With Zohran Mamdani’s resounding victory in New York City’s Democratic primary, the city has reached a pivotal moment in its political history. The impact extends far beyond New York. Cities are again becoming laboratories for a progressive politics that is shattering old norms. The Guardian reports a surge of as many as ten thousand young people showing an interest in running for local offices following Mamdani’s victory. Amanda Litman, the cofounder of the organization Run for Something sees something new, especially for young people. In Mamdani,
they saw a young person who took on the establishment against the odds and was able to center the issues that young people really care about — cost of living, especially housing, childcare, transportation — and talk about it in a way that felt hopeful and made people feel like maybe better things are possible.
This urban political movement has precursors as well. Michelle Wu in Boston and Brandon Johnson in Chicago have carved out new political space attempting to defend the rights of workers, win affordable childcare, and tackle the immense challenges of affordable housing. They face challenges and resistance, but they also bolster the idea that cities can be sites of democratic renewal and cultural and political refuges for besieged immigrants and other persecuted minorities. They affirm that a robust public sector offers equitable and efficient public services to meet people’s most basic needs.
Apart from his appeal as a youthful, engaging, and articulate candidate, Mamdani rode to victory in the Democratic primary through a clear, compelling economic program, an energized and effectively organized grassroots campaign, a youthful constituency tired of traditional politics and sterile solutions, a divided opposition dominated by the power of corporate wealth, and a belief in the promise of social democracy in an era of surging authoritarianism. These qualities invite historical comparison and lessons from the experience of earlier generations of municipal socialists.
It’s a well-worn cliché that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Like many clichés, it carries a kernel of truth. The uneven rhythms of social and economic change dictate new choices that produce varied outcomes. And historical contingency, by definition, carries a measure of unpredictability that may demand novel strategies. But the past can also be a useful guide for choices to be made even in the face of new circumstances. Some “lessons” from the history of municipal socialism may be instructive if not exactly replicable in today’s urban political landscape.
The idea that cities could be democratically governed by their working-class inhabitants is fairly new. In the late nineteenth century, amid rising levels of strike activity and economic precarity worldwide, workers in congested and decrepit cities lacking the most basic services confronted urban elites who claimed a historic right to govern in defense of their own property interests.
Elite power was maintained in part by severe restriction of the municipal franchise. Those in power were surprised by the emergence of new urban-based mass movements that challenged their rule and, with increasing success, won power behind an agenda that embodied workers’ longing to improve the conditions of their lives.
Russell Smart, an English socialist and leader in the early Independent Labour Party in Britain, codified many elements of that widely shared program:
municipalization of gas and waterworks, electric lighting, tram and omnibus service; workers’ municipal housing constructed by an expanded city Works Department, municipal clothing factories, coal yards, laundries, bakeries, trams (subsidized from taxes), municipal gardens, free meals for destitute children, and work relief through expanded municipal enterprise.
What municipal socialist programs had in common — whether in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Hamilton, Ohio, Butte, Montana; or Bradford, England, Malmö, Sweden, Bielefeld, Germany, or Redfern (Sydney), Australia — was a demand for expansion of the public sector to make cities more livable, affordable, and equitable for working people (and all other citizens). What lessons can we draw from their experience?
No city in the first decades of the twentieth century offered a more stunning example of what municipal socialist governance could produce than Vienna, Austria, what came to be known as “Red Vienna.” The Austrian monarchy collapsed in defeat after World War I and a popular “revolution,” building on decades of political work in the municipal political trenches, won an overwhelming victory in 1919. Using a newly democratized franchise, workers elected a large Social Democratic majority to city council that chose a skilled wood turner and modest but seasoned local social democratic city councillor, Jakob Reumann, as mayor.
Among the many achievements of Vienna’s municipal socialists, including in public health, educational reform, and unemployed relief, two have perhaps the most direct relevance to the contemporary moment in US cities: affordable housing and tax reform.
