In mid-January, as part of Woodbine’s inaugural weekend at 414 Broadway, our Research Group hosted the first in our series of roundtables, “On Municipal Socialism”, featuring eight different presentations surveying the meaning of the coming Mamdani era. As we wrote in the invitation, “from the ‘People’s Republic of Astoria’ to the ‘Commie Corridor’, there’s been a revival of interest in the histories of sewer socialism, and a surprising call from Jacobin to create popular assemblies. With this roundtable we’d like to take the chance to reframe the questions, stakes, and possibilities of the present moment... to avoid a passive spectatorship of either cheerleading or critique.”
Zohran’s shocking primary victory last June was one of the catalysts encouraging us to move to Manhattan. Now, 6 months into both his administration as well as Woodbine 3.0, we wanted to take stock. Below we’re publishing revised versions of two of the presentations from January, which tackle questions around the history and horizon of municipal socialism, and argue for a framing of a broadly autonomist ethos.
Autonomist Possibilities for the New Municipalism
by Amogha Sahu
Let’s start with the heyday of municipal socialism, in what Eric Hobsbawm calls the ‘giant city’. Mike Davis, following Hobsbawm, points to cities like Minneapolis, NYC, Chicago, Paris, Berlin, London, and St. Petersburg which – from around 1890 to the second World War – were the center of a distinctively progressive politics. At the time the left took the city as the center of a broader movement – the tip of the spear for the revolutionary struggle.
The city was good fodder for left politics for three main reasons: it provided a ready supply of proletarians; it gave them space to organize and acquire knowledge; and it was a ready source of antagonisms of a distinctively class character. Call these factors supply, space and motivation.
The supply factors are easiest to cite here – as Hobsbawm notes, there is a well-documented link between urbanization and proletarianization in late 19th century Europe and the United States.
There was space for workers to gather and form industrially effective groups, “tenements or dense row housing clustered around big industrial works and docks”. Patterns in suburbanization didn’t stem the tide, as “the nexus was perpetuated, even strengthened, in early industrial suburbs”. These efforts culminated:
By 1910 virtually every industrial city or town had an impressive central building for workers’ meetings, union offices, party papers, and the like. The typical maison du peuple or casa del pueblo had a library, a theater or cinema, sports facilities, and sometimes a medical clinic. Some were visionary cathedrals of the people: La Maison du Peuple de Bruxelles, the Urania in Vienna, and the Volkshaus in Leipzig.
There are also ways in which the great industrial cities were laboratories for sharpening class antagonisms. Consider Engels on the ‘Great Towns’ in the ‘Condition of the English Working Class’: “the great cities are the birthplace of labour movements; in them the workers first began to reflect upon their own condition, and to struggle against it; in them the opposition between proletariat and bourgeoisie becomes manifest.” Engels continues, “without the great cities and their forcing influence upon the popular intelligence, the working class would be far less advanced than it is”. Davis also speaks in this connection of the “spatial propinquity of production and reproduction, satanic mill and slum”.
City politics was also motivated by a distinctive set of flashpoint ‘issues’, as Davis notes, “Urban class struggles, especially those addressing emergencies of shelter, food and fuel”. Consider also the Meat Wars in Central European cities like Vienna and Budapest against the inflated “prices of meat and dairy products”.
There is a long and storied history of housing struggle in New York City in this period, from the ‘Great Rent War of 1907’ to The ‘Bolsheviki rent strike’ from 1917 to 1920, led by ‘the East Side Tenants League’, eventually concluding in the Albany decision to introduce a rent control law in 1920.
After this, there is a familiar history of decline. Instead of being the tip of the spear, the urban center became an isolated enclave. The gains in consciousness, in material organization, and in strategic leverage were not built upon, at least from a revolutionary point of view. The declinist story can be overstated – many urban struggles continued, and we can point to a period of urban turmoil in the advanced core from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Nevertheless, the broader framing movement, the Volkshalle etc., underwent a precipitous decline.
Corresponding to these new conditions, we had a new municipalism. Progressive power was understood in terms of a coalition between advocacy groups. The ‘PMC’, however that loose group is understood in a growing state and local government bureaucracy; and a complex accommodation of the pressures of an increasing, institutionally coordinated surplus population – the most prominent being mass incarceration.
