By Eric Brandom
Shelton Stromquist, Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism. London and New York: Verso Books, 2023. Pp. 880. $100 hardcover (ISBN 978-1-839-76777-7).
The rent is too damn high. But what can you do? The New York Times in May suggested Vienna as a model for managing the spiraling cost of housing. There, the state has stepped in to municipalize housing supply, keeping rents low at the expense of landlord profit. The article features an image of the famous public housing apartment block, the Karl-Marx-Hof. It would be difficult to miss the socialist inspiration for that particular building, of course, or in Red Vienna more broadly, but the Times mentions “socialists” only here and there, and passes quickly over the larger social vision embodied in the enormous Karl-Marx-Hof. Nor does the reader learn that Austrian fascists shelled the building during a civil war in 1934. The Times perhaps does not want to highlight the conflictual politics—which had to do not only with high rent, but also with a host of other issues that confront the poor and the working classes in cities—out of which the remarkable experiments of Red Vienna came.
These politics are central to Shelton Stromquist’s Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism, which closes with a chapter on Red Vienna. Stromquist’s readers will come away understanding that Red Vienna became a “beacon” for municipal socialists elsewhere in the world, including in the United States, not least because “their core programs were essentially identical” (796). Municipalization of basic services, building up of the housing stock, unemployment relief, “democratization of public space,” and, especially, “a redistributive tax structure” were all things that other municipal socialists had been campaigning for since the 1890s as well (800). Vienna was exceptional mainly in its success.
Claiming the City is the product of Stromquist’s long and active career as a historian of labor and socialist politics. It is a “translocal,” and perhaps really comparative, study of municipal socialism especially in the United States, Britain, Germany, Australia and New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, Sweden roughly in the years 1890-1930. The struggle for control over cities was, Stromquist argues, the beating heart of socialism in this period. Municipal activism united political demands with economic and cultural ones; cities were training grounds for national leaders, but also sites of transnational solidarities that skipped the national level. With an enviable richness and breadth of scholarship, Claiming the City makes a number of pointed arguments about local contexts—this review can only suggest their range—but its ambition is ultimately to offer an alternative history of socialism and labor activism in this period. Urban activism that focused on the politics of everyday life not only engaged working class enthusiasm, but was also at certain moments considerably more radical, more revolutionary, than was politics at the national level. To dismiss socialists running for school boards or city councils as irrelevant reformists or just re-branded liberals is, Stromquist insists, simply to get the history wrong. Milwaukee-style sewer socialism is nothing to scoff at.
Key to Stromquist’s larger argument is the claim that cities were everywhere the sharpest point of contact between capital and labor, and that therefore municipal politics is the arena in which democracy—citizenship—and property most directly come into conflict. The book’s first part begins with a discussion of the Paris Commune of 1871, emphasizing its impulse to municipal self-rule and direct democracy, and the debates about its significance for later practice. Stromquist maps the institutional landscape of municipal government in different national contexts and then describes the wave of labor action that washed across it in the 1890s. Despite important national differences there were many similarities. The wealthy everywhere wanted to avoid taxation; the working classes suffered from over-crowding, poor sanitation, and a lack of basic amenities. The demand for wider suffrage based not on property (or rate-paying) but residence was urgent nearly everywhere. Everywhere the form that municipal government took mattered – were elections by ward, or at-large? Especially but not only in Britain, socialists always had to compete with liberal reformists, who wanted many of the same improvements, but put their faith in professional and technically competent city managers rather than “the empowerment of a new working class prepared to engage in municipal combat with the political agents of a propertied elite determined to defend its hold on governance” (73). In the 1890s, working people began to get themselves and their candidates elected to local offices, and to impose first their voices and eventually in some places their solutions.
These working class municipal political insurgencies have enough in common with one another to constitute a single object of study – or so at least Stromquist wishes to argue. In response to a particular kind of “global crisis of capitalism” at the end of the century, Stromquist sees a very similar series of political projects, sometimes entangled with one another, “hemmed in by entrenched partisan loyalties, patronage networks, restrictive franchises, and outright political suppression.” In many parts of the world, facing similar problems and unreliable liberal allies, “a cohort of municipal political activists” sought to define, against both middle class reformers and socialist leadership at a national level, “a new politics that addressed the immediate and tangible needs of workers’ daily lives in cities” (146). This “politics of every day” was, says Stromquist, a key element in the actual functioning of socialist parties in the period (not reducible to trade-union conservatism), and was engaged in “struggles for the political soul of social democracy” both before and after 1914. Looking sometimes across the world for inspiration, they pushed for municipalization of utilities, power and water but also abattoirs, baths, and tramways. And their appeal was wide. Indeed readers in the United States may be surprised by how many cities elected socialists to office in these pre-WWI years. Probably more in Ohio than one might guess in the whole country. Even Wichita, Kansas came close to electing a socialist mayor.
