“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 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).
Reflecting the crisis and turmoil in US capitalist society the idea of “socialism” is on the rise. In the US 53% of Gen Z hold a positive view of socialism, 38% even view the idea of “communism” favourably (Cato Institute survey, 2026). What a shift from the decades of “red scares” during the Cold War, experienced by their parents and grandparents!
This ideological churning is even being reflected in one wing of US capitalism’s two-party system. 66% of Democrat voters “view socialism positively” (Gallup, 2025), a majority now, 62%, would vote for a candidate who identifies as a “democratic socialist” (The Economist/YouGov June 2026).
The possibility of DSA member and House of Representative 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 (Newsweek, 12 August 2026).
Despite the unpopularity of Trump, with 69% now believing he has financially profited from the presidency (Reuters, 19 August 2026), the desperate lament in favour of capitalism from “Promise to America” Democrats fails to chime with the lived experience of millions.
How can capitalism be said to be working with a raging cost of living crisis, with inflation about to spike again, seemingly endless wars, energy guzzling data centres and authoritarian state repression?
Crisis Shaking Both Parties
Right now, there is the opportunity for socialists to approach and offer an alternative to those who voted Trump because of his promises of “good jobs, good wages” and an end to “endless wars”, only to find Trump and his family enriching themselves as prices rise and Trump is trapped by the Iran war he started which now threatens a global crisis.
In referencing DSA’s surge the Financial Times commented (17 August 2026) “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 far-sighted elements of the US ruling class, who inhabit the Democratic Party elite, are perhaps 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 Second World War economic upswing.
Today even the prospect of mild social-democratic reforms collides with twenty-first century oligarchic US capitalism, where the combined wealth of the top few richest Americans exceeds the bottom 50% of the US population and yet personal and national debt is rising.
Such collisions escalate fatal processes for those who rule the United States. The surge of DSA and the other early stirrings of a rediscovery of the socialist tradition in the US are dramatic but will be dwarfed by what is on the horizon – the development of a socialist consciousness and mass combative organisations of the working class, capable of sweeping away capitalism and building a socialist society, with the working class is in power, not the oligarchs and their puppets.
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 it from the dangers to its continuation. 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 JD Vance, claimed on the Joe Rogan podcast that he’s “pro-labor” despite being part of a vicious anti-union administration.
The international capitalist press, in the 250th anniversary year of the USA’s revolutionary birth are aghast and frothing at the mouth to condemn DSA’s strident, young, successful candidates who apparently adhere to DSA’s “Workers Deserve More” 2026 programme. This advocates abolition of the Senate and other undemocratic institutions of capitalist so-called ‘liberal democracy’.
DSA Advances
Beginning in Mamdani’s New York, 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 opponents’ $16.3 million.
To deflect from the crisis in his own administration, the fractures in MAGA and his own fears about losses in the midterms, Trump and the Republican party effectively act as recruiting officers for the DSA and the populariser of socialist ideas. Trump says, “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” (Nevada speech, August 2026). Trump’s response to Janeese Lewis George’s win in the Washington DC mayoral primary contest was to threaten to take over the capital with federal forces if she wins the general election in November (The Hill, 12 June 2026).
Those inspired to vote for such candidates in primaries of course are aware Trump has put the military, the National Guard and his murderous paramilitary gang of ICE agents on the streets of US cities. He and Secretary of State Rubio threaten the left with jails and persecution on a weekly basis.
In Minneapolis, the site of the mass protests and a shutdown against ICE in January, Homeland Security Investigations is attempting to conduct a frame up trial accusing socialists, trade unionists and activists of “conspiracy”. And still the Democratic party leadership doesn’t just resist calls to abolish ICE, they vote to fund it, and in power locally allow their police to attack anti-ICE protesters.
New York’s primaries saw a clash of political machines. Mamdani backed candidates, including Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, defeated those backed by forces that are part of an older Democrat machine including the “Working Families Party”, which itself is based on liberal nonprofits and right-wing sections of the labor unions.
Mamdani mobilised his base in support of his “affordability” agenda and over the Gaza genocide as voters took on candidates funded by AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobby group). The Gaza genocide is a major polarising issue across primaries, the shift in US society’s view of the Israeli state is resulting in the defeat of many candidates backed by the Zionist lobby.
Corporate Machine Fights Back
Of course, the corporate Democrat machinery, despite its historic unpopularity (55% of US voters have a negative view of the party, the highest since 1990, reported Gallup in 2025) is still able to defeat DSA and populist “progressives” in many contests. Often this is based upon fund raising from big business and engaging in “red scare” tactics.
