ThomassRichards Authors Matt Thompson
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This is an interesting review and a good intro to new municipalism (or what @davidjmadden calls 'socialist municipalism')
But it misses some key aspects of what makes the movement distinctive, and distinct from London's municipal socialism.
So here’s a thread on municipalism...
Municipalism is not simply “a political stance as well as an approach to shaping the built environment” (as @davidjmadden puts it) – it’s a distinctive strategic approach to democratising the local state and transforming urban economies using urban spaces as a platform…
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Municipalism adopts a ‘dual power’ strategy: 1) supporting commons and practices of commoning through which a more democratic, cooperative (and potentially prefiguratively postcapitalist) ‘solidarity economy’ can be instituted;
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...and 2) seeking to take hold of the political institutions of the local state through mobilising social movements for winning electoral office, to reimagine and transform the state from within, through guerrilla occupation of bureaucracies, in order to support 1) above.
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Means and ends are intertwined in a prefigurative politics that ‘feminises’ the state’s decision-making processes and subverts technocratic managerialism in favour of 'collective theory-building' and open-source, crowdsourced deliberative-democratic policy-making.
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But it misses some key aspects of what makes the movement distinctive, and distinct from London's municipal socialism.
So here’s a thread on municipalism...
"Politically, socialist municipalism is fundamentally different than the elitist, real-estate-allied stance toward urban development that has come to be known as \u2018urbanism'."@owenhatherley's Red Metropolis reviewed by @davidjmadden for @jacobinmag. \U0001f3d7\ufe0f https://t.co/yF5IZa0FmD
— Repeater Books (@RepeaterBooks) January 26, 2021
Municipalism is not simply “a political stance as well as an approach to shaping the built environment” (as @davidjmadden puts it) – it’s a distinctive strategic approach to democratising the local state and transforming urban economies using urban spaces as a platform…
1/
Municipalism adopts a ‘dual power’ strategy: 1) supporting commons and practices of commoning through which a more democratic, cooperative (and potentially prefiguratively postcapitalist) ‘solidarity economy’ can be instituted;
2/
...and 2) seeking to take hold of the political institutions of the local state through mobilising social movements for winning electoral office, to reimagine and transform the state from within, through guerrilla occupation of bureaucracies, in order to support 1) above.
3/
Means and ends are intertwined in a prefigurative politics that ‘feminises’ the state’s decision-making processes and subverts technocratic managerialism in favour of 'collective theory-building' and open-source, crowdsourced deliberative-democratic policy-making.
4/