Good afternoon, beloved —
At around 4:45 on the day before yesterday, I selected "Compile" from a menu in Scrivener, found the PDF file that resulted on my desktop, and attached it to an email I sent to LSE's PhD Academy. What this means is that — after five and a half years in which (along with all of our lives) the entire course of my research project was derailed by a global pandemic and lockdown, we moved house, and I wrote and published Lifehouse — I have submitted my doctoral thesis. Now all that stands between me and the degree is the viva. And that's a two-hour conversation about topics that interest me deeply, with people I respect and whose perspectives I value, so: the very opposite of something that might cause me stress or anxiety.
In the usual way of things, I had errands to see to all day yesterday, a series of small household-logistical tasks that kept the idea that I'd actually submitted the thing from really landing. Today, therefore, is by a very real reckoning my first free day since the fall of 2019. I know I should be out aimlessly wandering the streets of London, and more generally pursuing life in all the other ways I've felt too harried to be able to justify across most of this timeframe. But here I am, sitting at the same keyboard, as though I'm in some deep way broken to the conditions of my project, and cannot yet imagine the contours of a freer way of being.
It'll come, I'm certain. But in the meanwhile, I figure I'd share some of the highlights of my doctoral work with you — the bits I'm actually pleased with. These are concepts and framings I think might actually have some analytic value outside the work they do in my thesis. For whatever it's worth, I hope you find them useful.
§ My thesis concerns the tradition of political thought and practice called municipalism, and how it was enacted in the two European capital cities of Madrid and Zagreb in the years between 2014 and 2019. Municipalism is quite a few things, but for me the core of it is anarchism's pragmatic accommodation of conventionally electoral logics at the local scale, with the ambition of securing civic power for a formation that substantially remains participatory, horizontal, feminist and commons-oriented in its commitments. It involves the development of vehicles for radical politics that aren't quite "parties" in the traditional sense; it at least nominally anchors its claim to legitimacy in neighborhood-scale deliberative assemblies; and it ultimately aims to furnish a city's ordinary inhabitants with the ability to materially determine the circumstances of their own being.
I think it's fair to understand the municipalism of that era as an outgrowth or development of the circa-2011 horizontalist "movement of the squares" that included Tahrir Square in Cairo, and the other manifestations of the so-called Arab Spring; Spain's 15M movement; the protest camps that took over Syntagma Square in Athens and the equivalent public plazas in the major cities of Greece; and, of course, the occupation of Zuccotti Park in New York City, and the other sites of the Occupy movement. (At the risk of some anachronism, I tend to fold in to this cohort other protests of the period that shared DNA with the movement of the squares, like Istanbul's Gezi Park occupation and the Quebec student protests of 2012, and Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement two years later).
At the time, you may recall, these movements were often criticized — whether fairly or not, in good faith or not, with any basis in reality or not — as lacking concrete "demands" or "objectives." This line of critique was levied both patronizingly, in mainstream-media accounts, and, as well, with at least ostensible sympathy, by those on the left who nominally shared the protests' orientation to authority, but appeared to prefer endless kibitzing from the sidelines about how they would do things to any significant degree of actual involvement. We can fairly position municipalism, then, in the first instance as a semi-conscious attempt to translate the insurgent energy of the squares into formations designed to acquire and make material use of the local state. And, at least implicitly, to respond to the criticism about "demands," however wanky or unjust, by articulating these movements' demands not in passive supplication to an external power, but as concrete measures they fully intended to enact once they had achieved civic power for themselves.
You can see why such a move would appeal to me, I think, but what's really impressive about municipalism is that non-party "platforms" or "confluences" upholding this way of doing things actually achieved electoral victory in the period I'm looking at, in multiple cities across Europe. For a variety of reasons, I chose to concentrate my inquiry on two of those cities: Madrid, where a confluence called Ahora Madrid ("Now Madrid") saw its candidate Manuela Carmena elected mayor in 2015, and Zagreb, where the candidate of the Zagreb je NAŠ! ("Zagreb is OURS!") platform, Tomislav Tomašević, first entered office in 2021. Both of the formations involved had developed policy agendas that were quite a good bit more radical than the parties they replaced in office, and my research has largely involved whether, how and under what circumstances they were actually able to enact these agendas — in other words, whether what Madrileño activists called la apuesta municipalista, the municipalist wager, ever came good.
