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It never seems to end, does it? There's always another boat in the Caribbean (not to mention the Pacific Ocean) to send to the bottom of the sea, and it increasingly seems that Donald Trump is also bringing war home in a big-time fashion. As the first billionaire president in American history, hes clearly doing it for the truly rich, including the record number of billionaires (at least 902 of them) now in America. As Bernie Sanders said recently at the enormous Washington, D.C. No Kings rally, This moment is not just about one mans greed, one mans corruption, or one mans contempt for the Constitution. This is about a handful of the wealthiest people on earth, who, in their insatiable greed, have hijacked our economy and our political system in order to enrich themselves at the expense of working families throughout this country.
And he added, We rejected the divine right of kings in the 1770s. We will not accept the divine right of oligarchs today. Only recently, millions of Americans (I was one of them!) marched in No Kings rallies across the country to make that very point, carrying signs like We dont bow to billionaires!
One thing is missing, though, in the growing opposition to an increasingly unpopular president and that's a genuine political movement against the barbarism of this moment. Yes, Zohran Mamdani is likely to be elected mayor of my own city in November, but generally Bernie aside the politics of opposition in the Democratic Party seems all too weak and mild. And with that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Eric Ross look back at American history and the role socialism once played in its politics. Consider it a way of remembering that there are indeed other worlds than the one we now find ourselves in. Tom
Socialism or Barbarism
Reviving the History of the American Left
By Eric Ross
More than a century ago, from a Berlin prison cell where she was confined for her uncompromising opposition to the slaughter of the First World War, Rosa Luxemburg warned, Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism. Her diagnosis remains no less salient today.
In the United States, we long ago chose the path of barbarism. Trump and his enablers have proven major catalysts in hastening our descent, but they are symptoms as well as causes. The compounding crises of our time, from ecological collapse to immense inequality to endless war, were hardly unforeseeable aberrations. They are the logical outgrowths of a capitalist system built on violent exploitation and rooted in the relentless pursuit of profits over people.
The unsustainable economic order that has defined our national life has corroded our democracy, eroded our shared sense of humanity, and propelled our institutions and our planet toward collapse. Today, we find ourselves perilously far down the highway leading to collective suicide. What the final autopsy will include be it nuclear annihilation, climate catastrophe, AI-driven apocalypse, or all of the above no one can yet be certain.
Yet fatalism is not a viable option. A different direction for the country and world remains possible, and Americans still can meet this moment and avert catastrophe. If we are to do so, Luxemburg's prescription, socialism, remains our last, best hope.
That conviction animates the democratic socialist campaign of Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York City. In a bleak political climate, he offers a rare spark of genuine hope. Yet his mass appeal has provoked a remarkable, if predictable, elite backlash. Hes faced Islamophobic smears, oligarch money, and backroom deals (efforts that, Mamdani observed, cost far more than the taxes he plans to impose to improve life in New York). Trump has unsurprisingly joined these efforts wholeheartedly, while the Democratic establishment has chosen the path of cowardice and silence, or at least equivocation.
The outrage over Mamdani is not only about the label socialist. Every American has heard the refrain: socialism looks good on paper but doesn't work in practice. The subtext, of course, is that capitalism does. And in a sense, it has. It has worked exactly as designed by concentrating obscene levels of wealth in the hands of a ruling class that deploys its fortune to further entrench its power. Especially since the Supreme Courts 2010 Citizens United decision, private capital has wielded untold influence over elections, drowning out ordinary voices in a flood of corporate money.
What makes Mamdani's campaign so unsettling to those (all too literally) invested in this status quo is not merely his critique of capitalism but his insistence on genuine democracy. His platform rests on the simple assertion that, in the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country in the world (as should be true everywhere across this nation), every person deserves basic dignity. And what undoubtedly unnerves the political establishment isn't so much his radical agenda but the notion that politics should serve the many, not the privileged few, and that the promise of democracy could be transformed from mere rhetoric to reality.
Whether Mamdani wins or loses in November (and count on him winning), he has sparked the reawakening of a long-dormant American tradition of leftist politics. Reviving socialism in this country also requires reviving its history, recovering it from the hysteria of the Red Scare and the Cold War mentality of better dead than red. Socialism has long been a part of our national experience and democratic experiment. And if democracy is to survive in the twenty-first century, democratic socialism must be part of its future.
The Roots of American Socialism
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