With an eye on Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral vote on Tuesday, Eric Ross says reviving U.S. socialism also requires recovering its history from the Red Scare and Cold War.
Zohran Mamdani at the Resist Fascism Rally in Bryant Park, Oct. 27, 2024. (Bingjiefu He/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 4.0)
By Eric Ross
TomDispatch.com
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.
He’s 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 Court’s 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 on Tuesday, Nov. 4 (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
Graffiti portrait on Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße in Frankfurt, 2015. ( X-angel/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0)
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a wave of immigration brought millions of workers to the United States, many carrying the radical ideas then germinating in Europe. Yet such beliefs were hardly alien to this country. The growth of labor unions and the rise of leftist politics were not foreign imports but emerged as a byproduct of the dire material circumstances of life under industrial capitalism in America.
By 1900, the U.S. had become the world’s leading industrial power, surpassing its European rivals in manufacturing and, by 1913, producing nearly one-third of global industrial output, more than Britain, France, and Germany combined. That share would climb to nearly half of the global gross domestic product by the end of World War II. However, the immense accumulation of wealth was not shared with those whose labor made it possible. American workers endured intense poverty and precarity, while being subjected to grueling hours for meager pay. They saw few meaningful protections, and suffered the highest rate of industrial accidents in the world.
Bodies of workers who jumped from windows to escape the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City, March 25, 1911. (Brown Brothers /Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
When workers rose in collective opposition to those conditions, they faced not only the monopolistic corporations of the Gilded Age, but an entire political economy structured to preserve that system of inequality.
Anti-competitive practices concentrated wealth to an extraordinary degree. The richest 10 percent of Americans then owned some 90 percent of national assets, with such wealth used to buy power through the cooptation of a state apparatus whose monopoly on violence was wielded against labor and in defense of capital.
Portrait of Mary Elizabeth Lease, 1890. (Deane – Kansas Memory/Wikimedia Commons/ Public Domain)
As Populist leader Mary Elizabeth Lease described the situation in 1900, “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.”
That was evident as early as 1877, when railroad workers launched a nationwide strike and federal troops spent weeks brutally suppressing it, killing more than 100 workers.
Such violence ignited a surge of labor organizing, thanks particularly to the radically egalitarian Knights of Labor. Yet the Haymarket Affair of 1886 — when a bomb set off at a May Day rally in Chicago provided a pretext for a bloody government crackdown — enabled the state to deepen its repression and stigmatize the labor movement by associating it with anarchism and extremism.
Still, the socialist left was able to reconstitute itself in the decades that followed under the leadership of Eugene V. Debs. He was drawn to socialism not through abstract theory but lived experience in the American Railway Union. There, as he recalled,
“in the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle the class struggle was revealed. This was my first practical lesson in socialism, though wholly unaware that it was called by that name.”
In 1901, Debs helped found the Socialist Party of America. Over the next two decades, socialist candidates became mayors and congressional representatives, winning elections to local offices across the country. At its peak in 1912, Debs captured nearly a million votes, some six percent of the national total, while running as a third-party candidate for president (and again from prison in 1920). For a time, socialism became a visible, established part of American democracy.
‘This War Is Not Our War’
Yet socialism faced its most formidable test during the First World War. Across Europe and the United States, many socialists opposed the conflict, arguing that it was a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” a framing that resonated with broad segments of the American public.
The socialist critique went deeper than class resentment. For decades, socialists were drawing a direct connection between capitalism’s parasitic exploitation of labor at home and its predatory expansion abroad.
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Writing during the late 19th-century era of high imperialism, as European powers carved up the globe in the name of national glory while showing brutal disregard for the lives of those they subjugated, progressive and socialist thinkers contended that imperialism was anything but a betrayal of capitalism’s logic.
