“The
Republican and Democratic parties, or, to be more exact, the
Republican-Democratic party, represent the capitalist class in the class
struggle.”Eugene V. Debs, The Socialist Party and the Working Class
(1904).
“Should
America go communist as a result of the difficulties and problems that your
capitalist social order is unable to solve, it will discover that communism,
far from being an intolerable bureaucratic tyranny and individual
regimentation, will be the means of greater individual liberty and shared
abundance.”
Leon Trotsky, If America Should Go Communist (1934). [marxists.org]
The economic
prerequisites for the socialist revolution are fully matured in the US. The
political premises are likewise far more advanced than might appear on the
surface.” James P. Cannon, Theses on the American Revolution.
“The Ninth
Congress of the Socialist Equality Party convenes at a critical turning point
in the political history of the United States and the world—the point of
intersection of war, economic crisis, and rapidly growing social
radicalization.”
David North,
An assessment of the decade of socialist revolution and the tasks of the
Socialist Equality Party, 11 August 2026. [wsws.org]
One week after the 2026 midterm elections, The New Yorker
published an essay by Harvard historian Jill Lepore titled "Can American
Socialism Survive Its Success?" Its subtitle states the thesis plainly:
the American movement has often watched its ideas flourish while its
organisations withered, and the question now is whether today's resurgence will
go the same way.
The framing is revealing, both for what it assumes and for
what it leaves out. For the liberal establishment, the problem of socialism is one
of institutional durability: membership rolls, mailing lists, and electoral
machinery. Socialism is treated as a set of popular "ideas", free
buses, rent freezes and childcare, that drift into the mainstream, while the
organisations that carried them fade away. This is presented as a tragic but
natural cycle of American political life.
Marxists reject this framework from the outset. Socialism is
not a menu of reforms that a capitalist party may or may not adopt. It is the
programme for the working class to seize political power and reorganisation of
economic life based on social need, not private profit. By that standard, the
"success" The New Yorker invites its readers to contemplate is
nothing of the kind.
Whose success?
The Nov. 3 midterms trigger the piece. Six candidates backed
by the DSA have taken House seats, bringing the total number of self-described
democratic socialists in Congress to eight (per CNBC). Zohran Mamdani is the
mayor of New York; Katie Wilson is the mayor of Seattle. Current Affairs
has called it 'Socialism's Moment'.
But all of these candidates ran as Democrats on the
Democratic line, and all of them will be in a Democratic caucus. CNBC's own
report points out that the sheer size of the Democratic majority will severely
limit the leverage any of them can exert. In other words, the 'socialist' wave
has delivered its votes to a party of Wall Street, the military/intelligence
complex and the war machine. This party has never been an independent vehicle
for the working class's political interests.
The same report actually makes a more telling point. DSA
leaders claim they are having greater success with donors, including wealthy
ones, as the organisation continues building its infrastructure ahead of 2028.
That is the real measure of the "success" they are celebrating. It is
not the growth of working-class consciousness or independent working-class
organisation, but the successful integration of a middle-class political layer
into the machinery of bourgeois politics.
The same exit poll found that 70% of voters feel the
economic system is rigged in favour of the rich. That's the actual state of
play: a very real and growing antagonism towards capitalism exists among tens
of millions of workers. The key question is what political outlook and what
organisation will give that antagonism a form of conscious expression? DSA's
answer, 'just vote Democrat,' is designed to ensure that it never takes on an
independent political form.
What really destroyed the organisations
The idea that socialist organisations in America 'died out'
while their ideas survived is a complete liberal myth. It's a myth which
conveniently ignores the real political reasons for their demise. The SP of
Eugene Debs, which pulled in nearly a million votes in 1912, wasn't just
dissolved by some inescapable law of American exceptionalism. It was crushed by
state repression. Debs went to prison for anti-war activities. The Espionage
and Sedition Acts were the tools of repression used against the anti-war
movement, and the Palmer Raids and mass deportations came in the postwar
period. Meanwhile, the SP was being torn apart by the impact of the Russian
Revolution and the internal struggle between its revolutionary and reformist
elements.
