Claiming the City is almost certainly the most comprehensive history of municipal socialism ever written. It ranges from the United States to Germany to Australia, digging deep into local experiences with socialist governance in a wide variety of contexts. Stromquist also investigates the political debate between municipal socialism’s defenders and its critics, who argued that taking over city governance was a detour on the road to revolution. The book is a magisterial achievement that is sure to inform debates about socialists and city politics for decades to come.

Though Margaret Thatcher famously declared that “there is no alternative” to her brand of austerity politics, her reign was marked by militant challenges to her project, from the miners’ strike to the poll tax riots. This study looks at the resistance to Thatcherism in Liverpool, where the Militant tendency, a group of Trotskyists in the Labour Party, had won leadership of the local council. They proceeded to lead a determined struggle against Thatcher’s cuts to local services, declaring they would rather “break the law than break the poor.” Marren’s book is a detailed account of these struggles, with valuable lessons for socialists confronting a new period of attacks on local government.

Judd’s book is the most detailed study of municipal socialism in the United States, focusing on the Socialist Party of America (SPA) in the early 20th century. Examining the experience of socialist governance in cities in Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, Judd discusses the many successes and failures of the SPA’s attempts to build class power at the local level. Though the politics of both cities and socialism in the United States have changed dramatically over the last century, there’s still a tremendous amount to be learned from this experience.