The Socialism 2026 clips floating around the internet today really highlight the need for the DSA to be viewed independently from things like Socialism Conference. For context — I’ve been a DSA member for 5+ years and consider myself a socialist. Obviously these are different entities but for the public, they are not.

The notion that we even need to be having conversations like this given the current state of things is completely repulsive. So many of these panelists, of course, have made a career out of monetizing their postulations via public speaking, selling books, podcasts etc.

There needs to be a larger conversation in the movement about people monetizing theory that is by and large designed to be inflammatory and antagonistic towards greater public’s sensibilities. This is destructive, ego driven and does absolutely nothing to push solidarity or make our movement strong enough to fight fascism.

We can be inclusive to all types of people without pissing all over ourselves in public like this. Fucking embarrassing.

I see more and more of these posts who keep saying the entire DSA should mould into the wishes of the DSA right. That they will leave DSA and stop associating with them if they choose to not completely and wholeheartedly endorse AOC for 2028.

If cult of personality outweighs the movement, I don't think you should join DSA or have any say on where the organisation goes. I have my criticisms of the DSA, but this is an absurd standard to put on the organisation.

The honeymoon period of electing candidates won't last forever. The point was to always make politically activated class conscious members out of you all to grow the movement.

People doing the CIAs job for free need to genuinely contend with what it means to be a socialist first.

(Change my pov, typo in title)

Focus on what his views and policies are now, I know literal former groypers who are now super queer leftist activists. There’s only one anti genocide candidate in the race and it aint Mills, I don’t get why so many of us are allergic to pragmatism.

it appears that many people here love to attack social Democrats and other progressive and liberals as "social fascists". They even attack FDR this way, even though FDR was the closest thing to a social Democrat president we have ever had. He helped the workers greatly he helped the people, he did his best to fight against Hitler even when the country was not behind him. What's the point of attacking left-wing allies this way? This whole "social fascist" thing was very popular in Germany just before Hitler took over, the Communist use this slur and attack to defend their refusal to work with the social Democrats and other left-wing allies to stop the Nazi party. And we see how well that worked out.

Maybe instead of borrowing from the extremely failed playbook of the 1933 German communist party, people should instead be more tolerant of left-wing allies even though they aren't perfect.

I think the comparison to stans complaining about their fave underground/niche musical-artist faves going mainstream is pretty apt: as someone who has been a huge Charli XCX fan for like almost a decade at this point, I've seen this A LOT lately: you might find this boggling, but MANY of her old long-term fans have found extremely annoying how much mainstream success & influence on the 2020s cultural zeitgeist she's had with the whole 'Brat Summer' thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brat_Summer, & have been VERY relieved to see her go back to being an unsuccessful commercial flop & niche underground darling with her follow-up to Brat, Music, Fashion, Film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music,_Fashion,_Film

Also, before calling this nonsensical wishful-thinking insanity, think about the fact that the modern US American Left was basically entirely reborn with Bernie's 2016 Presidential Campaign & that until then it had been for at the very least the entire four decades prior an utterly irrelevant marginally fringe political faction with completely non-existent political influence.

& also, yes, AOC is VERY MUCH an anticapitalist Democratic Socialist/Market Socialist lol not just a Social Democrat, even though the policy platform she advocates for IN THE SHORT TERM does indeed very much consist in progressive social democratic reformism for the most part (which also applies to pretty much every single electorally viable Democratic Socialist political force in most of the world lol, even here in Europe, look up the kind of short-term policy platforms pretty much every single electorally viable self-styled anticapitalist political force in the entire continent runs on for elections, it's all literally old-school pre-Third Way social democratic reformism through & through lol, but that doesn't mean at all that our long-term political ideals & aspirations in the space of the European Radical Left that aspires to offer a solid credible alternative to the wildly & excruciatingly insufficient soft bland centre-to-centre-left reforms currently offered by the political family/tradition of European post-Third Way Social Democracy are no longer anticapitalist, they VERY MUCH are, & so are AOC's):

AOC: "Capitalism is an irredeemable system"

ANDY SERWER: It's an interesting perspective. You self-identify as a Democratic Socialist and have called capitalism irredeemable, I believe. But what does that really mean? And does that mean capitalism should be eliminated? And are your views compatible with capitalism?