Francesca Hong was narrowly beaten in the Wisconsin governor primary by a centrist candidate who utilised past social media posts she had made on funding for the police and “cancelling thanksgiving”. In states like Florida, unlike New York, DSA backed candidates will be up against the Republican party machine and MAGA in November, and this will be a different kind of test.
The Democrat leadership are fearful about the impact of “socialist” candidates on them winning the midterms nationally and will not tolerate any upset to the balance of power in the party machine, their control of Democrat caucuses in Congress, the state senates and legislatures they control. They either will seek to defeat left-populist and DSA candidates or pressure them into cooperation.
Calls are made to mobilise against DSA in the party and across the liberal milieu, “The DSA is a Parasite. The left-wing faction is hijacking the Democratic Party”, claimed James Kirchick in the liberal Democratic journal The Atlantic (21 July 2026).
They are also vulnerable to populist “progressives” who do not identify as “socialists” like Abdul El-Sayed who won the Senate race nomination in Michigan. El-Sayed identified as a capitalist but believes in anti-monopoly enforcement and universal healthcare and regulation, raising the slogan “get money out of politics and put money in your pocket”.
In Iowa, self-described “prairie populist” Josh Turek had pro-union and pro-farmer policies which won a primary. Both these candidates spent their campaigns attacking the House Democrat leadership of Chuck Schumer.
A section of liberal commentators sees the situation in the Democratic Party as precarious enough that they urge unity with the centre/ corporate Democrats and such “progressive” populists against “Democratic Socialists” (“Platner Was Toxic. But Democrats Could Learn from His Politics”, Nate Cohn, New York Times, 15 July 2026).
Whatever the outcome of the mid-terms, the Democrat 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. They raise massively popular policies like Medicare for all and are a major reference point for workers and youth.
An AOC presidential campaign will likely resonate particularly with low-paid workers and youth, given her background of working as a waitress in the Bronx. Along with Mamdani, they call for the Democratic Party to be transformed into a vehicle for the working class.
Historic Development
However, the Democratic Party, like the Republicans reflects the peculiarities of the development of capitalism and its state in the US. It is more like a coalition of capitalistic interests, a corporate funded election machine, than the traditional political parties, with at least relatively democratic membership structures, that were previously seen in parts of Europe.
Both parties have represented shifting elite interests throughout their history, while being committed to the capitalist system. The Democrats, now seen as more socially liberal than Republicans, once represented the interest of slave owners in the south. But in the 1930s, led by Franklin D. Roosevelt they implemented the New Deal reflecting a section of the capitalist class who attempted to tame, partly through welfare reforms, the mass pressures of the working class and mass unemployment that came from the Great Depression. On the basis of the New Deal many Democrats gave themselves a new image, initially mainly outside the South, as a “friend” of labor in order to stop the development of independent working class political representation by working to neutralise or absorb steps towards that goal.
Populism has been a feature in both parties reflecting class and intra-class tensions. The historical absence of a mass working class party comparable to the former Social-Democratic or Communist parties globally has been a defining feature of US class struggle. Currently it is partially reflected in the left-populism of figures like Sanders and AOC and the growth of DSA and even in sections of workers and the poor who look to MAGA.
Engagement
As previously with Sanders’ campaigns, socialists will have to seriously engage with the likely momentum of an AOC primary campaign and the electric interest it could generate around left ideas. AOC can, reflecting the polarised situation in US society (which is even deeper than when Sanders ran), engage in combative rhetoric against Trump, the oligarchy and capitalist crisis.
Socialists’ engagement will have to be combined with skilful warnings that 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.
AOC is also capable of making political retreats for perceived electability as she did recently when she dismissed her support for demands from the Black Lives Matter mass movement against police racism as “woke one” without putting forward a socialist programme around demilitarisation, defunding and working class community control and oversight of the police.
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 when “the squad” elected to the House of Representatives contained 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. Without standing for a break with capitalism 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. Although Sanders, in the early part of his career supported the idea of a Labor Party, he soon effectively became a permanent Democrat ally who sought to direct activists and movements into supporting the Democratic party. 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 illegalisation and shutting down of a national railroad strike.
AOC’s record in the house earned praise from arch corporate Democrat ex-leader Nancy Pelosi, who didn’t just call her a “joy” to work with but highlighted how “operational” she is in working with the party leadership in the Democrat caucus (Politico, 15 April 2021).
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 capitalist 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 labor and civil rights movements.
AOC’s possible campaign has generated enthusiasm in DSA but also opposition from those who point to her record in the House, the fact she voluntarily pays dues to the Democratic Party, and her lack of accountability to the organisation which led to the retraction of her DSA endorsement in 2024.
There is a current debate in DSA about not just whether AOC should be supported as a candidate but how DSA should democratically take that decision. The direction of these debates and her campaign overall may also be affected by the direction of Mamdani’s mayoralty in New York.