Per the Riley and Brenner analysis, this ‘new municipalism’ ceases to be a spearhead of a broader national politics, but part of a new national interest group demanding a larger share of the national surplus. Municipalist projects – Livingstone’s GLC, the NYC projects of Messinger, Dinkins, and, the Dellums mayoralty in Oakland – were now situated as prefigurative; coalitional projects that couldn’t be replicated nationally, but rather represented the outer fringes of a national center-left electoral coalition.
Why?
The trite answer ‘deindustrialization’ is right at a deeper level – if we think of industrialization as a broader pattern of economic development that creates a dialectic. Goran Therborn expresses it well in speaking about the ‘grand dialectic’ of industrial production in creating both social conditions of production and increasingly powerful private relations of production.
When we speak of production being socialized, we mean a complex of things. A ‘socialized’ condition of production is one which is increasingly knowable, politically contestable, amenable to greater democratic planning, and capable of rational organization by those currently compelled to work within it. The pattern of industrialization in the European Core, especially in the big cities mentioned previously, at least partially ‘socialized’ production – enough to make the political utopias of that period minimally thinkable.
This trajectory clearly ended in the late 70s and early 80s. There are important questions about how to theorize what came afterwards – neoliberalism, post-industrial society, information society, service economy, financialized economy, reflexively modernized society, post-Fordism, and so on. Whatever our view about the precise theoretical framing, it is clear that these changes destroyed the gains of mid-century and threw them into reverse.
‘Deindustrialization’ is a useful umbrella term for the way in which the socialized forms of industrialized production were replaced by increasingly dispersed, de-socialized supply chains, with skilled labor being fragmented across a complex of high-tech manufacturing and ‘knowledge economy’ service jobs. Whatever we want to call the pattern of growth in the new economy, it was clearly not straightforwardly dialectical in its political effects, at least not in the older sense. In major American cities, it represented a return to a narrow logic of ‘trickle-down’ elite driven growth.
We can think of the Occupy movement as another turning point here. An urban movement, itself very inchoate, but in a way that is profoundly generative in fomenting a national progressive enthusiasm. Occupy’s failure is a spur to think about how to respond to these conditions. At the level of New York City specifically, we can distinguish between two broad strands of thought:
‘socialist’: focused on the reconstruction/infiltration of the great 20th century political forms – the trade union and the party – and the appropriation of the larger low-income group beneath the PMC layer as shock troops for this reconstruction. See the DSA.
‘anarchist’: focused on street protests, spontaneous demonstrations, action-oriented around a single issue, tactics without strategy, a combination of older direct action with the new social media – focused more on a mobile, workplace-independent surplus population. Here think Occupy itself, the issue-based protests of 2020 and 2023, etc.
As most people know, these groups are set against each other. Here are the caricatured positions:
The Anarchists think the Socialists represent a throwback, with an outmoded traditionalism which sticks its head in the sand to pretend that it is 1923. In practice, this means all the vices you can imagine: vanguardism, unjustified centralism, guilt-by-association, etc.
The Socialists think the Anarchists cite ‘changed conditions’ to cover up a fundamental lack of strategy – they often critique organizational forms to hide an antipathy to organization per se, which is, in the final analysis, an antipathy to politics as such.
While there are important ideological differences, the underlying movements these theorists reflected on were always too complex to be contained in these groups. Furthermore, if we have a permissive view of political activity, we have movements that fall in both categories. I think our working position here should be pluralistic about tactics and analysis – we know little, things are really complicated, it’ll take time to work through.
Mamdani’s victory seems easily slotted into the S column, but I think this is too quick. Yes, it is clearly a preliminary vindication of the ‘storm the institutions’ approach. Nevertheless, key ingredients of the victory rely on broader populist and autonomist insights. Mamdani occupied a big tent, was flexible about institutional and policy details, he created a persona focused on spectacle, ordinary conditions and events, and recognized a changed political battlespace.
This draws on autonomist-style insights about the mediatization of politics, about the ephemeral quality of today’s political coalitions – you can’t just rely on block votes – and the need to avoid left-style programs. We have here very much a ‘social democracy for a depoliticized culture’, one which does not fit a broadly orthodox perspective.
In thinking about where to go from here, I want to pull out one aspect of Mamdani’s appeal, and link it back to an attempt to recreate the conditions with which Davis begins.
I’ve charted a loss of knowledge and coherence in social and economic life. I think this is something we must intentionally reconstruct. The first step to doing so is to understand our terrain anew. Not the abstract terrain as seen by 30,000ft social theory, nor by the abstract labels of ‘Housing’, ‘Police’, ‘Childcare’ – but the citizen’s view of economic problems as they are lived. Someone like Lander may have had a better grip on these, but how far did that get him?
