"...[F]or those of us who have the luxury of not being in the trenches, it’s a good time to start talking about what a specifically socialist approach to municipal government might look like, especially when it comes to technology.
Fortunately, we have a historical precedent to help us think through this question. As Eric Blanc has argued, the experience of Milwaukee’s “sewer socialists” in the early twentieth century holds lessons for our current moment. Significantly, sewer socialism is a tradition that Mamdani himself has cited as inspiration. “Sewer socialism, to me, represents a belief that the worth of an ideology can only be judged by its delivery,” he said in an interview earlier this year.
The basic insight of sewer socialism is bringing people into your politics by improving their lives in obvious ways. “You win someone’s trust through an outcome” is how Mamdani puts it. The sewer socialists of Milwaukee made the case that municipal ownership of systems like sanitation, water, and power could deliver services more efficiently and more equitably than private ownership. They solved practical problems for their constituents while constructing working examples of a postcapitalist political economy in miniature.
The same method can be applied to the internet. Call it “digital sewer socialism.” Socialist elected officials in New York, Seattle, and beyond can craft policy interventions that increase the quality of life for residents by addressing the difficulties that arise in their relationship with technology. These interventions can be carried out in such a way that, by modeling socialist principles, they win wider support for socialist ideas."
https://jacobin.com/2025/12/digital-sewer-socialism-public-ownership
#USA #Socialism #SewerSocialism #DigitalSewerSocialism #PublicGoods #PublicInfrastructure
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