Forget national politics: the real potential for the left is on the local level | Douglas Williams

Many have tried – and failed – to move the Democratic party to the left. It isn’t called the “graveyard of social movements” for nothing. Now, after the election, people are trying once again. This time, they hope a “Tea Party of the left” can undertake a successful hostile takeover of the Democratic party.

This strategy assumes the Democrats can be pressured to represent working-class people. But it is unclear how such an effort would end any differently than similar attempts that have failed in the past three generations. This is wasting energy that could be much better spent elsewhere: namely, on the local level.

It could take years before we have a party that represents the working class, and that revolves around a politics of equality, justice and liberation on the national level. But on the local level, the picture is a lot more promising.

Some local races can be won with as little as 500 to 1,000 votes. The mostly nonpartisan nature of such elections makes it easier for leftwing alternatives to challenge for power and win.

Across our political landscape today, in fact, there are examples where just this is occurring. The longest-running case study is in Richmond, California, a city of just over 100,000 people about 20 miles outside of San Francisco.

There, in a city whose politics had been dominated by the oil industry for over a century, the Richmond Progressive Alliance has grown to become an unstoppable force in the city.

Its focus on coalition work with labor unions and environmental groups, as well as its connection to the community through people’s assemblies where citizens can air their grievances, resulted in the RPA sweeping the last city elections in 2016 and passing a rent control measure for the city.

Another example is Lorain County in Ohio, where the local central labor council (an affiliate body of the AFL-CIO) swept local elections in 2013 after local Democratic elected officials abrogated labor agreements and even crossed picket lines during a strike by Teamster sanitation workers to act as strikebreakers.

And then, of course, there’s Kshama Sawant, the engineer-turned-Socialist Alternative city councilwoman in Seattle, who became the face of a successful fight for a $15-an-hour minimum wage. Through a coalition with labor and working-class activists, Sawant was able to successfully push forward legislation that will raise the city’s minimum hourly wage to $15 by 2021.

Seattle’s rise in minimum wage has raised the living standards of the city’s workers, and Sawant has not stopped there: she was key in the passage of caps on move-in fees and deposits for the city’s renters.

This is not the first time, however, that socialists have used local politics as a means of transforming American society. In Milwaukee, socialists dominated politics in Wisconsin’s largest city from 1910 to 1960. This led to a great improvement in public services, particularly with regards to public health.

The Milwaukee Socialists achieved this in a few ways. First, they raised taxes so that municipal departments would not have to borrow money, which would have placed the city at the mercy of the all-powerful banking industry of that period.

Under the Socialist administrations in Milwaukee, the spending on health services increased from $0.26 per capita in 1910 to $0.63% in 1940, which led to pioneering work in factory inspections, school health programming and the fight against tuberculosis.

With the fall of the Socialist party in the city in 1960, Milwaukee would eventually become a test market for privatization of municipal resources, with the best-known examples revolving around school vouchers and, ironically, the municipal sewage system. As the city has not had a Republican mayor since 1908, all of these privatizations have come under Democratic mayors and Democratic city councils.

The kind of coalition-building between labor, community organizations and the working class that existed in Socialist-era Milwaukee – and which is currently manifesting itself in places such as Seattle, Richmond and Lorain County – must be cultivated by the American left today.

It makes no sense to spend the next couple of decades – any project of this magnitude will have to be a long-term fight – simply nibbling away at the edges of a rotten political system instead of building a robust leftwing alternative to it.

The call for those on the left to withdraw from national politics for a while and build power through both social movements and electoral victories at the local level is a suggestion that is spot on for the fight that we face.