Russian communist and revolutionary Vladimir Lenin called that moment “the monopoly stage of capitalism.” (Capitalists labeled it the cause of “civilization.”) While British economist John Hobson similarly maintained that empire served not the interests of the nation but of its elites who used the power of the state to secure the raw materials and new markets they needed for further economic expansion. “The governing purpose of modern imperialism,” he explained, “is not the diffusion of civilization, but the subjugation of peoples for the material gain of dominant interests.” That was “the economic taproot of imperialism.”
Similarly in the United States, W.E.B. Du Bois, a leading civil rights advocate, situated the war in the longer history of racial and colonial domination. He traced its origins to the “sinister traffic” in human beings that had left whole continents in a “state of helplessness which invites aggression and exploitation,” making the “rape of Africa” imaginable and therefore possible. War, he argued, was the continuation of empire by other means. “What do nations care about the cost of war,” he wrote, “if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?”
W.E.B. Du Bois, circa 1911. (Addison N. Scurlock, Wikimedia Commons)
Others, like disability activist and socialist Helen Keller, a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, echoed such critiques. In 1916, she wrote: “Every modern war has had its root in exploitation. The Civil War was fought to decide whether the slaveholders of the South or the capitalists of the North should exploit the West. The Spanish-American War decided that the United States should exploit Cuba and the Philippines.” Of the First World War, she concluded, “the workers are not interested in the spoils; they will not get any of them anyway.”
Once Washington entered the war, it criminalized dissent through the Espionage and Sedition Acts, the same “emergency measure” that would be used, during future wars, to charge whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and Daniel Hale. Socialists were among its first targets.
After a 1918 speech condemning the war, Debs himself would be imprisoned. “Let the wealth of a nation belong to all the people, and not just the millionaires,” he declared. “The ruling class has always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and have yourself slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world, you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war.” The call for a world “in which we produce for all and not for the profit of the few” remains as relevant as ever.
Eugene V. Debs leaving federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Jan. 1, 1921. (Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
Socialism After the Scare
The Red Scare of 1919, followed by McCarthyism in the 1950s and the broader Cold War climate of hysteria and repression, effectively criminalized socialism, transforming it into a political taboo in the United States and driving it from mainstream American discourse. Yet, despite the ferocity of the anticommunist crusade, a number of prominent voices continued to defend socialism.
In 1949, reflecting on a war that had claimed more than 60 million lives and brought us Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Albert Einstein argued that “the real source of evil” was capitalism itself. Humanity, he insisted, “is not condemned, because of its biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate.” The alternative, he wrote, lay in “the establishment of a socialist economy,” with an education system meant to cultivate “a sense of responsibility for one’s fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success.”
Martin Luther King Jr. carried that struggle against capitalism, racism, and war forward. Building on the legacy of the Double-V campaign, he called for confronting the evils of White supremacy at home and imperialism abroad. In grappling with those intertwined injustices, he increasingly adopted a socialist analysis, even if he didn’t publicly claim the label. For King, there could be no half freedom or partial liberation: political rights were hollow without economic justice and racial equality was impossible without class equality.
As he put it, you can “call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children.” Rejecting the pernicious myth of capitalist self-reliance with biting clarity, he pointed out that “it’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”
Martin Luther King giving a speech in 1964. (U.S. Library of Congress, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons)
In his 1967 Riverside Church speech denouncing the American war in Vietnam, King made the connection clear. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift,” he warned, “is approaching spiritual death.” America, he added, needed a revolution of values, a shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” one. As long as “machines and computers, profit motives and property rights [are] considered more important than people,” he concluded, “the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
A Better Country and World is Possible
The effort to discredit Zohran Mamdani and other Democratic Socialists like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, who challenge entrenched power, is, of course, anything but new. It reflects an ongoing struggle over the meaning of democracy. To build a society that actually serves its people, it is necessary to recover a long-marginalized tradition that understands democracy not simply as the holding of elections but as a genuine way of life focused on fighting for the many rather than the privileged few. Mamdani and crew can’t be exceptions to the rule, if such a vision is ever to take root in this country.
