The favorite paper of American finance capital is sounding the alarm over workers, particularly young ones, growing disenchanted with their rotten system. On Monday, September 29, The Wall Street Journal’s front page featured a headline reading: “The Rise of America’s Young Socialists.”
The article reports on the growth of DSA and the success of Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign. That’s nothing new. The bourgeois press has routinely run stories about the growing appeal of socialism since Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign in 2016.
But now, the Journal wants to alert its elite readership to a new cause for concern: “Some are venturing even further left.” What followed was a brief description of a recent RCA cell meeting in Northwest Philadelphia. The Journal’s reporter, Joshua Chaffin, attended the meeting in an attempt to understand what’s causing so many young people to “ditch ‘the milquetoast’ left.”
His answer: the crisis of capitalism, particularly since 2008. In response, millions of young—and even some older—workers are searching for the ideas of genuine socialism and communism. The Journal’s coverage highlights that many are finding them in the RCA.
Naturally, the mouthpiece of the class enemy isn’t going to get everything right: “Communism, they acknowledged, hadn’t worked anywhere in the world it had been attempted.” This is a lie. As Andrew Wagner, an RCA comrade who attended the meeting in question, told The Communist:
We at no point said “communism hadn’t worked anywhere in the world.” In a conversation with a group of comrades after the meeting, Chaffin put forward the idea that communism hasn’t worked, to which we responded with the Marxist explanation for the failures of Stalinism. None of that explanation made it into the article.
The Wall Street Journal and its billionaire owners are right to be concerned. The Revolutionary Communists of America are building a Leninist cadre organization—a disciplined network of revolutionaries steeled in Marxist theory and trained in the best methods for communicating these ideas to a broader layer of the working class. This is why we’re serious about recruitment—and political education.
The US is overflowing with people who are not only open to revolutionary ideas, but eager to get organized and take action. Since young people are on the front lines of this political radicalization, the RCA is conducting a fall offensive recruitment campaign on over 50 campuses across the country.
It’s off to an excellent start: over 2,500 prospective new members have signed up across the country since the semester began. But our work is only getting started. Now comes the real task: to properly integrate these comrades into our ranks and begin their consolidation in the ideas of Marxism and the methods of Bolshevism.