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socialism
Actually Michael Harrington Would Probably Love Today’s DSA – and Hate It Too
The "big tent" of the Democratic Socialists of America has its drawbacks too.
Aug 07, 2026
Kirkpatrick Sale has it half right in his lament over today’s Democratic Socialists of America, “Michael Harrington is Spinning in His Grave.” The imagined spinning stems from post-mortem distress at what its founding leader would make of the organization today. Sale—best remembered for SDS, his history of Students for a Democratic Society, the seminal 1960s “New Left” organization—calls himself Harrington’s “close friend and traveling companion,” and feels that today’s DSA “has stood on its head the principles that Mike and his colleagues stood for.”
While I cannot claim to have been Harrington’s friend, I did know him and arguably qualify as one of his colleagues, in that I was a member of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, his prior organization whose 1982 merger with the New American Movement created DSA. I remain a member of the organization to this day, and when serving in the Massachusetts House of Representatives was once one of DSOC/DSA’s handful of public elected officials. From my vantage point, while I understand Sale’s real–and Harrington’s imagined–distress at some of what he sees in today’s DSA, not only does he ignore developments that would have made Harrington proud, but I also think his take on Harrington’s politics is not quite right.
As a flat statement, Sale’s contention that DSA “is no longer anything that could be called democratic or socialist” is wrong, but he is not wrong in identifying parts of 2026 DSA that would seem unlikely to have appealed to Harrington. Sale clearly recognizes that the roots of the organization’s dramatic changes—its 20-fold inflation from the 6,000 member group of the 90's—lie in Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. He errs, though, in calling Sanders “a leading DSA figure and its only representative in Congress.” Sanders actually was not then, is not now, and so far as I know has never been an actual member of DSA—counterintuitive as that may seem.
After Sanders introduced “democratic socialism” to millions of American living rooms in his debates with Hillary Clinton and politically “lived to talk about it,” a whole lot of people who’d also been thinking about the idea googled the term and found DSA; some joined. They were then followed by some who indeed did not identify with the democratic socialist tradition but recognized that this was now where the action was—the hazard of success.
The result is generally understood as a “big tent” organization—a tent thus far large enough to contain both US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Democratic New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani—figures for whom I cannot imagine Harrington having anything but admiration—along with caucuses by no means committed to that approach, groups that Harrington would consider bizarre and out of place (as does this writer.) It contains serious divergences between local chapters and a tenuous national organization. How long this tent holds up is anyone’s guess. As for Sale, if he would actually consider the entirety of organization (the best description of which I’ve seen was recently published in a German Left Party newspaper—"Von Degrowth bis ML" Jungle World, July 30, 2026) he might well see similarities with the late years of SDS (an organization Harrington subsequently regretted having failed to productively engage with.)
Among those similarities is a certain not-ready-for-prime-time quality common in organizations trying to cope with the increased glare of the public attention spotlight. Foibles and foolish statements surface from the past. My personal nomination for the dumbest left slogan of recent years is “Defund the police”—its rational kernel of re-evaluating government’s approach to certain types of public safety situations smothered in a seemingly naive call for an end to law enforcement. And yet, even someone like Mamdani who is generally considered to possess masterful political skills—correctly, I think—has had to walk that one back.
On some points of his critique of current DSA, Sale seems perhaps frozen in time, such as his noting that “Mike was an outspoken champion of the new Israel.” That “new Israel” has changed quite a bit in the thirty-seven years since Harrington has been gone. Would he remain a champion of a nation now planning a prison for Palestinians that includes a moat stocked with crocodiles – a proposal temporarily stalled by consideration of the animals’ subsequently repealed protected status? Sure hope not.
But where I really think Sale is just wrong is in essentially arguing that Harrington was not actually a socialist. Yes, Harrington did talk of being “the left wing of the possible,” and that “generally meant working within the Democratic Party”—as do most current DSAers running campaigns to do something for the American working class in the here-and-now. And while Sale is accurate in saying that the DSA of Harrington’s day “put forth a vision of a democratically elected government that would be like those of the Scandinavian countries, providing state services in health, education, housing and the like,” his contention that back then there was “Nowhere stuff about ending capitalism” makes it sound like Sale missed a lot of meetings—and maybe didn’t keep up on his reading so well either. Even the small DSA had differing strands of thinking. One major one was all about imagining how to reach a genuinely democratically controlled economy beyond the “welfare state” and capitalism, something you will find reflected in Harrington’s writing.
So would the imagined Harrington be troubled by some of what he’d see in today’s DSA? Yes, I’m sure he would. And would he be positively thrilled by some of what he found in today’s DSA? Yes, I’m sure he would.
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Is the US Ready for Radical Change?
Political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou believes that radical change is difficult but still possible in today's United States, even though he realizes there is a strong anti-democratic tradition standing in the way.
Jul 28, 2026
The US is the richest country in the world, yet an international outlier on many measures. Among industrialized nations, the US spends a lower percentage of its GDP on public social expenditure, has no universal healthcare system, union density is at an all-time low, and the average American's standard of living is in decline, as "nearly half of US households can't make ends meet." Of course, delusional President Donald Trump continues to say that the US is the "hottest country in the world." Is the US, however, ready for radical change? After all, isn't there evidence that Americans are losing faith in capitalism and that socialism is gaining ground among voters?
Political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou shares provocative thoughts on these issues in an interview with the French-Greek writer and journalist Alexandra Boutri. Polychroniou believes that radical change is difficult but still possible in today's United States, even though he realizes there is a strong anti-democratic tradition standing in the way and regards the Democratic Party itself as the graveyard of radical change undertakings.
Alexandra Boutri: Recent polls indicate that capitalism is in trouble in the US, as there is a growing loss of faith in the system, apparently even among Republicans, while socialism is gaining mainstream appeal. So, I want to start this interview by inquiring about your own impression regarding political and ideological trends in the United States. Indeed, is the country on the verge of radical change?
C. J. Polychroniou: I am now old enough to take any talk of radical political change with a grain of salt. That being said, there is no doubt that the US version of capitalism has been an utter failure for the majority of Americans. In contrast to European or Asian versions of capitalism, capitalism in the US has always been structured around what we might call the Sopranos version of doing business, which is the Trump administration’s way of actually running the whole country today. But Trump aside, what kind of civilized society denies its citizens access to universal healthcare, tuition-free higher education, guaranteed long-term parental leave, 4-6 weeks of guaranteed paid vacation, and robust unemployment benefits? The US does!
Only the pathetic leadership of the Democratic Party stands in the way of Trump’s inevitable fall and disgrace.
The younger generations in the US seem to have awakened to the realization that the US economic system is brutal and thus detrimental to their well-being, even if they may not have an alternative socioeconomic system in mind that they would like to see instituted. They have indeed taken notice of the fact that the US is the only industrialized nation in the world without a universal healthcare system and that the standard of living has declined to the level of developing countries. Truth be told, even if North America remains the wealthiest on average, the quality of life in many European countries, which are, of course, still fully capitalistic, is superior to the US. There are stronger social safety nets and greater work-life balance in capitalist Europe than there are in the capitalist United States of America.
Which countries are best on women’s well-being? According to the latest Women, Peace and Security Index, European countries occupy all nine of the top positions while the US ranks 31st, below countries like Serbia and Malta. So, we do need to take into account different versions of capitalism. In that context, it is safe to say that many Americans have finally awakened to the realization that the US version of capitalism sucks! Anything more than that, however, is open to speculation. Socialism is gaining ground, but the challenges of building a unified socialist movement on a national scale and having a socialist political party that can contest power at the federal level are enormous in the United States of America.
Alexandra Boutri: Is the rise of socialism in the US the reason why Trump is reviving the boogeyman of communism?
C. J. Polychroniou: Absolutely. However much of a shallow man Trump happens to be, he is nonetheless a mastermind politician who has the pulse of today’s Republican voters. He is the greatest bullshitter of the modern age, but that’s only because of his audience. He knows how to stir fear. He also knows that he can normalize cruelty because his fanatical and racist fanbase simply loves it. Have his policies worsened economic conditions in the country to the point that even some of his own followers are beginning to doubt him? He only has to raise the volume on culture wars and then becomes again, in the eyes of his own supporters, the nation’s savior. Of course, such tactics have an expiration date even for the most popular authoritarian leaders. Look, for example, at what happened to Viktor Orbán in Hungary. After 16 years in power, even his own core supporters grew tired of his cronyism and corruption. I believe we will see something similar happen to Donald Trump and to the Republican Party, perhaps as soon as this coming November, in spite of how deeply the anti-democratic tradition has entrenched itself in all branches of government. In the end, only the pathetic leadership of the Democratic Party stands in the way of Trump’s inevitable fall and disgrace.
Alexandra Boutri: Are you also saying that the Democrats have been responsible for Trump’s rise to power?
