In and against the (local) state: radical municipalism at the Greater London Council, 1981-1986

This thesis explores the relationship between radical politics and the local state in the context of left urban government, through a case study of the ‘new urban left’ administration of the Greater London Council (GLC) from 1981 to 1986. Drawing on a critical historical study consisting of archival and oral history material, the GLC experience provides a lens through which to examine the potential, limits, and contradictions of radical urban movements developing political alternatives through the local state. Looking at how left activists pursued an alternative municipal politics, how they negotiated constraints, and how they experienced the contradictions of being ‘in-and-against-the-state’, the thesis develops an argument for looking beyond a binary conception of state and society. To capture different elements of working in-and-against the spaces of power, the thesis develops three linked conceptual frames each focused on different scales of analysis: ‘urban state activism’, highlighting the contestation of urban political economy; ‘reflexive autonomy’, emphasising the relational quality between constraint and agency and bringing into view both the limits and possibilities of pursuing radical politics within the local state; and ‘activist state work’, exploring the practical labour in the boundary-bridging world of radicals within the state, spanning the distinct yet overlapping roles and values of activism and officialdom. Productive possibilities for anti-capitalist social change can be found in the contradictions, gaps and fissures that emerge from political contestation within local government. The GLC study informs an argument for rethinking existing habitual binaries in radical left state-critical thought, chiefly in separating state from society and splitting left strategies into abstention or reformism. The thesis argues for antagonistic engagement with local states, and for attention to the everyday micro-politics of pursuing activism through the practical labour of statehood, which contributes to ‘new municipalist’ thinking on renewing left strategies for urban transformation.