In the 1930s, the great industrial struggles that built the
CIO, including Minneapolis, Toledo and Flint, demonstrated the immense social
power of the American working class. Socialists, communists and other militants
played decisive roles. Yet the Stalinised Communist Party, pursuing the Popular
Front strategy dictated by Moscow, worked to subordinate this movement to
Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. The Trotskyists of the Socialist
Workers Party, whose members had played a leading role in the 1934 Minneapolis
Teamsters strikes, were prosecuted and imprisoned under the Smith Act during
the Second World War.
Afterwards, trade unions purged militants and became
instruments of Cold War anti-communism and labour-management collaboration. The
tendency from which the modern DSA sprang (Michael Harrington's Democratic
Socialist Organising Committee, founded in 1973 and absorbed into DSA in 1982)
was based on the idea of 'realigning' or 'transforming' the Democratic Party
rather than creating an independent revolutionary party of the working class.
The lesson of this history is not that socialist organisations are inherently weak. It is that the constant subordination of the working class to bourgeois politics has repeatedly killed off the prospect of the working class ever becoming an independent political force. The social reforms that did survive (Social Security, labour rights, Medicare, etc.) were all concessions taken from American capitalism under the pressure of the times. They were not evidence of capitalism evolving into socialism. The fact that both Democrats and Republicans eventually rolled them back is the very definition of the opposite.
City Hall and the limits of "sewer socialism"
New York was the flagship of the new movement. Mamdani was
elected on a platform of initiatives including fast and free buses, a rent
freeze for rent-stabilised tenants, and universal childcare. In June, after
appointing six of its nine members, the Rent Guidelines Board voted 7-1 to
freeze one- and two-year stabilised leases from October 2026 to September 2027.
No worker will begrudge tenants a bit of relief from rising
rents. It is important to be clear, though, that this is not socialism. A
temporary freeze on rents in the regulated part of the market doesn't change capitalist
ownership of land, housing and finance. The property developers, landlords,
banks, and other financial interests at the heart of the housing system remain
exactly as they are.
Mamdani himself has referred to the municipal socialist
tradition in Milwaukee and the so-called 'sewer socialists'. That tradition was
largely about efficient municipal administration and the provision of public
services. Any improvements such policies may bring about remain within the
realm of municipal reform. They don't, in any way, eliminate capitalist
property or transfer political power to the working class.
New York is still one of the great centres of world
capitalism. No municipal administration, however well-intentioned in its reform
programme, can transform the class relations institutionalised on Wall Street,
since those relations go far beyond the municipal boundary and rest on ownership
of the means of production.
This isn't really a question of individual treachery or
individual sincerity. It's a question of programme. A movement that takes
responsibility for administering capitalism has to operate within the economic,
political, and legal framework of that administration. Eventually, workers'
interests will run up against the demands that finance, property, and the state
make of that administration.
The historical experience of reformist governments
internationally, from SYRIZA in Greece to ostensibly left administrations
elsewhere, therefore demands serious examination. Winning office and possessing
political power are not the same thing.
Ideas without a programme, organisation without
independence
The New Yorker's formula, ideas flourish while
organisations wither, should therefore be turned on its head. The central
problem is not that American socialists have been organisationally incapable of
sustaining attractive reforms. It is that organisations claiming the socialist
mantle have repeatedly rejected the working class's political independence.
DSA is not an independent working-class political party. It
operates overwhelmingly through the Democratic Party and organises electoral
campaigns for candidates who stand within that party. This contradiction became
especially stark during the 2022 railroad dispute, when Congress intervened and
imposed a contract on rail workers, preventing a national strike.
An organisation cannot overcome this contradiction merely by
increasing its membership, fundraising capacity or representation in elected
institutions. Organisational growth and socialist political development are
entirely different things. Indeed, under definite conditions the first can
proceed at the expense of the second.
The question "Can socialism survive its success?"
is therefore posed falsely. What may unquestionably survive is a political
apparatus possessing elected representatives, campaign funds, professional
staff and positions within existing institutions. But an organisation that
grows by integrating itself ever more deeply into the capitalist political
structure is not necessarily succeeding as a socialist movement. It may instead
be abandoning the historical content of socialism while retaining its name.
