role in urban welfare and public
development. For instance, we recognize in hindsight that something
akin to social democracy existed in New York City during the
mid-twentieth century, but until recently it was understood as a
product of liberalism. The process of figuring out how to recover this
socialist legacy underscores how much has changed. As formidable as
the obstacles that municipal socialists faced in the past were, there
are now even more ways to stymie a progressive agenda.

The ethnic machines, muscular campaigns, and transactional public
administrations that characterized American cities from the late
nineteenth century through the 1970s have been replaced by a far more
impenetrable sphere of policy and dealmaking—one largely determined
by the financial, tech, and real estate sectors and their quests for
massive tax abatements
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Among the consequences are the affordable housing crisis, frequent
cuts to public services, and the increasing “gigification” of
labor markets, all of which fuel atomization and the erosion of civic
welfare’s collective purpose.

The ways in which municipal socialism contested industrial capitalism,
moreover, are not entirely replicable in globalized service economies.
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
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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. Under many business models today,
workers are constantly surveilled and easily isolated, preventing
meaningful workplace camaraderie. The platform and gig economy, in
particular, has deployed
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game-like software and manipulative prompts to instill workers with
the notion that they must pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

In other words, 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. Though less stark than in rural and
peri-urban counties, atomization in urban areas has been fueled by a
host of digital services that have facilitated work-from-home
arrangements for middle- and upper-class professionals; socioeconomic
segregation and rising housing costs; and lingering isolation and
pessimism wrought by the pandemic. Frequently, the leadership of blue
cities has only made the problem worse. Their uncritical support for
tech platforms over fixed investment, craven acceptance of gargantuan
police budgets, studied aloofness over wage theft
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commitment to a neoliberal vision of public-private partnerships
exacerbates pervasive feelings of disempowerment. The effect is that
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.

These obstacles can only be overcome through the resourceful actions
of workers, their own articulations of what the urban economy should
be, and their rediscovery of community. Well beyond pressing for
reforms already entertained or enacted by center-left Democrats, such
as universal pre-K, free school meals, and free public transit,
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.
Challenges to neoliberal logic ought to combine things like higher
minimum wages, price controls, and cost-of-living subsidies via luxury
taxes with massive and innovative public investment. As _Claiming the
City _impresses upon us, 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.

JUSTIN H. VASSALLO is a writer and researcher specializing in American
political development, political economy, party systems, and ideology.

* History of socialism
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* municipal socialism
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* 20th century history
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* urban politics
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