Issue 60 cover
Cover art by Gaurab Thakali
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Municipal Socialism

  • Issue 60
  • Winter 2026
“Our greatness will be anything but abstract. It will be felt by every rent-stabilized tenant who wakes up on the first of every month knowing the amount they’re going to pay hasn’t soared since the month before. It will be felt by each grandparent who can afford to stay in the home they have worked for, and whose grandchildren live nearby because the cost of childcare didn’t send them to Long Island.”
— Zohran Mamdani, November 4, 2025

“In left-wing social centers and popular bars in rural Tuscany, there are still those who remember Inti-Illimani bringing its message of defiance from Chile.”

Features

Liza Featherstone

Zohran Mamdani Wants You to Do More Than Survive

Our comrade won because he told New Yorkers they deserve it all — love, leisure, pleasure, sport.

Ryan Cooper

America Can’t Build Homes Anymore

Cities stopped building not by accident but by design. Our housing system is constructed on scarcity, speculation, and private veto power.

Chris Maisano

What Zohran Can Learn From the Sewer Socialists

From Milwaukee’s sewer socialists to La Guardia’s New Deal metropolis, urban reformers changed their cities by forging alliances beyond local power.

David Broder

When the Leaning Tower Leaned Left

In the 1970s, the Italian Communist Party was again on the rise in Tuscany. Then it all toppled over.

“While Livingstone had seized power in what was effectively a palace coup, planned and orchestrated by a handful of activists, his administration was defined by a radical redistribution of power and resources.”

Front Matters

The Soapbox

Letters + Internet Speaks

Party Lines

Eric Blanc and Bhaskar Sunkara

Politics Is Something We Do

Dossier

Struggle Session

Alfie Steer

Remembering Red Ken

Interview by Bhaskar Sunkara

Ezra Klein on Abundance and the Left

“Amid the economic depression of the 1870s, New Yorkers came to feel that residents who contributed to the local economy, not real estate firms, were the real engines of prosperity.”

Cultural Capital

Reading Materiel

Juliana Devaan

The City the Rich Built — and Broke

Paint the Town Red

A Poet in Practice

Red Channels

Eileen Jones

The German Take on Gotham

Stand-In Cities

Bernie’s Fireside Chats

Ways of Seeing

Daniel Finn

The Life and Death of Paris’s Red Belt

The Grass Is Greener

Lost Art

“Fascist violence engendered political crises that only served to justify indefinite prefectural control or the replacement of elected officials with royalist or Fascist proxies.”

The International

World

A Planet of Slums?

Americas

Edwin F. Ackerman

The Mayor of Mexico

Europe

Marshall Pierce

Fascism Destroyed Italy’s Socialist City Halls

Sketches of Spain

Mena

Leena Dallasheh

Tawfiq Zayyad: Poet, Communist, Mayor

The Pharaoh’s Curse

Africa

William Shoki

The System That Survived Apartheid

Asia

Samir Bhan

Modi’s Hindutva Theme Parks

“The goal isn’t to freeze a community in time. The goal is to create a community where people can thrive. ”

The Tumbrel

Girondins

Amber A’Lee Frost

No War but Artisanal Doughnut War

Free Reign

On Gen-Z, Jihad, and Generalissimo Zohran Mamdani

Thermidor

Kim Phillips-Fein

Fallen Angels

Urban Legends

Nick French

Zohran Mamdani Is Right on Public Safety

Picking Up the Shards of Broken Windows Policing

On King David, King Donald, and the 2028 Election

Versailles

Meagan Day

When the Rich Say “We’re Leaving”

The Oligarch Upstairs

Misery Index

On Marxism, Murder Sprees, and the Age of Mamdani

“The fiscal challenges should be taken seriously, but they need not lead to despair.”

Leftovers

The Vulgar Empiricist

Nathan Gusdorf

Mayor Mamdani’s Budget Can Add Up

The Dustbin

Nick Perkins

Waiting for Socialism in Schenectady

Downstate Socialism

Popular Front

Samuel Stein

When Unions Built Social Housing

Sharing the Big Apple

Now Who’s the Boss?

Means & Ends

Indulgences