Radical municipalism is paving the way for direct democracy in LA

This article Radical municipalism is paving the way for direct democracy in LA was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Home to almost 10 million residents in 2022, Los Angeles County can sometimes seem like a vast political paradox. Known as a quintessential example of urban sprawl, it is also the most overcrowded county in America. Over the past 20 years, robust grassroots organizing built multiracial movements for organized labor, immigrant rights and housing justice while electing multiple self-identified leftists to L.A. City Council. At the same time, brutal overpolicing, ethics scandals and rising gentrification have been constant challenges for organizers and activists there. 

This summer, L.A.’s controversial efforts to reduce homelessness have reentered the national spotlight. “Home to 7.1 percent of the nation’s unhoused,” state and local governments have increasingly relied on criminalization to push houseless people out of the public eye. Arrests, tickets and the destruction of “homeless encampments” have become a common sight. A Supreme Court decision in June (passed along ideological lines) made it easier for cities to “ban people from sleeping and camping in public places,” increasing the pressure on local officials to clear remaining encampments. On August 8, California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom was spotted clearing out homeless encampments himself in L.A. County, a publicity stunt meant to highlight the urgency of removing them.

Issues like these have pushed organizers to consider new frameworks for building political power in the region, including the Solidarity Research Center, or SRC. Founded in 2014 as the “research arm” of the Industrial Workers of the World, SRC has since evolved into a “worker self-directed nonprofit” that supports movements for direct democracy and cooperative economics. In recent years, SRC has been blending research with capacity-building for social movements as part of an ongoing experiment with radical municipalism. 

Radical municipalism draws from a variety of frameworks that place cities at the center of social transformation, looking beyond capitalism and the nation-state for new forms of community-building. In the 1970s, for example, Huey Newton theorized about “revolutionary intercommunalism,” arguing that national liberation struggles were better understood as “a dispersed collection of communities” vying for self-determination on a smaller scale. Social theorist Murray Bookchin (best known as the father of “social ecology”) used “municipalism” to describe a decentralized system of direct democracy, where citizens make decisions collectively through local assemblies.

In July, SRC released “Building Power in Place: A Municipalist Organizing Toolkit.” The toolkit functions as a “snapshot” of radical municipalism in theory and practice, aimed at organizers and activists interested in exploring municipalist tactics within their own local contexts. Shortly after the toolkit’s release, I spoke with Yvonne Yen Liu, co-founder and executive director of the Solidarity Research Center. We talked about the advantages and challenges of building a radical municipalist movement in L.A. — as well as what lessons organizers can learn by studying local campaigns for direct democracy. 

For those who aren’t familiar, what are some key principles of municipalism? What makes it distinct from other frameworks for organizing locally?

I’ll start with a story. During the pandemic, I got very involved in organizing in my neighborhood — a mostly working-class, Latine community in Los Angeles. Like many other people, I was fortunate in that I was not an “essential worker” and I was able to quarantine at home. With my neighbors, I started a mutual aid network. I think the experience of organizing in a hyperlocal way made me realize the importance of building an activated community. When you know [your neighbors] and the daily struggles that each other have, [you] can support each other but also demand something better for all of us. We need to build power starting at this level and then we can scale up from there. 

Specifically, we [at SRC] are inspired by radical municipalism. There’s a lot of progressive policies that get enacted by cities, which is great, but [they’re] not about building a counter-hegemony, which is what we are trying to do. We’re trying to build dual power. We are trying to create an alternative polity and a solidarity economy that will replace the nation-state, or city-state, or power elite — an economy that is not based on extraction and exploitation resulting in alienation. 

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This has happened in other places. When I started to organize in L.A., I found examples in Barcelona, Spain, in Rojava, but very few in North America (save Cooperation Jackson). So we started the Municipalism Learning Series to learn from other examples globally and historically and then apply that to North America — and also to expose broader audiences to radical municipalism. 

We have an organizing project on the ground, Los Angeles for All, which has been convening a peoples’ movement assembly for the last three years. Last year, we started a fellowship. We have 26 fellows across the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico — they are also involved in municipalist campaigns and social movements in their places as well. The curriculum that we developed over the course of a 12-week program for our fellows, the Municipalism Cohort Fellowship, is encapsulated in the Municipalism Organizing Toolkit.

What made L.A. such a compelling place to try building a municipalist movement on the ground?

There’s nothing about Los Angeles that makes it a fertile ground for municipalism, which is exactly why we need to start it here. We have a river that’s layered over with concrete, we have freeways that divide our neighborhoods, there’s climate apartheid. Our built environment is not conducive to gathering and building community. 

There was a specific crisis that catalyzed our peoples’ movement assemblies. In October of 2022, there was a leaked audiotape of a secret meeting between three city council members and a labor leader talking about redistricting — and it was extremely racist. It was about consolidating their own power, and drawing the lines of political boundaries in this city that would help them do that. I think it was an example to many Angelenos of how our city is structured so that politicians can amass a lot of power and not be scrutinized or accountable. We have an Ethics Commission which is essentially powerless to hold anyone accountable. We have 15 city council people for a city of four million — that’s ridiculous. Even within the scale of representative democracy, that’s not representative.

