From Municipal Socialism to Community Wealth Building: The Local State, Economic Creativity and Grassroots Democracy

In the early 1980s, several large British cities became centres of resistance against the rise of Thatcherite neoliberalism. The British government soon saw ‘municipal socialism’ as another ‘enemy within’, comparable in both disruptive potential and ideological orientation to the protests of the miners in 1984-85. The Labour-led councils tried to defend their populations against job losses, the starving out of public services, and the demolition of local democracy. They adopted themes and issues raised by the new social movements of the 1970s and early 1980s, experimented with innovative forms of grassroots democracy, and were successful enough to provoke a notorious ideological backlash. In the 2010s, community wealth building (CWB) became a strategy for defending cities against the worst consequences of post-2008 austerity policies. Preston in Lancashire rose to exemplary status and its ‘model’ was tried, and later built on, in other municipalities. Again, CWB aims at dealing with the consequences of central government cuts. It focuses on ‘predistribution’, on creating a local economy beneficial to local populations and includes elements of deliberative democracy. The article compares these two initiatives for local democracy and socialism, explains differences in rhetoric and in reactions to these experiments, situating them in the political contexts of the 1980s and 2010s, and finally discusses whether left-wing municipalism is a transformative set of policies and politics with a potential to move beyond capitalism.