C J. Polychroniou: Of course, and it was the Democrats, with their ability to destroy trust in government by siding themselves utterly and shamelessly with major corporate and financial interests, that rolled out the red carpet for Trump’s arrival on the nation’s political scene. The country had been moving further and further to the right since the early 1980s. In fact, the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as moderates had been declining since the Clinton years. Democrats still talk about Bill Clinton’s achievements, such as turning deficits into surpluses and making the economy more globalized, but his policies ushered in a new era of inequality while he transformed the welfare state by ending social policy. Essentially, the welfare state was dismantled under the Clinton presidency and was largely replaced in turn by volunteerism.
Neoliberalism (embraced by both parties in the US) and cultural relativism (a late obsession of liberals and segments of the left) have been at the core of the political turn to the far right in the US. The main point, though, is that the Democrats failed to advance a meaningful alternative whenever they found themselves in power. The Obama administration also had the chance to make a meaningful impact on the future of the country but opted, instead, to align itself with the status quo on all major issues, both on the domestic and foreign front. The Biden administration did make some progress on economic policy, mainly thanks to pressures from the progressive wing of the party, but failed miserably on foreign policy. As to why Kamala Harris lost to Trump, that's an issue that will forever be debated.
Alexandra Boutri: In a recent campaign speech in Michigan, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said that the Trump administration is “hellbent on tearing down in four years what it took this country 250 years to build.” What did she mean by that, and how likely is it that she will be the Democratic 2028 nominee?
C. J. Polychroniou: Naturally, the country has made progress over the past 250 years. Don’t you think it would have been unnatural if it hadn’t done so? But how do we measure progress? Wars existed in the past, and it appears that war will never end. By the same token, we have taken major steps toward protecting individuals against discrimination on the basis of sex or gender, but economic inequality is greater today than it has ever been in the modern era, while women, people of color, and minorities continue to face economic disadvantages. In any case, it is beyond dispute that Trump is destroying whatever social and economic progress has been made so far. He is a wrecking ball, an unhinged sociopath, but one who is still being treated as America's savior by something like close to 40% of voters. That’s simply mind-boggling, but it says something noteworthy about the persistence of a particular component of American political culture—one that rests on possessive individualism, anti-intellectualism, and the paranoid style. Richard Hofstadter addressed some of those aspects of American political life long before the rise of Trumpism. But we need to add racism, as it also remains a profound component of American political culture.
If popular struggles succeeded in introducing a universal healthcare system in the US, well, that would definitely constitute radical change in terms of how the nation has decided to deal with the well-being of its citizens.
I don’t know if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will decide to run for president in 2028. I hope she does. Recent polls indicate that she is more popular with Democratic voters than the likes of Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, and Kamala Harris, none of whom offers hope for a brighter future, although any one of them would be an improvement over Trump. What I do know, though, is that if AOC does decide to run for president in 2028, not only will she have at least half of the country react with extreme fear and paranoia attacks, but she will encounter massive opposition from the Democratic establishment itself. In 2016, the Democratic National Committee derided the Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) campaign. I expect something similar will happen to AOC. The current leadership of the Democratic Party is the graveyard of radical change in the US.
Alexandra Boutri: What would constitute radical change in today’s United States?
C. J. Polychroniou: That’s a very important question, and I’m glad you raised it. Political, economic, and even sociocultural settings must be taken into account whenever we speak of demands for radical change. Take something like universal healthcare. Almost every country in Europe has universal coverage, and it can also be found in many countries around the world. But in the US there has always been staunch opposition to universal healthcare policies by powerful private entities like the health and insurance industries. If popular struggles succeeded in introducing a universal healthcare system in the US, well, that would definitely constitute radical change in terms of how the nation has decided to deal with the well-being of its citizens. No question about it. Radical change should not imply the transformation of a country’s entire system of government. That would constitute a revolution. Even then, we would need to distinguish between a political revolution and a social revolution. For instance, the American Revolution was a political, not social revolution. It did not alter the fabric of society; it did not change wealth distribution and left the class system intact. On the other hand, the French Revolution that began in 1789 and the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia were truly social revolutions in that they transformed property relations and changed radically the class systems in both countries.
Alexandra Boutri: Today’s left focuses too much on cultural issues without really challenging capitalism. Indeed, in the recent past, issues like multiculturalism and even certain variants of feminism have functioned like ideologies of capitalism. In addition, some segments of the left have a knack for spreading ideas that are either not well thought out or simply impractical. For instance, and I believe this also captures your own sentiments, I find talk about “degrowth” and “wealth tax” schemes that fail to address the dynamics of unfettered capital accumulation while making in addition ludicrous claims that their implementation would solve the climate crisis as rather wishy-washy responses to capitalist crises and thus by no means game-changing strategies. My question then is this: What sort of new ideas would qualify, in your view, as game changers for the contemporary capitalist environment in the United States?
C. J. Polychroniou: I have already mentioned universal healthcare. In any case, it would be rather easy for anyone, I think, to simply suggest ideas to improve the state of the US economy and to create a better society but that would be meaningless if the ideas themselves weren't accompanied by concrete steps and specific policy proposals on how to erect alternative socioeconomic arrangements. But we need expertise for that to happen. That being said, a new project has been launched by the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst called Game Changers: Economic Policies for a Working America. It’s a project that was conceived of and is being directed by Gerald Epstein, a world-leading progressive economist who also happens to be PERI’s co-director. The issues addressed range from health and the environment to trade and finance. The policy briefs produced by different economists contain the sort of policy proposals that are desperately needed for rewriting the rules of the US economy in a manner that caters first and foremost to the needs and interests of American workers. I recommend everyone interested in progressive ideas on how to create a fairer, greener, and sustainable US economy to study some of the policy briefs that have been posted on PERI's website.
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My Conversation With Karl Marx About Donald Trump
The struggle between classes might seem an antiquated concept, but nonetheless it is the main factor that undergirds history, past, present and future.
Jul 06, 2026
The following invented interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Norman Solomon: You’ve downplayed the importance of the individual in history. But the United States now has as president an individual who transformed power relations and the political landscape.
Karl Marx: I can assure you that he did not do that by himself. Power relations are class relations. And by the way, I never said individuals are irrelevant to history. I exhorted individuals to get involved in changing history.
NS: President Trump has rolled back gains from the last hundred years and more. Also, he’s mentally unstable, to put it mildly.
KM: The basics still hold. As I wrote in 1869 about a situation in France where a cult existed around a tyrant, the class struggle “created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.”
NS: But now one highly dangerous and unhinged person has taken control of the U.S. government. And he got there with a majority of votes of the working class. It’s been a huge shock to have a virtual psychopath as president.
KM: Those you would call liberals like to disconnect such poisoned flowers from their historic roots. Victor Hugo was like that, as with so many commentators in your day, endlessly heaping their derision on the despicable despot. Hugo excelled at bitter and witty invective against Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte after the coup d’etat. As I pointed out, “The event itself appears in his work like a bolt from the blue. He sees in it only the violent act of a single individual. He does not notice that he makes this individual great instead of little by ascribing to him a personal power of initiative unparalleled in world history.”
NS: Actually, Trump does seem to insanely wield destructive power in ways unparalleled in world history.
KM: But he did not obtain that power through his own will. If you fixate on an individual personality, you’ve lost the historical plot.
NS: One sociologist, Dylan Riley, recently commented: “From a Marxist perspective, much of the left-liberal critique of contemporary American politics can be viewed as essentially petty bourgeois. It revolves around moral arguments advocating for equal opportunities and less social division and conflict.” And he added: “I think that Marx’s central point on this is to emphasize the importance of class struggle as the mechanism through which any class compromise is actually imposed. And if you miss that point then your politics are disabled from the get-go.”
KM: First, I’m glad to say that I am not a “Marxist,” given how much idiotic rubbish has been babbled by some who so label themselves. You can look it up, “Ce qu'il y a de certain, c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste.” But that aside – yes, certainly, there is just no way to reasonably talk oneself around the primacy of class struggle. The phrase might sound overly polemical to petty-bourgeois ears in the America of the 21st century, but that’s the most powerful engine driving history. You can deny or evade it, but you can’t really avoid it.
NS: Trump is a voraciously narcissistic capitalist, but he’s also flagrantly racist and misogynist.
KM: Of course, capitalism functions to oppress and divide the working class. Systems of racism mean more profits for the few. Likewise, women are exploited and underpaid for their labor. I wrote about this extensively.
NS: The horrible fact remains that we are now oppressed by an extremely reactionary vicious president aspiring to become an unlimited tyrant. And he harbors special hatred for women and people of color, with horrendous social impacts.
KM: Class struggle failed to result in the needed remedies to appalling human conditions, with some special victimizations within the working class. On this point, we could leave the last words to my comrade Friedrich Engels, who wrote in 1890: “The ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure – political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas – also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form.”
NS: So, you and Engels agreed that many different forces shape history, yet one individual can conceivably make all the difference at certain junctures?
KM: Fred clarified his point further this way: “We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one.” And he went on: “There are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant – the historical event.”
NS: Well, right now the historical event that keeps happening often seems to be dominated one way or another by Donald Trump.
KM: Even if it seems that way, the main propellant of a current event can often look obvious while unfolding as optical illusion. As I noted back in 1843, “The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions.” Never forget that a few live in obscene luxury while billions live in immiseration and billions of others are barely able to scrape together the essentials of life. The struggle between classes might seem an antiquated concept, but nonetheless it is the main factor that undergirds history, past, present and future.