Faced with an extreme housing shortage and skyrocketing rents, the Viennese socialists instituted rent control and massively expanded public housing by building 63,924 publicly owned new apartments or houses between 1919 and 1934. Even today, the benefits of Red Vienna’s “social housing” remain, with 80 percent of residents qualifying for public housing and, once they contract for housing, paying on average 8 percent of their income for rent. By contrast, in New York City, renters pay a median 36 percent of pretax income on rent.
What enabled social democratic transformation in Vienna was to a large extent the achievement of home rule under the new postwar Austrian constitution, and with that, the city’s right to set its own tax policies. Municipal socialists worldwide shared this aspiration and saw in “Red Vienna” a model to emulate. Australian Labor Party activists reported the consequences admiringly in1925.
The socialist most hated in Vienna by the well-to-do is certainly Hugo Breitner. Speak to them of Lenin, Trotsky, or Liebknecht, and they will listen with perfect calm, but mention the name Breitner and the calm is replaced by fury and hate. . . . He is credited with the intention of destroying the whole economic life of Vienna, etc., etc.
In reality he is merely the author of the financial policy of the municipal council. Breitner’s new tax scheme introduces some 18 new taxes, which chiefly hit those who can afford to pay, and abolishes one or two old taxes which burdened the workers unfairly — for instance the house tax and various taxes on food.
The challenge of expanding home rule and winning state government support for tax reform in New York City and New York State lies before a new Mamdani administration as it aspires to implement its agenda. The balance of municipal and state power and the home rule of cities varies from one state to another in the United States; in New York, many key issues at the heart of Mamdani’s agenda like taxing the rich, making major changes in public transit policy, or strengthening and expanding some affordable housing provisions are determined at the state level, and face a governor who has hardly proven supportive of his agenda.
Mamdani will need to mobilize political support widely, both to achieve results at the state level and as a buttress against the threats posed by rising authoritarianism nationally — a lesson Vienna’s municipal socialists tragically learned in 1934.
Socialists’ municipal success rose dramatically between 1909 and 1917. They won control of city government in places like Milwaukee, Hamilton, Butte, Schenectady, Bridgeport, Flint, Minneapolis, and some 180 other US municipalities between 1911 and 1920. Almost invariably, however, in subsequent elections, they faced temporary political alliances engineered by businessmen to produce a single opposing slate, typically labeled a “Citizens’ Party.” “Fusion” proved a formidable challenge to fledgling socialist city governments just beginning to implement their ambitious programs.
In Hamilton, Ohio, socialists won a controlling majority in city council in 1913 and elected the mayor. During the following two years, they implemented an impressive set of initiatives. They established a new minimum wage and eight-hour workday for city employees; reduced the police force by a third and saw crime fall by half; made major capital improvements in the city’s water, gas, and electric utilities; collected overdue fees owed by major businesses; and created a city health bureau to inspect housing and sanitary facilities. Despite a devastating flood in 1914, the city-owned utilities generated a surplus of $51,000 to fund other city services.
However, “redemption” from socialist rule came in the municipal election of 1915, when the Democrats, with tacit support of the Republicans, fielded a unity slate. The socialists fell to defeat, save for a single council position.
A remarkably similar story had played out in Milwaukee, where an impressive victory in 1910 led to considerable expansion of city services, new municipal markets, free medical dispensaries, expanded public parks and swimming pools, and steps toward municipalization of streetcars. A fusion slate defeated the socialists in 1912, only to see the socialists return stronger in 1916 and continue to govern the city for extended periods between 1916 and 1960.
Mamdani faces the prospect of fusion even before he has had a chance to govern New York City, as establishment political interests seek to winnow the field to a single Mamdani opponent. Whether he can thwart such a fusion strategy remains to be seen. But for the moment, the personal ambitions and inflated egos of Curtis Sliwa, Eric Adams, and Andrew Cuomo seem to preclude their exiting the race. Internal contradictions among Democratic Party elites, the tainted hands of Donald Trump, and the sheer momentum of Mamdani’s popularity may give him some advantage. But, in the end, grassroots mobilization of new and enthusiastic young voters may hold the key to his success, no matter what strategy opposing elites may devise.