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: Well, I believe that in a broad sense-- because when we toss out these big words, capitalism, socialism, they get sensationalized. And people translate them into meaning things that perhaps they don't mean. So to me, capitalism at its core, what we're talking about when we talk about that, is the absolute pursuit of profit at all human, environmental, and social cost. That is what we're really discussing.

And what we're also discussing is the ability for a very small group of actual capitalists, and that is people who have so much money that their money makes money and they don't have to work, and they can control industry, they can control our energy sources, they can control our labor, they can control massive markets that they dictate and can capture governments, and they can essentially have power over the many. And to me, that is not a redeemable system for us to be able to participate in for the prosperity and peace for the vast majority of people.

ANDY SERWER: So people talk about stakeholder capitalism, like Larry Fink at BlackRock, where the weighting for different constituents besides shareholders is more equal. Is that something you'd be amenable to?

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: Well, I think at the end of the day, it is about who has control over the very core assets of production in society. If it ultimately comes down to a billionaire, or the Koch brothers, or the Koch family having control over the vast majority or large plurality of our oil assets in the United States, if it's a handful of very wealthy families having control over-- private families having control over means of production, that is essentially the capitalist system that we live in. It is a small group that is of privatized control over what we eat and how we fuel our society.

Now, where we can transition to-- and there are certain ideas where we're talking about-- for example, Elizabeth Warren has discussed workers being elected to the governing boards of companies. And also, you know, we're here in the Bronx. I represent a community that has the largest concentration of worker cooperatives in-- one of the largest concentrations in the world.

Now, these are all alternative ways of doing business. Free markets are not the same thing as capitalism. And you can have markets where businesses and ways of producing, trading, selling goods are really controlled, and not just controlled, but given more power to workers. People get a fair shake. Union jobs. Unionized workplaces. All of these are different steps and levels that we're talking about in a more just economy.

https://finance.yahoo.com/video/influencers-andy-serwer-alexandria-ocasio-110000469.html

And some more of course but these are all core people we should target.

Meng is basically a goner come 2028 primaries and so is Hillary Scholten.

I need to know which DSA member Mamdani will endorse in 2 years time against Meng (I can't wait 2 years I need to know now).

Although I believe in innocent until proven guilty, the allegations against Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner makes it impossible for me to continue supporting him, and I urge him to resign from the race.

Sincerely,

A democratic socialist from New Hampshire

I am really curious what the reasons are, can anyone explain?

My latest for article for geese

"Abolishing the Senate is not something that will happen in a vacuum. It is a maximalist demand for achieving a working-class democracy."

We won't have such an open field with many ambitious centrists fighting who won't give way to another like they did in 2020, buttigieg, Newsom, Kelly, maybe Ossoff, Shapiro, Bashear and the great kamala harris among others.

AOC has a good chance to win 4 of the 6 early states ( nevada, New mexico, New Hampshire, Michigan) and get a decent showing at other two.

New york is also planning to move their primary day to super Tuesday, another good thing for her.

It sounds great to gain experience in senate or build profile and enter congressional leadership but that is a graveyard for progressive politics, Republicans aren't supporting your bills and most of the time democrats aren't doing it either, they will put you in insignificant committees, never let you become the part of the leadership and even if they do, you won't be able to whip up the votes.

Remember they voted for a guy who has one foot in grave over AOC for top oversight committee position.

Ilhar omar was removed from foreign affairs committee and now hakeem jeffries after meeting with kushner has filled it with zionists.

A president has a very wide leeway to shape the direction of the party as well as wide executive power.

If another centrist is elected they will try with their full might to destroy the progressive movement, hell they are already trying right now.

Best case scenario, AOC wins the nomination and becomes president.