In Donald Trump’s grim vision for and version of America, democratic institutions are decaying at a rapid pace, the military is being used to occupy cities with Democratic mayors, and tyranny is replacing the rule of law. Fascism has never triumphed without the assent of elites who fear the rise of the left more than dictatorship. Mussolini and Hitler did not take power in a vacuum; they were elevated by an elite democratic establishment that preferred an authoritarian order to the uncertainties of popular democracy.
Meeting today’s crises requires more than piecemeal reform. It demands a reimagining of political life. The centuries of imperialism that are returning home in the form of fascism can’t be dismantled without confronting the capitalism that has sustained it, and capitalism itself can’t be transformed without democratizing the economy it commands.
This country once again stands at a crossroads. Capitalism has brought us to the edge of ecological, economic, and moral catastrophe. Today, the top 1 percent control more wealth than the bottom 93 percent of Americans combined, a trajectory that is simply unsustainable.
The choice remains what it was a century ago: some version of socialism as the foundation for a renewed democracy or continued barbarism as the price of refusing it. The question is no longer whether socialism can work in America, but whether American democracy can survive without it.
Eric Ross is an organizer, educator, and PhD candidate in the history department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
This article is from TomDispatch.com
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Oh hell! Big money loves socialism. Y’all know it Privatize the profits and socialize the risks.
Sadly the word “socialism” also needs to be reclaimed from Keynesian liberals who like useful idiots have actually allowed themselves to take on and legitimize the hyperbolic nonsense of socialism being “when the government does stuff” originally pioneered by the McCarthyite right. This is the kind of dialectic that would have made Marx roll in his grave.
Win/ Win Capitalism
respect
listening
negotiate
‘The effort to discredit Zohran Mamdani and other Democratic Socialists like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib. , who challenge entrenched power..’.
This is BS.
Taking BS as an example, he is a reformist and as such does not represent a threat to the status quo, something which is confirmed by history and mainstream comment. ‘It should be clear to anyone who is not trying to frighten voters that Sanders is a social democrat..’ (Marketwatch, 11 February 2020). Similarly, we read: ‘In capitalist mecca Las Vegas, social democrat Sanders cements Democratic front-runner status’ (CBC, 23 February 2020). Both outlets identify him correctly as a social democrat rather than ‘ democratic socialist’ (a tautological misnomer). Sanders has voted with the Democrats 98 percent of the time. Let us put his qualified support for $15/hour into context:
1865: ‘Instead of the conservative motto, A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work, we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, Abolition of the wage system’ (Marx, Value, Price, and Profit).
1928: ‘Earning a wage is a prison occupation’ (Wages, DH Lawrence).
1965: Workers still ‘don’t realise that they can abolish the wages system’ (Socialist Standard).
2019: $15/hour by 2024? (Sanders’ Raise the Wage Act).
2025: The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour.
The American Marxist Daniel De Leon would have identifed Sanders et al. as reformist lap dogs! ‘As a poodle may have his hair cut long or his hair cut short, as he may be trimmed with pink ribbons or with blue ribbons, yet he remains the same old poodle, so capitalism may be trimmed with factory laws, tenement laws, divorce laws and gambling laws, but it remains the same old capitalism. These “humaniitarian parts” are only trimming the poodle. Socialism, one and inseparable with its “antirent and anticapital parts,” means to get rid of the poodle’ (The Daily People, 2 November 1908).
Rosa Luxemburg knew that ‘without the conscious will and action of the majority of the proletariat, there can be no socialism’ as did Debs:
‘I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists use your heads and your hands’ (pre-1908).
“reviving U.S. socialism also requires recovering its history from the Red Scare and Cold War”.
Sorry to be negative, but it’s hard to imagine a better way of turning off young people – the same young people who will have to carry the burdens of change. Some of us are getting old. I’ve tried talking about the history back to the 60’s – lived history for me, ancient history for 20 year olds. Their eyes glaze over fast; talking about socialist esoterica does the same thing, with reason.
