Municipal socialism

Last updated July 29, 2024

Municipal socialism is a type of socialism that uses local government to further socialist aims. It is a form of municipalism in which its explicitly socialist aims are clearly stated. In some contexts the word "municipalism" was tainted with the concept of provincialism. However, when it was adopted by various socialist networks in the late nineteenth century, this approach to socialist transformation spread across Europe and North America.^[1] Following electoral success in a number of localities, by the early twentieth century discussion of municipal socialism took on a more practical character, as Edgard Milhaud, Professor of Political Economy at the University of Geneva.^[2] established Annales de la Régie Directe, an academic journal which set out to scientifically examine the initial steps towards transforming areas previously dominated by private enterprise into new forms of public service.^[1] This journal contributed to a growing network of municipal socialists in Europe and North America, in which three types of movements were united at a local level: trade unions particularly of municipally run public services such as gas, transport, sewage etc., consumer and industrial co-operatives, and other associations of consumers including tenants groups opposed to price and rent increases.^[1]

History

There have been several historical and contemporary movements that aim to use local government to develop socialism.

In the United States

Municipal socialism has been used to describe public ownership of streetcar lines, waterworks, and other local utilities, as was favored by "Progressives" in the United States in the late 1890s/early 1900s.^[3] The term Sewer Socialism was also used to describe the pragmatic reformist policies of Emil Seidel, Daniel Hoan and Frank Zeidler, Milwaukee's three Socialist mayors in the 20th century.

A chapter on municipal socialism appears in Class in America: an Encyclopedia:

The heyday of municipal socialism is generally considered to have been from 1901 to 1917. [...] In 1911 there were seventy-three Cities with socialist mayors, and over 1,200 other socialist elected officials across the nation.^[4]

In the United Kingdom

The term municipal socialism has been used to describe the local government-led social reform developed in the United Kingdom. This includes the reforms initiated by Joseph Chamberlain as mayor of Birmingham between 1873 and 1875. These reforms included rendering gas and water supplies public services, controlled by the government, clearing slums and the introduction of a city park system.^[5] Chamberlain's approach was also described as "gas and water socialism".^[6] Chamberlain's reforms were influential on Beatrice Webb, one of the leaders of the Fabian movement.^{[ citation needed ]}

Beatrice Webb's husband, Sidney Webb, wrote in Socialism in England, published in the 1890s:

It is not only in matters of sanitation that this 'Municipal Socialism' is progressing. Nearly half the consumers of the Kingdom already consume gas made by themselves as citizens collectively, in 168 different localities, as many as 14 local authorities obtained the power to borrow money to engage in the gas industry in a single year. Water supply is rapidly coming to be universally a matter of public provision, no fewer than 71 separate governing bodies obtaining loans for this purpose in the year 1885-86 alone. The prevailing tendency is for the municipalities to absorb also the tramway industry, 31 localities already owning their own lines, comprising a quarter of the mileage in the Kingdom.^[7]

The Fabians were influential in the London County Council and London School Board, as well as in some other local authorities, through the newly formed Labour Party. A more radical expression of the municipal socialist movement was Poplarism in Poplar, east London, led by George Lansbury.^[8]

More recently, the term refers to attempts in the 1980s in British cities by left-wing figures in the British Labour Party to resist the curtailment of local government powers by Margaret Thatcher's right-wing Conservative central government during the rate-capping rebellion. This movement was also known as "local socialism" or the "new urban left".^[9] Examples of such local authorities included the Greater London Council under "Red" Ken Livingstone, Lambeth council under "Red" Ted Knight and Linda Bellos, Liverpool council under Derek Hatton and Sheffield council (sometimes referred to as "the People's Republic of South Yorkshire") under David Blunkett. These authorities were often derided as "loony left" by Conservative supporting tabloid newspapers.^[10]

Recently, some media outlets have identified a resurgence of municipal socialism in places like Preston.^[11] The New Statesman has also called the policies of the town "new municipalism" and "community wealth building" alongside that of municipal socialism.^[12] Both The Economist and New Statesman tie the projects to Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party.^[11]^[12]

