We, as at least halfway competent dialecticians, welcome the rise of democratic socialism, in the same spirit with which any lover of truth welcomes the spread of the most flagrant error. It is only in the struggle with error that the truth comes to assume a concrete content. And in this spirit, we feel compelled to reflect on some recent contributions in the media organ of the Young Democratic Socialists (YDSA), The Activist.

Like Jacobin and Cosmonaut, it is another nodal point in the network of publications that express the democratic socialist sensibility which has spent the last decade becoming ever more hegemonic among the oppositionally minded, against the backdrop of secular weakness in the labor movement and the protracted decadence and fragmentation of revolutionary socialist organizations. In dark times, the soft bigotry of low expectations comes to the fore, here in the form of a complacent assumption that democratic socialism is at least an interruption in the reproduction of the universal Third Way that seemed destined to set the mood of our ongoing post-Soviet malaise, at least till the incoherent ruptures of 2016. Adherents of this assumption would insist either that we refrain from criticizing democratic socialism entirely, or at least dilute said criticism to a point where it can be judged palatable to the devotees of this overwhelmingly dominant political fad.

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We agree completely that it is unfair to accuse Mamdani of betrayal. Like Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, or any of the leaders of democratic socialism, Mamdani has been perfectly honest and forthright about what he is going to do, manage the bourgeois state in the interests of the bourgeoisie, while providing some token benefits to the working class, with which he hopes to build a governing majority; all while proving his fitness for power to Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Mamdani never lied about this during the campaign. He is not betraying his program, but fulfilling it. There is indeed a betrayal in this scenario, but not by Mamdani. The betrayal was the one carried out by the socialists with Marxist education who choose to deepen the historic demoralization and disorientation of our class by insisting, to the politically naive and uneducated, that this sellout program of kneeling and cringing before the millionaires like a castrated farm animal would be sufficient to change the balance of force between the classes in a manner substantive enough to restore some dignity to our lives.

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The capitalist economy draws a sharp line between mental and manual labor, between leadership and execution in production. The “intellectuals” or mental workers here form a particular social strata, a strata which economically occupies an intermediate space between the capitalists proper and the mass of the exploited. By their social position and their attitude to life, the intellectuals can be counted as belonging to the possessing class; their economic situation, however, pushes them year after year ever more hopelessly down into the proletariat.

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A spectre is haunting the world: the spectre of communism. All the powers of the old order have joined in a holy alliance to drive it out: the President at Mt. Rushmore and the President in the Kremlin, the palaces of the Gulf and the parliaments of Europe, the cable network and the hedge fund, the think tank and the masked men marching under the Confederate flag, the social democrats and the foundation-funded activists alike.

In 1848, when the Communist Manifesto was first written, the spectre haunted one continent, because that continent was then the whole of the capitalist market. The market grew until it covered the earth exactly as the first writers of that manifesto told it would. The spectre grew with it. Its writ now runs everywhere the wage is paid, which is everywhere. Wherever the market went, the attempt at exorcism followed it.

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Two current wars furnish the primary evidence for this exercise of scrutiny. The first is the Russo-Ukrainian War, which began with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and which, as of this writing in early 2026, continues without operational resolution along a 1,000km front, now running longer than the duration of Eastern Front operations during the Second World War. The second is the Iranian-US/Israeli conflict that erupted in June 2025 with Operation Rising Lion and expanded into a broader regional war by early 2026. These conflicts differ enormously in geography, political character, and the correlation of forces, yet they begin to blend, and share a common underlying condition: in both, the material and technological environment of combat has again transformed the relationship between the offense and the defense, between fire and movement, and between the front and the depth, in ways that compel a re-examination of operational categories Commander Isserson established.

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On March 14^th, 1883, Karl Marx passed away. On that day the proletariat of the entire terrestrial globe lost its brilliant and devoted leader.

In the current moment, even fierce enemies of the proletariat and opponents of scientific socialism are forced to admit that the spiritual creativity of the author of “Capital” and the practical activity of the father and leader of the workers International, firmly connects the great events of the second half of the 19^th with the dawning promise of the 20^th century. Karl Marx himself represented a rare exception even in the ranks of the great individuals, with whom nature does not often indulge history. A deep thinker and genius, he was at the same time a practical man of action, a passionate, tireless, selfless warrior in the great battlefield of the history of humankind. His choice of a practical revolutionary path was clearly illuminated by the light of theory, but the fruits of practical revolutionary activity filled theory with living substance, instilling new fresh forces in it.

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Earlier this year, Aaron Amaral, a seemingly prominent member of the self-proclaimed revolutionary socialist organization, the Tempest Collective, saw fit to share what his organization considers to be the “united front approach”. Since variants of this “approach” are common currency with the opportunist left, regardless of whether they visualize themselves riding or ambushing a tank in Budapest in 1956, it is perhaps worth our while to dissect how Amaral characterizes it.

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DSA has come of age. Recent electoral contests have transitioned the organization from a growing left opposition within the constellation of structures that constitute the apparatus of the Democratic Party into a king maker. With this transition the question of how to relate to the organization, a question that has been crucial for partisans of communist politics in the US since at least 2016, becomes even more so. For those who seek to perpetuate the ninety year abdication of independent class politics, premised off the reduction of socialism to democracy, which found its highest expression to date in the US with the New Deal coalition, the answer is simple. Stream into the organization to nudge the liberal-socialist bloc further left. For those of this orientation the furthest strategic horizon is the constitution of a bourgeois labor party devoted exclusively to the mediation of the class contradiction and its facilitation of a redundant democratization of the already democratic US imperialist state.

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David Camfield’s Red Flags is worthy of note as perhaps the most recent attempt to restate the third camp position which, during the bipolar confrontation between imperialism and socialism that traversed the 20^th century, equated the two. This position, much like the now often associated view that sees plantation slavery as a form of capitalism despite the clear absence of constitutive structural features of the latter in the former, occludes the history of the modern revolutionary process as a history of the progressive transformation of production relations in indissoluble organic unity with their organically associated juridical expression. We are instead left with an illegible panorama in which modernity appears as an arbitrary series of shifts among various vaguely defined forms of domination confronted only by a resistance from “below” that is diffuse, molecular and without any lasting victories in empirical history.

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