They have their own problems; we have to let them define the movement, or lose it. Once they’re interested in socialist ideas, some will be interested in where those ideas came from, and why. Some won’t. That’s the time to be ready with answers. Not when trying to recruit people. They want to know what to do – which, almost by definition, is NOT what was done before. The authorities learn history, too.
This otherwise excellent post could have included mention of Graham Platner, running to be the nominee to face Susan Collins next year in Maine. Also Karishma Manzur is running against empty suit Chris Papppas for his NH congressional seat. The GOP candidate is likely to be John Sunnunu Jr, who will almost surely have little difficulty defeating the weak and colorless AIPAC tool Pappas. Manzur would give voters a genuine choice in NH. In both cases, the Democratic establishment is working hard to weaken (Platner) or ignore (Manzur) them, since both have staked out truly progressive positions. Neither Sanders nor Ocasio-Cortez deserve mention any more as real democratic socialists. Both sold out to the DNC in exchange for keeping their seats.
Russiagate, created and fueled by the Dems, might have been even more effective than Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare. At minimum, it significantly increased the demonization of Russia.
Mandami has already backed up on his platform to make corporations public. Will he be another AOC who wears a gown to tax the rich but does nothing to make it happen? I hope not, but…
New Yorkers today seem to have forgotten that Socialism isn’t new to them either. Given their history, New Yorkers souldn’t be scare mongering over a Socialist who is advocating for worker and minority rights to be elected to represent them as mayor.
Vito Marcantonio was a Socialist who advocated for the working class, poor, immigrants, labor unions, and African-American civil rights. He served seven terms as a United States Congressman representing Harlem from 1937 to 1951.
Benjamin Davis won repeated elections to the New York City Council as a Communist between 1944 and 1949. A Black Communist no less.
And after his stint in the US Congress, Fiorella LaGuardia ? no doubt a familiar name ? was NYC mayor from 1934 to 1946. Although officially a member of the Republican Party, he was very vocal about being a Socialist within that party, much like Mamdani considers himself a Socialist within the Democratic Party.
And yet here we are, enduring another campaign of smear tactics that only serve the wealthy elite and continue to punch down on the workers who actually drive our society in every conceivable way.
Good history. I am *extremely* wary of Mamdani.
As we saw with Sanders in two democratic primaries, one of the primary ways the Democratic party stays relevant is to allow socialist ideas to enter the debate through a few candidates, then make sure they never get real power. It is also likely someone will check ahead of time (or use blackmail) to make sure these candidates will follow orders at critical times. Note that Sanders basically gave all his fundraising to the party and betrayed the movement.
I agree with much of what Mamdami (or Sanders) says but in our current system it is impossible to make essentially revolutionary changes (such as wealth redistribution) without a new organization unconnected to big money. The Demcrats are part of the uniparty – both sides representing big money but trying to sound as different as possible in areas elites deem nonessential.
There’s a reason “Trotskyist” is a negative term among many socialists – he took money from capitalists, even Nazis, but essentially diverted people from true revolutionary goals. His ideas were funded in western universities because they were opposed to the USSR, just like any ideas showing how socialism doesn’t work gets a lot more support. We need to make sure those who are supposed to represent socialism actually do.
“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.”
Nah. Things will go out in a whimper not a bang. More and more citizens will be renting, the gulf between the financial elites and the rest of us will grow ever wider, gated communities will be the norm. The vast majority of the population working for crap wages, in massive debt due to housing, healthcare bills and student loans will make for an angry and embittered population. They’ll see no point in the concept of a “United States of America” that puts little value on citizenship. Perhaps different regions of the country will eventually break off to declare some kind of autonomy. But a big cataclysmic event is unlikely. Things will just fade off in a depressing familiarity.
