From Zohran Mamdani to Melat Kiros, a new generation is reviving Marx’s oldest thesis — that the world’s most advanced capitalism breeds the seeds of its own revolt
Trump’s anti-communist speech, it must be said, is a source of first-rate inspiration, and it’s time we dig a little deeper into this subject today.
The United States has been, for decades, without competition, the world’s center of anti-communist ideology. In American political culture, the word socialism has long functioned as an indictment. It was used to discredit opponents, shut down debate, produce moral panic, and remind voters that there’s a line serious politics doesn’t cross. But that line is becoming increasingly porous today.
“Democratic socialism,” even though it isn’t quite what the name would suggest—since it would essentially mean introducing a socialist system through victory in democratic elections, and its representatives, at least in the US, probably wouldn’t go that far even if they won—is growing in America out of very concrete life experiences. Out of the feeling that work guarantees ever less security. The new American left therefore appears less as an ideological import from the last century and more as a language through which young and urban strata try to describe everyday life in the richest country in the world.
In this shift lies perhaps the greatest American paradox. A country that built its very identity on the promise of individual success is now producing generations who increasingly doubt that the market leads them toward a better life. The American Dream is still sold through advertisements and political speeches, but its social foundation is rapidly weakening.
When the promise of upward mobility collapses, terms that once seemed forbidden begin returning to public discourse.
The rise of the Democratic Socialists of America (*DSA) shows that discontent no longer stops at student campuses and protest banners. It’s gaining electoral campaigns, local organizations, candidates, and victories. Zohran Mamdani, a New York politician associated with the DSA, Melat Kiros in Colorado, and a number of other candidates linked to the DSA have become a sign that part of American society is no longer satisfied with mild reformist liberalism. A different economic language is being sought, and through it, a different distribution of power.
*DSA stands for Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the US. It’s not a classic political party, but a network of local chapters, activists, and candidates who most often run through the Democratic Party or in local elections, pushing for public healthcare, stronger unions, more affordable housing, more accessible education, taxing the wealthy, and sharper criticism of American foreign policy, especially toward Israel. In the American context, the DSA is often called socialist, but much of its practical program more closely resembles a more radical European-style social democracy—which, in the US, is nonetheless already subversive enough to cause panic within the political establishment.
Today’s American socialism is still far from a revolutionary project in the classical sense. Still, American democratic socialism has a more explosive symbolic effect. In a country of privatized security and corporate politics, even a basic demand for social protection acts like a tectonic challenge to the order.
Marx’s old thesis on the most developed capitalism
Karl Marx, the German philosopher and critic of capitalism, viewed capitalism as a system that develops its own strength to the point where that strength begins to destroy its own foundations. Capitalism creates enormous productive capacities, connects markets, concentrates wealth, and produces modern classes. But at a certain historical moment, the relations that drove development turn into shackles. Society then, Marx argues, enters a period of crisis in which new political possibilities take shape beneath the surface of everyday life.
Of course, the gap between theory and practice was, let’s say, considerable!
The history of the 20th century took a rather stranger path than a schematic reading of Marx would suggest. The first great socialist revolution broke out in Tsarist Russia, a country of weak industrialization, a vast peasant mass, and an autocratic state exhausted by war. The Russian Revolution was an event of world importance, without doubt, but Tsarist Russia did not represent the peak of developed capitalism. It was a space of imperial collapse, state crisis, and social despair.
That is why today’s America is so interesting for Marxist analysis. The US is the most developed capitalist product of the contemporary world. There we find technological monopolies, the most powerful financial institutions, digital platforms that govern labor and attention, a military-industrial complex with planetary reach, and a political system deeply dependent on money. American capitalism no longer functions merely as an economic model. It looks like a total civilizational infrastructure.
It is precisely in such a society that the limits of the system begin to show. Productivity rises, but security retreats. Technology advances, but the worker keeps losing bargaining power. Wealth reaches historic peaks, but housing becomes unattainable.
