Mamdani’s Municipal Socialist Inheritance

Zohran Mamdani’s stunning victory in New York City’s Democratic Party mayoral primary has captured the country’s attention as few municipal elections have in recent years—or even decades. It is not simply the prospect of a Muslim mayor, with immigrant roots, or a youthful, charismatic politician not cut from conventional cloth. Neither is it primarily that his candidacy has mobilized a youthful constituency badly needed by a beleaguered, aging, and calcified Democratic Party with a stodgy and unimaginative leadership. Mamdani is a self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” with a startlingly original municipal platform that has captured the imagination of voters. He has also been a lightning rod for right-wing and mainstream red-baiting of an intensity rarely seen since the Cold War. Some elements of Mamdani’s program are foreshadowed in the progressive administrations of Mayors Michelle Wu in Boston and Brandon Johnson in Chicago. Some of us with longer memories will recall socialist Mayor Bernie Sanders in Burlington, Vt., long before he became a U.S. senator and national presidential candidate. More deeply buried in the historical record are the vibrant currents of municipal socialism that reshaped our urban worlds more than we acknowledge or even realize.

“Municipal socialism” has a long and distinguished history in the United States and around the world. Its roots go back to the very different world of the late 19th century and a political movement born of spreading labor conflict and decaying, elite-dominated cities. Bursting with new migrants and unregulated capitalist expansion, elite-governed cities proved largely incapable of meeting the most basic needs of their working-class citizens—safe water; sewage disposal; affordable housing and city transit; and access to safe, affordable food, electricity, public parks, and libraries. Within a few decades, this working-class municipalist movement had set in motion reforms that would radically transform the fabric of cities and lay the foundation for a vibrant, democratized urban public sector capable of meeting the basic needs of urban citizens and tangibly improving the quality of their lives.

This historical movement to democratize and humanize cities may not offer an exact template for today’s political moment. But what they built and the challenges they faced can instruct us nonetheless. For all the lack of democracy in the Gilded Age—the denial of voting rights to Blacks across the South, women in virtually every state, and immigrants in many cities—the authoritarianism of President Donald Trump and his minions has created a truly unprecedented anti-democratic political challenge. That makes the fight to protect democracy and the public sector in cities even more consequential.

Programmatically, municipal socialists fought for an expanded public sector that could address the basic needs of working-class residents. As Canadian political scientist Warren Magnusson has written, in The Search for Political Space (University of Toronto Press, 1996), workers imagined they could:
…live in public housing, ride public transit, rely on public utilities for water, power, lighting and telecommunications, send their children to public schools, get health care at public hospitals and clinics, go to public swimming baths, recreation centres, parks, and theatres, eat at public restaurants, and depend on public pensions and other benefits for people with inadequate incomes.

In 1895, English socialist and Independent Labour Party activist Russell Smart delineated a similar but even more expansive municipal agenda that included municipalization of gas and waterworks, electric lighting, and tram and omnibus service; workers’ municipal housing constructed by an expanded city works department; municipal clothing factories, coal yards, laundries, bakeries, and gardens; free meals for destitute children; and work relief through expanded municipal enterprise. Workers in Malmö, Sweden affiliated with the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP) added city markets, heated cottages for the unemployed, and free medical clinics to a similar agenda. Impressive, too, were other wide-ranging socialist demands, from school meals programs to “collective ownership of beer” in places like Broken Hill, New South Wales.

Such a vision is not a far cry from the existing urban public sector today in many U.S. cities that grew from these municipal socialist roots. Mamdani’s program is, in many ways, merely an extension of these principles in response to specific challenges today—the need for publicly funded childcare, stronger rent regulation in a housing market where the cost of housing has escalated beyond the means of working-class families, free municipal bus service, and municipal grocery stores that will put a dent in the inflated cost of food.

Historically, local elites, whether conservatives or liberals, belittled the idea that working people could manage the complex machinery of local government. In much the same vein, today Democratic and Republican party leaders point to the “inexperience” of Mamdani and his allies whose “utopian” policies, they claim, would produce inefficiency and mismanagement.

The case of Hamilton, Ohio, in the election of 1911 is instructive. Two local newspapers, the Evening Journal and the Hamilton Telegraph quoted local elites mocking the idea that “a good umbrella mender” could “run the city of Hamilton.” Of the top municipal administrators hired by the newly elected socialist mayor and councilors, “five were machinists, and one each a painter, umbrella maker, laborer, paper maker and insurance executive.” Despite the fierce opposition of local elites, they managed to steer Hamilton toward civic renewal with a vibrant and efficient public sector. They instituted a minimum wage and eight-hour day for city employees; cut back on a “bloated” police department; reformed a badly mismanaged public works department; reinvested in equipment and facilities of neglected water, gas, and electric works; collected payments owed by major corporate consumers; upgraded refuse and litter collection; passed a “pure food” ordinance for inspection of milk and other foods; and adopted a “smoke ordinance” regulating factory emissions, among other improvements.

In Milwaukee, socialists gradually built strength in city council, and in 1910 elected 21 out of 36 council members, as well as woodworker Emil Seidel as mayor. Seidel mocked the inefficiencies of capitalism and advocated an expanded public sector. “See how easily we get along when the idea of profit is absent,” he told reformer Frederic Howe for an article in a June 1910 issue of The Outlook, “Milwaukee, a Socialist City.” The Milwaukee socialists quickly pushed forward plans to municipalize street-cars and other services, including a city-owned terminal station, municipal baths, markets, cold storage, ice and garbage disposal plants, public works employment for the unemployed, free medical dispensaries and hospitals, expanded public parks and swimming pools, and free textbooks. They also enlisted public schools as community centers.

Municipal socialism flourished in U.S. cities and around the world during the first three decades of the 20th century. More than 29 Ohio cities elected socialist governments between 1911 and 1920, and in as many as 180 cities in the United States generally. Other countries including Britain, Germany, Sweden, and much of the rest of continental Europe, as well as Australia and New Zealand, saw a surge in municipal socialist victories.

While municipal socialist governance profoundly reshaped urban public services and left a lasting legacy, it also faced political challenges to staying in power. In the United States, wartime and postwar repression directed at socialists and immigrants put the brakes on socialist governance in many cities. For earlier municipal socialists, just like Mamdani today, the home rule of cities—their ability to govern themselves—typically faced restrictions that gave preemptive power to states. City charters varied, but often major policy initiatives required state sanction. In many cases, cities’ ability to set their own tax policy to fund expanded public services required state approval or state legislation. In Mamdani’s case that will apply, at a minimum, to his proposal to raise state and city income tax rates on the very wealthy.

Despite their achievements, many early municipal socialist victories were short-lived. Sustained socialist governance of cities routinely faced the challenge of political fusion, where opposing parties realigned to form a temporarily unified opposition to defeat socialist rule. In the case of New York City, the prospect of Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo mounting “independent” campaigns might bode well for Mamdani. However, if one of them agrees not to run at the urging of Trump and his billionaire friends, opposition to Mamdani might then coalesce around a single fusion candidate, and he may face a challenge similar to his municipal socialist predecessors. Nevertheless, what is unprecedented (and somewhat unpredictable) is the surge of excitement and enthusiasm, especially among younger voters, around his program and his candidacy. No matter what political gymnastics his opponents may try, he has sparked a new municipal movement in New York City and around the country that, while not without historical precedent, is also refreshingly new for our time.

Shelton Stromquist is author of Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism (Verso Press, 2023).