In Australia

There have been several examples of municipal socialism in Australian history, a belief that was most popular in the state of Queensland. In the City of Townsville, the libertarian socialist Alderman Ned Lowry led a municipal socialist movement in the 1890s, which advocated for the "municipal ownership of gas, tram and other industries".^[13] Although Lowry died in 1897, the movement was picked up by the Townsville newspaper Democrat. In the neighbouring City of Maryborough, the municipal socialist movement advocated for the municipalisation of "water, lighting, transport, abbatoirs, markets, washhouses, and the conveyance of coffins to cemeteries[ sic?]".^[13]

The Communist Party of Australia held a majority of seats in the New South Wales' Kearsley Shire from 1944 to 1947.^[14] The Shire was committed to municipal socialism, advocating nationalisation of electricity and the expansion of the social wage, and was unique for its commitment to activism around federal and international affairs.^[14] The council notably rejected visits from the Governor of New South Wales, and criticised Britain for not supporting the Greek People's Liberation Army.^[14]

In Austria

Between 1918 and 1934, the Social Democratic Party of Austria had near-total control over the Viennese local government during a period known as Red Vienna. During their rule, the SDAP passed new labor laws and expanded access to public housing, sanitation, and childcare services in the city.

Critical reception by communists

Vladimir Lenin was sharply critical of municipal socialism when the idea was taken up by Russian Mensheviks in the early twentieth century:

The bourgeois intelligentsia of the West, like the English Fabians, elevate municipal socialism to a special “trend” precisely because it dreams of social peace, of class conciliation, and seeks to divert public attention away from the fundamental questions of the economic system as a whole, and of the state structure as a whole, to minor questions of local self-government. In the sphere of questions in the first category, the class antagonisms stand out most sharply; that is the sphere which, as we have shown, affects the very foundations of the class rule of the bourgeoisie. Hence it is in that sphere that the philistine, reactionary utopia of bringing about socialism piecemeal is particularly hopeless.^[15]

Subsequent leninist groups pursued this critique of municipal socialism in its 1980s incarnation. The Revolutionary Communist Group wrote:

"Municipal socialism" became an avenue that Labour used to retain the allegiance of the new labour aristocracy from the public sector. Many jobs and ‘non-jobs’ were given to this already privileged layer as the left feathered its own nest. Spurious community groups, housing schemes, race relations and ethnic minority units for tiny privileged layers of black and Irish people were set up and paid for. They were all designed to foster the interests of those who found jobs and funding through them, with little benefit to those who were really suffering the onslaught of Thatcherism. Even when "municipal socialism" took on a popular and widely supported position, its limitations were quickly exposed. The Fare's Fair dispute of 1982 showed this at an early stage, after the Law Lords overruled an attempt to introduce cheap fares on London transport, and Ken Livingstone's Greater London Council did not make a serious fight of it. In reality, Thatcher destroyed "municipal socialism" by continually restricting local democracy and the rights of local authorities to raise and spend money.^[16]

Related Research Articles

Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership. It describes the economic, political, and social theories and movements associated with the implementation of such systems. Social ownership can take various forms, including public, community, collective, cooperative, or employee. As one of the main ideologies on the political spectrum, socialism is considered the standard left wing ideology in most countries of the world. Types of socialism vary based on the role of markets and planning in resource allocation, and the structure of management in organizations.

Sidney James Webb, 1st Baron Passfield, was a British socialist, economist and reformer, who co-founded the London School of Economics. He was an early member of the Fabian Society in 1884, joining, like George Bernard Shaw, three months after its inception. Along with his wife Beatrice Webb and with Annie Besant, Graham Wallas, Edward R. Pease, Hubert Bland and Sydney Olivier, Shaw and Webb turned the Fabian Society into the pre-eminent politico-intellectual society in Edwardian England. He wrote the original, pro-nationalisation Clause IV for the British Labour Party.

The Independent Labour Party (ILP) was a British political party of the left, established in 1893 at a conference in Bradford, after local and national dissatisfaction with the Liberals' apparent reluctance to endorse working-class candidates. A sitting independent MP and prominent union organiser, Keir Hardie, became its first chairman.

