Mamdani, a “New Municipalism”, and the Undertow of Party Elites

The fight is on for the future of cities and with it the future of democracy in the country.  The Trump administration’s ham-fisted deployment of federal troops and the National Guard to usurp local policing and bolster ICE roundups of “immigrant-looking” residents is being challenged by mayors and governors and by citizens outraged by the abuse of power.  Elected city officials, critical state governors, and mobilized urban residents are pushing back.

In New York, Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign has crystallized a new municipal politics determined to assert the right of cities to set their own taxing and spending priorities and make city life more affordable and humane.  His campaign has also called forth an establishment opposition determined to thwart the “threat” of an urban democratic socialist agenda and the popular movement it has energized.  A shifting coalition of interests ranging from the city’s largest real estate and financial corporations, to mainstream national Democratic Party leaders, to the racist and xenophobic Trump administration and its acolytes, is desperately searching for ways oppose Mamdani with a single “independent” candidate, most likely the deeply discredited Andrew Cuomo.  The strategy implicitly subordinates municipalities to state and federal priorities.  Even Trump, who has shown signs of resignation to a Mamdani victory and called him “my little communist”, seems to believe that in the end, he could control him by claiming, “he has to come to Washington for money.”[1]  The story is not new.  Municipal socialists in the past have repeatedly confronted state and federal limits to their self-government.  And they have faced opportunistic “fusion” candidates recruited by elites to undercut a new socialist politics in cities, or to undermine successful socialist administrations, once elected, by hamstringing local initiatives and giving ultimate control over key policy arenas and taxing authority to state and federal authorities.

Zohran Mamdani Speaking at DSA 101 Meeting, Church of the Village, Nov. 11, 2024.

But in cities today neither Mamdani’s campaign nor the longstanding fight for municipal socialism are isolated.  Progressive political impulses growing out of working-class demands for affordable, livable cities have appeared in recent municipal campaigns from Boston to Chicago to Los Angeles.  A “new municipalism” is animating politics at the local level with a potent political energy that workers and young people bring to an agenda that promises to make urban life more affordable, equitable, and democratic.   Local coalitions in places as diverse as Boston, Chicago, and Portland, Richmond, CA, Nashville, TN, Detroit, MI, Somerville, MA, Richmond, VA , Seattle, WA and Minneapolis, MN are creating political space for a new people’s agenda and a rejuvenated politics of grassroots democracy.[2]

Why city (and state) politics matters

The power of cities and their right to self-government are inevitably shaped by state and national politics.   Traditions of local control in the eighteenth-century North American colonies gave way to growing elite fears about local governance.  James Madison, in Federalist Paper #10, worried that “a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it, in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district than an entire state.”[3]  While the US Constitution was silent on the powers of local government, a number of Supreme Court decisions in the nineteenth century enhanced the power of states over cities, culminating in what came to be called “Dillon’s Rule”, put forward in an 1868 Iowa Supreme Court decision.

The true view is this: Municipal corporations owe their origin to and derive their powers and rights wholly from the legislature.  It breathes into them the breath of life, without which they cannot exist.  As it creates, so it may destroy. . .[Cities] are, so to phrase it, mere tenants at will of the legislature.[4]

That view did not go unchallenged.  Michigan Supreme Court Justice Thomas M. Cooley argued that local self-government antedated state incorporation.  “Local government is a matter of absolute right; the state cannot take it away.”

It is axiomatic that the management of purely local affairs belongs to the people concerned, not only because of being their own affairs, but because they will best understand, and be most competent to manage them.[5]

While states have continued to claim authority to set limits on municipal home rule, the determination of where those boundaries lie varies greatly from one state to another and over time.  In the so-called “Progressive Era”, cities sought to breach those boundaries in order to implement local municipalization of utilities and public transit or enact tax reforms to finance increased city services.[6]  Mamdani, if elected, will face a similar contest with New York state and the federal government over implementation of tax initiatives and the expansion of municipal services that new taxes would finance.

Whose Party—national elites or local activists?

Then, like now, political elites within social democratic parties (or in today’s Democratic Party) saw cities as “stepchildren” and gave short shrift to the municipal arena.  In Germany, Social Democratic Party leaders, Karl Kautsky and Paul Singer, repeatedly subordinated municipal activists’ agendas to the party’s national priorities.[7]  In Britain, the emergence of a “Parliamentary Labour Party” shifted power from the locally grounded Independent Labour Party branches toward a national party, which became, according to municipal socialist Russell Smart,

A mere machine for registering the decrees of the three or four able men who for so many years, have formed the inner circle . . .all the wires are in their hands. . . even when the general sentiment of the Party is in opposition to them.[8]

In Sweden, even as the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP) was born in 1889, Axel Danielsson, the militant leader of Malmö’s local socialists, warned that municipal agendas might be subordinated to the party’s national priorities as “a paltry program for a purely parliamentary party.”[9]  Cooperation at the national level between social democrats and liberal governments led to a moderate reformism which paid lip service to municipal priorities.

