The Fortunes and Fragility of Socialist Municipalism

Below is the text of an article I wrote for Jacobin shortly before Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral race this Fall. The print edition is out now, and the whole issue on municipal socialism looks fantastic. Arguably, the questions posed in the article are even more pressing in the aftermath of a Mamdani victory, as the new mayor and his fledgling administration pivot to the difficult project of enacting their agenda.

When Fascism Destroyed Italy’s Socialist City Halls

Zohran Mamdani’s surging mayoral campaign in New York City embodies, for many, the promise of a new wave of democratic socialists targeting mayoralties and city-council seats across the United States. Unsurprisingly, the campaign has also become a lightning rod for conservative and corporate liberal efforts to not just obstruct Mamdani’s path to Gracie Mansion, but to discredit socialist projects in general. The sentiment shared by both detractors and enthusiasts is one of possibility: if elected, Mamdani might throw fuel on the fire of a socialist movement capable of combatting oligarchy, improving the lives of working people, and unsettling the moribund landscape of American politics.

Is this appraisal warranted?

Crucially, the horizon opened by Mamdani’s candidacy is darkened by recent federal incursions on the autonomy of city halls. This summer’s National Guard deployments in Los Angeles and the District of Columbia, federal operations in Chicago, New York, and Portland, and President Donald Trump’s sinister likening of Mamdani’s campaign to “a rebellion” all underscore the precarity of local authority confronted with forces of political reaction. Of course, the power of American presidents to interfere in state and municipal affairs remains bound by constitutional and statutory checks. Yet, given the uncertain staying power of these legal controls, the Left would be wise to consider not just municipal socialism’s promise, but also the historical crucible of its defeats.

Redder Years

A century ago, Italy witnessed an unprecedented wave of labor militancy, combining electoral advances with revolutionary mobilization. Nurtured by socialist and radical syndicalist currents and buoyed by a wave of socialist municipal victories, the biennio rosso — the “Two Red Years” of 1919-1920 — ushered in mass strikes, factory occupations, and organized experiments in worker self-management.

In industrialized Turin, a young Antonio Gramsci collaborated with workers in the metalworking and auto industries to form factory councils, with the goal of democratizing production and transitioning to working-class control. By late 1919, over 150,000 Turinese laborers were organized in autonomous councils. The movement soon spread to Milan and stretched as far south as Campania and Sicily, incorporating no less than half a million Italian workers. In September 1920, this labor militancy reached a fever pitch: armed workers occupied factories across Italy — not to halt production, but to place it under the control of democratically organized shopfloor councils.

In most histories, the biennio rosso is remembered for this searing but quickly defeated eruption of extra-electoral radicalism. Ultimately, the revolutionary moment was fleeting. By December 1920, the factory occupations had been effectively suppressed and the workers’ councils all but dismantled.

Yet if the agitation, mass strikes, and pitched street battles of 1920 are the stuff of labor legend, just as significant was the biennio rosso’s groundswell of socialist activity in an electoral frame. The November 1919 general election brought a surging victory for the Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI). Socialist candidates secured nearly a third of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies, drawing 32.3 percent of the popular vote—the largest share for any party. This figure is itself remarkable, given that the PSI’s platform at this time was “Maximalist”: full alignment under the Third Communist International’s call for a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. No single party line commanded more support in Italy in 1919.

At the local level, too, Socialists made inroads, conquering nearly a quarter of Italian municipalities and more than a third of provincial councils. This movement’s meteoric trajectory offers a sobering lesson for today’s socialist municipalism.

In November 1920, the northern industrial capital of Milan, still reeling from September’s factory occupations, confirmed Angelo Filipetti’s Socialist administration. A medical doctor, “intransigent” Socialist, and veteran of the Milanese left, Filippetti worked alongside the recently founded League of Socialist Doctors to reform public assistance, de-privatize hospital care and pharmaceutical services, and reform labor legislation. Excoriating the Milanese bourgeoisie in his inaugural address, Filippetti submitted that the new municipal government, “which flanks the working class led by the socialists, must charge into combat against the bourgeois state, seize new rights, broaden the circle of its activity and, if necessary, break the laws that limit its action.” Echoing contemporary efforts at urban reform, Filippetti’s mayoral agenda included expansion of public transit, investment in social housing, and the extension of Milan’s green spaces and parkways.