Mamdani
Mamdani’s election, the generalised interest in socialism, and the use of primaries as a tool not just of lesser evilism but to hit back at the Democrat and Republican leadership over issues like repression, the cost of living and Gaza has led to another surge for DSA. It is now up to over 130,000 members, in numerical terms the largest self-described socialist organisation in the US since the Socialist Party in the early 1900s. It has its biggest presence around Mamdani and AOC in New York.
Mamdani’s approval rating has increased since he was elected in the city recently reaching 69% of NYC voters (Siena poll August 2026). A broad section of workers and youth view him as having made progress on city infrastructure, rent, childcare and the pied-à-terre tax on the second homes of the wealthy, especially in contrast to the decades of previous neoliberalism. Rather than mobilising his base to fight for what could be achieved against the corporate Democratic leadership and the Trump administration, he has instead sought to negotiate and build coalitions, particularly with Democratic state Governor Kathy Hochul.
Hochul, wasn’t opposed by Mamdani when she organised scabbing on the nurses strike in the city early in 2026. Mamdani’s administration will face ever greater budgetary pressures that he has yet to provide socialist policies to deal with, let alone a strategy of mobilising to fight the lack of state and federal funding. There is opposition to the pied-à-terre tax and he has delayed the roll out of free public transport and made retreats on rental policy. The Mamdani administration is also using the private sector and developers for repairs, management and demolition of public housing, which is opposed by tenant campaigns, and to supply the promised municipal grocery stores.
Mamdani backed candidates in the primaries, and started building a political machine, but he is not in favour of utilising this in an all-out confrontation with the party leadership, he used his authority in DSA to mobilise against a potential challenger to the Democrat leader of the House Hakeem Jeffries in November 2025.
While Sanders and AOC’s campaigning has boosted ‘progressive’ candidates like Justin Pearson in Tennessee they did not endorse DSA’s Francesca Hong in Wisconsin. While they are not prepared to break their “unity” with the likes of Schumer and Jeffries their campaigning in red, Republican, states serves a useful purpose for the Democratic Party leadership against the Republicans, while not fundamentally challenging the corporate Democrats’ power bases.
Drawing Conclusions
If these left populist figures were serious socialists, committed to breaking the power of the capitalist ruling class, they would understand that the Democratic party is built to defend capitalism at home and imperialism abroad. Now, given the public positions they have, and widespread interest in and sympathy for socialist ideas, they could launch a serious struggle, together with labor union organisations and popular organisations, explaining the need for a socialist alternative program and the building of a genuinely democratic working class based party to fight for this programme and whose elected representatives are subject to recall, do not accept corporate money and are accountable to the membership and the organised working class.
The Democrat leaders and apparatus along with sections of the US ruling class would fight by claiming that at least they are the ‘lesser evil’ compared with Trump and the right populists. But socialists would answer that it is the combination of the Democrats consistent defence of capitalism and their repeated failures to deliver which prepared the way for the right populists. Biden’s presidency and Trump’s re-election is simply the latest example of this process.
However, people like Sanders, AOC and Mamdani are not prepared, as they should be if they were serious fighters against capitalism, 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. On the contrary, these leaders are the main pressure, including in DSA, for the argument that the most viable way to get socialists elected is on Democratic Party ballot lines. The undemocratic legal restrictions across much of the US on parties and candidates standing in elections are used to argue against the formation of an independent worker’s party.
Debates on Tactics
But even with this existing pressure, debates over this strategy exist in DSA, organisations like the labor unions and wider society. The new generation, excited by socialist ideas, as the crisis of capitalism worsens, are unlikely to accept a simple repetition of betrayals without a fight. The repeated attempts of the left populists in the DSA to maintain unity with the corporate Democrats is unlikely to avoid divisions and crisis, especially if that strategy continues beyond Trump’s current presidency.
An alternative idea to supporting AOC that is being raised in the DSA is running a union worker for president. This reflects the growing popularity of the idea of organising in US workplaces, particularly as an estimated fifty million workers in the US desire a union contract (Economic Policy Institute, 2026). A discussion should take place urgently among labor activists, socialists and campaigners with mass assemblies locally and nationally about the need for a union activist to run a presidential campaign on a fighting programme independently of the two corporate parties.
The DSA was largely formed from a right-wing split from remnants of the Socialist Party in the early 1970s. It mainly advocated pressuring the Democratic Party to “align” itself with the working class and progressive movements. For years the DSA was very small but it was transformed by the surge in interest in socialism sparked off by the combination of continuous Republican attacks on ‘socialism’ and enthusiasm for Sanders’ 2016 presidential run. Now, alongside those who hold onto the idea of continuing to work in the Democrats, there are a variety of currents in DSA who argue that eventually a “socialist party or a workers party” is needed. However, they are unclear about how DSA could be utilised to help create that and how an organisation of a few hundred thousand mainly college-educated youth with some workers can be built to reach millions in the US with socialist ideas.