At the founding convention of the Socialist Party of America the debate between “impossibilists” and “constructivists” echoed controversies among social democrats globally, where the tension over local vs. national strategies was equally pronounced.  Socialists divided sharply over whether to pursue “immediate demands” in city politics that would have a tangible impact on workers’ lives.  At the Party’s 1901 convention, Max Hayes, Cleveland printer and socialist doctrinaire, argued against a platform of “immediate demands” that promised piecemeal progress in cities.  The abolitionist movement, he said, “did not say  ‘Let us free one slave at a time’. . .You know it was no compromise. . .when the crash came the entire slave power was destroyed and all the slaves were thereupon set free.”[10]  At the next general convention, the debate over immediate demands continued, now framed in a new “municipal and state platform”—what one critic claimed might be mistaken for “a hat rack” of incremental reforms.  Alternatively, a defender of immediate demands made the analogy of two factions of a shipwrecked crew.  One faction simply argued for getting to shore but with no practical plan; the other suggested bailing the boat in order to reach the shore.  Another local activist took the long, evolutionary view.

This movement at the present time is a municipal movement; it will grow and develop within the states, and you will take possession of them long before you do of the national government.  The municipalities are the natural homes of the proletariat.  It will first assert its strength there.  You will first be obliged to assume a constructive course.

Success in the municipalities would bring new “responsibility thrust upon our shoulders” for implementing all “that will enable the proletarians to raise their standard of living and contribute to their well-being.”[11]

Victor Berger of Milwaukee was the most prominent advocate of a local, constructivist strategy built on immediate action.

Progress is not attained by simply waiting for a majority of people, for the general reconstruction, for the promised hour of deliverance. . .We want to reconstruct society, and we must go to work without delay, and work ceaselessly for the cooperative Commonwealth, the ideal of the future.  But we want to change conditions now.[12]

A municipal socialist legacy

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a rising tide of municipal socialism laid the foundation globally for making cities livable for all people.  It faced the formidable opposition of deeply entrenched urban elites.  Today’s political moment has resurfaced the class tensions that lay at the heart of ruling elites’ longstanding assertion of their right to govern in defense of their property interests, with a presumption that only they could provide the necessary managerial expertise.  But workers in the 1890s showed new determination to claim their “right” to run cities in their own name on behalf of their own interests.  This conflict manifested itself historically in successful socialist victories from Bradford, England to Bielefeld, Germany to Christchurch, New Zealand to Vienna, Austria and countless other towns and cities across the globe.  The United States witnessed literally hundreds of municipal socialist victories in cities as diverse as Schenectady, NY, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Butte, Montana, Barre, Vermont, and Hamilton and Dayton, Ohio.[13]

Workers recognized the city as a unique laboratory for building the foundations of a more humane, democratic, and cooperative social order.  As a Melbourne (Australia) labor newspaper wrote, workers saw that, “the municipality is around them, is part of their daily lives, ministers to their comfort and their health, and is (to coin a word) watchable by them individually.  Therefore, if anywhere, [there] they can learn the first lessons of that social cooperation. . .”[14]  And in 1911 workers in Sydney, Australia took note of their “right to the city”.

Of all the fields of political activity the municipal one is in some respects the most important inasmuch as it is nearer to us than any other, touches our daily life closer, and has the most intimate bearing on the great social problems we are all striving to solve.  Our municipalities are in fact the nearest thing to practical Socialism we possess.[15]

Crafting a city platform. . .challenging a national leadership

Social democracy came of age in a period of surging nationalism in which the dramas of everyday life at the local level seemed pedestrian to national elites, and because of the constraints imposed by state pre-emption and municipal franchise restrictions, the remedies available to cities appeared wholly inadequate to address the depth of their problems.  Nonetheless, a growing cadre of local working-class activists asserted the importance of what seemed to others, small victories.  Italian socialist, Giuseppe Zibordi in 1910 noted that progress in cities may have been “about little struggles, humble battles that would make an outside observer laugh.  But still there, where socialism vanquished the stupid competition of personalistic parties. . .these immediate struggles [had] an immense moral value.”[16]

