Why now, why here: a conjunctural theory of socialist advance in big city America

Socialist electoral formations are advancing in large, knowledge-economy American cities while remaining absent from more peripheral economic spaces, and now, rather than two decades ago, when inequality and labor militancy were arguably more acute. This paper explains that uneven geography by operationalizing Gramsci’s distinction between organic and conjunctural conditions for cross-city comparison, charting a course between the universalizing templates of classical Marxism and the descriptive particularism of the ordinary cities tradition. It specifies four conditions whose spatial condensation opens pathways to socialist breakthrough: two organic, the formation of an educationally rich, housing-poor middle class and the agglomeration of a counter-hegemonic civil society; and two conjunctural, the legitimation crisis that permits majoritarian realignment and the institutional veto architecture through which a deposed ruling coalition carves out its own path to minoritarian restoration. Comparing Los Angeles, New York, and Minneapolis, it recasts the uneven spatialities of socialist advance as central to the vocational praxis of critical and radical geographers in the United States.