The Unfinished Business of American Socialism

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For generations, Democrats have borrowed socialism’s most workable ideas. Now Silicon Valley has taken up its dream of a world beyond wage labor.

At that convention, the Party adopted a platform that began by denouncing capitalism as a system that produced, among other evils, an “extortionate cost of living”: “Under this system the working class is exposed to poisonous conditions, to frightful and needless perils to life and limb, is walled around with court decisions, injunctions and unjust laws, and is preyed upon incessantly for the benefit of the controlling oligarchy of wealth.” The platform called for the collective ownership of everything from the railroads and the telegraph lines to mines, forests, oil wells, banks, and the currency system.

“The socialist moment is here,” Nathan J. Robinson, the editor of the socialist magazine Current Affairs, announced this past summer, pointing to the swelling membership of the Democratic Socialists of America and to socialists’ newfound prominence: Zohran Mamdani on the cover of Time. Is it 1912 all over again?

This year, the banner of socialism is being carried by the D.S.A., whose hundred and thirty thousand members already include two U.S. representatives, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib; there are hundreds of D.S.A.-backed state and local officeholders across the country. (Bernie Sanders is a longtime socialist, but he is not a member of the D.S.A.) The D.S.A. is not a political party, but it does have a platform. Sort of. In 2017, its National Political Committee decided to replace its “priorities resolution” with a platform. Promised for 2019, it was postponed to 2021, given the D.S.A.’s “ideological diversity.” A new platform, which the D.S.A.

“We are workers fighting to transform society: to win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic,” the program pledges, while inveighing against the existing parties: “Both are funded by the same criminal class of billionaires and war profiteers.” The program proposes, among other things, the abolition of the Senate and the replacement of the Presidency and…

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