NS: Some people complain that’s what you always say.
KM: That’s because it’s always true.
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No, Socialism Won't Kill the Democratic Party
The democratic socialists are fighting the battles the Democratic Party have refused to wage. This is the way.
Jun 28, 2026
Maybe you’ve heard the phrase means of production and maybe you haven’t. It basically means the tools, land, factories, machines, infrastructure, and systems a society uses to make the material stuff of life. Who owns those means, who controls them, and who benefits from them is one of the oldest fights in politics.
The communists, at their extreme, think the state should own and control all of it. The capitalists, at their extreme, think it should be completely in private hands. Socialists like me think there ought to be a blend of public and private ownership, that capitalism and socialism work best when paired. The neoliberals, which is mostly what we’ve got now, think our future should be in private control but paid for by the people, maybe with a guardrail or two set up between the people and the private sector’s insatiable desire for profit.
We fought about this hard in the early 1900s. There was a big movement around labor and organizers and workers, and a lot of those folks were actual communists. The communists were fighting for the means of production and the capitalists were fighting for it too, and they fought tooth and nail. The workers were unionizing and fighting for better rights and better conditions, and these were actual fights, with guns and sticks and knives, and people got killed, mostly workers. They fought for more rights. They fought for the 40-hour week. They fought for overtime. They fought for working conditions that were safe and not deadly, and in a lot of cases they won. They won those fights with blood. They won those fights with effort. They won those fights by putting things on the line.
You might have heard of something called the weekend. Not the singer, though I love him. The idea that Monday through Friday is the work week and the weekend is for your life. You might have heard of the eight-hour day, that anything over eight hours is overtime. Both of those were brought to you by the labor movement, a labor movement that at one point was empowered not to fight for the members of its own labor union but empowered to fight for people who worked for a living. That was their mantra. That was their goal.
Then came the New Deal in the 30s, the people injecting themselves into the production of the things we needed to rebuild the country after the Great Depression. We did it through the Civilian Conservation Corps. We trained workers, we provided health care, and during the war we even created daycare centers so women could go into the factories. It was a real rebalancing of our economy between capital and labor, with the state taking part of the means of production, engineers and scientists doing the work for the people, paid for by the people, and then used by the people. Corporations got brought to heel for a while.
Then we beat the fascists, the Nazis in Germany and Italy and the imperialists in Japan, and right after that the Americans decided the biggest scourge, the biggest fear they had, was communism and socialism. Because we’d gotten a taste through the New Deal and the Arsenal of Democracy of what it was like to share in the growth, to share in the fruits of our own labor, and there was a fear that if we kept tasting it we’d decide we too deserved more, and that would mean the Vanderbilts and the railroad tycoons and the shipping barons and the oilmen would have less and the people who did the work would have more. So we fought it. We fought it through the McCarthy era, with propaganda, with all sorts of ideological battles. The idea of socialism and the idea of communism both lost. And the Democratic Party started moving away from its socialist roots and its socialist ideas toward what would ultimately become neoliberalism, the system we’ve got now.
We went through all of those fights, the prisons, the violations of the Constitution. We perverted ourselves in order to fight off socialism, to keep the means of production in the hands of the capitalists, because they alone were able to properly guide our system. And then what did they do with our productive capacity? What did they do with it through the 70s and 80s and 90s and 2000s and right up to today? They shipped it off to Mexico and China and Brazil. They gave away the very thing we fought over. And why? Because it was cheaper, more profitable, and they figured they could do it with impunity.
But when you take away people’s means of production, you also take away their means of making a living, their power and their value in life, economically and socially and every other way, and then you’ve got people fighting over what little is left, and it turns ugly and it turns dirty. Look at January 6th. Look at the riots and the protests during the Black Lives Matter movement. What you end up with is a police force that has to oppress, and private prisons that have to fill up, and a military-industrial complex that doesn’t care whether it’s participating in a genocide or not, because it’s about money and power. And ultimately what you end up with is a country that can’t defend itself or provide for itself, a giant welfare state leaning on the Chinese to make our goods and to buy our debt. A nation that no longer holds its own means of production, no longer holds its own means of making a living, no longer holds its independence, not in energy production, not in the ability to build housing or infrastructure or the things that make our lives better. We import all of it, because all we need is money, we can just make more money.
And that only works as long as the money stays in the hands of a few. All that money creation, all that expansion of wealth, would lead to massive inflation if it weren’t held by a few, and you can already see what it does, because it’s caused massive inflation in indexes and in asset prices. Bitcoin and Apple and the stock market have risen to unreasonable heights, heights that are detached from any reality. Tesla is worth more than the next 30 car companies combined, even though it doesn’t produce as much as any of the top ten and doesn’t make more profit than any of the top ten, and yet somehow it’s worth more. Why? Because the money that’s been created has caused that inflation, and the inflation stays at the top. It makes trillionaires and centibillionaires. If that same money had been shared with the rest of America without creating more productive capacity, without the ability to build more housing or train more doctors or build more hospitals, it would create massive inflation everywhere, because you’d have more money chasing fewer goods in a system that can’t produce the things anymore and just imports them. The inflation is real. It just stays at the top, in asset prices, instead of showing up at the grocery store.
So the means of production was a fight that working people lost and the capitalists won. And then the winners gave away the spoils of their own victory to other nations, because they aren’t patriots and they aren’t citizens of this country. They’re citizens of the world. They’re detached and untethered, private jets and private islands and private security forces, and at that level of wealth they don’t need this country to succeed.
But here’s the thing. The elite, for now, do need us more than we need them. We’re the ones propping them up right now.
The question with AI and robotics is not whether the machines will be powerful. They will be. The question is whether they become another offshore factory, another private island, another asset owned by people who do not need us, or whether they become part of a shared American capacity again.
We lost the last fight over the means of production, and then the winners gave it away. We should not let them do it twice.
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Named for Mamdani, GOP Bill Would Strip Citizenship From People Who Advocate for Socialism
History tells us, over and over again, that once you give the government the power to disappear people for what they read, write, believe, or advocate that power never stays trained just on the original targets.
Apr 21, 2026
Republicans are at it again, and it’s hard to overstate how chilling this is and what it tells you about the direction people in this Party want to take America.
Texas Congressman Chip Roy is preparing to introduce legislation he’s calling the “MAMDANI Act,” named after Zohran Mamdani, the recently elected democratic socialist mayor of New York City, that would let the federal government bar entry to, deport, and strip naturalized citizenship from any person who advocates for or is “affiliated with” what Roy calls “totalitarian” movements. The list includes, from Rep. Roy’s webpage:
“[A] socialist party, a communist party, the Chinese Communist Party, or Islamic fundamentalist party, or advocates for socialism, communism, Marxism, or Islamic fundamentalism.”
The bill targets people who “write, distribute, circulate, print, display, possess, or publish” material supporting socialism or any of those other ideas.
“Possess?” That single word means that owning a copy of Marx’s Das Kapital, or a pamphlet from a Palestinian solidarity group, or a battered paperback of Howard Zinn — or maybe even one of my books on the New Deal — would be enough to make a green-card holder or a naturalized citizen “inadmissible or deportable.”
“Affiliated with?” That would prevent anybody who’s ever affiliated themselves with the Democratic Socialist Party in New York that Mamdami ran on behalf of (along with the normal Democratic Party; New York has fusion voting so you can run on two parties simultaneously) from staying in America. Gone to a meeting, rally, or put yourself on their mailing list? You’re toast.
“Write?” That means they’re coming for me, and for you if you’ve ever echoed in writing the kind of sentiments that Republicans call socialism, including food stamps and school lunches, free college, public libraries, a national healthcare system, police and fire, and highways that don’t have tolls. (When billionaire David Koch ran for vice president in 1980 on an antisocialism agenda, he called for the end of all these forms of “socialism”.)
“Distribute?” And they’d be coming for Substack, too, it appears. Along with your local bookstore or library.
We haven’t seen anything this sweeping since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, when then-President John Adams had roughly 30 newspaper editors and publishers thrown in prison for attacking him. Ben Franklin’s grandson was arrested for publishing an op-ed calling the president “old, querulous, Bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams.” A town drunk in New Jersey was arrested for criticizing him while imbibing in a bar. Adams’ overreach lost him the election of 1800 to his then-political enemy Thomas Jefferson, who openly opposed the Acts.
But here we are again, and here’s another dangerous overreach on the GOP’s part in this legislation: Roy’s bill explicitly forbids judicial review of any inadmissibility, deportation, or denaturalization decision made under it.
In other words, if this law passes then no court can stop or second-guess the government: no habeas corpus, no meaningful appeals; just an order from the Attorney General or some twit at ICE or Homeland Security and you’re on a plane or stuck in a hellhole “detention facility,” possibly for the rest of your life.
That’s not immigration policy, that’s the architecture of a police state, and it’s modeled on how the Nazis stripped citizenship from German Jews and political dissidents in 1935 under the Reich Citizenship Laws.