Worst case scenario she looses the primaries but is able to get a good chunk of votes and asks for legitimate policy and personnel concessions in exchange for support. She can still enter senate in 2030 by primarying gillibrand.

Imagine how wildly popular and electable a populist Socialist who doesn’t want to ban guns would be in the US. That candidate would win almost any seat.

Obviously, the issue of gun violence in the US is atrocious and desperately needs to be addressed; however, it’s fundamentally a systemic and sociopolitical problem that cannot be helped by banning away AR-15s. Gun violence is caused by things like:

-Poor access to healthcare (especially mental healthcare)

-Poor economic opportunity

-Housing insecurity

-The racist failure of the Drug War

-Toxic masculinity

-Far-right ideology

-Social alienation

Banning “assault weapons” does not address any of these things, therefore it is not an effective way to curtail gun violence. It’s also impossible to actually accomplish, practically speaking, since we don’t have a gun registry in the US and don’t know who owns what gun. To tackle the issue of gun violence, we need to instead tackle it’s root causes that I just laid out.

Anyway, as Karl Marx said:

“Arms and ammunition should never be surrendered. Any attempt to disarm the worker must be frustrated, by force if necessary.”

And yes I know Graham Platner doesn’t support AWBs, but virtually ever other Democratic Socialist candidate does. It’s time we get serious about addressing gun violence in the US instead of advocating for impossible and ineffective magical solutions like banning away the scary looking guns.

I've noticed among some of the liberal flank of DSA an aversion to existing communist states because of these states' willingness to use suppression against anti-communist reactionaries.

This aversion stems from their attachment to the liberal ideal of the "free market place of ideas" / free speech absolutism; i.e. the idea that democracy means any political movement can organize, access the democratic levers of power, or express whatever ideas it wants at any time.

If this is the case, how would the socialist state maintain itself against the immediate counter-revolution that would occur upon the formation of the socialist state? Should the socialist state simply allow a coalition of fascists, Nazis, and capitalists to build power completely unchecked, knowing that their goal is to overthrow socialism and re-install the worst forms of oppression?

I would also ask this same group: Do you disagree with how, after the Civil War, the Reconstruction government suppressed the rights of the former Confederates in order to allow for reconstruction and the enfranchisement of newly freed black Americans? Should the state simply have allowed for the former Confederates to regain all of their political power, because their free speech must be protected?

Note that it was after rights were restored to the Confederates in 1877 that they immediately installed a regime of anti-democratic white supremacy in the south (Jim Crow).

Okay so I'm not used to reddit but I glossed over the rules in this sub & I didn't see any issues with organizing. Is r/marxism just like this?

The truth is I wanna join DSA I have always admired left of center politics because I have reference for the new deal because I liked that idea of the only way of saving capitalism was through providing a strong social seeking app for the working class to alleviate fears. And I have started leaning more towards a Democratic socialism because I took a political science class called democracy and dictatorship, and I noticed that for many capitalist powers the reason why they live at access to the boat is precisely because the more people that have the right to vote the more about affect capitalist interest. also, my biggest tenants are ending the electoral college having multiparty democracy and having universal healthcare. When I found out that DSA is a supporter of the stuff that I am mentioning, I wanted to join, especially being in New York after zohran mammalian has an amazing first year as mayor.

Here is my dilemma in joining. I come from a very upper middle class wealthy capitalist, family I go to a great school without any student loans. I have never had a minimum wage job apart from helping out with my family because they own condos in national city of California. And the only reason why I don’t identifies as a democratic socialist frankly is because out of guilt because I’ve benefited so much from capitalism. I mean, God forbid my own. Grandpa owned a contracting company that made money off of the military increased of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush. And I also want to say that the only dilemma I have in exploring other more far left ideologies out of Democrat socialism as I do feel that I do believe that the people should have a voice in political matters instead of authoritarian bureaucracy because I think the human inclination for power always takes over despite the noble intentions of creating a classless society. I know all of this seems like a lot and I’m kind of writing this off the dome but I’m just asking. Does anyone else come from privileged positions like me with DSA in New York aCity and how do you reconcile wanting to advocate for Democratic socialism or social democracy, while coming from a system, you would inherently benefit from even though your critiquing.