Here's where things get interesting, so far as I am concerned. Ahora Madrid ran into more or less immediate trouble in trying to enact its agenda, both because they didn't have a sufficient basis of support among the civil service — the administrative apparatus that actually, materially applies the means of governance to the city and its population — and, even more foundationally, because Maneula Carmena refused to govern as a municipalist from the moment she took office in the Ayuntamiento, Madrid's palatial city hall on the Paseo del Prado. Ahora Madrid was defeated by the right-wing Partido Popular at the very next election, in 2019, and just about everything they had achieved during their four years in office was undone, in astonishingly short order. Meanwhile, Zagreb je NAŠ underwent some changes of its own, merging into the more conventionally-constituted Možemo party, and while the results of last week's election suggest that the Tomašević administration will have earned another term in office, I think it's fair to say that progress toward their more radical objectives has been both slow and partial.
In the thesis, I get into the reasons why I think both formations found themselves in a degree of difficulty, Ahora Madrid's vexations obviously more decisive (and in fact terminal) than any that to date have afflicted the municipalist effort in Zagreb. The central reason has to do with a dynamic that was articulated by Robert Michels in 1911, which he called "the iron law of oligarchy." Michels's "law" holds that once they have acquired office, even those political formations explicitly founded on democratic principles — like the municipalist movements in both Madrid and Zagreb — tend over time toward centralized managerialism. This will manifest as the steady erosion of horizontal commitments, the centralization of operational expertise and control, and the gradual accrual of power by a relatively concentrated nexus of technical experts, administrators and staffers, as the procedural demands of governing a heterogeneous urban population inexorably generate both professionalized roles and the stratification of influence.
But importantly, this only describes what this process looks like from the outside. There is clearly an interiority to it as well: a shift in perception and affect that I was able to discern in the language, posture and bearing of the former activists I spoke to who had become elected officials or civil servants upon the acquisition of power. Almost to a one, they had internalized something I think of as “administrative realism”: a foreclosure of possibility occasioned by the (perceived) pace and scale of the demands placed on them, as newly-elected members of a governing party formally consecrated to participatory and horizontal process. They would explain to their friends outside government that "you wouldn't believe the pressure we're under," or how that pressure seemed to come at them from every direction — from their ideological opponents, from the media, from former fellow travelers in the movement. Or even, most ominously, from members of a public they'd clearly started to see as hectoring and ignorant, rather than as the sources of liberatory energy, generators of ideas and empowered partners in co-creation municipalist orthodoxy constructs them as.
I wasn't able to garner enough supporting evidence to formally make this claim in the thesis, but I believe that the broad onset of administrative realism among the newly-elected members of a municipalist administration actually precedes a Michels-style centralization of power and authority. You have to first internalize the image of itself held by the governing apparatus, that is, before you lose the ability to impose your own, newer diagram of forces on it. And when that image is something that's been molded over time to suit the pressures of clientelism and/or adherence to the usual, awful tropes of neoliberal governmentality, those are the tendencies that tend to win out.
The way I'd put it is that there are two primary failure modes of municipalism, at least as it has been enacted to date. The first and most obvious is electoral defeat. As an insurgent movement of the left, you put all your eggs in the basket of electoral legitimacy, and your power evaporated the moment that legitimacy was withdrawn, in the entirely conventional and usual alternation of parties elected to office: too bad, so sad, sucks to be you. The other failure mode is more insidious. It's arguably what's currently taking place in Zagreb: that the municipalist formation is sustained in office, but is effectively able to govern only as a party of the tepid and constrained social-democratic center. All of the truly distinctive, vibrant things about the tradition shear away, and what you're left with hardly seems worth the trouble. Let me say it again: the failure mode of municipalism is social democracy.
§ Here's when I depart — I hope judiciously — from observation, analysis and characterization, and (as you know is my wont) begin to make what the academy would call "normative claims." In the thesis, I confessed from the outset that I have an affinity with the object of my study. I want municipalism to endure, and to succeed, and to evolve. And not just municipalism tout court, either, but the version of it that most strongly affirms and maintains the participatory, horizontal and frankly anarchist aspects of its heritage. I felt like one of the biggest contributions I might be able to make with this tranche of work, then, was not simply naming administrative realism, but trying to identify some strategies municipalist formations might use to lever their way past it.