While currently a minority in DSA, there are advocates for breaking with the Democrats now and promoting the idea of a new workers party. The Rhode Island DSA chapter has taken the political decision to break from supporting Democrat candidates and caucuses publicly and in its bylaws. They are running a “independent socialist candidate”, Britanny Kubicek, for the General Assembly (RI’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, who have also endorsed independent activist Andrea James, who broke from the Democrats, standing for Massachusetts governor.
Follow Debs
Eugene Debs, the socialist activist and militant trade unionist from the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, has been referenced by Sanders, Mamdani and in the recent formation of the “Socialist Party of Indiana” which emerged from campaigns against Democratic cuts and privatisation of public education by the Indianapolis city council. But Debs should not be kept as an historical figure. 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. He stood on a fighting programme as the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate in 1912 and won over 900,000 votes in that election. This was 6%, equivalent to winning over 9.3 million votes in 2024. The Socialist Party, in that period, had deeper roots in the working class than the DSA has today. It won large support, including elected representatives nationwide and in sections of the country now considered Trump heartlands. It did this by posing a class struggle alternative to populism and capitalism. But it is this example set by Debs which people like Sanders, AOC and Mandani reject by working with the Democrats at a time when that party is being increasingly questioned.
The level of opposition to the two-party system in the US is shown by 47% of voters now identifying as independent (Gallup January 2026) and the tens of millions who don’t vote. Independent candidates are attacked by the undemocratic two-party system and come under its pressures. Former strike leader and populist Dan Osborn ran as an independent in the Nebraska senate race in 2024 winning 46% against the Republicans. But in his latest run he is accepting fundraising from “act blue” which fundraises for Democrats. Independent Socialist candidate, and former Seattle councillor, Kshama Sawant gained a respectable 17% of the vote but failed to advance through a “jungle primary” in Washington state which favours the two main parties. The legal system is also used by the Democrats to control voters’ choice. Recently the Green Party candidate Butch Ware was blocked from running in the California gubernatorial primary.
The labor unions and their social weight and resources can have a critical role to play in the formation of a mass workers party. Union members need to argue against the idea of winning favours from the Republicans and Democrats and for the running their own candidates and also throwing their weight behind pro working-class independents who are standing up to the two-party system while ending funding for Democrats and Republicans. This would help build the basis for a workers’ party that refuses corporate donations and, for those workers elected, the acceptance of only the average wage of the working people they represent with the balance being publicly donated to the labor movement.
As was seen with the Labor Party initiative from sections of the unions in the late 1980s and 1990s any new formation that takes a step in the direction of a mass workers party will be under pressure not to electorally challenge the two corporate parties. As well as the newly organised forces attracted to such a formation it is likely to pull in splits and elements from supporters of the two parties themselves. This can include those who want a truly independent working class force and are moving to fighting for a socialist programme and those who wish to derail it.
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.
For AOC, “democratic socialism” means “ensuring basic human rights—such as healthcare, housing, and education—are guaranteed for everyone in a wealthy society like the US” (NBC news interview, 1 July 2018). She argues for a ‘mixed economy’, i.e. capitalism, with a role of the state and cooperatives and the market. She, like Mamdani, references the FDR New Deal with public investment and public works funded through taxation of the wealthy which would also fund Medicare for all. This was the basis of her Green New Deal bill which was blocked by the Senate and Congress.
She and Sanders have campaigned for a moratorium on AI data centres and called for greater public control over the technology industry. Sanders has also proposed a sovereign wealth fund that would give the public a 50% ownership stake in major AI companies. However, these measures avoid challenging capitalism by advocating that big tech is brought under full public ownership.
Socialists must patiently and firmly explain that while every reform must be fought for, US capitalism today 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 crisis, corporate healthcare, environmental destruction nightmare is for the working class through a fundamental socialist transformation 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, paying compensation on the basis of proven need. Socialism means a higher level of production and technology, even than exists currently in the US today, and the working class, rather than the bosses of giant corporations, planning the economy internationally in the peoples’ interests and not that of capital’s profits.
While we agree with the DSA’s call for the abolition of a Senate that is designed to permanently give power to a minority, socialists want to get rid of the entire outdated semi-democratic political superstructure that was ushered in by the first American revolution – all of their courts, legislatures, police forces and security agencies must be replaced and new institutions of a workers’ democracy, run in the interests of working people. Only this can consign the republic of ‘big money’ to history. Such a second, socialist, revolution in the US would electrify the working class and poor globally.