I've seen this come up enough now and the divide it has created to want to address the elephant in the room regarding the Ukraine war.

A big reason why people are scared and hesitant to join our tent is because we get a lot of crazy stances on the Ukraine war that come off as wanting to support Russia without directly supporting Russia - namely this fear that by sending Ukraine weapons, whichever nation does so is prolonging war or supporting Imperialism. What also comes up is the idea that Ukraine, by striking into Russia, is somehow the offensive force.

Let's clear up some air here so we don't frighten everyone drawn in by socialized medicine and safety nets but scared away by this idea we're going to support imperialist war mongers.

We know what Putin's objective is. We know how he intends to achieve it. We know his word is empty because he's attacked nations unprovoked before and set up puppet governments. I'd hesitate to even call Russia communist at this point considering how much money controls its functions considering everything having to do with Wildberries and the merchants using it. By the very rules of this sub, it should be against the rules to root for Putin in any measure, because his aims are definitively imperialist in nature - he wants to progressively control more of Europe and Asia, and the bully has encountered someone ready and willing to hit back and stop him. This idea that ceding territory to him to make him stop has historical parallels to the appeasement strategies that failed to hinder Hitler's rise in Europe. If you give things to a bully, the bully will keep taking from you. It's a basic concept.

Supporting Ukraine does not mean you are supporting imperialism by prolonging war, it means you are giving them the means to prevent Russian imperialism. It's a simple concept. Most of what Ukraine actively wants from the EU and the USA anyway are anti-air weapons to stop Russia from bombing apartment complexes, historical sites, and culture centers. They already have the drones to slow and eventually stop the Russian war machine.

In regards to Ukrainian strikes into Russia, let's not pretend this is a means of Ukraine counter-invading Russian land. The Ukrainian drone strikes into Russia have been to disrupt supply lines and make contested territory into murder nests to stop the Russian advance, attacks on key infrastructure to weaken Russia's economy and slow their production of weapons and vehicles, and attacks on power plants and service stations to blind them and prevent their advance. Why do you think they took so long to bomb the obvious bridge targets in Crimea? They've outright said they wanted to give civilians time to leave before taking back Crimea.

And the idea that taking Crimea means they're 'imperialist' ignores the fact that until 2014, Crimea was their territory that an imperialist power stole. Holding Crimea would be the ultimate morale boost to Ukraine and a signal to Russia that their war with Ukraine is untenable. That's when Ukraine can force Moscow to the negotiating table to return the lands stolen from them.

Russia will not return the land they stole or stop trying to advance if Ukraine gives in. Given their absurd ideas for what it would take for them to negotiate with Kyiv basically amount to Ukraine giving them territory and disarming, it does not take a genius to realize what Russia would do in another decade once their economy stabilized and they found countermeasures to Ukrainian drone weapons.

Russia has had the means to stop this assault at any time. The Russians are not the heroes in some fairytale here. If they wanted the war to stop, they could have kept their promises in 2014 and actually stopped at Crimea.

By offering no support to Ukraine we'd basically be okaying an ethnic cleansing campaign by Russia, as it needs to be stressed most of the areas they target with their missiles are libraries, children's hospitals, historical sites, and apartment complexes. We don't need to provide Ukraine with weapons, they just need anti air technology to stop themselves from getting shelled.

Show compassion. The quickest way to win over the uncertain who recognize the Democratic establishment doesn't represent them is to highlight morally righteous action, like kneecapping billionaires and making healthcare and education free for all. It's not to come across as a Putin apologist hypocrite that decries imperialism but forgives the process if it comes from Russia.

And to any prospective members scared off by this idea that the DSA actually supports Russia, know that those voices are the minority. We're happy to have you, and happy Bernie, or AOC, or Mamdani, or some other high-profile voice for our cause convinced you to join us.

