Capitalism is rotting from within. Billionaires rake in record profits while working-class living standards have declined for decades. Workers and young people are angrier than ever, and are desperately looking for a political alternative.
60% of Americans now describe themselves as working class, up from 35% in 2003. This growing class identification is a sign of the times. It’s also a reflection of reality. The vast majority of the US is working class, and a tiny minority of billionaires live like parasites off our labor.
One of the most dramatic expressions of this developing class consciousness is the rise of the DSA.
Although they have a history stretching back to the mid-20th century, DSA burst into public consciousness following the rise of Bernie Sanders in 2015. Sanders made “democratic socialism” a household word, and in the wake of his 2016 capitulation to Hillary Clinton, thousands turned to DSA as a vehicle to get involved in the fight against Trump.
At the time, DSA had only 5,000 members. In 2017, the organization reached 30,000, and by the end of Trump’s first term, they’d mushroomed to around 90,000. After the electoral victories of Zohran and other DSA-endorsed candidates, they now report 120,000 members.
Why is DSA in the spotlight?
DSA-backed candidates are winning elections by speaking to issues facing ordinary workers. Zohran ran on addressing the urgent cost-of-living crisis. He also stood out as one of the few openly pro-Palestine politicians in America.
The DSA candidates’ campaign promises—such as universal healthcare, free childcare, and affordable housing for all—are extremely popular and entirely reasonable.
For example, 63% of Americans favor Medicare for All, a key DSA demand. A recent study from the Yale School of Public Health found that Medicare for All would reduce annual spending on healthcare by over $1 trillion, while saving 114,000 lives a year. Just imagine the amount of waste and profiteering that could be eliminated by something as simple as abolishing private health insurers, expropriating the medical industry, and integrating everything into a single national health provider.
Likewise, there are 28 vacant homes for every homeless person—more than enough to provide affordable, quality housing for all. Moreover, there is enough wealth in the banks, hedge funds, and in the coffers of the Fortune 500 to pay for universal childcare, free and quality education for all, and far more.
But the ruling class won’t give up its profits without a fight. The capitalists have vast means at their disposal to secure and defend their class interests: from the media to the state bureaucracy, the courts, and the police. They will use all of these tools, and more, to fight against any attempt at reform.
Why? Because workers and capitalists have opposed and irreconcilable interests. Any win for the working class comes at the expense of the capitalists, and vice-versa. The class enemy fears that conceding even minor reforms would set a dangerous precedent. If workers manage to squeeze a concession out of the ruling class, they might just get a taste of their own power and be emboldened to demand more.
This is why even modest reforms will require class battles on a scale not yet seen in 21st-century America. In this struggle, the working class can rely only on our own strength. We will not win if we play by the conventional rules of bourgeois politics—we need militant class-struggle methods, including strikes, mass demonstrations, workplace occupations, and mass tenant unions.
Break from Bourgeois Politics
Collective mass action can force the ruling class to grant reforms, but even more importantly, it increases the working class’s confidence in itself. When workers hit the capitalists where it hurts—their profits—they learn that their role in production gives them the power to bring society to a halt, and the potential to reorganize and plan the economy in their own interests.
In this way, the fight for reforms prepares workers to achieve the ultimate aim of the class struggle: a socialist revolution in which the working class takes power, expropriates and nationalizes all the key levers of the economy, and forms a workers’ government to run society in the interests of the majority.
But DSA’s central strategy—running in elections as Democrats—impedes the development of class consciousness, rather than impelling it forward. Instead of increasing workers’ confidence in their own strength and unity, it blurs the class line and sows confusion about who workers can trust. By remaining within the narrow confines of bourgeois politics, the healthy class anger that is finding an expression in the DSA won’t achieve its full potential.
Workers need our own, class-independent party not beholden to the billionaires or their institutions. In such a party, electoral representatives would use their platforms to expose the limits of the capitalist system, mobilize the working class, and prepare them for revolutionary struggles.
There has never been a better time to launch such a party. 62% of Americans think a third major party is needed. Young workers are wide open to socialism. 53% of young people have a favorable view of socialism, and 38% say the same for communism.
This is part of the same process of radicalization that led a record-breaking 100,000 volunteers to knock doors for Zohran’s campaign. He and the DSA have become a point of reference for millions across the country.
If the DSA as an organization or one of its candidates gave the lead, the entire American political system could be turned upside down. A working-class, socialist alternative to the Democrats and Republicans won’t be an irrelevant third party. It will be the first party which the American workers could call their own.