The richest economy in the world looks, to an increasing number of its citizens, like a mechanism of constant extortion.
Marx’s analysis here doesn’t function as a prophecy with a ready-made date, but rather as a diagnostic apparatus that is becoming usable again. Because Marx argued that the revolution—the primary, main one—would ultimately happen precisely where capitalism had reached its greatest development, that is, its peak. That, of course, was not Tsarist Russia, but it could be today’s USA.
Because capitalism in the US has reached a form in which it no longer needs to hide its own hierarchy. Billionaires openly finance campaigns, corporations write laws, private funds buy up housing blocks, and health insurance functions as an industry of selection between those who can pay and those who must wait. Under such circumstances, democratic socialism gains strength because it names what the official liberal language—itself also staunchly pro-capitalist—often softens or doesn’t dare even bring up.
DSA as a workshop of American discontent
The DSA is today the most visible organizational expression of this shift. As already mentioned, the DSA is not a classic party with its own electoral line, but a network of local chapters, activists, campaigns, and candidates. This form suits the American political system, in which the two major parties close off space for third options. Socialist politics therefore pushes through primary elections, city councils, local coalitions, and pressure on the Democratic Party.
The DSA’s success lies in its ability to connect moral outrage with organizational work. The American left has long known how to produce powerful protest language, but it often lost battles within institutions. The new wave of democratic socialists is trying to avoid that trap. It goes door to door, builds ground game, seeks out candidates who know how to talk about housing, work, and war, and then challenges entrenched Democratic incumbents in safe districts.
Melat Kiros’s victory over longtime Democratic representative Diana DeGette in Colorado is especially significant as a symbol of generational change. DeGette belonged for decades to the safe Democratic establishment. Kiros arrived with a stance that links domestic class politics with criticism of American foreign policy. It is precisely this combination that increasingly shapes the new left. For it, health insurance, rent, Palestine, and the military budget belong to the same political space—and they should!
The DSA, in this sense, of course, does not yet have anything close to the character of a revolutionary movement capable of taking over the state or overthrowing American capitalism. Its program often resembles a social-democratic minimum that, in some other country—say, any country in Europe—would sound almost conventional. But the American context changes the meaning. When public healthcare is demanded in the US, it strikes at one of the most powerful private industries. When rent control is demanded, it opens a conflict with the capital of the real estate sector. And only when the military budget is called into question does it touch one of the pillars of the American empire.
Let’s not assume that the DSA is the last word.
Out of such an organization, more radical factions can be born. The history of the left shows that social-democratic waves often open space for deeper conflicts within the movement itself. One part remains tied to reforming the system, while another begins seeking a break with its logic and starts invoking revolution.
If living conditions continue to worsen, and the liberal center continues to defend an order that fewer and fewer people trust, the DSA could become a school of political radicalization for a new generation of Americans. This is almost inevitable, because generations keep coming, while conditions don’t improve. The American Dream remains an American nightmare because it was defined that way.
Let’s look here at two interesting surveys conducted by Gallup Poll last September:
Trump’s crypto-feudalism and shameless capitalism
We mentioned this in the previous piece, but it’s worth expanding on this key part of the story. Donald Trump in his second term truly acts as a grotesque symbol of the phase in which American capitalism loses even its last need for decent justifications. The billionaire president, surrounded by crypto tokens, family businesses, and political power, embodies a system in which public office and private enrichment merge before the public’s eyes. Reports of income exceeding a billion dollars from crypto dealings sparked particular outrage in a country where millions of people live paycheck to paycheck.
This very crypto-politics of the Trump era has special significance. It shows capitalism in the form of raw speculation, detached from production and social utility. A token, a brand, access to power, and media attention are turned into a source of enormous profit. Small investors enter driven by hope, often despair, belonging, and propaganda, while those at the top exit with profit. It is almost a textbook picture of a financialized order in which wealth arises from position, while risk is passed downward.
Capitalism is overrun with numerous pump-and-dump schemes, but this time they come from the president himself. All of this suggests the system has hit a ceiling, that it has nearly matured into what Marx claimed would take a long time to arrive.
