Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Shelton Stromquist, emeritus professor of history at the University of Iowa and past president of LAWCHA, is the author or editor of ten books, including A Generation of Boomers: The Pattern of Railroad Labor Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (1987); Reinventing "The People": The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (2006); and Labor's Cold War: Local Politics in a Global Context (2008). More than two decades in the making, his latest book, Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers' Fight for Municipal Socialism (2023), offers perhaps the most ambitious American entry to date in the growing field of global labor history. The result of years of research and travel in English-, Swedish-, and German-speaking worlds, Claiming the City neatly combines an older methodology of community studies with a thoughtful reflection on the strengths and weaknesses of the socialist political tradition. The core of radical politics, Stromquist argues, is best found in the interaction of workplace and electoral mobilization at the local community level, which he insists can prove as cosmopolitan in sensibility and transnational in both derivation and influence as any nationally centered political movement. From his encyclopedic grasp of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century political events, I try below to draw him out on what is most distinct about the municipal socialist tradition.—Leon Fink, Labor founding editor.First, given my long-standing interest in "politics from below" and my conviction that cities have inevitably been the crucible for episodes of working-class mobilization, I felt that there was something of a hole in our histories of the rise of social democracy that required close (and comparative) attention to what was happening in cities around issues that had the most tangible and direct impact on workers' daily lives. But beyond the "hole" I came to believe that cities were a kind of experimental laboratory in which new political thinking and new strategies might germinate. The late nineteenth century has always struck me as a pivotal "moment" when something new was in the air. And there, unsurprisingly, I found "municipal socialism."Second, as I burrowed into the research—the first stop being the International Institute of Social History IISH in Amsterdam, dare I recall in the fall of 2000—I began to discover things I had not altogether anticipated. Municipal activists were surprisingly (at least to me) internationalist. That was reflected in their programs, their newspapers, their organizing, their travels, and their alertness to what was happening in other cities around the globe. As I looked further and eventually more closely at individual cities—places like Frankfurt, Malmö, Bradford, Broken Hill, Christchurch, Vienna, and Hamilton, Ohio, to name only a few—I began to discern a remarkable congruence in the evolution of municipal socialist politics in the prewar years (really 1890–1914). Furthermore, that congruence in part reflected the history of how local elites had governed and contained working-class insurgency locally. And that proved to be a longer and more interesting history than I had anticipated.Third, I started this project as a US historian, though I had had a couple of previous collaborations with transnational scholars at the IISH, but as the research evolved, I became a much more globally oriented labor historian. Nevertheless, the United States always remained part of the project, and squirreled away in the back of my mind was the old Sombart question which many of us have tried to escape or better yet consign to the dustbin. However, revisiting some newer work on US cities and building on older research I had done on Milwaukee, Cleveland, and some other Ohio cities, I came to realize that, at least at the municipal level, the US story was not the outlier in the history of socialism that so much national scholarship had claimed it was. Municipal socialist politics in US cities began to look a good deal like what I was seeing elsewhere, in some ways as robust or more so, but also more varied.Fourth, another of the "surprises" came with examining the evolution of municipal socialist politics in the context of World War I and its aftermath. The story does vary a good deal from one country and one city to another, but what struck me—particularly in my research on Germany, Austria, and Britain—was how the war provided cover for socialists in cities to pursue their agenda, increase their power relative to their opponents, become eventually outspoken in their opposition to the war, and ultimately to demand and win democratization of the municipal franchise. These wartime developments set the stage at the end of the war for workers to regain and then increase their prewar strength and expand their claims to govern cities in workers' interest. The US story took quite a different turn. Toward the end of the war and after, US socialists lost ground, largely due to the fierce repression they suffered, and they did become an outlier.Finally, in the back of my mind over the course of the research and writing, was an awareness that we see in our own time a renewal of interest in municipal activism on the Left in the United States (as well as globally). It is taking a variety of forms—an inventive "municipalism" in electoral politics, workers' centers, revival of local DSA Democratic Socialists of America chapters led by a younger generation of activists, pushback against state legislatures' restrictions on municipal home rule, public sector workers' defense of their rights to collective bargaining, city-centered Black Lives Matter movements, and local climate activism. Some of this is new—certainly newly energized—but to a large degree these initiatives, with some of which I have been involved, seem lacking in an awareness of the history of how municipal socialism emerged as a vibrant political movement more than a century ago. It is a rich legacy of an expansive municipal public sector which we now take as given but which was