A big part of the problem these formations faced, in both Madrid and Zagreb, was that the open public assemblies from which they derived their original energy, and in which they founded their claims to popular legitimacy, had largely ceased to be by the time they won office. (Yes: surreally enough, for those of us who were there, the circa-2011 moment of the squares has passed decisively into history.) Worse, because they'd thought of standing parties as "the father of all the problems in democracy" — as one of my respondents in Madrid characterized this viewpoint — and as a consequence organized themselves as rather looser and more contingent "platforms," they'd deprived themselves of the means of self-reconstitution. And worst of all, many of their fiercest, most charismatic and most articulate activists had been siphoned up into jobs in government at the moment of victory, either elected as city councilors or appointed as functionaries of the civil service. This meant that having once achieved the thing they set out to accomplish, these formations found themselves without any remaining real organization in the neighborhoods: nothing to generate ideas, nothing to muster support, nothing to hold them to account, and quite possibly nothing to mobilize come the next election.
It's as if amassing and then discharging the energy it takes to launch a radical formation into civic power is an all-or-nothing proposition: either the process ignites a self-sustaining reaction, and an ongoing, autocatalytic conscientization that reproduces its own constituency and conditions of possibility. Or it results in something that is just robust enough to succeed on a single occasion, but is ultimately unable to escape the gravity well of the usual, and fizzles off to nothing. In my reading, this is exactly what happened to Ahora Madrid. In the aftermath of its defeat, just about everyone I know who was associated with its development now pursues other projects entirely. It's as though the effort to elect Manuela Carmena mayor not merely consumed every resource they had on hand at the time, but semi-permanently suppressed their ability, and maybe even their desire, to live a political life. And if this dynamic can be perceived in individual lives, some close analogue also feels like it's operating at the collective level. The municipalist project in Madrid is, for all intents and purposes, moribund — along with all the hopes it harnessed in the heady years after 2011, and sought to bring to fruition.
From this juncture, there are two choices you could conceivably make as a once-and-possibly-future municipalist, and still be true to your originary commitments. Understand, though, that these two possibilities are in just about diametric tension with one another. You could reorganize the vestiges of your movement as a "non-party party," landing somewhere in the zone between the relatively conventional “party of a new type” outlined by Chantal Mouffe here and, at the outer bracket, the insurrectionary, "destituent," nonrepresentative forms of life-in-common invoked by the Invisible Committee here. This would mean embracing everything thinkers like the Invisible Committee or Harney and Moten decry: affirming the party form (and, by extension, the local state) as sites where participatory-emancipatory values can still be enacted, and trusting that processes and procedures true to this affirmation might be arrived at and made to work. You can, I trust, glimpse what the problems with this strategy consist of.
The reason of state is, after all, astonishingly tenacious. Since at least as long ago as 1979's “In And Against The State," it's been broadly recognized that even the most motivated cadre of activists will struggle to achieve emancipatory transformation when embedded in the formal structures of government. Even beyond the distortions of an internalized administrative realism, this line of thought argues, both the state form itself and the form of relations it imposes on its subjects constrain liberatory action too profoundly to be greeted with anything other than sorrow. As James C. Scott demonstrated over and over in the course of his lifework, to embrace the state (and its inherent requirements for consistency, statistical regularity and standardized procedure) is to mutilate most of the ways in which life produces its own unruly order, meaning and value.
So the state is out. You could then, alternately, opt to retain the dignity, the autonomy and the freedom to develop projects that are external to (or in frank conflict with) the state’s own that are enjoyed by formations who don't have the slightest intention of staking an electoral claim on citywide power. On this contrasting theory, the attempt to occupy the state — even locally and “for the purpose of abolishing it” — breaks everything valuable and distinctive about the tradition in which municipalism situates itself. What is being affirmed here is not the seizure of the apparatus of governing, then, however locally, nor (even its “non-reformist”) reform from within, but rather its circumvention through the classically anarchist cultivation of alternate capacities for collective life. And what this ultimately leads the chastened horizontalist cohort toward in the retreat from government is not any kind of party, not even one drawn up on non-party lines. "Destituent power" of this sort aims not to govern at all, but to hollow out the logics of governance by rendering them increasingly irrelevant. The aim would then be to develop viable alternate forms of relation, care and provisioning, and embed them in all the interstices the state cannot reach, no longer serves or has chosen to abandon.