The Communist Party of Australia (CPA), known as the Australian Communist Party (ACP) from 1944 to 1951, was an Australian communist party founded in 1920. The party existed until roughly 1991, with its membership and influence having been in a steady decline since its peak in 1945. Like most communist parties in the West, the party was heavily involved in the labour movement and the trade unions. Its membership, popularity and influence grew significantly during most of the interwar period before reaching its climax in 1945, where the party achieved a membership of slightly above 22,000 members. Although the party did not achieve a federal MP, Fred Paterson was elected to the Parliament of Queensland at the 1944 state election. He won re-election in 1947 before the seat was abolished. The party also held office in over a dozen local government areas across New South Wales and Queensland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tom Mann</span> British trade unionist and activist (1856–1941)

Thomas Mann, was an English trade unionist and is widely recognised as a leading, pioneering figure for the early labour movement in Britain. Largely self-educated, Mann became a successful organiser and a popular public speaker in the British labour movement.

The British Labour Party grew out of the trade union movement of the late 19th century and surpassed the Liberal Party as the main opposition to the Conservatives in the early 1920s. In the 1930s and 1940s, it stressed national planning, using nationalisation of industry as a tool, in line with Clause IV of the original constitution of the Labour Party which called for the "common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service".

The Fabian Society is a British socialist organisation whose purpose is to advance the principles of social democracy and democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist effort in democracies, rather than by revolutionary overthrow. The Fabian Society was also historically related to radicalism, a left-wing liberal tradition.

The Civic Gospel was a philosophy of municipal activism and improvement that emerged in Birmingham, England, in the mid-19th century. Tracing its origins to the teaching of independent nonconformist preacher George Dawson, who declared that "a town is a solemn organism through which shall flow, and in which shall be shaped, all the highest, loftiest and truest ends of man's moral nature", it reached its culmination in the mayoralty of Joseph Chamberlain between 1873 and 1876. After Dawson's death in 1876 it was the Congregationalist pastor R. W. Dale who took on the role as the movement's leading nonconformist spokesman. Other major proponents included the Baptist Charles Vince and the Unitarian H. W. Crosskey.

State socialism is a political and economic ideology within the socialist movement that advocates state ownership of the means of production. This is intended either as a temporary measure, or as a characteristic of socialism in the transition from the capitalist to the socialist mode of production or to a communist society. State socialism was first theorised by Ferdinand Lassalle. It advocates a planned economy controlled by the state in which all industries and natural resources are state-owned.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of the socialist movement in the United Kingdom</span>

Socialism in the United Kingdom is thought to stretch back to the 19th century from roots arising in the English Civil War. Notions of socialism in Great Britain have taken many different forms from the utopian philanthropism of Robert Owen through to the reformist electoral project enshrined in the Labour Party that was founded in 1900 and nationalised a fifth of the British economy in the late 1940s.

The French Left refers to communist, socialist, and social-democratic political forces in France. The term originates from the National Assembly of 1789, where supporters of the revolution were seated on the left of the assembly. During the 1800s, left largely meant support for the Republic, whereas right largely meant support for the monarchy.

Reformism is a trend advocating the reform of an existing system or institution – often a political or religious establishment – as opposed to its abolition and replacement via revolution.

The history of socialism has its origins in the Age of Enlightenment and the 1789 French Revolution, along with the changes that brought, although it has precedents in earlier movements and ideas. The Communist Manifesto was written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1847-48 just before the Revolutions of 1848 swept Europe, expressing what they termed scientific socialism. In the last third of the 19th century parties dedicated to Democratic socialism arose in Europe, drawing mainly from Marxism. The Australian Labor Party was the first elected socialist party when it formed government in the Colony of Queensland for a week in 1899.

Democratic socialism represents the modernist development of socialism and its outspoken support for democracy. The origins of democratic socialism can be traced back to 19th-century utopian socialist thinkers and the Chartist movement in Great Britain, which somewhat differed in their goals but shared a common demand of democratic decision making and public ownership of the means of production, and viewed these as fundamental characteristics of the society they advocated for. Democratic socialism was also heavily influenced by the gradualist form of socialism promoted by the British Fabian Society and Eduard Bernstein's evolutionary socialism.

Kearsley Shire was a local government area in the Hunter region of New South Wales, Australia.