A ”joyful” campaign for a Labour city

The struggle between local activists and national party leaders frequently came down to the content of party platforms and the priority given to local campaigns.  In the North of England local Labour Party activists argued for the primacy of the municipality.  Russell Smart, in an influential pamphlet on “municipal socialism”, argued that “[t]he Socialist looks to the Municipality and the Parish Council rather than to the national government as the means where the problems of democracy may be successfully solved.”[17]  But he also warned that the path from “competitive anarchy” to “orderly collectivism” would not necessarily be “heroic” or “captivate the senses or charm the imagination.”  Victory would not come in a single battle, but rather from a “never-ending series of desultory fights between the well-disciplined, officered forces of the enemy, amply supplied with the sinews of war, and the looser formed battalions of the labour army blindly struggling for social justice.”[18]  Others, like an ILP candidate in Bristol, professed little time for parliamentary campaigns, “indeed we find our hands pretty full with local elections” and candidates “who are able to do some practical work, and are to a great degree controlled by those who elect and run them”.   They were “very keen on the subject of Labour Representation, especially local representation, where one is least liable to be sold.”[19] (emphasis in the original)  The national leadership of the emerging Parliamentary Labour Party found these developments disquieting to the point that in 1900 party head and future Prime Minister, J. Ramsey MacDonald, refused to publish and circulate the proceedings of a meeting of local “Socialist and Labour Elected Persons”[20]

Many local activists recalled not the drudgery of the campaign, but “a labour of joy”.  Those were, according to a Nottingham worker, “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, 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.[21]

They were “happy warriors” indeed, reminiscent of the rank-and-file labor and Democratic Party activists who brought the New Deal to life in 1933-36, or the latest generation of young local activists who are lifting up the campaign of Zohran Mamdani and other municipal struggles today.[22]

Socialist “revisionism” for the city   

Theoretical debates over the value of municipal politics and reform have shaped the social democratic movement almost from its outset.  Nowhere was that debate more heated than among German social democrats.  The conflict lay in part in the studied ambiguity of one of the party’s key founding documents, the Erfurter Programm, drafted in 1891.  The “radical” theory of part one, drafted by national party leaders, stood in contrast to the specific demands of the practical “social-democratic program of action”, reportedly drafted by future revisionist Eduard Bernstein, much of which focused on cities—free education and health care, progressive local taxes, and equal, direct voting rights.[23]  These tensions would play out in the famous “revisionist controversy” among German social democrats, with Bernstein arguing for flexibility and experimentation in the face of the constantly changing realities of capitalist evolution.  He perceived the “democratization of local and municipal government” as key.  And he believed that “increasing the functions and powers of local elected bodies” would lead to the state becoming “a real commonwealth—not a power above Society but a tool in the hands of an organized Democracy”.  He understood that enhanced power of the municipality would be a necessity “if a socialist policy of local government is to be possible”, and in turn “municipal socialism” would be “an indispensable lever for forming or completely realizing. . .’the democratic right of labour’”.

Mamdani’s challenges             

Zohran Mamdani faces analogous challenges today with much of the national leadership of the Democratic Party being reluctant to endorse either his candidacy or the “social democratic” thrust of his municipal platform.  He repeatedly insists that his focus is on New York and an agenda for improving the lives of its residents. Democratic Party elites allege his “inexperience” and the “radicalism” of his proposals to address the affordability of life for workers in New York City, including his determination to tax billionaires in order to fund his proposals for universal child care, free public transportation, and the construction of affordable housing.  New York Governor Kathy Hochul, Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer, and House Democratic leader Hakim Jeffries implicitly challenge the new popular politics his campaign represents. That political movement has energized the Mamdani campaign and brought in tens of thousands of volunteers.  It also poses a threat to the national political strategy of party leaders.  The silence of Barack Obama, the Clintons, and the political allies of Biden is deafening, as they almost certainly work the levers of power behind the scenes to undercut the Mamdani movement.  Simultaneously, the Trump administration dangles high profile jobs before Mayor Eric Adams and Republican Curtis Sliwa in order to persuade them to withdraw and unify behind Andrew Cuomo’s “independent” candidacy, a move not so quietly endorsed by Trump.

Where do we go from here?

Cities have been (and are) generative of new political energy that brings into focus the tangible possibilities of concrete and immediate improvements in people’s daily lives.  They do so by renewing the promise of democracy at the most basic, local level.  The agendas draw energy from the unique circumstances of the moment and address the needs in new, creative ways.  In the case of New York, this means new solutions to the crises of housing affordability, public transit, access to lower cost food, and childcare.