I’ve walked through Berlin’s Topography of Terror museum, and the documents on display tell the horrific story of how that the lawyers who drafted those Nazi laws studied America’s own racial and political exclusion laws for inspiration.
Now Republican Chip Roy wants to bring them back to America as Republicans try to reinvent or country in the image of Trump’s mentor Putin’s Russia or — as the authors of Project 2025 openly suggest — Orbán’s Hungary.
The bill’s namesake, Mayor Mamdani, became a U.S. citizen in 2018 after moving here from Uganda as a child. He hasn’t been credibly accused of any crime, and as the Brennan Center for Justice meticulously documents, the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the use of stripping people of their citizenship as a political weapon like Putin now routinely does and Trump loves to threaten.
That goes all the way back to trying to overturn the 1943 Schneiderman Supreme Court ruling, which held the government must prove “lack of attachment” to the Constitution by “clear, unequivocal, and convincing” evidence. Disagreeing with someone’s politics doesn’t cut it by a long shot. But Roy and his allies aren’t interested in the existing jurisprudence; they want to write new laws that nullify that decision (and common decency) altogether.
Roy told Breitbart his target is what he calls a “Red-Green Alliance” of socialists and Islamists, and a summary from his office goes further, claiming current immigration policies — echoing Clarence Thomas‘ recent speech that I wrote about yesterday — have produced “dangerous levels of opposition to classical American political doctrines, like free-market capitalism.”
That’s an extraordinary admission, because Roy isn’t proposing to deport people who commit crimes, or who support terrorism, or even who lied on their citizenship applications. He wants, instead, to strip of citizenship and then deport people who don’t sufficiently believe in the unregulated, low-tax version of the so-called free market capitalism advocated by the rightwing billionaires who now own the GOP.
This is a loyalty test for an ideology rather than a country, and, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, it’s the kind of legislation the robber barons of the 1920s and the John Birchers and McCarthy movement of the 1950s dreamed of but could never ram through Congress and neither Taft nor Eisenhower would ever have signed.
We’ve actually run a smaller, more local version of this experiment before, and it ended in disgrace. The Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920 saw roughly 10,000 immigrants rounded up without warrants and 556 of them deported, including the anarchist Emma Goldman, all for the crime of holding the wrong politics.
The Communist Control Act of 1954 put into law by Republicans at the height of McCarthyism, was eventually declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1973 and most of its provisions repealed. Each time we’ve tried this sort of neofascist thing the country looked back in shame, having relearned that the First Amendment doesn’t have an exception for people who say we should tax the morbidly rich to build and support a middle class.
History tells us, over and over again, that once you give the government the power to disappear people for what they read, write, believe, or advocate that power never stays trained just on the original targets.
There are nearly 25 million naturalized citizens and 12.8 million green-card holders living in the United States today, and every single one of them would, under Roy’s bill, be subject to having their citizenship reviewed and potentially revoked based on some rightwinger complaining about them to a federal bureaucrat or police agency or the discovery of a book in their house.
It would threaten millions of legal permanent residents and visa holders working in our hospitals, building our houses, teaching our children, designing our electronics, and even farming our food. The fear alone is the point: if you’re a naturalized citizen or green-card or visa holder and you want to attend a Free Palestine rally, a labor union meeting, or a tenants’ rights organizing session, you’d now have to ask yourself whether some aide in Stephen Miller’s office might decide that constitutes “advocacy for socialism.”
And it’s one of dozens of similar laws that have been proposed by Republicans in recent years.
Presumably, this is the sort of thing that the billionaire who funded JD Vance’s rise to the Senate and vice presidency meant when he famously said, “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.” That’s the billionaire whose company now compiles information on Americans on behalf of the Trump regime.
Call your member of Congress through the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and tell them you oppose the MAMDANI Act and any legislation that creates thought, publishing, and speech crimes, then use the ACLU’s action tool to make sure your senators hear from you, too.
Support the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which has been on the front lines fighting Roy’s earlier “Sharia-Free America Act,” and back the American Immigration Council as it readies the inevitable legal challenges. Get involved with Indivisible and your local Democratic Party to make sure the 2026 midterms send Roy and every co-sponsor of this bill back home permanently.
The Constitution doesn’t defend itself and neither does freedom; that work belongs to us, and the time to engage with it is right now.
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US Corporate Media Seems Very Afraid of Democracy
Maybe mild forms of socialism is not what they fear most.
Jan 18, 2026
Much as they did back in 2018, when New Yorkers stunned the political establishment by electing a little-known former bartender named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress, the corporate political press covered the most thrilling Democratic victories of 2025 as if they were largely inexplicable, semi-miraculous flukes. While breathlessly covering the tweets, styles, preferred lipstick brands and personal qualities of individual politicians, establishment media outlets mostly ignored the organizing efforts led by ordinary people that put representatives like Ocasio-Cortez in positions of power.
In the view of these publications, recently sworn-in New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wasn’t a movement candidate who emerged after years of working on other insurgent campaigns and organizing with groups like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), of which I am a member, but a slick young upstart whose campaign was “built from nothing in a matter of months” (New York Times, 6/29/25).
After the general election, the New York Times (11/4/25) wrote that while Mamdani had won the primary by uniting “a new coalition of Brooklyn gentrifiers and Queens cabbies,” he triumphed in the general by running an “improbable backroom campaign” that “wooed, charmed and delicately disarmed some of the most powerful people in America.” This framing, by New York politics reporter Nicholas Fandos, suggested that Mamdani—undeniably a “megawatt talent”—had blandished his way into the mayoralty virtually singlehandedly.
NBC News (11/4/25) wrote of his “meteoric rise” from a “virtually unknown state assemblyman who barely registered in polling” to the mayor of America’s largest city without substantially analyzing how that came about.
‘Building civic architecture’
This framing obscures both the crucial role that ordinary people played in these campaigns, and the potential they have to organize and win even political changes the rich and powerful bitterly oppose. And it misses the real story of Mamdani’s win: the unprecedented army of volunteers, young people and first-time voters who propelled him to victory. That story was mostly covered by left-wing outlets like Dissent (11/25/25) and Jacobin (7/15/25), which put out sharp analyses of how campaigns like Mamdani’s were structured and organized, and how they were able to succeed against such long odds.
Grassroots formations that provided crucial support to Mamdani’s campaign, such as DSA and DRUM Beats, which organizes working-class Indo-Caribbean and South Asian communities, are membership-based organizations. They differ in structure and strengths from the top-down, consultant-driven campaign model corporate political outlets see as the norm.
These groups also spent years planting the seeds of victory by organizing people who had long been overlooked, ignored or shut out of conventional politics to participate in local elections. In other words, Mamdani’s campaign was the opposite of the Times‘ characterization as being “built from nothing in a matter of months.”
As Chris Maisano explained in Dissent, “people on the ground have been quietly building civic infrastructure” in neighborhoods Mamdani won. The mobilization of these communities “transformed the electorate and helped Mamdani offset Cuomo’s strength in neighborhoods that shifted sharply to the former governor in the general election.”
Establishment media’s obsession with portraying democratic socialism as divisive and/or fatally alienating to voters blinded it to what was truly radical about Mamdani’s campaign: It empowered ordinary people to lead, changing individual lives and history. What most scares the establishment isn’t socialism; it’s people-powered democracy.
Discouraging mass political participation is not new—in a 2019 Politico article (4/25/19) headlined “Politics Is Not the Answer,” Matthew Continetti suggested that “we might begin to see ourselves, and all of our virtues and our vices, more clearly” if we would only lower our expectations “of what politics can achieve”—but it’s newly salient in the run-up to the 2026 midterms.
‘Too much emphasis’ on ‘far-left positions’
One function of the corporate political press is to funnel popular energy and outrage into what its backers see as the proper channels: lawsuits, think tanks and voting for establishment-backed candidates. This is reflected in how these outlets are covering contemporary opposition to Donald Trump.
The New York Times (9/17/25) wrote about a new Democratic think tank, the Searchlight Institute, that attributes the party’s recent losses to “too much emphasis on issues like climate change and LGBTQ rights…at the expense, some argue, of appealing to voters in battleground states.”
Paraphrasing the think tank’s founder, Adam Jentleson, the paper’s Reid J. Epstein noted that
organizations focused on climate change, gun control and LGBTQ rights have all managed to get Democratic presidential hopefuls on the record taking far-left positions to the detriment of their general election performance.
The Times quoted operatives who disagreed with Jentleson, but didn’t bother to analyze his essential claims: Were those positions really “far left” and alienating to the party’s base? What evidence is there that candidates who took certain positions on climate change and/or LGBTQ rights underperformed in general elections as a result of those positions?
To the Times, the needs and preferences of the party’s “liberal base” are inscrutable and beside the point; what matters is the guidance of self-appointed experts like Jentleson, whose think tank is “subsidized by a roster of billionaire donors,” including prominent hedge fund managers and real estate investors.
‘A lot of compromise’
In a New York Times column (4/17/25) calling for a “national civic uprising” against Trump, David Brooks argued that the mass rallies Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders led in 2025 were “ineffective” because they were “partisan,” and made opposition to Trump “seem like a normal contest between Democrats and Republicans.”
