Recent debates about the most appropriate political agents for realising social justice have largely focused on the potential value of national political parties on the one hand, and trade unions on the other. Drawing on the thought of Murray Bookchin, this article suggests that democratic municipalist agents – democratic associations of local residents that build and empower neighbourhood assemblies and improve the municipal provision of basic goods and services – can often also make valuable contributions to projects of just social change. I identify a long-term and a more short-term argument for the value of democratic municipalist agency in Bookchin's thought and claim that the latter provides a compelling case for the valuable contributions this form of action can make to the achievement of a wide variety of visions of social justice. This provides a useful partial corrective to recent political theorising about the nature of the partisanship and trade unionism necessary to secure social justice.

E CONOMIC inequality is widely regarded as one of the most important issues of our time. Extreme economic disparities destabilize democracy-as the richest exert increasing control over political outcomes-and lead to forms of social stratification which take a severe toll on the mental wellbeing of the worstoff. Economic inequality also plays a key role in driving the ongoing ecological catastrophe, as the spending habits of the wealthiest tend to be concentrated in carbon-intensive activities, and limits opportunities to access the most meaningful work and the best health and educational resources to the richest few. 1 Some political philosophers have recently proposed radically reshaping the existing basic structure of liberal democracies as a way to secure substantial increases in political, social, and economic equality for all citizens. William Edmundson and David Schweickart, for example, have defended systems of market socialism, in which the firms which make up the "commanding heights" of the economy are democratically controlled by their workers and either directly owned by them or leased to them by the state. And Alan Thomas and others have proposed a property-owning democracy, in which the state works to ensure roughly equal private ownership of capital among its citizens. 2