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Our city is also unable to care for people that are unhoused. We have over 70,000 neighbors that live in the streets, or live in their cars or RVs, or sleep on someone’s sofa. We don’t even understand the scale of it. And yet our city has been pursuing this municipal ordinance called 41.18 which essentially criminalizes people for sleeping on the streets. Thousands of people have been swept from their homes and communities as a result. The city just released a report looking at the impact of enforcing 41.18: They found that $3 million was spent by the city and only two people were housed permanently out of all who were impacted. So there’s a crisis in our city, especially around our ability to have our basic needs taken care of. Los Angeles, in that sense, is the most appropriate place to start this movement. 

Three years into Los Angeles for All, what lessons have you learned so far?

Maybe I’m biased because I’m a researcher, but I think any good organizing campaign should be conducted like an experiment. We had a hypothesis that L.A. is ready for its municipalist moment or movement. And we’ve learned in the past three years that people are really hungry for this. It’s also been really hard to organize. Like I said, the built environment is working against us, there’s so much that is not conducive to trying to build community and share decision-making. We’ve convened maybe over 10 people’s movement assemblies and we’re at a point where we are reflecting. Like, have we built a movement? Have we built a base? Have we actually built power? 

What we have built is a different type of culture for our movement in the city. It’s very easy to keep us separated and to not have us in solidarity with each other. The fact that we’re meeting each other, eating together, talking with each other, getting to know each other [and] our stories — that in and of itself is powerful. But we can’t just rest there: we need to come together and make decisions together and take action together. I feel like that’s the inflection point that we’re currently at. 

We’re in a moment where we’re studying our housing and land crisis. How can you organize if you don’t have a place to live or if you can’t even stay in your city? In May 2024, the median home price in L.A. was $1 million. When you look at other municipalist movements like Barcelona, for instance (which started in 2015), it came out of a housing crisis. People were being evicted, and there was a group called PAH that organized to stop evictions through direct action and civil disobedience. And it was an anti-eviction organizer, Ada Colau, that became elected as the mayor on this municipalist platform, Barcelona En Comú. So there’s something very central about housing. [We’re] trying to move more intentionally in that space in partnership with our tenants unions and mutual aid groups that work with unhoused people.

[We’re] also focusing on the need to build more on the hyperlocal level. We called for a citywide assembly before we had a neighborhood base. We had a pretty strong base in East Los Angeles, but there are parts of L.A. where we’re not as strong. We can link up with groups that already have a base in [some] places, but there are also places that are not very well organized. We can’t just start at the scale of the city and go down, we need to start from the ground up. This was a big lesson for us, because how do you know unless you try it? 

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If I look at the example of Barcelona, they called for a citywide assembly before they had neighborhood assemblies. But they were also fortunate that they have the cultural tradition of neighborhood assemblies. We don’t have that here. So I would say that the next phase of what we’re doing is about supporting the agency of different neighborhoods to congregate and gather. 

I’d imagine the organizing landscape in L.A. might be very fragmented. What’s it like trying to make new interventions when you might have a lot of different people and groups talking around the same issue? 

L.A. is big, sprawling [and] absolutely fragmented. Every place has complicated personalities, people who feel like they have ownership over a sector, a neighborhood, an issue area. We’re all working in these little silos: we accept the fragmentation and we internalize it, to the extent that we don’t think of ourselves as this cohesive movement. 

We’ve definitely gotten questions asked of us like, “Who are you? What gives you the right to do this?” And my response is, “Anyone can do this: anyone can step up and call for a people’s movement assembly.” In fact, other groups have. The more the merrier, as far as I’m concerned. There’s also a level of humility that I’ve cultivated personally in saying that I don’t have the answers — this is just my best effort. I’m not the chosen one, neither is anyone else, but we’re trying. This is an experiment, and we’re gonna evaluate what we find. 

I will say that we have intentionally courted the autonomous actors in social movements in Los Angeles. We’re very clear that we are interested in building an autonomous social movement that will empower outside of the electoral pathway. Although we’re not excluding it altogether, we’ve seen that it hasn’t always helped. How do we enter into a strategy like that and have other irons in the fire as well? Ideally, if we do elect people into office, it’s so that they can break open the institution to allow social movements in — not that they monopolize and become gatekeepers of power.

Over the past decade, we’ve seen a shift in the word “democracy” in American popular consciousness. We’re seeing elected officials and movement workers talk about the idea of democracy being “under threat.” Can movements for direct democracy on the local level inform those broader conversations?

I think people are genuinely concerned on the left and the center about rising authoritarianism. There was that Supreme Court decision [about presidential immunity], and I think that ALEC has been working on getting a constitutional convention together. We’re potentially going to see it in our lifetime. 

There’s always been a tradition of direct democracy [in America]. In New England, they have direct democracy written in their state and local charters — there are town halls where people make decisions. Here in Los Angeles, we have people who are fighting for charter reform, for civic assemblies, for democracy vouchers, all these kinds of liberal interventions which are better than what we have now. 

We had a conversation internally: “What’s our relationship to civic assemblies? They’re not a people’s movement assembly, but they’re better than a group of 15 people making decisions for a city of 4 million.” So we support them — they bring us closer to our vision of what democracy should look like. But they’re not our vision exactly. They’re like “non-reformist reforms.” They don’t hurt our desires for something better, but they’re not that, either.

What is that beautiful quote by Ursula K. LeGuin? “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings.” This is all up to us. If we want a more humane form of collective governance that values people as human beings — and we see each other and meet each other’s needs — we can decide that. I think that’s how it will enter into the liberal discourse right now.

Building Power in Place: A Municipalist Organizing Toolkit is available now. You can read and download the toolkit here.

This article Radical municipalism is paving the way for direct democracy in LA was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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