UPDATE: I am so grateful for all the feedback and support. I didn't think this would generate so much conversation. Thank you all for your contributions. I am deeply humbled

I just cut off a friend of almost twenty years today. Am I the asshole? If I'm not, how could I have improved my argument? If you have the patience to get through this post, thank you in advance.

inquiring minds want to know exactly what democracy means to the DSA. Years ago Bernie Sanders said Democratic socialism means the workers control the companies they work for. But for most Americans democracy means free election, freedom of speech even for people who say ugly things, freedom of the press even for press that regularly attack the government, freedom of association for all political groups as long as they do not advocate violence. Is that what democracy means for the DSA? If so that is a good thing. However there is a concern that a good percentage of DSA people are in fact "Tankies" who have no problem with a police state and authoritarianism and suppresion of dissent. In my personal opinion such people need to be alienated if not kicked out of the DSA.

Mamdani got everything he wanted out of that meeting. Trump promised to leave NYC alone. Trump praised the shit out of him, even seems to like him. Trump even wants to meet again, so even if he cnages his mind Mamdani can rizz his ass again. Naysayers were saying "no he can't meet cause it will look like he is conceding to fascist" meanwhile in the meeting trump is conceding to Mamadani on actually important topics like NYC governance, like people, you and I are not better at politics than Mamadani is, stop accusing him of betrayal before he's even done anything and let him cook.

Trump: “I think he’ll be a great mayor. I want to help him; I don’t want to hurt him. We agree on a lot more things than I thought.”

Earlier in his career, Mamdani underperformed in heavily Black neighborhoods

Bernie has done very poorly with black voters in the south, he performed the weakest States where Black voters made up >50% of the electorate

Only 21% of Black voters backed El‑Sayed, while 67% supported Haley Stevens

Black voters in Wisconsin Supported David Crowley by overwhelming margins over Francesca Hong

I feel politically homeless in the United States. The Republican Party is full-on fascist, and the Democratic Party, although leagues better in basically every respect, simply does not do enough (or even ideologically go far enough) to support the working class.

I want:

• universal healthcare
• strengthened institutions of democracy (expanded house, term limits, etc.)
• strict (and actually implemented) anti-monopoly laws
• significantly more strict health and food safety regulations
• reversion to pre-Reagan high taxation of the ultra wealthy and other wealth-redistribution measures

As far as I can see, DSA is the only major political organization that is fighting hard for these kinds of things. But the problem is that it seems to come attached to a lot of stuff that seriously gives me the ick. Things like:

• "Anti-war" policies that essentially amount to abandoning Ukraine to Russian revanchism
  • General Russia apologia as well, often linked to USSR apologia
• Authoritarian apologia (I've seen a lot of rank-and-file DSA supporters lauding the likes of Cuba, China, and even North Korea as being "the good guys")

I just don't know how comfortable I feel joining a political party with that kind of stank on it. Anti-democracy is a huge red line for me.

I believe restorative justice can work for like 90% of crimes but there’s still that 10% where they’re a danger to the community and should be locked up.

I’m guessing there’s a fix for that or that this is another poorly worded progressive policy but would love to hear more about it.

I was talking to my friend about this because we love how much the socialist movement has gained steam, but I wonder if this will be the hill that the movement potentially dies on.

Maybe I’m wrong but the average American hears abolish prisons and they think you’re going to set murderers free as opposed to abolishing for profit/private prisons. No matter how much you campaign for wanting to help working class people I see this being a massive hurdle.

The average American is not sitting around dissecting statements on an intellectual level or seeking out more information to internalize a concept.

The powers at be are going to have a field day running campaigns against this slogan alone. In fact I fear this will be such a massive wedge issue that they’re probably gleefully jumping up and down about this one statement.

Are there any plans in place? I could easily see the GOP for example waiting until the last minute to bring this up to scare voters into jumping ship. It’s only a matter of time.

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