Yet one day earlier, the Times (4/16/25) reported that the Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez rallies had “drawn enormous crowds” and were “energizing a beaten-down Democratic Party.” And according to a Sanders adviser, the paper noted, “21% of those who signed up to attend Mr. Sanders’ events reported that they were independents, and 8% said they were Republicans.”
Organizing mass rallies that expose thousands of listeners in conservative areas to critiques, not just of Trump, but of oligarchy in general, seems like an effective means of diluting right-wing power and demonstrating that leading Democrats and their allies care about Americans throughout the country, not just in blue states. But to those in corporate media, the point of politics is not to inspire regular people to organize and win broadly popular demands, but to “build power” and “do good things” by, as the New York Times’ Ezra Klein suggested in a recent interview with the New Yorker’s David Remnick (9/29/25), engaging in “a lot of compromise and a lot of working with people who we have very, very deep disagreements with.”
Klein is far from the only Democrat who believes we should take “an approach to politics that we think will expand our coalition such that we are not always within two points of losing to Donald Trump or the people around him.” But to Klein, that means penning paeans to hatemongers like the late Charlie Kirk (New York Times, 9/11/25), not standing up to plutocrats.
‘A better story’
Despite evidence that mass issue-based organizing campaigns can and do politicize people, bring them into effective coalitions and achieve significant victories, corporate media outlets and establishment leaders remain laser-focused on encouraging the rank and file to elect centrists rather than build mass movements.
As CBS News (12/16/25) recently reported, former President Barack Obama—still one of the Democratic Party’s most popular figures—is urging Democrats to “focus on winning the midterms and developing ‘a better story’ to tell voters, rather than on ‘nerdy’ internal disagreements.” The man once touted as the nation’s “organizer in chief” has long since abandoned encouraging Americans to organize, fight for and win life-changing policies; he is advising them to focus on winning the midterms by burnishing their brand.
The endurance of Trump, who won more votes than Kamala Harris in 2024 but has never won the consistent support of a majority of Americans, revealed to many that they cannot trust US political leaders to protect the rights and interests of ordinary people. Campaigns like Mamdani’s in New York, and recently elected Mayor Katie Wilson’s in Seattle, have shown people around the world that they have the power to win the policies and elect the leaders they want, without top-down instruction or management from—and despite interference by—elites.
To pundits and corporate media outlets, this is a dangerous lesson: If everyday people realize they don’t need overpaid consultants or self-declared experts to win real change, how long can the status quo be maintained by its beneficiaries?
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Whatever Socialism's Sins, It's Capitalism That Threatens Life on Earth
The question is no longer whether this system is failing us, but whether we are willing to confront the power structures that depend on that failure.
Jan 11, 2026
Socialism destroyed Venezuela. This is the claim being made by many. According to the Manhattan Institute, corruption was not to blame, mismanagement was not to blame, falling oil prices were not to blame, and US sanctions were also not to blame. No—they argue the single cause of Venezuela’s plight was socialism. The big bad bogeyman we have all been taught to fear.
It is widely argued that growth in socialist economies is lower than in capitalist economies. This argument dominates mainstream economic discourse. We can see it with our own eyes. Of course, the citizens of the capitalist United States have higher standards of living. Of course the citizens of Europe have more cars, and Chinese citizens have more gadgets. We know all this. But we no longer live solely in capitalist economies. Today we are living under the machinations of the billionaire class. We live in a rampant capitalist fever dream that is doing so much more damage than socialism ever will.
While socialism, in a few nations on Earth, has lowered the standard of living for a few hundred million human beings, capitalism is destroying any chance of a peaceful and abundant future for all species on our incredible planet. Our atmosphere is full of carbon dioxide that is in geological terms warming our home at an unprecedented rate that threatens the very survival of our species. Every year, 7 million people die from breathing polluted air. I say “murdered” is the better word—because we could stop it. We know it is happening, and we know the cause, so manslaughter doesn’t do it justice. And what we see is only the smoke; the real fire is much larger.
Since the industrial revolution we have destroyed 1.5 billion hectares of forest. This is an area 1.5 times the size of the US. In the last 10 years alone, we have cleared an area of land equal to that of Central America. Animal populations have declined by 73% since the 1970s. Our rivers are full of shit, yet void of life. Our oceans will soon be home to more plastic than fish. Humans and the animals we breed to kill make up 95% of the world’s mammalian biomass. Around 70% of the world’s bird biomass is now made up of domesticated poultry bred for human consumption.
The leader of Venezuela was just hauled out of bed and jailed for failing his people. Well, I would suggest that the leaders of the “free” world are also failing their people, but who is going to haul President Donald Trump out of his gold-plated corporate-sponsored bed?
Due to climate change, primarily driven by the burning of fossil fuels for economic growth and animal agriculture, which reduces our ability to draw down carbon naturally, we are beginning to see the outcomes of unregulated growth. Erratic weather conditions in Russia, Ukraine, the UK, China, Mozambique, Pakistan, Canada, and Iran resulted in reduced harvests of key staples in 2025. This is just the beginning.
Our soils have been so degraded by intensive agriculture that the United Nations has warned that much of the world’s remaining topsoil could be severely degraded by 2074 if current practices continue. On top of that, we are hurtling rapidly toward a future of widespread water shortages. In just four years, demand for freshwater is projected to outstrip supply by 40% and half the world’s population could suffer severe water stress. This includes the now free and prosperous people of Venezuela, where much of the country could be uninhabitable by 2070. Without water, there is no food. Scientists have been warning us for decades that food production will be impacted greatly by climate chaos. They forecast that the chance of simultaneous areas suffering crop failure increases from 7% at 2°C (3.6°F) to a staggering 86% if we allow the billionaire class to push us to 4°C (7.2°F).
A lack of food and water, extreme heat, and sea-level rise will certainly make our planet more volatile and conflict ridden. Report after report state that we are heading toward societal collapse—a term used to describe the systematic breakdown of the core social, economic, and political institutions that sustain societies. A consequence of this will be the erosion of international laws and human rights. Does this ring any bells?
As destabilizing as climate chaos already is, an even more profound disruption is now being layered on top of it: artificial intelligence (AI). Beyond its enormous energy and water demands, which promise to exacerbate the problems outlined above, AI threatens the very fabric of society. It threatens vast swathes with employment. It threatens to fundamentally destabilize the conditions that make human societies possible. And it is all being foisted on us without our consent in order to increase profits. This is capitalism in its purest form—where profitability outweighs every other consideration, including life itself.
If we are going to blame socialism for the problems in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, communism for the problems in North Korea, then surely, with everything stated above, we must blame capitalism for the complete breakdown of ecosystems, never-ending wars, climate chaos, and a potential AI takeover. And the scale of destruction wrought by Jeff Bezos and his billionaire brethren is gargantuan when compared to anything caused by socialism. Let’s please put things in perspective.
The leader of Venezuela was just hauled out of bed and jailed for failing his people. Well, I would suggest that the leaders of the “free” world are also failing their people, but who is going to haul President Donald Trump out of his gold-plated corporate-sponsored bed? It is only the people of the most powerful nation on Earth that can do that. It should always be down to the citizens of a country to bring about change. It should never be the responsibility of a golden elite that has no interest in improving lives, but simply improving bank balances. They say you get the government you deserve. Well then, we currently have the governments we deserve. What are we going to do about it?
The question is no longer whether this system is failing us, but whether we are willing to confront the power structures that depend on that failure. We need to be honest with ourselves: We are in a class war. A small number of billionaires are grinding all Earthlings into the ground. We are losing on every battlefield. Until we start acting like we are being erased systematically, we will continue to be erased systematically.
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Why Trump Tried Tariffs: The Turn to Nationalist Capitalism
Trump's trade policies are an admission of capitalism's failures. Perhaps finally enough people have learned the lessons of the past so that we can build an economy that works for working people.
Nov 24, 2025
A short response to this essay’s title is: “because he, and the US system he now sits atop, are desperate.”
A mid-length answer connects certain similarities in the histories of US and British capitalisms. Britain’s declining empire and economy led to Boris Johnson, blaming Europe for that decline, cutting off from Europe via Brexit, and Britain’s downward self-isolation since. The US’s declining empire and economy led to Trump, his blaming that decline on the whole world, cutting off from and punishing the world via tariffs and trade wars, and the resulting US downward self-isolation.
A fuller response is more complicated and requires specifying the historical context. Before the 1970s, US citizens had long been told about the exceptional virtues and benefits of US capitalism. We had achieved unprecedented success, the world’s only truly “middle-class” society. Extremes of wealth and poverty barely existed except for a very few superrich and a few very poor. After the 1970s, we were told a different story, namely that the US government had excessively intervened from the 1930s to the 1970s in the workings of “our optimally efficient private enterprise economy.” Regaining prosperity required ending such government interventions. Since the 1970s, terms like neo-liberalism, globalization, free-trade, and privatization became prominent markers of US capitalism, differentiating it from the 1930s to 1975 when the state’s economic interventions had won praise. After the 1970s, freedom from those government interventions became the dominant dogma governing state economic policy.