What the discussion leaves out
A discussion of American socialism in November 2026 that
confines itself to elections and organisational longevity necessarily passes
over the decisive questions confronting the working class.
The first is war. American capitalism remains at the centre
of an international system characterised by sharpening geopolitical conflicts
and enormous military expenditures. Socialism cannot be reduced to domestic
redistribution while foreign policy and militarism are treated as separate
questions. Opposition to imperialist war belongs at the centre of a genuinely
international socialist programme.
The second question is the defence of democratic rights. The
growth of authoritarian forms of rule cannot be separated from extreme social
inequality and the political crisis it generates. A ruling class confronted by
growing social opposition increasingly regards democratic forms as obstacles to
securing its interests. The defence of democratic rights therefore depends upon
the independent mobilisation of the working class rather than confidence in the
institutions or representatives of either capitalist party.
Third is the working class's international character.
Workers in New York and Seattle confront corporations, banks, financial markets
and supply chains extending across national boundaries. Their conditions of
life are inseparable from those of workers in London, São Paulo, Shenzhen and
throughout the world economy. There is consequently no national, still less
municipal, road to socialism.
Finally, there is the rank and file. The more significant
development is not simply the election of a handful of politicians presenting
themselves as democratic socialists but the emergence of struggles by workers
against employers and, increasingly, against trade-union bureaucracies seeking
to contain those struggles. Socialist politics must seek to develop the working
class's independent initiative and organisation. These are the conditions in
which the socialist question is actually posed: not principally as the
popularity of individual reforms, but as a question of class power.
The question that should be asked
The real question is not whether American socialism can
survive its success. It is whether the American working class will break
politically with the Democratic Party and construct its own revolutionary
political leadership on an internationalist and socialist programme.
Widespread hostility to inequality, declining living
standards, and the domination of political life by immense concentrations of
wealth provide an objective basis for such a development. But hostility towards
capitalism does not spontaneously become socialist consciousness. Nor will it
reach socialism through the electoral structures of the Democratic Party, the
fundraising apparatus of DSA or the administration of municipal reforms.
It requires the conscious assimilation of the strategic
experiences of the American and international working class throughout the
twentieth century, including the Russian Revolution, the degeneration of the
Soviet Union, the rise of Stalinism, the Popular Front, fascism, the betrayal
of revolutionary opportunities and the prolonged struggle waged by Leon Trotsky
and the Fourth International against Stalinism and reformism.
This is precisely what disappears when socialism is reduced
to the history of organisations, policies and electoral cycles. The fundamental
historical question is not why particular socialist organisations disappeared.
It is what programme they fought for, what class interests they represented
and, above all, what political relationship they established between the
working class and the capitalist state. The New Yorker worries that
socialist organisations may wither once again. The working class should draw a
very different lesson from this history. It is time to build the organisation
that will not.
Bibliography
Articles and reports
Guttenplan, D. D. "The Rapid-Fire Political Education
of Zohran Mamdani." The Nation, 12 May 2026.
Izaguirre, Anthony. "Rent Board Fulfils Mamdani's Vow
to Freeze the Rent on 1 Million NYC Apartments." Associated Press, 25 June
2026.
Lepore, Jill. "Can American Socialism Survive Its
Success?" The New Yorker, 9 November 2026.
"America Doesn't Like Socialism, but the Candidates
Keep Winning." CNBC, 7 November 2026.
"Socialism's Moment Is Here." Current Affairs,
2026.
"NYC Rent Guidelines Board Final Vote." NY1, 25
June 2026.
Books
Cannon, James P. Socialism on Trial. New York:
Pioneer Publishers, 1942.
Dobbs, Farrell. Teamster Rebellion. New York: Monad
Press, 1972.
Harrington, Michael. Socialism. New York: Saturday
Review Press, 1972.
Isserman, Maurice. The Other American: The Life of
Michael Harrington. New York: PublicAffairs, 2000.
Kipnis, Ira. The American Socialist Movement, 1897–1912.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1952.
Salvatore, Nick. Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982.
Trotsky, Leon. The Death Agony of Capitalism and the
Tasks of the Fourth International (The Transitional Program). 1938.
Weinstein, James. The Decline of Socialism in America,
1912–1925. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967.