Trump himself is therefore not merely an anomaly of American politics. He is the face of a system that has fully developed the logic of self-interest to its end. His vulgar openness even has a certain analytical value, because it strips away the layers of idealism from American democracy.
Clearly, popular outrage over such dealings doesn’t automatically lead to the left. It can end up in cynicism, abstention, right-wing populism, or conspiracy theories. The American political scene has shown for years how class anger can be redirected anywhere—toward migrants, culture wars, and nationalist myths. Still, when the president of the most powerful capitalist state turns political office into a private financial lever, criticism of capitalism stops sounding abstract.
All the “side brakes” meant to divert attention are slowly losing their meaning.
Here we approach what is sometimes called the final stage of capitalism. However, that phrase shouldn’t be understood as a countdown to an end, as if history were moving toward a pre-scheduled collapse. It is a description of a ceiling of moral and political legitimacy. The system can keep functioning, markets can grow, indexes can break records, but an ever-growing number of people stop believing that this growth has anything to do with their own lives. When that connection breaks, various possibilities open up—left, right, authoritarian, and emancipatory.
Gaza as a catalyst exposing the liberal center
It’s worth noting that the polarization around Israel and Gaza has given American democratic socialism additional strength, almost real momentum.
For young voters, student activists, and the new left, Gaza has become a moral test for the liberal establishment. The Democratic Party spent years presenting itself as a space defending minorities, human rights, and international law. The war in Gaza opened a deep gap between that narrative and actual American policy toward Israel.
Anyone who follows the US closely knows that the difference between Republicans and Democrats is often just a matter of nuance, but that isn’t something clear and understandable to young Americans. Now, though, it’s becoming so, through the terrible Israeli crimes against Gaza, which have turned into a kind of catalyst for awakening.
For the new left, support for Israel is no longer a marginal foreign-policy issue. It’s experienced as part of a broader imperial structure. The American military budget, lobbying money, pressure on campuses, and the punishment of pro-Palestinian voices all come together into one new realization.
The DSA has taken a position here that sets it apart from moderate progressivism. A pro-Palestinian stance has become part of the movement’s identity, and candidates who openly criticize Israel are increasingly winning the support of young voters. Predictably, this provokes strong resistance from donor networks, pro-Israel lobbies, and Democratic centrists. And so the conflict over Gaza turns into a new conflict over the very future of the Democratic Party—a conflict that might not otherwise have flared up so strongly.
What amounts to a certain precedent, or at least something we haven’t seen in America in many years, is that at this point domestic and foreign policy can no longer easily be separated. The same system that at home produces housing insecurity, privatized healthcare, and worker powerlessness, produces abroad interventions, alliances with repressive regimes, and a massive military apparatus. The new American left increasingly recognizes this connection. Class critique of capitalism merges with an anti-imperial critique of American power.
This realization, if it keeps growing, will soon outgrow even Mamdani and those who are today’s political sensation. Tomorrow it could turn into a desire for greater resistance.
America therefore finds itself in an unusual moment. Socialism is returning to a country that for decades turned it into a political monster. The DSA doesn’t have the strength of a historical overthrow, but it has the strength of a symptom. It shows that something has shifted deep within society. Capitalism in the US has won so completely that it has used up its own mythology. Freedom, prosperity, and democracy are no longer delivered in their proper edition.
In the end, Marx will return to America too. Because the world’s most developed capitalism is beginning to produce political forms of its own negation. These forms are, for now, reformist, electoral, and still cautious. But beneath them a deeper process is moving. Generations that no longer trust the market, nor the liberal center, and especially not imperial morality, are beginning to seek their own path and salvation. In American history, this is already a major change. In world history, it could be the beginning of an even greater shift.
About the Author
Mario Hoffmann is an independent analyst and writer covering global economics, geopolitics, and international affairs. With a background in history and politics, he writes for EconoPuls to provide in-depth context on the stories shaping our world.