Before the 1970s, private capitalism had widely seemed the problem and government intervention had seemed the necessary solution. After the 1970s, the reverse view prevailed. It insisted that government intervention was the problem and privatization was the solution. This reversal reminded many of an important earlier reversal: after 1945, when the US and the USSR reversed their status as great allies to became instead the opposite, great enemies.
After the 1970s, the US government increasingly resumed its pre-Great Depression limitations on economic intervention (associated with classical, i.e. British, liberalism). Increasingly too, after the 1970s, the 1930s New Deal seemed a distant, long-ago emergency time. Its reforms were considered no longer needed or, worse, deemed counterproductive. A few Depression era reforms survived because of working-class pressures from below, plus widespread apprehensions that they might well prove useful to constrain future economic downturns. The US business community had never wanted the New Deal, resented its reforms, and recoiled at the taxes on their profits that helped pay for them. That community’s political goals after 1945 boiled down to undoing the New Deal. That had to be done slowly, gradually, and cautiously for political reasons from 1945 through the 1970s. After that, with Reagan’s election, it could and did accelerate. It has done so still more in Trump’s second term.
After the 1970s, US capitalism’s ceaseless relocation of capital investments from lower- to higher-profit opportunities increasingly took two prominent forms. First was automation: employers sequentially installed computers, robots and AI. Second was globalization: employers increasingly went beyond US borders. They moved jobs abroad and especially to Asia and Latin America. US military bases by the hundreds, originally justified after 1945 as needed to contain the Soviet Union and communism’s expansion, revealed their other and more important purpose. They served nicely to enforce a world trade system (later exalted as a “rules-based international order”) committed to US-led and US-defined “free” trade.
Tying everything together ideologically, a new dogma effectively reversed its 1930s to 1970s predecessor. The old dogma had admitted that private capitalism sometimes encountered serious business cycle problems. For example, those in the 1930s had threatened capitalism itself. Keynes had shown the world how to prevent or at least greatly moderate them. Timely government intervention, monetary and fiscal, could do the trick. Central banks could manipulate the quantity of money in circulation and interest rates to control capitalism’s cycles. Governments could likewise maneuver tax collections, spending programs, and resulting borrowing toward the same end. For a while it was widely believed that capitalism’s long-standing problem of cyclical instability had been solved. Leading US economists, among others, went to work to persuade and explain the Keynesian solution to business, political, and academic leaders. Most of the rest of the economics profession followed by teaching Keynesian economics to successive generations of college students. From the 1930sto the 1970s, economists were mostly the old dogma’s priests.
At the margins of the US economics profession from 1945 to 1975 were some who rejected the dominant old dogma more or less. Among them Milton Friedman refused the premise that capitalism had somehow “failed” in the 1930s. It could have rallied, he believed, to overcome a cyclical downturn as it had many times before. Indeed, he and his co-authors labored to suggest how and why governmental interventions did more to worsen the Great Depression than to prevent or moderate it. Marxist economists such as Paul M. Sweezy, admired Keynes’ critical insights into capitalism’s cyclical dysfunction yet disagreed that his work had or could overcome that cyclical instability. Still other marginal economists demurred, but even taken altogether, the marginalized economists could not undermine the Keynesian dogma. For decades, government leaders believed that they and their business and academic advisers “knew” how to manage capitalism to end its dangerous instability. They ruled the US (and beyond) after the 1930s Great Depression.
What finally undid that dogma were two key movements that converged in the 1970s. The first was the recovery of all the major economies that had destroyed one another in World War 2 (especially Japan, Germany, UK, France, and others except the US). While US capitalism had been the only globally dominant economy from 1945 to 1975, serious foreign competition resumed for the US again by the end of that period. The second development that undermined the Keynesian dogma was technological development: chiefly the computer and jet air travel. They enabled employers to raise profits (1) by exporting jobs to lower-waged regions overseas and (2) by automation that replaced workers with computers, robots and now AI. US employers profited from relocating abroad because they thereby escaped the high wages and costly benefits that US workers had won in rough union and class struggles with employers before and during the 1930s Great Depression. They also escaped the costs of ecological protection.
Of course, automation and job exports represented costs to workers who lost jobs, to their families, and to the businesses relying on their purchasing power. Employers targeted especially the highest-paid workers since replacing them by automation or overseas relocation boosted employers’ profits the most. Often unionized, those workers tried to resist and pushed back. In response, globalizing employers mobilized and funded a massive ideological program to undermine those workers’ resistance. It updated classical defenses of capitalism whenever its social costs, such as automation and relocation, became more burdensome.
A positively defined term, globalization, came to the fore. It replaced terms like imperialism and colonialism that had acquired increasingly pejorative connotations. Economists celebrated globalization for bringing everyone greater efficiency via free trade. The same economists denounced national regulations and controls for restraining global capitalist expansion and the prosperity it delivered. In the US, enthusiasts for capitalism extolled immense gains awaiting capitalists who expanded inside the US and then globally. Not only would profits soar, but societies as a whole—all classes, the claimed—would benefit. Globalization was the greatest of historical tides that lifted all boats.
Within the US employer class, the risk-takers went first. They moved enterprises, built them, or partnered with existing enterprises in China, India, Brazil, etc. The low wages there, accommodating governments, and access to their large and fast-growing markets proved uncommonly profitable. That forced their more risk-averse competitors back in the US to join the relocation. Their exodus shaped the US and most of the world’s other economies over the last half-century.
Yet right from the beginning, there were victims and critics. They tended to arise from among the highest-paid job-holders: unionized, white, male factory workers. They had risen to the top of the working class during the century before the 1970s. There they encountered a tendency of capitalism bitter for workers. The more successfully US laborers had struggled to raise their wages, the greater the incentive that resulted for employers to fire them and substitute machines or cheaper foreign workers.
Globalization as an efficiency-maximizing kind of capitalism became an ideological campaign slogan for US corporations relocating overseas. Celebrating globalization spread from corporate leaders to podcast hosts, journalists, academics, and politicians. The voices of those who objected and criticized globalization found few outlets. Globalization’s celebrants insisted that everyone everywhere would benefit.
The working class, bearing the brunt of globalization, slowly but increasingly turned against it. The richest 10 percent of Americans, invested in the stock market, did not. Corporate gains boosted by relocating production abroad (firing workers and thereby saving on wage costs) enabled higher dividends, capital gains from appreciating stock, and soaring executive pay packages. But that trickle-down got little further than the nation's richest 10 percent. American capitalism thus devolved over many years into two economies. Today, in the rich one, 10% of US citizens account for 50% of total consumer spending. In the poor one, the other 90% do the other half of consumer spending.
For those deprived of good jobs, appealing to their union leaders, both major parties’ establishments, and broad public opinion yielded little. Most unions had long since narrowed their focus and targets to more immediate gains workers could still get or to reducing further losses. Unions devoted relative few resources to educating members on, let alone mobilizing them around, international issues. Most Republicans had long sided with employer interests and thus readily endorsed globalization. For many Democrats, the long post-1950s decline of the labor union movement deprived them of their labor base and also of large numbers of their most skilled union-donated campaign workers. Democratic Party leaders’ resulting turn to corporate donors led them increasingly to mimic Republicans’ endorsements of globalization. The large but amorphous and disorganized US left made some criticisms of corporate globalization but managed only sporadic resistance.
Globalization proved an effective ideological cover as the US replaced the old European empires across the 20th century. The US presented its global position and resulting actions—economic but also political and military—as so many steps leading to “global freedom” as they “helped” liberate other nations caught in doubly backward conditions. Backward economically because they had not sufficiently developed the private capitalist enterprises needed for a “modern, developed economy.” They were not yet integrated into that maximally efficient world economy that globalization could and would achieve. They were backward politically because they had not sufficiently developed the necessary “liberal democratic institutions” credited for making the US the leading global model economy for our times. Establishing US-style “freedom” and “capitalism”—often merged into an identity—became the globally necessary road to social success and progress. Saying so won Nobel prizes.
Until that road no longer seemed necessary. A confluence of social changes finally turned many in the US against globalization while many in China turned in favor of it. China’s state-led and sustained high rates of economic growth after the 1970s plus the relocation to China of many US, European and Japanese private capitalist enterprises combined to make China the manufacturing powerhouse of today’s world economy. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics”—China’s official self-definition—is a hybrid of state-owned and operated enterprises alongside private foreign and domestic capitalist enterprises. Supervisory economic planning and management of that hybrid by the Chinese state and the Chinese Communist Party combined to make China’s economy the world’s fastest growing during the 21st century’s first generation. Ironically, the stable hegemony of the US dollar provided the context for China’s remarkable growth.
A key factor distinguished Chinese from other Global South circumstances. The West had denied post-1949 China the foreign aid and development “assistance” deployed elsewhere. Its resulting self-reliance sped China’s growth. Even the initial assistance China obtained from the USSR vanished when the two nations’ relationship deteriorated (roughly 1960 to 1989). Another key factor was China’s commitment to national economic planning before and after it allowed, invited, and facilitated a private capitalist sector of both domestic and foreign enterprises. Chinese economic growth displays a remarkable mastery of both economic nationalism and openness to the world economy, both state and private enterprises. All were integrated to serve maximum economic growth.