Fall 1920 saw similar Socialist victories in Bologna, Modena, Livorno, and Perugia. Landslide municipal elections in October ushered in the mayoralty of Bolognese Socialist Ennio Gnudi, a twenty-seven-year-old railway worker, trade unionist, and member of the PSI’s Communist faction. Pledging to extend Bologna’s celebrated pane quotidiano program — a legacy of Socialist mayor Francesco Zanardi, aimed to eliminate price-gouging on bread and flour — the young mayor insisted that Bologna’s city council had chosen a “humble worker” as mayor in order to ensure “that the rights of the working class, the proletarian class, would be defended throughout the city.” At Gnudi’s inauguration, a red flag flew above Bologna’s imposing Asinelli Tower.

In nearby Modena, the same election cycle produced Ferruccio Teglio’s Socialist administration, with a platform aimed at public education, the expansion of workers’ rights, and the creation of municipal libraries and soup kitchens. In Livorno, a Socialist city council came to power under the leadership of Uberto Mondolfi, founder of the city’s Popular University — an institution rooted in socialist traditions of mutual aid and worker education. And in Perugia, Ettore Franceschini — secretary of the city’s Chamber of Labor and a “highly energetic agitator” of the PSI’s Maximalist faction — became the city’s first Socialist mayor, buoyed by the “red wave” that swept agrarian Umbria in 1919 and 1920.

For a moment, Socialist municipalities from Milan to Perugia fused the ballot box to mass mobilization, heralding a transformation of city halls into citadels of working-class democracy.

Extraordinary Powers

If the ethos of these mayoralties and the movements that carried them remains a wellspring of inspiration, their fate also portends the fragility of socialist municipal power. By 1922, the left-wing administrations of Milan, Bologna, Livorno, Modena, and Perugia had all fallen under rising pressure from the Fascist movement. More than their victory, their dramatic eclipse remains a cautionary tale.

In Bologna, the destruction of Ennio Gnudi’s socialist administration was almost immediate. Within an hour of his investiture, squads of fascists — many of whom had arrived from Ferrara, about 50km to the north — stormed the Palazzo d’Accursio, raking its façade with gunfire. Street clashes erupted in the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II. The day’s dust settled over early casualties of fascism’s rise: ten dead and approximately 50 wounded. Luigi Poli, Bologna’s chief of police, faulted the PSI for inciting the violence and moved swiftly to arrest over 300 Socialist militants and party-leaders. No Fascists were apprehended.

The impact of this dramatic episode reverberated well beyond the battle-scarred Piazza. Its most sinister repercussion lay in having furnished a pretext for Bologna’s provincial Prefect to dissolve the municipal council, on the grounds that councilors could not manage the unruly situation. Gnudi and his elected administration were replaced by prefectural appointment, and the city’s administration was handed over to an “Extraordinary Commissioner.”

More than two years would pass before another municipal election was held in Bologna. In March 1923, Fascist Party (PNF) member Umberto Puppini assumed the mayoralty. Three years later, a package of legislation known as the leggi fascistissime abolished mayoralties and municipal councils altogether. Instituted in their place were unelected and unaccountable administrative “powers” (podestà).

The unmaking of Bolognese municipal socialism provided a template for future assaults on the wider socialist movement, which became commonplace in 1921 and 1922. Their tactical lynchpin lay in the mechanism of commissariamento, or the state’s power to dissolve municipal administrations and install a Prefectural Commissioner. A predictable pattern emerged: Fascist street violence, intimidation, or agitation engendered political crises that served to justify indefinite prefectural control or the replacement of elected officials with royalist or Fascist proxies.

In the months that followed, Socialist cities fell like dominoes. In March 1921, squads of Blackshirts stormed Perugia’s local prefecture to demand the dismissal of Mayor Ettore Franceschini. By May, the provincial government caved under pressure from the Fascist movement; the city council was dissolved and Frenceschini dismissed. In Modena, credible Fascist threats led to mayor Ferruccio Teglio’s resignation on April 10, 1921, only five months after assuming the mayoralty. The same day, Modena was commissariato: its municipal council dissolved and replaced with a Prefectural Commissioner. In Livorno, days of Fascist street violence — including the murders of city councilors Pietro Gigli and Luigi Gemignani — preceded the August 1922 ouster of mayor Uberto Mondolfi. Over a thousand armed Blackshirts descended on Livorno’s city hall building, forcing Mondolfi and his cabinet to resign. The city was immediately placed under administrative control.