Here too, though, there are some obvious objections: this "refusal of the means by which power reproduces itself" sure sounds tasty, but I think it's fair to ask how the larger number of ordinary inhabitants of the city are supposed to enact it, especially under conditions of pressure, and still more so when they have by and large been marinated in the prevailing logics of neoliberalism for so long that they feel like second nature. (It feels like this is precisely the challenge confronted by our friends Cooperation Jackson, for example.)
There is, in other words, a problem of reach. Not so much of scale, per se — though in any event I tend to reject scale as an imperial logic, and the logic of the enemy — but properly of reach. If you believe (as I do) that everyone in the city has the right to the same baseline standard of care and provisioning as a fundamental matter of equity, it's hard, even with the best will in the world, to entrust the maintenance of this standard to groups oriented toward destituent power.
You can't live with the state, then...and just as clearly will have a very difficult time guaranteeing dignity for the greatest possible number without access to an apparatus that might as well be the state, even if it travels under other names. These are the horns of a particularly ugly dilemma. The party of the progressive left, broadly constituted — even in a consciously non-party manifestation — and the destituent, tactically opaque, possibly even fugitive autonomous group clearly constitute the poles of a irreducible binary. They harbor profoundly different theories of change, they appeal to completely different constituencies, and they do both of these things in ways that call upon entirely different "regimes of justification." I think, further, that it's fair to say these groupings often despise one another, the moreso the more deeply the members of each cleave to their own interpretation of the right and the good. The narcissism of small differences being what it is, they may even loathe one another more than either of them loathes their natural enemies on the local right.
If there's anything you likely understand about me, though, it's that my instinct whenever faced with an opposition of this sort is to ask ¿por qué no los dos? — to attempt a reconciliation of opposing positions in a way which embraces and sublates the valuable perspectives contributed by each. So that's what I tried to sketch out in the concluding pages of my thesis: a way of harnessing the energies of each of these diametrically-opposed tendencies toward the end they nominally have in common, which (as I read it) is preserving and extending the city's capacity to support human flourishing, in all its dimensions. I call it citycraft.
§ What could this possibly mean? Well, let's start by defining its opposite number, statecraft, conventionally: as the art of preserving sovereignty through the centralized management of territory, population and risk. Statecraft operates by abstraction and scale, privileging legibility, control and the reproduction of institutional authority. Whether it wears a liberal, authoritarian or technocratic mask, it invariably assumes the ontological priority of the state as such — its coherence, its borders, its right to decide — and organizes life accordingly. Its primary instruments are law, bureaucracy, regulation, surveillance...and always, always force. And this is true even when statecraft is articulated at the nominally more neighborly scale of the city.
I think of citycraft, by the sharpest contrast, as the situated practice of composing livable relations in shared space, without defaulting to the logics of the state. It "governs," to the degree it does, not from above or outside, but from within — immanently, prefiguratively, experimentally. Where statecraft aims above all to preserve order, citycraft seeks to sustain flourishing. It is less concerned with power over territory than with what we might call the generative choreography of entangled life, and with keeping open the civic conditions under which other forms of care, claim and cohabitation might arise. If statecraft reproduces the state, citycraft reproduces the city as a field of becoming.
Importantly, citycraft invites the participation of both those who feel that the ends of justice and equity are best served via the intercession of a formal apparatus of governance, and those for whom any such thing is anathema. It involves the painstaking composition of a transinstitutional common will among everyone in the city, and the deployment of that will toward the regulation of the conduct of government by the population empowered. Think of it as governmentality turned inside out, or governmentality-from-below.
If the non-party and the autonomous destituent formation are each problematic in their own ways, then, I wind up arguing that we need to conjure the existence and viability of one final possibility, the riskiest but perhaps the most felicitous of all the options available. It consists in enacting both of these strategies simultaneously and in good-faith coordination with one another, despite the differing commitments that cleave them, the manifest and obvious tensions between them, and the generally somewhat antagonistic stances toward being in the world adopted by those who espouse them.
Assume that there are enough inhabitants of the city embarked on the most ecumenical version of this project to populate both a cohort, relatively sympathetic to radical commitments, that is willing and able to enter the institutions of governance, on the one hand, and on the other a cohort committed to the realization of a destituent power in the neighborhoods, that is only legible to those institutions insofar as it makes tactical or strategic sense to be (and only for so long as they choose). What might be achieved if the members of both cohorts conceived of themselves as the positive and negative poles of a single whirling dynamo?