In contrast, the US and the collective West, 70 years after World War 2, transitioned from free trade toward economic nationalism under Presidents Biden and especially Trump. That transition flowed chiefly from (1) steadily rising working class opposition to the globalization after the 1970s in the US and Europe, and (2) growing Chinese challenges to the global dominance of the US in the world economy.
Angry white male unionized (and thus relatively well-paid) factory workers, displaced by automation and globalization, knew that it was their employers who made the decisions that displaced them. They also knew that profit considerations motivated those decisions. However, they also feared the backlash that would crash in on anyone who blamed employers, the employer class, or the capitalist system for anything negative. Seventy-five years of Cold War ideology had taught the US working class how ferociously the US employer class could mobilize the mass media, academia, and most major social institutions to demonize and repress anything that even hinted of anti-capitalism or socialism.
Therefore, US workers hurt by automation or job exports rarely chose to blame corporate owners and leaders. They rarely opposed free trade, globalization, multiculturalism, neoliberalism, nor the anti-communism/socialism usually woven into them. The employer class and its media, political and academic spokespersons, most Republicans and Democrats, all celebrated globalization as the cause and expression of a wonderfully successful capitalism. It brought material prosperity and political freedom. Blaming capitalists was therefore considered irrational, perverse, or both.
The economic theories of the academics simply reinforced the way the economy and politics blocked any revolt. Generations of leaders in business, politics, and mass media learned in their college courses that private enterprises in markets minimally regulated by any state apparatus achieve the “maximum possible utility.” In short, capitalism was the human race’s greatest and finest achievement. Criticizing it thus became, for many, literally unthinkable.
Trump explained to victimized US workers what caused their economic pains: foreign immigrants, China, and indeed foreign nations generally, including even Canada and Mexico. For decades, he said, all had economically cheated and abused the US. Traditional Republicans and Democrats had been complicit. He presented himself as the new and different kind of politician who alone would end that abuse and the pains it caused. He would “Make America Great Again," and the “rest of the world will have to pay for it.” His means: anti-immigrant walls supplemented by mass deportation, tariff walls, and trade wars that would reshore manufacturing (i.e. secure, high-paying) jobs, and reduce federal budget deficits. All that would revive US capitalism and its global dominance; the decline of the empire would be reversed.
More recently, Trump broadened his list of primary targets to blame for US social distress: protesters against ICE deportation actions and critics of his other policies (especially “efficiency” firings of federal employees and government “shutdowns”). He called them all “radical left lunatics.” In the case of New York City’s new socialist mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who won with more votes than all other candidates combined, Trump’s denunciations peaked in calling him a “communist.” The McCarthyite tragedy of the 1950s returns, but this time already well en route to becoming a farce.
Trump has likewise sharply increased the severity of punishment he decrees for those he decides are “evil-doers.” He has summarily executed an estimated 83 persons in fishing boats in the Caribbean and Pacific whom he has called “drug traffickers in narco-boats.” No trials, no evidence, no lawyers, no judge: Trump simply ordered the killings in international waters (executions without trial or evidence). Trump has likewise attacked or threatened to attack foreign governments (Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, Panama, Greenland, Mexico, and Canada).
Trump’s nationalist political theater includes repetitions of his belief that tariffs punish those foreign countries he blames. He seemed not to understand, as every undergraduate economics student learns, that tariffs imposed by the US government fall only on the US businesses or individuals who import goods and services. By saying or implying that foreigners pay his tariffs, Trump makes it appear that he thereby punishes them for causing US workers’ distress. Of course, Trump’s tariffs are a major new tax imposed by a Republican president on US businesses and individuals (those who import tariffed items). For opponents of taxation and Trump followers who blame foreigners for US problems and suffering, it is very politically convenient and comforting to imagine that Trump’s tariffs hurt them.
US tariffs can also hurt foreign economies in so far as US buyers order fewer foreign-made products. This can happen if US importers raise their prices for imported goods and services as a way to pass on (recoup) their tariff costs. To the rest of the world, Trump’s tariffs were aggressive economic warfare: risking losses for them to secure economic gains for the US. The world awaits how each foreign country will decide whether, how, and when to retaliate and how badly retaliations will impact the US economy.
One last point about tariffs can show how systematically Trump protects and serves the employer class in the US. In contrast, what he does for his MAGA base is mostly symbolic and theatrical. Tariffs are taxes that fall directly on US businesses and so might have been expected to anger and provoke them. Trump avoided that problem by means of his “big beautiful tax bill” passed by Congress before Trump presented his tariffs. That bill extended the huge tax cuts for businesses and the rich (originally scheduled to expire in 2025) that were Trump’s first act in his first term as president. That tax bill also provided further tax cuts for them. In other words, Trump cut all business taxes before his tariffs raised them on business imports. The net effect on business and the rich was to protect them even as they proceeded to pass on the cost of the tariffs by raising retail prices for the US employee majority.
Most Republican and Democratic leaders (Bushes, Clintons, Obama) kept on supporting globalization after the 1970s. Increasingly the same donors funded both parties, and those donors were globalization’s chief beneficiaries. The leaders marginalized the few voices that publicly blamed employers for choosing to automate or relocate abroad. Those few voices—people like Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Mamdani—provoked intense hostility from party leaders. Trump’s rare outbursts focused only and briefly on particular companies, not on the employer class per se as the key and therefore blameworthy decision-makers.
China’s economic growth after the 1980s was unprecedented in its speed. In addition, China built an economic alliance initially with Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa known as the BRICS; it kept adding various members into the new century. By 2020, the aggregate GDP of China and its BRICS allies had caught up to the aggregate of the US and its G7 allies. Since 2020, China and its BRICS allies have outgrown the US and its G7 allies each year. Before 2010, China was viewed by most in the West as just another poor, subordinate Global South nation slowly being “modernized” thanks to the West’s globalization/free trade program. Unlike them, however, China grew much faster. “Modernization theories and theorists” had often expected China’s economic development to be slower. It was, after all, cut off from much Western assistance, trade, and investment for ideological reasons. Its communist party, presiding over its “socialism with Chinese characteristics” was thought to hamper growth with regulations and planning.
For US and European leaders, as China’s development progressed into the 21st century, it was redefined from a subordinate nation into an evil and aggressive dictatorship. Most established political leaders in the West accused China of outcompeting the West economically by means that were illegal or unfair. That soon broadened to accusing China of threatening the West politically, ideologically, and even militarily. China’s endorsement of free trade (as the global context for its own spectacular economic development over the last 30-40 years) helped to provoke the West’s turning away from it toward economic nationalism instead.
Already during Obama’s presidency, 2009-2017, it became common to hear of the “need to pivot toward China” as the key adversary for the current century. China’s embrace of “free trade” and globalization was interpreted as part of its adversarial position. Of course, many larger US employers who had invested heavily in China after the 1970s also still supported free trade. Those investments assumed access to China’s expanding market plus the profitable export of their outputs back to the US market. Yet China’s rise steadily undercut the West’s support for free trade. Increasing numbers of US business leaders questioned free trade orthodoxy, became supporters of a US turn to economic nationalism, and supported Trump as its emerging champion.
To conclude, statistical projections mostly agree that China’s dominance in world industrial production will grow between now and 2030. Already, China’s industrial output exceeds that of the US, Germany, Japan, and South Korea, combined. There is little evidence to support the possibility that the US can or will reverse its decline relative to China. That decline will impede the reshoring of US manufacturing, balancing the federal budget, and offsetting the likely employment impacts of the AI revolution and other nations’ retaliations to US tariffs. The US working class might then shift leftward politically to solve the problems that Trump’s rightward turn failed to overcome.
A new New Deal (Green or otherwise) might then emerge much as the original did in the 1930s. Then the US working class responded to a sustained capitalist crisis by surging sharply to the left around the New Deal Coalition (the CIO unions, two Socialist parties, and the Communist Party). Today’s coalition would differ from its predecessor because its activists will have learned key lessons from the 1930s as well as from the subsequent period that undid so much of the New Deal. Chief among those lessons is that capitalism itself must be put into question.
That means the new New Deal will not leave corporations in private hands. After 1945, corporate capitalism’s major shareholders and top managers had retained their social positions as receivers of the system’s corporate profits. That position gave them every incentive to protect and boost their profits by, among other strategies, using them to undo the regulations, tax structures, and indeed the whole progressive spirit of the New Deal. That is what they succeeded in doing over the last 75 years. Those 75 years also taught us why we must put capitalism itself in question. Many of us have done that and reached conclusions guiding our contributions to social change now.
The organization of enterprises—factories, offices, and stores—can no longer entail a basic division between a class of employers and a class of employees. Their consequentially different class interests and conflicts provoke and produce capitalism’s difficulties and the obstacles to overcoming them. Reforms of capitalism were the experiment undertaken in and by the New Deal. Those reforms left unchallenged capitalism’s basic class structure. History—the undoing of the New Deal over the last 75 years—has shown those reforms to be insufficient.