Mamdani is very very good at highlighting these problems and making them his business, at least in terms of their initial presentation – Halalflation, LaGuardia taxi drivers, the paucity of public restrooms. But he has yet to draw this together into a new picture of what makes the city run, in the sense of the conditions of production.
Probably the most productive reaction for those of us who are anarchist-sympathetic is to go further down this road. I don’t think it’s helpful to shake our fist from afar at tentative moves towards ‘popular assemblies’. The socialist emphasis on institutional muscle to push through Mamdani’s program is clearly necessary in a narrow sense for its audience. We have to start elsewhere.
We should begin with specific fragments of NYC urban life, of problems initially identified by how they are lived, and use those to construct a concrete, working understanding of NYC in 2025.
Four quick suggestions, localized to where we are right now: (a) the proliferation of third spaces, their form and function as part of a larger project understanding what replaced Davis’s Volkshalle worker’s pubs and street corners; (b) the informal and semi-formal elements of the New York City service economy, most prominently the knockoffs being sold right outside Woodbine’s doors; (c) the patterns of migration since 2021, and the enclaves scattered around the city, and; (d) an ownership map of NYC, with categories that are actually politically workable: not just ‘residential’, ‘commercial’, etc.
That’s how we can get beyond nostalgia, and aspire for more than just a better yesterday.
Municipalist Power and the Subjective Mutation of Politics
by Tony Iantosca
1. The Struggle Beyond Victory
If there is an excitement in the city over the past year, it is not limited to concrete victories at the electoral or policy level. The discussions that I and others have had begin with the radical potential that can supersede policy and push us to think about the election of an openly socialist mayor as an expression of broad, popular power, creativity, and discontent. The conflicts between the fluid city-state we call home, and the fascistic attempts at extinguishing our ungovernability are to be embraced. The electoral and legislative appearance of this conflict is only one manifestation of the contestation under way. It’s now important to explore how to channel and keep in motion the affective and social discontents that underlie this moment, plugging them into new circuits that give meaning to our everyday lives.
Murray Bookchin’s work on libertarian municipalism is one route through which this can be achieved. Though certainly not concerned directly with affects or subjectivity, he does provide us with important ways to think the city as a site of struggle around expanded conceptions of freedom. In the end of his life he renounced both his early Marxist and later anarchist phases in order to reinvent politics from the perspective of the lived reality of city life, making his work indispensable for any discussion of street-level urban politics. We shouldn’t, however, try to copy and paste his municipalist vision onto our present, but understand its larger implications for creating new political subjectivities and how we can, simply put, become new people by building another relationality, a new type of politics. This will begin to form what Bookchin calls, in his 1991 essay on confederalism, “a new political culture that embraces new ways of thinking and feeling.”
With that in mind, I will very briefly review what Bookchin’s municipalist theory offers in a concrete way, and end with what implications this theory carries for these transformations of forms of life.
2. Municipalist Horizons
Bookchin sees the city as the locus of a revolution from below because spatially and socially it offers face-to-face contact with one’s neighbors immediately outside one’s door. The city is the site of everyday existence. Capitalism has expanded its threats to life well beyond the walls of any workplace, so Bookchin sees the struggle expanding as well to the whole urban environment, and thus to everyday life. He seeks to seize the possibilities that this inherent characteristic of cities offers. It should be our task to not simply seize them, but to remake what a city means, as a starting point to confronting capitalism itself.
In the context of New York City, our familiarity with our surroundings, our neighbors, and our fellow tenants, are all nascent forms of the popular assembly that Bookchin envisions. These assemblies deliberate on issues that collectively affect the lives of the community. Here it is vital to note the difference between the popular assembly as Bookchin envisions it and the union, the worker coop, or even the mutual aid group, since the assembly includes governing economic relations or the answering to the deprivations of capitalist society. The assembly also redefines the experience and meaning of the everyday life of a community. The capacity of the assembly then becomes clear as a site for social desires to be invented and to proliferate, giving us not just a territoriality to defend, but new forms of life, new ways of thinking and feeling that channel and organize our energies.