I do not mean to downplay the extremely dangerous potentiality of nuclear war with the Washington-militarist-Zionist empire (“NATO”) incessantly encroaching on Russia’s Western border areas, seriously threatening Russian security in the most fundamental ways.
Excellent article, but I would not promote Bernie Sanders and AOC as firebrand socialists. They have clearly surrendered to the blob. If they hadn’t, they would have been marginalized out of their cushy careers by now. Ask Dennis Kucinich how that works.
That was exactly my thought, too. Thanks you put it to paper.
AI Overview
Wisconsin has a rich socialist heritage, particularly in cities like Milwaukee and Racine, which stands in stark contrast to the anti-socialist rhetoric of figures associated with McCarthyism, Scott Walker, and Donald Trump. The rhetoric used by these different groups reflects the changing political landscape and the use of “socialism” as both a governing philosophy and a political smear.
Wisconsin’s Socialist Heritage
Cities and Names: The main hub of Wisconsin socialism was Milwaukee, known for its pragmatic “sewer socialism”. Key figures included three long-serving socialist mayors:
Emil Seidel (1910–1912)
Daniel Hoan (1916–1940)
Frank Zeidler (1948–1960)
Focus on Governance: These leaders focused on practical civic improvements like public parks, sanitation systems, education, and public works, which brought honesty and integrity to city government and improved the quality of life for residents.
Immigrant Roots: The movement was heavily influenced by German immigrants (“Forty-Eighters”) who brought radical ideas and a strong sense of community, establishing a durable social fabric built on communal ties and labor unions.
McCarthyism and the Shift in Rhetoric
Senator Joseph McCarthy: A Republican U.S. Senator from Wisconsin in the 1950s, McCarthy rose to national prominence by making unsubstantiated claims of communist infiltration in the U.S. government and military.
Rhetoric of Fear and Accusation: McCarthyism was characterized by a “Red Scare,” where the term “communist” was used as a powerful smear to silence dissent and destroy careers. The rhetoric relied on fear and suspicion, often conflating dissent with disloyalty.
Impact on Socialist Heritage: This era created a hostile environment for openly socialist politics, contributing to the party’s eventual decline as the rhetoric of anti-communism permeated the political landscape.
Modern Political Figures and Rhetoric
Scott Walker: The former Republican Governor of Wisconsin (2011–2019) was known for his battles against labor unions (e.g., Act 10), which critics saw as an assault on the state’s historical communitarian and pro-labor heritage. His rhetoric centered on fiscal conservatism, limiting government, and promoting individual success over collective solidarity.
Donald Trump: Trump has frequently used “socialism” and “Marxism” as political attacks against his opponents, particularly moderate Democrats like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. His rhetoric often employs similar tactics to McCarthyism, conflating a broad range of progressive policies with extreme, foreign ideologies and framing them as an existential threat to the American way of life. He often claims that Democrats want to prevent “Christian-hating communists, socialists and Marxists” from entering the US.
Zohran Mamdani: A current Democratic Socialist in New York politics, Mamdani has openly embraced the term “democratic socialist” and famously used the phrase “seizing the means of production”. This reflects a modern attempt by some politicians to reclaim and redefine “socialism” as a valid approach to progressive policy within the American political system, a stark contrast to the pejorative use by Trump and others.
Roy Cohn: A lawyer who gained notoriety as chief counsel to Senator McCarthy during the “Red Scare” hearings, Cohn later became a mentor and personal lawyer to Donald Trump. This connection provides a direct lineage between the tactics and rhetoric of the McCarthy era and those used by Trump today, particularly in the use of aggressive, smear-based political attacks.
The shift in rhetoric demonstrates how the term “socialism” has evolved from a practical, municipal governing model in early 20th-century Wisconsin to a potent, often fact-free, political weapon in modern national discourse.
Excellent comment, Joe. Encapsulates America’s love-hate relationship to Socialism. And as they say, Americans love Socialism, they just hate the word.