fought for in the streets and in city councils around the world. There seemed some value in recovering and making that history more accessible.Liberal reformers—and they of course came in many varieties—were generally skeptical that workers themselves could or should govern cities through their own parties. Many liberals professed a commitment to "non-partisanism" in city governance, whereby elites, representing the "best interests" of the city and with greater managerial expertise, would govern independent of any party affiliation. Socialists pushed back on this notion. Victor Berger in Milwaukee, for example, did not believe in the mechanisms of "direct democracy," which have "a tendency to destroy parties and loosen tightly-knit political organization." Workers needed to build class-based "political machines" and hold those they elected accountable. In Christchurch, New Zealand, when workers elected five social democrats to city council in a stunning 1913 victory, fights in council erupted when the "social democrats" objected to being denied their "share" of committee assignments. Members of the liberal "Citizens Association" bristled at the idea that there were "parties in the Council."Liberal elites regularly challenged workers' right to hold political office. In Hamilton, Ohio, a so-called Citizens Party mocked the idea that a worker was qualified to be a city councilor: "Jake Halperin is a good umbrella mender, but the people do not want him to run Hamilton." In textile towns of West Yorkshire, like Halifax, Leeds, and Keighley, liberals in the 1890s routinely refused to nominate workers to their tickets despite seeking to win working-class votes. In Huddersfield, for instance, a former weaver asked the liberals, "Is it a disqualification that a man has worked on a loom?"Programmatically, municipal socialists shared some common ground with liberal reformers. Indeed, what early success they achieved, as a minority presence in elected municipal bodies, came when they cobbled together coalitions that could push through some modest reforms around housing or sanitary inspection, emergency unemployed relief, or the regulation of public markets. Some reformers, like Joseph Chamberlain in Birmingham, Hazen Pingree in Detroit, or T. E. Taylor in Christchurch, might push for limited municipalization or street and sanitary improvements, but they lacked formal affiliation to a working-class party and generally resisted raising taxes to fund an expanded public sector, even as they appealed for working-class support. Meanwhile, some self-identified socialists like Sidney and Beatrice Webb shared with many liberals a faith in the leadership of experts and "men of high honour." As historian Bryan Keith-Lucas has put it, the Webbs foresaw a path to greater efficiency and rationalization in city governance that was "in some ways authoritarian" and "distrustful of popular elections as a means of achieving it."Clear boundaries generally differentiated socialists' municipal programs from those of reform-minded liberals. Socialists consistently pushed for an expanding public sector following "the guiding star of a cooperative commonwealth." Milwaukee's socialist mayor-elect Emil Seidel mocked the inefficiencies of "municipal capitalism": "See how easily we get along when the idea of profit is absent." Socialist Mayor Fred Hinkel in Hamilton argued that because socialists expected eventually to take over the means of production, they had a grudging respect for the "captains of industry" who had built up "the system out of which shall grow the cooperative commonwealth." English socialist Russell Smart delineated a municipal public sector that would include municipalization of "gas and waterworks, electric lighting, tram and omnibus service . . . workers' housing . . . clothing factories, coal yards, laundries, bakeries . . . municipal collective farming." Workers in Malmö, Sweden, added city markets, heated cottages for the unemployed, and free medical clinics to a similar agenda. Impressive, too, were other socialist demands that ranged from school feeding programs to "collective ownership of beer" in places like Broken Hill, New South Wales.Essential to an expanding public sector was increasing municipal revenues. Many socialists around the world found some version of Henry George's "single tax" on the unearned increment of property values appealing. Others turned to new taxes on incomes and wealth and the elimination of consumption taxes. In "Red Vienna" the socialist who stirred the most "fury and hate" among the well-to-do was city finance director, Hugo Breitner, the architect of a new revenue structure that "chiefly hit those who can afford to pay" and made possible the massive initiative to build public housing for workers. Liberal elites historically had opposed increasing taxes to meet the ever-enlarging needs of cities, and they continued to block socialist tax initiatives.Socialists also consistently fought for expanding municipal employment at trade union rates for wages and hours, proposals that liberals generally opposed for fear of their leakage into private sector employment. They much preferred private contracting for essential municipal services.Finally, the stability of elite rule in cities was premised on a highly restrictive municipal franchise, usually more restrictive than the national parliamentary franchise. Workers consistently fought for municipal franchise reform, attacked plural and cumulative voting, and advocated "one person, one vote" (including woman suffrage). But liberals, always uneasy about workers' power, fought rearguard actions to maintain a restrictive franchise in cities, though on occasion conceding piecemeal reform of property or residency requirements.Socialists' municipal programs were both expansive and empowering. In the midst of the revisionist controversy in Germany, Eduard Bernstein argued that municipal power needed to be "enhanced" by "an extension of the right of expropriation." In short, "municipal socialism" could be "an indispensable lever for forming or completely realizing . . . 