Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism

The readers of Labor do not need to be reminded about how deeply Shelton Stromquist has contributed to the field of labor history in the past decades. Claiming the City, an ambitious global history of socialist municipalism at the turn of the twentieth century, comes as a summation of these efforts. The book joins together aspects from Stromquist's earlier scholarship. It roughly shares a time frame with Reinventing the People: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and Modern Liberalism (2006), adopts the local history approach seen in Labor Cold War: Local Politics in a Global Context (2008), and builds on insights about comparative and transnational history developed in Frontiers of Labor: Comparative Histories of the United States and Australia (2018), which Stromquist edited with Greg Patmore. Anticipated by several essays and articles, Claiming the City is a towering contribution to the scholarship on global socialism. This volume offers encyclopedic knowledge on municipal socialism, which has never been studied from a global perspective. In the process, it advances several historiographical conversations, innovating them and offering a model for future research.Claiming the City is bookended by two pivotal episodes linked to the urban history of socialism: the Paris Commune and “Red Vienna” of the 1920s. Within this broad chronological arc, the book's core argument focuses on the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth century. The geography of the book is selective and follows cultural and imperial lines, with attention devoted to five countries (Great Britain, Germany, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand) and more occasional forays into Sweden and Austria. The book is split into three parts. The first lays out the premises of the project, with the initial chapter offering a long historical discussion on the formation of cities and urban elites and a second chapter arguing for the significance of the 1885–94 “global strike wave” as a key background for the rise of municipal “new politics.” Parts II and III have country-by-country chapters covering the period up to World War I and the years of the war and its immediate aftermath.Even if they are not explicitly listed in the introduction, a few core “case studies” feature throughout the book: the West Riding of Yorkshire and Manchester in England; Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane in Australia; Hamilton and Dayton, Ohio, and Milwaukee in the United States; and Christchurch and Wellington in New Zealand (in the case of Germany, the analysis is at once more localized and more nationalized than the other countries). Stromquist's argument is built by juxtaposing these case studies next to each other. In this way, Stromquist demonstrates how socialists in different countries pursued similar goals (an extension of the franchise, public control of municipal services, equal representation in local councils, the improvement of living conditions in cities through parks, sanitation, and so on) and faced similar obstacles (lack of electoral power, ad hoc antilabor legislation, lack of support from national organizations, fusionist politics). At the same time, in several chapters this localized analysis is integrated within broad national contexts, especially for developing histories of national trade unions and socialist parties. Stromquist recalls famous debates between giants of German social democracy like Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein in order to contextualize the role of lesser-known figures like Hugo Lindemann or Albert Südekum in pursuing social municipalism within the German Social Democratic Party. He cites the successes of Milwaukee's socialists in order to assess their echo across the United States and the global socialist world. A detailed reconstruction of the British Independent Labour Party's origins serves as a chance to demonstrate the key role that municipal socialism had in undermining the Liberal Party and establishing Labour as a national party. Occasionally, chapters abandon the country-by-country structure and embrace a proper transnational approach: in the opinion of this reviewer, they are among the most fascinating of the entire book.Claiming the City offers a decisive contribution to the revitalization of the literature on Second International socialism after decades of neglect. Interest in the subject peaked in the 1970s, when historians sought to understand both the true nature of Third International communism and the limitations of Western social democracy in the conundrum of the sudden collapse of the International in 1914. Stromquist joins a chorus of historians who are revising old knowledge with the help of new methodologies, including Kevin J. Callahan, Elisa Marcobelli, Daan Musters, and Lucas Poy. His “translocal” approach allows a reconstruction of the connections between municipal socialists across the Western world and its settler colonies, allowing him to do for socialism what James T. Kloppenberg and Daniel T. Rodgers did for progressive thought in Europe and North America. Stromquist contends that municipal socialists practiced an “internationalism from below” that was changing Western cities and driving the growth of global socialism in the immediate aftermath of World War I.With this focus, Stromquist's book accomplishes the extraordinary feat of adding new knowledge to a topic: turn-of-the-century international socialism, explored by Marxist historiography to its very last shred. First, he contextualizes the battle for municipal socialism in the broad debate between “possibilists,” who were interested in gradually reforming capitalism, and “impossibilists,” who sought an outright, violent, and immediate break with it. Here Stromquist adds municipal reform to the list of the opportunities that socialism missed by chasing parliamentary influence. As he puts it, “Social democrats’ aspiration to parliamentary power became a Faustian bargain in which they accepted, even celebrated, nationalism and the nation-state's dominion at the expense of workers’ local power and international class solidarity” (15). Second, through its piecemeal reconstruction of the role of socialists in either opposing World War I or helping the working class navigate it through local initiatives, Claiming the City offers a convincing corrective to the widely held tenet that grassroots socialist internationalism evaporated in 1914. Local activism at a municipal level was one of the ways that socialists continued to resist exclusionary nationalism and practice working-class solidarity well beyond 1914 and the collapse of the International.Given the scope and size of the project, perhaps the book would have benefited from a more clear-cut methodological section in which the author explained his decision process on some key aspects, such as the project's geography and the country-by-country arrangement of the chapters. Moreover, while the book is packed with information on socialist women and the socialist approach to women's rights, race is almost exclusively discussed in two sections about Australia and the United States. These sections recap national debates on the subject rather than intersecting the subject of race with the topic of municipal socialism. Empire, which at least implicitly affected the geography of the project, is not openly dealt with. Yet ultimately these are not so much limitations as they are avenues for further research that the groundbreaking Claiming the City opens up for scholars broadly interested in the global left, labor, and urban history.