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SOCIALISM OR BARBARISM  
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Eric Ross
October 30, 2025
TomDispatch [[link removed]]

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_ Reviving the History of the American Left _

Zohran for Mayor, Eden, Janine & Jim is licensed under CC BY 2.0 /
Flickr

 

More than a century ago, from a BERLIN PRISON CELL
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confined for her uncompromising opposition to the slaughter of the
First World War, Rosa Luxemburg WARNED
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“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 [[link removed]]. 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
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OLIGARCH MONEY
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and BACKROOM DEALS
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(efforts that, Mamdani OBSERVED
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taxes he plans to impose to improve life in New York). Trump has
unsurprisingly joined these efforts wholeheartedly, while the
Democratic establishment HAS CHOSEN
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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
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hands of a ruling class that deploys its fortune to further entrench
its power. Especially since the Supreme Court’s 2010 CITIZENS UNITED
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decision, private capital has wielded untold influence over ELECTIONS
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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
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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
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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
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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

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a WAVE OF
IMMIGRATION
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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
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surpassing its European rivals in manufacturing and, by 1913,
producing NEARLY ONE-THIRD
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of global industrial output, more than Britain, France, and Germany
combined. That share would climb to NEARLY HALF
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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
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of industrial accidents in the world.

When workers rose in collective opposition to those conditions, they
faced not only the monopolistic corporations of THE GILDED AGE
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but an entire political economy structured to preserve that system of
inequality. Anti-competitive practices concentrated wealth to an
extraordinary degree. The richest 10% of Americans then owned SOME 90%
PERCENT
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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. 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
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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
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AFFAIR OF 1886
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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
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He was drawn to socialism not through abstract theory but lived
experience in the AMERICAN RAILWAY UNION
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RECALLED [[link removed]],
“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
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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
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some six percent of the national total, while running as a third-party
candidate for president (and again FROM PRISON
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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
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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. Writing during the late nineteenth-century era of HIGH
IMPERIALISM [[link removed]], 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
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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
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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
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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?”

Others, like disability activist and socialist Helen Keller, a
founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, echoed such
critiques. In 1916, SHE WROTE
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“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
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the same “emergency measure” that would be USED
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future wars, to charge whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg, Edward
Snowden, and Daniel Hale. Socialists were among its first targets.

After A 1918 SPEECH
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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.

SOCIALISM AFTER THE SCARE

The RED SCARE OF 1919
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MCCARTHYISM
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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
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lives and brought us Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Albert Einstein argued
that “the real source of evil” was capitalism itself. Humanity, HE
INSISTED [[link removed]], “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
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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
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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
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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.”

In his 1967 RIVERSIDE CHURCH SPEECH
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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 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
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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
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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
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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 [[link removed]] 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% CONTROL MORE WEALTH
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than the bottom 93% 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._

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and Ann Jones’s __THEY WERE SOLDIERS: HOW THE WOUNDED RETURN FROM
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* Zorhan Kwame Mamdani
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* U.S. history
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* socialism
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* democracy
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* autocracy
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* Inequality
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* unions
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* class struggle
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* Donald Trump
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