The second part of the book fills in this picture with detailed studies of specific contexts, with substantial chapters on England, Germany, New Zealand and Australia, and the United States. In each case the national provides a frame for local case-studies, so that the chapters could be read each as small monographs. In the United States, for instance, significant space is given to a comparison of the somewhat different trajectories followed by two cities in Ohio: Hamilton and Dayton (435-456). The former is typical in that the socialists eventually in 1915 lost to a fusion candidate, a Democratic businessman with Republican support (444). One local newspaper called this “redemption” from socialist rule, which is surely significant: it is the same word used for the restoration of white supremacy in post-Reconstruction southern polities. There is a useful discussion (467, 666-67) of the development of the legal doctrine according to which municipalities are entirely under the tutelage of states, so that the Ohio state legislature could put sharp limits on the capacity of a municipality to, as for instance was attempted in Cleveland, municipalize streetcars (a frequent object of contest).
In the final chapter of that part of the book, Stromquist argues for the existence of an “internationalism from below.” It is exemplified by figures like Walter Thomas Mills, who came from Milwaukee to New Zealand as an emissary of municipal socialism, or Patrick Hickey, who crossed the Pacific in the other direction, from the mining districts of New Zealand to the mines of Butte, Montana, among other places (477-78). Stromquist sees this internationalism not so much in theoreticians expounding on proletarian universalism. Many of the major theorists of the period, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Karl Kautsy, and Rosa Luxembug, make appearances here. Eduard Bernstein, who is experiencing something of a revival these days (see the forthcoming article by Peter Giraudo), is treated most sympathetically. To the discourse of high theory Stromquist prefers the imagined community of the working classes articulated through newspapers: socialists in Hamburg and Broken Hill read about Milwaukee, and vice versa. They shared enemies, ideas, inspiration, and in some cases personnel.
The third part of the book is about what the terrible crisis of the First World War did to the socialist movements and institutions so lovingly reconstructed up to that point. For Stromquist “it is crucial to understand the municipality as a setting in which opposition to the war congealed around the grievances of daily life” (529). Broadly speaking, the thrust of this part of the book is to show that the municipal socialists were capable of significant resistance to the wartime order – that, indeed, it was possible to articulate and pursue anti-war politics at the municipal level in a way that the national level generally did not allow, especially in Germany (see for example 724, 730-36). The history of resistance to the war in Germany, Stromquist maintains, simply cannot be understood at the level of national party politics (742). So too, he argues, we misunderstand the eruption of revolutionary governments in German cities in 1918/19 if we do not put them in the context of long struggles for municipal socialism stretching back into the pre-war period – and perhaps not only in Germany.
Claiming the City is a large and ambitious book, crossing national boundaries in ways that will no doubt rankle some specialists. One might object that the book’s subject is not really global. This is a book about Europe and Anglophone settler colonies, about the political context of nation-states in which a nominal commitment to civic equality could be exploited by the many against the few. Stromquist is very aware of the specific and highly class-dependent role that women played at this moment, included as legitimate reformists but not as full citizens. Racism is discussed in the WW1-era Australian context, but much less than might be expected in the American one. Given the granular attention to, for instance, how British legal and political institutions were selectively imported to the antipodes in establishing municipal government there, it is surprising how little empire as such comes into the meat of the argument. The Leninist moment of connection between domestic class politics and international conflict or empire does not arrive.
The book is a history of working people and what they have achieved, not an inquiry into the limits that global capital places on their action. Stromquist cites and invokes the work of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and Mike Davis, as well as sociologists including Saskia Sassen, but he is first of all a historian – and this is no bad thing. Claiming the City is a valuable work of historical recovery. As Stromquist writes, “cities remain vibrant laboratories for the practice of social democracy. If not explicitly drawing on municipal socialism, [present-day reformers] nonetheless embody important elements of that tradition and, consciously or not, defend what is in many ways a powerful and ennobling history” (817). This history may seem distant to our current moment, and those looking for ways to think about abolition of the carceral state, for instance, or threats of capital flight at the municipal level, or the continuing salience of the structurally racist real estate industry, will have to read creatively. It seems evident, however, that there can be no choosing between electing left-wing political candidates and support for labor organizing and strike actions –the two are now and always have been complementary. Technocracy in all its forms remains an enemy of democracy – Stromquist advocates for participatory budgeting, for instance. And the fusion candidate, uniting the sensible liberal with the business-oriented conservative, remains an electoral threat.
Claiming the City is a hopeful book about what is possible when working people engage in municipal politics. It is full of strike actions, brave refusals, and creative political maneuvering on the part of working class people. Stromquist does not dwell on the fact that Paris and Vienna, the two radical cities bookending his narrative, were both destroyed by the organized violence of national state repression. Indeed the history Stromquist recounts here was eclipsed for much of the 20th century by another revolutionary city – Petrograd – that did not allow itself to be crushed. In 1920, the anarchist-turned-Bolshevik Victor Serge, looking back at the pre-war period on which Stromquist focuses, explained to his fellow anarchists that “not one of the words which we used before the war and the revolution has ceased to be necessary for us: on the contrary, a number of those which at that time were only words now refer to realities; but there is not a single one of them which can be used in precisely the same way as previously” (121). Those words, those demands, those dreams, are still necessary – what they mean in the present, however, remains to be determined.
Eric Brandom is a Visiting Assistant Professor and James Carey Research Fellow in the History Department at Kansas State University. He is co-author with Tommaso Giordani of a translation and critical edition of Georges Sorel’s “Study on Vico” (Brill, 2020) and has published articles in venues including French Historical Studies, French History, and History of Political Thought.
Title Image: Exterior of the Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna. Source: Yourstage.wien.info
Age of Revolutions 