The rise of the DSA and the tasks facing socialists in the US
Frank Merritt
“We are capitalist, not socialist. We believe in a growing, fair, and competitive economy that rewards hard work, innovation, entrepreneurship, and ownership”. – Promise to America pledge, drafted by Democratic Congressmen Suozzi (New York) and Gray (California), June 2026.
This pledge, signed by Democratic House members, is an indicator of the consternation from corporate Democrats at the recent surge of populist ‘progressives’ and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
The idea of ‘socialism’ is on the rise, reflecting the crisis and turmoil in US capitalist society. 53% of Gen Z hold a positive view of socialism. 38% even view the idea of communism favourably in the US. What a shift from the decades of ‘red scares’ during the Cold War, experienced by their parents and grandparents!
In referencing DSA’s surge, the Financial Times comments: “With apologies to Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, a spectre is haunting America – the spectre of socialism. Its platform – affordable housing, universal healthcare, free college for all and higher taxes on billionaires”.
But the situation is more perilous than these capitalist commentators evaluate. The farsighted elements of the US ruling class who inhabit the Democratic Party elite perhaps are beginning to sense it. Elements of the platform on which most DSA candidates stand is theoretically possible in a capitalist system, and were even partially achieved in reforms granted to a mobilised working class in many parts of the world during the post-World War Two economic upswing.
Today, even the prospect of mild social democratic reforms collides with 21st Century oligarchic US capitalism, where the combined wealth of the top few richest Americans exceeds the bottom 50% of the US population.
The surge of the DSA – currently around 120,000 members – and the other early stirrings of a rediscovery of the socialist tradition in the US are dramatic, but will be dwarfed.
The development of a socialist consciousness and mass combative organisations of the working class would be capable of sweeping away capitalism and building a socialist society that would put the working class in power, replacing the oligarchs and their puppets.
Visceral anger
The visceral anger bubbling in US society at the cost-of-living crisis, which will only be partially reflected in the November midterms, is forcing all sides of the two-party system to react to defend against dangers to the system.
This is why Trump moved to ban large institutional investors from buying single-family homes, and talks of state intervention into AI companies, and why vice president JD Vance, despite being part of a vicious anti-union administration, claims on the Joe Rogan podcast he’s pro-labour.
Beginning in Zohran Mamdani’s New York City, a chain of DSA members won Democratic primaries, including in Denver, this summer. Union organiser Angie Nixon in Florida is the first DSA member to win a statewide primary. Her shock result was based on raising $975,000 compared to her opponent’s $16.3 million.
Trump and the Republicans are also recruiting officers for DSA and socialist ideas. Trump said recently that “the Democratic Party is now full of communists” who “want to take their ruinous and deadly ideology of misery and squalor to every state in America.”
The genocide in Gaza is a major polarising issue across primaries, the shift in societal view of the Israeli state is resulting in the defeat of many candidates backed by the Zionist lobby.
The possibility of DSA member and member of the House of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) running in the Democrat primaries for the 2028 presidential election is gaining traction. She has polled ahead of corporate Democrats Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris in prediction markets.
Whatever the outcome of the midterms, the Democratic Party leadership will further move to take on any threat to its pro-capitalist agenda, which will include mobilising against AOC and any left populist candidate in the presidential primaries, as they did in the previous Bernie Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020.
Currently Sanders and AOC are mobilising large “fight oligarchy” rallies across the country, raising massively popular policies like Medicare for all. They are a major reference point for workers and youth.
As previously with Sanders, socialists will have to seriously engage with the likely momentum of an AOC primary campaign and the electric interest it will generate around left ideas. AOC, reflecting the polarised situation in US society, which is even deeper than when Sanders ran, can engage in combative rhetoric against Trump, the oligarchy and capitalist crisis.
Engagement will have to be combined with skilfully warning her record shows she is likely to end up like Sanders in endorsing the candidate and agenda of the corporate Democrats, even if the primaries go to the wire.
It was the Sanders campaign, calling for a “political revolution against the billionaire class” in 2016, and AOC’s 2018 primary victory, that lifted DSA into tens of thousands of members in its initial surge. DSA gained national prominence as ‘the squad’ were elected to the House of Representatives containing its supporters.
However, neither Sanders, AOC or Mamdani show any signs of drawing the conclusions that a struggle, mobilising their base and the wider working class, is needed against the corporate Democrat leadership. They have a record of trying to build ‘unity’ with it, to the fatal detriment of movements of workers and youth.
Sanders, who could have defeated Trump, demobilised his mass base repeatedly, endorsing Clinton, Biden and then Harris for the presidency. AOC and the squad’s actions have demoralised activists including in DSA, whose membership fell heavily under Biden, when she supported funding for Israel’s Iron Dome and the shutting down of a national railroad strike.
The graveyard
The Democratic Party has been rightly called the ‘graveyard of social movements’ by generations of activists. AOC’s record so far shows that she is susceptible to the pressure of ‘co-option’ by the capitalist corporate machine.
As has even been seen with activists with a more fighting record than hers, including Sanders who was originally seen as an independent, in the labour and civil rights movements.
There is a current debate in DSA about whether AOC should be supported.
Sanders, AOC and Mamdani are not prepared to use their authority to break from the Democratic Party machine and launch an independent party capable of attracting the attention of workers and youth, with the potential to become a mass vehicle for the discussion of socialist ideas.
A discussion should take place urgently among labour activists, socialists and campaigners with mass assemblies locally and nationally about the need for a union activist running a presidential campaign on a fighting programme, independently of the two corporate parties.
There are advocates for breaking with the Democrats now and promoting the idea of a new workers’ party. The Rhode Island chapter of DSA has taken the political decision to break from supporting Democrat candidates and caucuses publicly and in its bylaws.
They are running an “independent Socialist candidate”, Britanny Kubicek, for the General Assembly (Rhode Island’s state legislature) in November on a socialist programme and calling for a workers’ party.
This development, although it will encounter political opposition, can encourage other chapters and sections of DSA to move in the same direction. Kubicek is endorsed by the Independent Socialist Group, the CWI’s co-thinkers in the US.
Eugene Debs, the socialist activist and militant trade unionist who ran for president five times between 1900 and 1920, has been referenced by Sanders and Mamdani and others on the left.
But what needs to be rediscovered by the new generation is that Debs, as well as playing a leading role in many strikes and going to prison for opposition to war, stood independently of the two capitalist parties.
Standing on a fighting programme as the Socialist Party candidate in the 1912 presidential election, he won close to a million votes. The Socialist Party, in that period, had deeper roots in the working class than the DSA has today.
The labour unions, and their social weight and resources, can have a critical role to play in the formation of a mass workers’ party.
They should run their own candidates and throw their weight behind pro-working class independents who are standing up to the two-party system while ending funding for Democrats and Republicans. Candidates from a workers’ party should refuse corporate donations and, if elected, accept only the average wage of the working people they represent.
Socialism
The ideological opening presented by this rise of ‘democratic socialism’ must be seized by those who are committed to a revolutionary socialist programme. Every opportunity to explain what socialism is to those who are excited by it, must be taken.
Socialists must patiently and firmly explain that while every reform must be fought for, today’s US capitalism and its oligarchic ruling class will not tolerate such ‘democratic socialist’ measures.
The only way to guarantee an end to the capitalist cost of living, corporate healthcare, environmental destruction nightmare is for the working class to take into public ownership the biggest corporations, banks, tech, healthcare and energy industries and run and plan the economy democratically for the needs of the majority.
A fundamental socialist transformation of society means a higher level of production and technology, even than exists currently in the US today, and the working class planning the economy internationally.