Social democracy originated as an ideology within the labour movement whose goals have been a social revolution to move away from purely laissez-faire capitalism to a social capitalism model sometimes called a social market economy. In a nonviolent revolution as in the case of evolutionary socialism, or the establishment and support of a welfare state. Its origins lie in the 1860s as a revolutionary socialism associated with orthodox Marxism. Starting in the 1890s, there was a dispute between committed revolutionary social democrats such as Rosa Luxemburg and reformist social democrats. The latter sided with Marxist revisionists such as Eduard Bernstein, who supported a more gradual approach grounded in liberal democracy and cross-class cooperation. Karl Kautsky represented a centrist position. By the 1920s, social democracy became the dominant political tendency, along with communism, within the international socialist movement, representing a form of democratic socialism with the aim of achieving socialism peacefully. By the 1910s, social democracy had spread worldwide and transitioned towards advocating an evolutionary change from capitalism to socialism using established political processes such as the parliament. In the late 1910s, socialist parties committed to revolutionary socialism renamed themselves as communist parties, causing a split in the socialist movement between these supporting the October Revolution and those opposing it. Social democrats who were opposed to the Bolsheviks later renamed themselves as democratic socialists in order to highlight their differences from communists and later in the 1920s from Marxist–Leninists, disagreeing with the latter on topics such as their opposition to liberal democracy whilst sharing common ideological roots.

The 1944 New South Wales local elections were held on 2 December 1944 to elect the councils of the 301 local government areas (LGAs) in New South Wales.

The 1944 Kearsley Shire Council election was held on 2 December 1944 to elect eight councillors to Kearsley Shire. The election was held as part of the statewide local government elections in New South Wales, Australia.

The 1947 New South Wales local elections were held on 6 December 1947 to elect the councils of the local government areas (LGAs) in New South Wales.

References

1 2 3 Dogliani, Patrizia (2002). "European Municipalism in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: The Socialist Network" (PDF). Contemporary European History. 11 (4): 573–596. doi:10.1017/S0960777302004046. ISSN 0960-7773. JSTOR 20081861. S2CID 161327546.
↑ Prix nobel de la paix; candidature de M. Edgard Milhaud, Professeur d'économie politique à l'Université de Genève (in French), Geneva: Journal de Genève, 1948, p. 43, retrieved 2017-08-28
↑ Source: The American Nation: A History of the United States (Authors: Mark C. Carnes and John A. Garraty, Published by: Pearson / Longman); Gail Radford "From Municipal Socialism to Public Authorities: Institutional Factors in the Shaping of American Public Enterprise" Journal of American History Archived 2007-12-23 at the Wayback Machine
↑ Weir, Robert E., ed. (1970). Class in America: an encyclopedia. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. OCLC 185041248.
↑ "Raymond F.Betts Europe In Retrospect: A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PAST TWO HUNDRED YEARS, Ch.5 "Concentration"". Britannia.com. Retrieved 2009-10-11.
↑ Upton, Chris (25 September 2014). "Joseph Chamberlain and the rise and fall of local government". The Municipal Journal . Retrieved 2 February 2024.
↑ "Internationalist Communist Union". Union-communiste.org. Retrieved 2009-10-11.
↑ Ackroyd, Peter (2012). London: The Concise Biography. London: Vintage Books. p. 557. ISBN 9780099570387.
↑ Diamond, John; Nelson, Andy (1 January 1993). "Community work: Post-local socialism". Community Development Journal . 28 (1): 38–44. doi:10.1093/cdj/28.1.38 . Retrieved 2 February 2024.
↑ Caldas-Coulthard, Carmen Rosa; Coulthard, Malcolm (1996). Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis. London & New York: Routledge. pp. 100–101. ISBN 0-415-12142-6.
1 2 "Preston, Jeremy Corbyn's model town". The Economist. 19 October 2017.
1 2 "What is "new municipalism", and can it really combat austerity?". 7 June 2021.
1 2 Burgmann, Verity (1985). In our time : socialism and the rise of labor, 1885-1905. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. ISBN 0868615374.
1 2 3 Mowbray, Martin (1986). "The Red Shire of Kearsley, 1944-1947: Communists in Local Government". Labour History (51): 83–94. doi:10.2307/27508799. JSTOR 27508799.
↑ "Lenin "Municipalisation of the Land and Municipal Socialism" 1907". Marxists.org. 2005-03-10. Retrieved 2009-10-11.
↑ David Yaffe 2001