'the democratic right of labour.'"Municipal socialists were aware of the limitations they faced. Italian Giuseppe Zibordi acknowledged that the progress of municipal socialists may have been "about little struggles, humble battles that would make an outside observer laugh," but he saw "immense moral value" in these victories. Historian Gerhard Ritter nicely framed the political accommodation that these "little struggles" often entailed: "It is difficult on Sundays to speak of class warfare and revolution in a party meeting, when in the previous days one was finding common ground with one's liberal colleagues in the city council over the necessity for putting up lights in a dark city street." Nevertheless, municipal socialists saw tangible value in their sphere of local activism. As Victor Berger argued, "We wicked 'opportunists' want action. . . . We want to reconstruct society . . . and work ceaselessly for the cooperative Commonwealth, the ideal of the future. But we want to change conditions now." In Austria, shortly before the outbreak of the Great War, the editors of a new socialist periodical, Die Gemeinde, made the case for a municipal focus: "If local administration is not the basis for world-shattering events and dramatic tensions, it is nevertheless the grounds for real work and honest fulfillment of duty; and it is not the great world political events alone that reorder human society, it can also be the inconspicuous, unnoticed, simple everyday work in narrowly bounded space."Locally focused socialist activists were often described as "constructivists" and their critics within social-democratic movements as "impossibilists." At stake fundamentally was how best to challenge the "larger forces" that impeded socialist revolution. Their conflicts over strategy and ultimate goals were evident in struggles within the German SPD over Bernstein's revisionism and what prominence to give municipal agendas but also in the Socialist Party of America (SPA) debates over "immediate demands." In New Zealand the struggle was between revolutionary "Red Feds" and more moderate social democrats; in Sweden between national leaders of the Social Democratic Party and local activists in Malmö and other cities. In Britain contention was between the locally grounded politics of the Independent Labour Party on the one hand and the parliamentarism of the Labour Representation Committee and the Parliamentary Labour Party on the other. In Austria national party leadership committed to the revolutionary goals of the SDAPÖ Social Democratic Party of Austria repeatedly marginalized the municipal socialist program crafted by Vienna's first socialist city councilors, Jakob Reumann and Franz Schuhmeier.The "larger forces" with which municipal socialists had to contend—depressions, imperialism, war, migration/urbanization/industrialization—certainly set limits to what they could accomplish at the local level. The concentration of economic power in nation-states, their imperial initiatives, and global economic forces reshaped national politics and international relations. In that context, cities and their socialist activists might seem small players. However, from another angle, these "larger forces" opened new opportunities for local activists. They lent support to a new general unionism and energized a vibrant socialist politics initially most evident in cities. Migration reconstituted a working class determined to address the local hardships of daily life in the cities where they congregated. The worldwide depression of the 1890s fueled the eruption of mass strikes, and the consequent state repression drove workers to turn to politics—again first and foremost in cities. These politics were not insular but "translocal" as local activists built their own international networks, traveled across borders to organize, compared notes, read, and learned from each other's platforms, pamphlets, and newspaper accounts. The outbreak of world war may have shattered the internationalism of national social-democratic parties, but local activists reconfigured their municipal movements in wartime to address the newest hardships workers faced. In time they gave sustenance especially at the local level to emerging opposition to the war and conscription in Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Austria, and the United Kingdom. However, in the United States and Australia, the war gave license to state repression that targeted socialist party and industrial union war opponents and significantly eroded their capacities.War opened political space in other ways as well by giving new life to the movement for democratization in cities through expanded working-class and woman's suffrage. Germany is the most vivid case, where the collapse of imperial authority created new local political opportunities for "Workers and Soldiers Councils" and Independent Social Democrats to claim governing authority—at least in the short run. In Austria the war's aftermath gave birth to "Red Vienna," which for more than a decade offered a model of municipal socialist governance worthy of emulation.But this history also reveals the sobering limits of "socialism in one city." The brutal crushing by state authorities of the municipal socialist experiment that was the Paris Commune of 1871 and the annihilation of Red Vienna by Nazi sympathizers and conservatives in 1934 provide testimony to the power of "larger forces" to impede the progress that municipal activists might achieve. Nevertheless, a longer history—mostly beyond the limits of what I could address in this book—provides some evidence for the survival and success, indeed the expansion, of the municipal socialist agenda in cities during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We live in cities where many of the programs municipal socialists fought for are normative. That's an important story—with direct bearing on today's struggles—of the continuing fight for municipal home rule, the campaigns to resist privatization of public services, and the defense of a robust and expansive municipal public sector and the labor rights of its workers.
Fink et al. (Wed,) studied this question.