The same day — August 3, 1922 — dealt a coup de grâce to municipal socialism in Milan. On the heels of a nationwide general strike in opposition to Fascist violence, squads of Blackshirts stormed and occupied Milan’s Palazzo Marino. On August 4, the Prefect formally dismissed mayor Angelo Filippetti and installed Count Ferdinando Lalli as Prefectural Commissioner. Milan’s Socialist administration was effectively dissolved. That evening, Fascist squads mounted their latest siege on the Milan offices of Socialist daily Avanti!, burning the building and smashing its presses. By nightfall, six were dead and dozens wounded.

The neutralization of these Socialist municipalities was not incidental: it was integral to the momentum that propelled and consolidated the Fascist movement. By converting Socialist strongholds into administrative jurisdictions, the Italian state integrated Fascist demands to transform local governments from bases of working-class power into nodes of state control. Each success propelled further conquests, hardening Fascist cadres, normalizing street violence and commissariamento, and winning over hesitant elites. From the perspective of Fascism’s coalescence, the war on Socialist municipalities converted violent Fascist spectacle into bases of support.

The bastions of municipal socialism built by the labor movement of the biennio rosso were toppled in two years’ time. To historians, those years are known as the biennio nero — the two black years that catapulted Benito Mussolini’s Fascists to power — soon inaugurating a twenty-year regime.

Mobilization

This history counsels caution to the current wave of city-hall socialism: progressive municipalities remain fragile if they lack the coalitional density and organizational ballast to defend themselves against forces of counter-mobilization and reaction.

Yet, if the disquieting resonances of the biennio nero are all too clear, the resemblance is more a key to understanding the problem than a literally similar situation. Crucially, the mechanism of commissariamento has no precise counterpart in American federal law: no president—and, outside the District of Columbia and its territories, not even Congress—can dissolve a city council, dismiss a mayor, or install an unelected commissioner to govern. Executive muscle runs through narrower channels, including, in the most extreme instances, invocation of the Insurrection Act. For now, the more prosaic arts of electioneering and targeted preemption appear to rule the day; interference by right-wing non-state actors remains, as well, a live possibility.

Rather than furnishing a blueprint or playbook, the historical crucible of the 1920s offers a framework for disciplining our expectations of socialist municipal power in contexts of direct and indirect reactionary intervention — and in the absence of broader infrastructures of leverage and support. Even barring federal incursion or counter-mobilization, a socialist municipal agenda will inevitably collide with entrenched fiscal-legal constraints. Unless backed by an organized mass base capable of targeted disruption — strikes, walkouts, and coordinated direct action — its impact on working-class living standards is likely to be modest. While this modesty is no indictment in itself — modest gains are still gains — municipal socialists run the risk of producing popular disillusionment: the whiplash generated by an incandescent campaign that promises the world yet can deliver only piecemeal relief. At the limit,institutional constraints risk turning socialist municipal governments into mere stewards of austerity. This, in turn, invites quiescence among constituents, organizational attrition, and disenchantment with socialism itself.

While the danger posed by this dynamic cannot be overstated, a means of mitigating it may lie in the very scale of grassroots mobilization that buoys recent socialist campaigns. Often, these are propelled by an unusually large activist core, with a constituency that is not just sympathetic, but organized — of the order of 50,000 volunteers, in Mamdani’s case. The challenge is to consolidate episodic mobilizations of the campaign trail into a durable, bottom-up institutional framework that can sustain momentum while building capacity, bench-strength, and organizational reach. To do so would be to build what Antonio Gramsci called a “pedagogic movement”: a worldbuilding endeavor that weaves class politics and civic activity into the very fabric of everyday life.