§ This point of view recognizes, pragmatically and without necessarily affirming it, that much of the population depends vitally on the state and its services for the maintenance of life — and this is, if anything, still truer across the ostensibly “developed” world in 2025 than it ever was in the pre-Thatcher Britain in which "In And Against The State" was written. But it recognizes, too, that the horizon of possibility imposed by the compromises involved in occupying the state will always be far closer than any that would nurture the heart of anyone dedicated to a politics of liberation. Where sympathetic civil servants can prefigure relations that genuinely break with the logic of state, so much the better. Otherwise, however, the focus of any tendency that wants to achieve prefigurative and liberatory ends should remain on ensuring the self-organization of autonomous (neighborhood or cross-cutting) counterinstitutions, as a fundamental condition of possibility.
This points toward a hybrid strategy that constructs sympathetic left-of-center government — when indeed such a thing is available — as a “partner state," energetically pursues public-commons partnerships with that government where it can, and maintains its maneuverability and its organic resources otherwise. Rather than placing all its eggs into the single basket of government, by recruiting every sympathetic warm body in the region into the ranks of the bureaucracy or the city assembly, this allows the local horizontalist/participatory left to maintain its bases of power and influence outside the apparatus. It retains the capacity to develop social and political goods autonomously, whether in the absence of the state’s support or in the overt presence of its hostility. But it also understands that the presence of that state as guarantor of a certain bottom line of dignity in many ways allows it to push further, and on a terrain that is largely of its own choosing.
From this perspective, our task as once-and-future-municipalists isn't merely to develop platforms or confluences that are capable of winning formal power once, but to elaborate a persistent hybrid capacity, closely attentive to affect, reproduction and risk, that can be leveraged to carry out the long program. It is a double helix, woven of an institutional strand that understands supporting the people in the development of their own power to be the fundamental purpose and justification of governance; and an autonomous strand that is willing to interact tactically with the other in furtherance of common projects, while remaining both metabolically distinct from it and free to enact its own defining values.
Some will surely feel that this conception flirts with incoherence — as, in fact, many anarchists believe municipalism already does. And frankly, I'm not sure that it doesn't. The easily-foreseeable risk of such a strategy is invariably that it satisfies nobody fully, and therefore generates two immediate constituencies for its abandonment, in the form of unmollified partisans of either of the tendencies hybridized, even before you get to the formal opposition. But it feels to me that the conscious, patient, painstaking elaboration of a capacity for citycraft is not by any means a lesser option where the furtherance of liberatory ends is concerned. It is the deep game.
§ So those are the concepts I was able to develop in the course of this work: administrative realism, as a subjectivity that saps members of municipalist formations of the psychic resources they need to continue the mission once elected to office; the development of a countervailing transinstitutional common will that lies across the nominally primary distinction between administrator and administered, and transforms it into something like a collaboration toward a shared end; and citycraft as a conscious practice of identifying the diametrically opposed tendencies within municipalism, and harnessing the tensions between them toward the generation of new possibilities for human flourishing in the urban frame.
I'll be honest with you that I'm somewhat less confident in the soundness of these propositions than I am in the analysis they were built from. So it may well be that this work is bound to remain what it is literally, which is to say academic. I'd like to think, though, that there's something to these notions that's "safe enough to try, and good enough for now." They are meant to be tested, and offered in the hope that they will be, with my intense gratitude for all those who've invested so much of their life energy in the municipalist project to date. And in the meanwhile, I'll let you know if my examiners sign off on it.
§ At the moment I'm reading a book I think of as being pre-refuted, or, I guess, prefuted: Jared Diamond's The World Until Yesterday, which has a lovely title, but which available scholarship had already demonstrated to be very nearly incorrect in the entirety of its assertions the moment it saw publication. I'm listening to U2's Zooropa, which with Achtung Baby I am always delighted to uphold as near-perfect crystallizations of their moment, whatever one might otherwise think about U2; and watching The Larzac: A Land That Wants to Live and the astonishing Sanrizuka Notes #3: The March of the Earth, about which much more shortly.
Other than a quick reminder that I'll be appearing in two sessions at the Hay Literary Festival week after next, and that it'd be lovely to see you if you should happen to be there too, that's it for now. As always, I hope that you are well, that you have your feet planted solidly on the good Earth, and that you are taking care of those who need you, taking care of yourself, and letting others take care of you. You have
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 143 of Friday, 23 May 2025, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