Our next step is to democratize enterprises as a needed addition to the 1930s-type reforms of capitalism so that they do not again get undone. If profits flow to the workers in enterprises where employers and employees are the same people, equal components of a democratically organized community, they will not be used to undo reforms generated by those workers. Changing the class structure of enterprises will ramify throughout the society experiencing such change. Democratizing enterprises will make the largely formal democracy elsewhere in that society far more real than it has ever been.
A genuinely new New Deal should remember and build on all the old New Deal accomplished. Yet it must also not repeat its crucial mistake: not challenging capitalism itself. Evidence is accumulating that that crucial lesson is being learned.
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Eugene V. Debs, Defender of American Liberty
Released from jail on this day 130 years ago, the great socialist and labor leader delivered a speech we would do well to remember in these perilous times.
Nov 22, 2025
On November 22, 1895, Eugene V. Debs was released from Woodstock Jail, where he had been imprisoned for six months for his leadership of the 1894 Pullman strike. Later that day, before a large crowd of supporters at Battery D in Chicago, he spoke on the topic of “Liberty.”
Debs was a great orator, and “Liberty” is a brilliant speech, powerfully evoking both “the spirit of liberty” heralded by the Declaration of Independence, and the promise of a freedom yet to be redeemed by American workers in thrall to plutocratic government. As Nick Salvatore noted in his classic biography, Eugene V. Debs, Citizen and Socialist, this speech marked an important moment in the evolution of Debs from a radically republican labor activist to the country’s leading socialist.
Debs notes his own situation, “stripped of my constitutional rights as a freeman and shorn of the most sacred prerogatives of American citizenship.” He proceeds to defend the American Railway Union as a necessary and legitimate organization of workers, and the strike as a legitimate means of pursuing justice, which” threw down no gauntlet to courts or armies—it simply resisted the invasion of the rights of workingmen by corporations.”
An adamant defense of worker rights, the speech’s overriding theme is unmistakably the political theme of “liberty” and indeed democracy. This is clear from Debs’s opening words:
Manifestly the spirit of ’76 still survives. The fires of liberty and noble aspirations are not yet extinguished. I greet you tonight as lovers of liberty and as despisers of despotism. I comprehend the significance of this demonstration and appreciate the honor that makes it possible for me to be your guest on such an occasion. The vindication and glorification of American principles of government, as proclaimed to the world in the Declaration of Independence, is the high purpose of this convocation.
The entire first half of the speech centers on the theme of “personal liberty; or giving it its full height, depth, and breadth, American liberty, something that Americans have been accustomed to eulogize since the foundation of the Republic.” Paying tribute to the republic’s founding—"For the first time in the records of all the ages, the inalienable rights of man, ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’ were proclaimed July 4, 1776”—Debs proceeds to wax poetically, for eight long paragraphs, about the enduring resonance of that 1776 proclamation, the indivisibility of liberty, and the “more than satanic crime of stealing the jewel of liberty from the crown of manhood and reducing the victim of the burglary to slavery or to prison.” It is for this crime that he morally indicts the railroad magnates and their federal government allies for breaking the strike and imprisoning its leaders.
Debs insists that it is the labor movement that most embodies “the spirit of ’76”:
To the unified hosts of American working men fate has committed the charge of rescuing American liberties from the grasp of the vandal horde that have placed them in peril, by seizing the ballot and wielding it to regain the priceless heritage and to preserve and transmit it without scar or blemish to the generations yet to come.
The ballot, Debs notes approvingly, “has been called a weapon that executes a free man’s will as lighting does the will of God.” Debs rhapsodizes in almost religious tones about the power of democratic elections:
There is nothing in our government it cannot remove or amend. It can make and unmake presidents and congresses and courts. It can abolish unjust laws and consign to eternal odium and oblivion unjust judges, strip from them their robes and gowns and send them forth unclean as lepers to bear the burden of merited obloquy as Cain with the mark of a murderer. It can sweep away trusts, syndicates, corporations, monopolies, and every other abnormal development of the money power designed to abridge the liberties of workingmen and enslave them by the degradation incident to poverty and enforced idleness, as cyclones scatter the leaves of the forest. The ballot can do all this and more. It can give our civilization its crowning glory—the cooperative commonwealth.
Debs appreciated the rhetorical and the inspirational power of the dissenting American political tradition that hearkened back to the Revolution and its “spirit of ’76,” a tradition that included his heroes Jefferson, Paine, Garrison, Phillips, Lincoln, and Anthony. And he firmly believed that civil liberties and regular democratic elections represented forms of genuine if precarious social progress whose defense and expansion offered real opportunities for the furtherance of social and economic justice. He was, in short, a democrat.
He ended his speech with the hope that “American lovers of liberty are setting in operation forces to rescue their constitutional liberties from the grasp of monopoly and its mercenary hirelings.” That hope was not in vain, even if the Pullman strike was suppressed and Debs twice found himself in prison for refusing to be silenced, in 1895 and then in 1918 when imprisoned for his famous “Canton address,” critiquing WWI. The labor movement he helped to lead played a crucial role in advancing many of the policies—from the 8-hour workday to occupational safety and health regulation to “social security” broadly understood—that most Americans today simply take for granted. Debs was indeed one of the 20th century’s true crusaders for civil liberties and democratic inclusion. And his distinctive vision of a democratic socialism established an enduring legacy whose most recent heir is New York City’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, who indeed quoted Debs in his victory speech.
At a time when the Trump administration is attacking liberty on a daily basis, targeting everyone on the left as a “radical lunatic” and “enemy from within,” and seeking to destroy the very possibility of political dissent and opposition, Debs’s paean to “Liberty” on November 22, 1895—and his commitment to its active promotion—has never been more relevant.Keep ReadingShow Less
86 Democrats Join GOP in Voting for 'Very, Very Stupid' Resolution Condemning Socialism
"House Minority Leader Jeffries voting with the GOP in favor of this resolution is showing his ultrawealthy donors exactly who he fights for," said one progressive leader. "It’s not the people."
Nov 21, 2025
Dozens of US House Democrats who joined the Republican Party on Friday in backing a resolution that denounced “socialism in all its forms" and opposed "the implementation of socialist policies in the United States" did so despite the fact that the GOP has used the term "socialism" liberally to describe a variety of social welfare programs—making the true meaning of the resolution open to interpretation.
"Socialism" is the word President Donald Trump has used for proposals to ensure the federal government provides healthcare to everyone in the US, and he's among the Republicans who have warned extending Medicare to all Americans would "bankrupt our nation"—despite studies showing that the system would save more than $600 billion per year, and that wealthy countries that ensure all citizens have health coverage have far better health outcomes than the US.
Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) called the Green New Deal, which would create 3.4 million new green jobs per year, a "socialist scheme."
During the Great Depression, Social Security—now credited with lifting more Americans out of poverty than any other US government program—was denounced by opponents of President Franklin D. Roosevelt as "socialism," as was Medicare when it was introduced in 1965.
Republicans and their wealthy donors have warned that New York City's Democratic mayor-elect, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, will wreak havoc on the city with his plans for fare-free buses and a network of city-owned grocery stores, with the president calling him a "100% Communist lunatic." Fare-free public transit already exists in about 100 thriving cities around the world, including a growing number in the US, and more than a million Americans already benefit from publicly owned grocery stores where prices are 25-30% lower than at private stores—which also continue to run.
Friday's resolution, introduced by Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.), states its opposition to "socialist ideologues" including Joseph Stalin and Kim Jong Un as well as the "collectivistic system of socialism in all of its forms."
After the US House vote on Friday, former Democratic Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner said that considering how "the GOP calls every social safety net measure 'socialism,' votes like this matter in a policy context."
They also say a lot, said Turner, about the Democratic leaders—like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY), House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (Mass.), and House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (Calif.)—who voted for the resolution.
"House Minority Leader Jeffries voting with the GOP in favor of this resolution is showing his ultrawealthy donors exactly who he fights for," said Turner. "It’s not the people."
Jeffries waited until the final days of the New York City mayoral campaign to endorse Mamdani, despite the fact that the candidate had won Jeffries' district in the June primary and captured national attention for his relentless focus on making the city more affordable for New Yorkers.
Drop Site News was among those that noted the House voted as Mamdani was en route to Washington, DC to meet with Trump for the first time. The support for the resolution among top Democrats who have refused to embrace the popular young politician's meteoric rise was viewed by some as a statement regarding Mamdani's visit to the White House—during which Trump gave the mayor-elect a comparatively warm welcome.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) said those who supported the "pointless" resolution "feel threatened by democratic socialists like myself who are unbought and willing to take on the billionaire class."
Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) called the debate over socialism on the House floor "so very, very stupid."
"A bunch of people with taxpayer-funded salaries, doing a job that is impossible to outsource to the private sector, are condemning the evils of socialism," said Casten. "Either they are stupid, or that they think you are."
"We have a mixed economy," he added. "We benefit from free markets and competition in lots of sectors, and also have a judicial system, border security, national defense, economic security for seniors and those who can't work that is socially funded. That's a good thing! Condemning one half of that equation has no more logic—and is no more deserving of finite House floor time—than condemning defensive linemen because they never score touchdowns."
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