When democratic socialists in the 1890s began to break through established political allegiances and form a grassroots movement capable of contesting for power in cities, they did so by stimulating a youthful, infectious enthusiasm that swept new people into the movement. The mill towns of West Yorkshire, England, brimmed with a contagious spirit that energized a new politics by drawing on a vibrant culture of laborism evident in labor choruses, cycling clubs, agitational vans, expanded newspaper distribution, and the social gospel of “labor churches.” A Nottingham worker remembered those “glad, creative days.”
Even those of us who lived through them did not realize how happy and privileged we were. . . . Arid minded highbrows thought that it was trivial, the politically orthodox disliked it, Socialist doctrinaires declared that its economic basis was not sound, but the man in the street accepted its teaching to which he gave the intense fervor of a happy convert.
The movement evolved from “a mere exercise in economic thinking into a crusade for a more excellent way of living.” A “spiritual revivalism” took hold among, what the socialist Clarion newspaper called, “the great unattached,” and drew new legions into the movement. One observer recalled:
The men and women who were [the movement’s] members and workers . . . were in the grip of a new and compelling faith. It appealed to the emotional side of their natures, and they became, in imagination, citizens of a new and better world . . . the possibility of creating a social environment in which men would live “with the light of knowledge in the eyes” released in them hidden stores of moral energy.
In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, socialists built a formidable grassroots organization that broke through traditional ethnic barriers to create a new political force capable not only of winning office but transforming local government to address the needs of working-class families. As socialist Victor Berger recalled:
We have been at this twenty-six years, this education of Milwaukee. . . . We did not depart from our line of attack. Year after year we distributed literature from house to house. . . . Printer’s ink is far more convincing than meetings or public speaking. In this way we reach thousands of persons who never attended a political gathering.
The socialists’ indefatigable “Bundle Brigades” got party literature within forty-eight hours “to almost every house in the city in the language best understood by its inhabitants.” The socialists literally “saturated” the city with their municipalist program that promised tangible improvements in working peoples’ lives.
The Mamdani campaign does not need lessons in popular mobilization. By all accounts, its thousands of activists — fifty thousand in the primary — following the example of Mamdani himself, engaged voters directly, listened to their concerns, channeled their frustrations, and drew them into a movement that felt new and hopeful. Their enthusiasm today echoes the West Yorkshire workers who sang their way from village to village as they spread the gospel of a democratic socialism.
Other “lessons” from the municipal socialist past may also deserve to be heard. In Vienna, as in countless other cities that elected municipal socialist governments, unsung workers rose from the ranks to keep the movement focused on its own principles and its promises. Red Vienna’s first mayor, Reumann, served four years but chose to step aside voluntarily for others in the movement to carry forward the impressive work he had begun. When Bradford’s Independent Labour Party won control of city council after World War I, it continued to require that party members elected to council attend regular monthly meetings to be queried face-to-face by rank-and-file members about the substance of their work in council.
The discipline of Socialist Party members in Milwaukee and their continuing work at the grassroots enabled the party to weather fusion and to build an enduring base of support among its working-class constituents. As Berger argued, Milwaukee had become “a convinced socialist city.” Despite ebbs and flows and the chicanery of its political opponents, “Once they have voted the Socialist ticket, the workingmen never desert us.”
The Mamdani movement will grow from the enthusiasm it generates. Its challenges, like those faced by its municipal socialist forebearers, will be to steer clear of a politics dependent on personal ambition and charisma; to build, maintain, and strengthen its base of support through ongoing organizing around issues critical to peoples’ lives; and, through the practical work of fulfilling and extending its agenda, to deflect the harping of established politicians in its own party and submerge the hollow red-baiting of its right-wing antagonists. It will need allies in the city, the state, and nationally — but not at the price of its principles or the integrity of its movement.
Great Job Shelton Stromquist & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