Gramsci’s writings of the later 1920s and 1930s anatomize the strategic missteps that led the PSI to its nadir in the biennio nero, while also charting a path toward reconstitution of the movement under the banner of an anti-fascist “united front.” According to Gramsci, the PSI’s principal weakness lay in its failure to generate cross-class alliances: by placing disproportionate emphasis on its relatively narrow base of urban, industrial workers, the PSI leadership had neglected the all-important “Southern Question” — the socio-economic conditions of the Southern peasantry and, indeed, of Italy’s overwhelmingly rural population outside the Mezzogiorno. Even at the apex of its national influence, the PSI’s socialism had been effectivelymunicipal: its hegemony was strongest within the narrow sphere of its urban base. The result was political isolation. Apart from Socialist inroads in rural Emilia Romagna and the Po Valley, the PSI ceded the countryside to its Fascist opponents, who welded peasant grievances — especially those of small proprietors — into a militant nationalist bloc.

Against the backdrop of this diagnosis, Gramsci outlined a theory of organization designed to restore the socialist horizon blacked out in the 1920s. A reconstituted workers’ movement would require socialist hegemony to stretch beyond a narrow industrial base. Multiplying its channels of influence would require a transversal organizational ecology. This infrastructure, Gramsci suggested, could perform the work of “political apprenticeship,” with “pedagogy” inscribed in two interlocking moments. On one hand, a re-formed working-class party would cultivate rank-and-file leadership through venues such as research groups, assemblies, leagues, and cooperatives. In them, workers and peasants could collaboratively diagnose problems, coordinate pressure, and forge affective solidarities. On the other hand, these same venues would serve as seedbeds for the demands of particular sectors to be generalized and integrated into a common program. The aim was simple: political apprenticeship would generate the intellectual capacities able to transcribe raw discontent into militant class consciousness, with socialism reconfigured as the natural idiom for articulating various types of grievances. As rank-and-file competences were built and alliances shored up, socialist hegemony would stretch beyond the industrial core, without sacrificing the horizon of class struggle.

This account of political pedagogy can orient today’s municipal socialists in consolidating the heightened mobilization that develops during electoral cycles into an active and organized base. But as history has shown, movement-building of this kind is fragile and combustible. Feminist militants of the 1960s and 1970s warned that facile calls for coalition-building easily do cover for existing hierarchies, derailing movements and splintering struggles for liberation. Today, transforming socialist campaigns into incubators of militancy, rallying people across different social groups, demands an organizational ecosystem that can build capacity without falling back on familiar lines of domination. The immediate question, however, is whether campaign momentum can be sustained at all.

From a Gramscian perspective, meeting this challenge will require an integrated circuit between leadership and base, consistently activated in setting the political agenda, diagnosing obstacles, and consolidating leverage. There are formidable constraints on the implementation of any socialist program. It is crucial, therefore, that the bottlenecks and resistance faced register on a map of the political terrain that is shared by both socialist leadership and its constituents. Then, these obstacles can encourage collaborative strategizing rather than demobilization or disaffection. Certain infrastructure useful to this end may be established from above — chartered assemblies, neighborhood delegate committees — while other institutions — dues-based associations, popular research units, tenants’ unions — may be incorporated from below. What matters is that they operate as coherent channels for exchanging information, drawing constituents in as co-authors of the socialist movement, rather than just spectators.

Naturally, this approach is not without hazards. It could all too easily default to a managerial choreography that pacifies the public with “listening sessions,” soliciting feedback only in order to police or domesticate expectations. The Gramscian alternative implies real joint-authorship: in this “pedagogy,” officeholders are not instructors but a vanguard that reports back to the rank-and-file with the aim of identifying constraints, testing tactics, and generalizing lessons across sectors of struggle. This shift re-embeds socialist mayors or councilors in the movements that propel them, re-casting their campaigns as vehicles to not just mobilize, but sustainably organize and build capacity in the socialist movement. Their “pedagogy” familiarizes people with the work of politics: citizens learn to be protagonists of collective life.

Transforming flashpoint campaigns into real incubators of popular power will hinge on the new municipal socialists’ ability to maintain and expand forums that bind leadership to constituents. The objective is not to promulgate hype or to stage-manage narratives of triumph, but to collaboratively strategize around the real, structural obstacles that confront a socialist program. At stake is whether today’s city-hall socialism can avoid becoming an isolated redoubt, inspiring, but ultimately fragile.

---