All decision-making power, for Bookchin, rests with these neighborhood assemblies. He envisions that power being communicated to administrative councils through what he calls “a recallable deputy… whose sole functions are coordinative and administrative.” In other words, such deputies are not elected based on their gregarious characteristics, or their talent at crafting interesting policies, but only as functionaries subordinated to the power of the assemblies. Finally, these administrative councils would form a network with borough-wide and then city-wide administrative councils to execute the will and desires of the popular assemblies. The socialist left has recently come around to this traditionally more anarchist form of political organizing, but clear distinctions remain as to the aim these would take. For Bookchin, the assembly exists so that bigger, more institutional forms are subordinated to the desires of neighborhood-level organizations. The DSA version seems to leave that institutional power largely intact, with neighborhood assemblies only supplementing its power. Bookchin’s vision provides us with a model of governance that mobilizes the capacity for everyday people to act, to pose and work through the questions confronting their communities, rather than a response to problems posed by institutional power.
These distinctions aside, a striking moment in Bookchin’s work comes when he states clearly that through struggling for such a radical transformation of power, we cannot emerge on the other side of this struggle as the same people who initiated it. In the same essay, he writes that “our personal proclivities and vocational concerns” would dissolve into a communal interest, and that the identities that confine us to utilitarian roles of “worker, professional, manager” would vanish. We can recall here Marx and Engels’ famous statement in The German Ideology that in communism, “nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity, but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes… society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” The purported sarcasm of such a sentence aside, the activity of governing one’s everyday life, in other words, does not bind a person to an identity and communism, as Marx and Engels indicate here, does not mean the individual dissolution of desire into the communal but the convergence of desires, activities and potentialities into a common and collectively governed project.
Thus, the different potentialities that we each have to act in many different roles in our communities and the desires that attract and guide this potentiality are what a libertarian municipalist society has the power to activate. Unfortunately, Bookchin himself was known to disregard and disparage the emphasis on subjectivity that other theorists of his generation developed in response to the limited horizons and betrayals of traditional hierarchical political formations. That generation of the second half of the twentieth century – those immersed in the struggles just before the emergence of new wars over what existence means – grappled with the need to continuously reconstitute and actively mutate their struggles. Meanwhile, new acts in the long nightmarish drama called neoliberalism began alongside fleeting intermissions in which one found it possible to think.
3. Politics Beyond the Subject of Need
We are grappling with another such moment, in which tangled threads of that history combine to produce a myopia that can only be overcome by a heterodox project of building new worlds. In other words, where previous thinkers staked out their territory, we can brush our sands over their lines and find new paths through both the institutional and subjective that dismantle themselves in order to foster our powers of invention.
As we are presently configured in relation to city governance, our structured, self-interested individual character remains intact. This is true insofar as we are imagined as users, beneficiaries, or even worse, customers of city services. Such a conception is what underlies a transactional model of politics that functions on the basis of an abstract accounting of needs. This binding of the human to their basic survival, and the rationality of the inputs and outputs of the larger system in which the human is bound, has something to do with the formation of our subjectivity today. Perhaps this is the limit of the technical functioning of the municipalist vision Bookchin offers, since it relies on preconceived formulas and roles drawn from Athenian direct democracy. But he at least gets us beyond a binding of our subjectivity to basic utility in relation to quantified, subdivided matter – this much for me, this much for you. He understood this reduction of the subject to need is the trick of capitalism that destroys our capacity for interdependency, for posing our own problems instead of responding to those imposed upon us. By making us dependent on capital and the state, our alienation is much broader than that produced through working and consuming. In Bookchin’s words, the project should be “a fluid and ever-developing kind of social metabolism in which the identity of an ecological society is preserved through its differences and by virtue of its potential for ever-greater differentiation.”
Differentiation and its potentiality: these are the promises and powers of a municipalist project, one that, as Stavros Stavrides writes in Towards the City of Thresholds, functions by multiplying sites of encounter across these differences through the creation and negotiation of what he calls urban thresholds. These thresholds are the power of mutation, the power of the proliferation of resistant subjectivity, throughout the fabric of the city. These are the spaces that are produced in the urban environment in a process of affirmative alienation from our everyday existence, spaces created through political struggles that make the contours of our everyday lives recede as the new ones are being built. Stavrides notes that we can reshape the city’s spaces and times through practices, like the assembly, that imbue our physical environment with new liberatory dimensions that we determine together. This collective determination will in turn be determined by our power to reclaim problems and questions, ones that push us beyond basic needs, rather than being called upon to respond to the questions institutions impose upon us, limiting our possibilities and desires. The assembly is one site through which this struggle over the horizons of our heterogenous desires can be expressed.