Mamdani with MTA NYC Transit President Richard Davey and MTA Construction and Development President Jamie Torres-Springer. (Marc A. Hermann / MTA)

But to carry forward this fight, new municipal movements must contend with the resistance of political elites, whether through the realignment of entrenched leaders behind fusion candidates or state preemption of the right of cities to govern their own affairs.  Only a mobilized electorate at local (and state) levels can overcome these barriers.  This may mean, among other things, building new democratic structures for participation in civic life—like participatory budgeting assemblies—alongside existing governing structures as part of a struggle for a genuinely “democratic control of urban space.”[24]

The “right to the city”, as David Harvey has argued represents a claim by those who “produce” the city—the workers who have “always been temporary, insecure, itinerant and precarious”—to a voice in the traditional realms of electoral politics.  It is also embodied in informal living spaces and neighborhoods, where the “right to the city” also means, in Henri Lefebvre words, a “right to difference” as an antidote to “intolerance and segregation.”  According to Harvey, it means “claiming back the right of everyone to live in a decent house in a decent living environment.”[25]  And that is precisely the program that Mamdani and the “new municipalism” movement are putting forward for cities in celebration of their diversity and their social democratic heritage.

Notes

[1] “Trump says it looks like Mamdani is ‘Going to Win’,” NYT, 9/12/25

[2] The outcroppings of this “new municipalism” are evident across the country.  See Steve Early, “Richmond Progressive Alliance’s Lessons for Local Organizers,” Jacobin, 10/15/24, Barcelona En Comú, Debbie Bookchin and Ada Colau, eds., Fearless Cities: A Guide to the Global Municipalist Movement (Oxford, UK: New Internationalist Publications, 2019) and David Harvey’s classic, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso Press, 2012 [2019]).  An important hub of the new municipalism is https://municipalism.org/partners/ and its “Municipalism Learning Series”, a project of the Solidarity Research Center in Los Angeles.

[3] Publius [James Madison], “No. 10”, The Federalist Papers (New York: Penguin, 1961 1787-88]), 84.

[4] “City of Clinton v. Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad Company” (1868), quoted in Dale Krane, et al., Home Rule in America: A Fifty-State Handbook (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2001), 8.  See the legal analysis of shifting state and local claims in Gerald E. Frug, City Making: Building Communities without Building Walls (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 43-47.

[5] Quoted in Frug, 47-51; also, Dale Krane, 10.

[6] On the shifting legal interpretations restricting or supporting municipal home rule, see Frug, 36-53; also Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing ‘the People’: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 76-82.

[7] For a rebuttal of the SPD leadership critique, see Hugo Lindemann, “Zur Kritik der sozialdemokratischen Communal programme,” Sozialistische Monatshefte, Heft 4, 1902, 277-8.

[8] Labour Leader (UK), May 22, 1908.

[9] Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 8.  Shelton Stromquist, Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism(London: Verso Press, 2023), 141-2.

[10] Socialist Party of America, Unity Convention, Proceedings, August 1901, Sixth Session, 36-7.

[11] Socialist Party of American, National Convention, Proceedings at Chicago, May 1-6, 1904, 253, 258.

[12] Social Democratic Herald, February 22, 1902.

[13] See Stromquist, Claiming the City, and idem., “Municipal Socialism”, The Cambridge History of Socialism, Marcel van der Linden, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

[14] Tocsin (Melbourne), August 31, 1905.

[15] The Worker (Sydney), January 13, 1911.

[16] Giuseppe Zibordi, “Primavera di vita Municipale,” Avanti (1910) quoted in Margaret Kohn, Radical Space: Building the House of the People (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 137-8.

[17] H. Russell Smart, “Municipal Socialism”, Manchester Labour Library, 1895, 2.

[18] Smart, “Municipal Socialism,” 2.

[19] J.A. Cunningham, Bristol Trades Council Labour Electoral Association to J. Ramsey MacDonald, May 10, July 6, 1900, Labour Party Archives, Manchester.

[20] Independent Labour Party (ILP), Report of the eighth Annual Conference, Glasgow, April 16-17, 1900, 11-12.

[21] Ben Turner, About Myself (London: Cayme Press, 1930), 79-80 and Alex M. Thompson, Here I Lie(London: 1937) quoted in Stephen Yeo, “A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain, 1883-1896,” History Workshop, n. 4 (Autumn 1977), 8.

[22] For the latest “Building Power in Place” Municipalism Learning Series, “Direct Democracy & Popular Assemblies,” see https://municipalism.org/offerings/panels/

[23] Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, Abgehaften zu Erfurt, vom 14 bis 20. Oktober 1891 (Berlin: Vorwärts, 1891, 5-6; see also, Manfred Steger, The Quest for Evolutionary Socialism: Eduard Bernstein and Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 64.

[24] Mike Davis, “Who will build the Ark?” in Davis, Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory (London: Verso, 2018), 219.

[25] Harvey, Rebel Cities, 131, 133; Chris Butler, Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life and the Right to the City (New York: Routledge, 2012), 150.