Was Lenin PMC? How Elite Theory doesn’t fit the movement for socialism

Chris Cutrone

July 23, 2026

This is the nucleus of the question which causes all the differences. Is the antagonism between the middle class and the proletariat so great as to prevent the proletariat from allying itself with certain factions of the middle class against other groups of the middle class? Or are there within the middle class enmities greater than the hostility which exists between the middle class and the working class, so that in some circumstances it is possible and even necessary to establish by the alliance of the working class with certain factions of the middle class a great reform party, a new party of such strength and stability as to be able to share in the government? Is this alliance of the proletariat with parties of the middle class for the purpose of forming a government party a necessary stage in the march of the proletariat to the conquest of political power? 

Or is it an occasional act made possible or even necessary by exceptional contingencies, rather than simply a normal stage of the evolution through which the party in all countries should pass? 

This is the question which is the basis of our dissensions. 

— Karl Kautsky, “The two tendencies” (1902)

Was Marxism merely an elite ideology, for marshaling the working class against an existing elite by an aspiring elite? Was it a deception of the workers — as well as a self-deception — by a radical intelligentsia? What was the relation between proletarian socialism and would-be socialist intellectuals? 

Lenin described himself and other Marxists, positively, as “Jacobins indissolubly linked to the organization of the class-conscious proletariat.” As a “Jacobin,” wasn’t he just a petit bourgeois radical, seeking power on the backs of the workers? 

But Hal Draper, for one, classified Lenin as a “socialist from below” — by contrast to Stalinism as “socialism from above.” [1] Lenin was leader of an actual working-class movement and party in a real working-class revolution. [2] He fulfilled the Marxist vision.

Judging the Russian Revolution from its results in the Soviet Union and beyond, it seems that this was an illusion: the purported “workers’ state” was in fact a party-state. It was what James Burnham called a “managerial revolution.” It was what Noam Chomsky and his anarchist followers such as Michael Albert called a project of the “coordinator class.” They all agreed with Stalinism that the Soviet Union was the authentic result of 1917 and not its betrayal. In this its dialectical character is lost.

Insofar as the Millennials have rediscovered Sociology and Political Science as disciplines — social and political theory — it has been in the form of Elite Theory. Its attraction has been agonizingly ambivalent: Did the Millennials want to be a new elite, or not? 

Until the proletarian socialist movement is successful, Elite Theory will appear not only plausible but true — truer than Marxism. It will be the default, implicit and gut-level consciousness of politically-minded people. For the working class remains a passive object of politics today. The elite are the subject. 

Musa al-Gharbi has written and spoken on the class of “symbolic capitalists” — the Pareto Principle’s top 20%, as opposed to the bottom 80% — and on the crisis of “elite overproduction” that led to the “culture wars.” [3] Benjamin Studebaker has written and spoken on the conflict of “falling professionals” vs. the remaining established “rump professionals,” and the political crisis of democracy and problem of legitimacy that results from it. For Studebaker it is also a problem of education: the 40% who have “higher” formal education today, beyond the previously historically conventional 20%. 

Catherine Liu has addressed the problem of PMC or “professional managerial class” ideology, following Barbara Ehrenreich’s work coining the concept of the PMC from the previous 1960s New Left generation. But Ehrenreich and Liu wanted the PMC to recognize themselves not as elites but as workers. It was an analogue to the Maoist theory of “white skin privilege” as an ideology that prevented class consciousness of the “white” workers. Al-Gharbi, by contrast, wants to emphasize the inevitable self-deceptions of the PMC as beneficiaries of the system, and disputes their self-conception that they are exploited as workers, seeing them instead as “capitalists,” however “symbolic” ones. This is especially true during periods of “elite overproduction” and the resulting “culture wars” in their Darwinian struggle for existence, when the stakes of their conflicts become outsized. 

The question is the role of the intelligentsia in society and politics, especially as mediating between the capitalists and workers. Al-Gharbi cites Marx’s Capital vol. 3 on the “functional capitalists” as opposed to “owner capitalists,” and recognizes their prominent role in making policy: setting the conditions for capitalist production.

In my call for “Socialist unity!” (2025), I addressed aspiring socialists today as actually “capitalist politicians.” What would it take to be otherwise? How would it be possible to avoid the fate of past generations of would-be socialists becoming state and other political and social managers of capitalism?

Antonio Gramsci offered a way of distinguishing between what he called “state intellectuals” and “organic intellectuals.” “State intellectuals” are those who are not only employed by the state but all those who have official education, what Curtis Yarvin calls the “Cathedral,” meaning academia and other NGO entities, whether public or private, as the support structure for the state and its political ruling class. But for Gramsci, the only possible “organic intellectuals” under capitalism were in and as a function of the proletarian socialist party. Activists might style themselves as such, but there is no such party, hence intellectuals today are by default “state intellectuals.” Gabriel Rockhill, in his apostate academic agony, calls this disparagingly the “compatible Left.”

What made Lenin more and other than PMC was the proletarian socialist party. But there was no guarantee that this was the case. Lenin himself acknowledged that the party, even and including in and as a function of the socialist revolution itself, became the vehicle for workers to become “careerist bureaucrats” (who, as Lenin wrote, “deserved only to be shot”!), which the history of the Soviet Union and the states that followed it has borne out. But not only Stalinism and its offsprings but also the politics in the avowedly capitalist world have demonstrated this tendency, and specifically in the labor bureaucracy, or officials in the labor movement and unions, whom C. Wright Mills included in his sociology of politics in The Power Elite (1956). 

Robert Michels, an associate of German sociologist Max Weber and key Elite Theorist, in his book on Political Parties (1911), centered on analysis of the Marxist SPD (Social-democratic Party of Germany), wrote of the “iron law of oligarchy,” which he observed operating in the socialist workers’ movement and party. This was not merely a function of the intellectuals in the party, whom Michels observed actually maintained the goal of socialism, in ways that workers, rising to party organizational responsibility and leadership, tended to abandon, in favor of maintaining their political and social positions.

So, the real question is not what the party does to and for workers, making them part of a rising elite component of the system, but rather what it does for and to the intellectuals, allowing them to transcend their mere role as intellectuals. Lenin thought it accomplished this through becoming party militants. As I wrote four years ago for Sublation, in “Dogmatization and thought-taboos on the Left” (2022), the default perspective for intellectuals is to regard things in terms of alternative and politically competing capitalist policies — to see themselves as potentially in the position of the ruling class, but doing things differently — but the task is to see things in terms of, not if we had power, but of what the workers would do if they had power.

Now, I would like to specify further — and hopefully better — the nature of the problem, namely, not what the workers would do if they had power within capitalism, but if they had the goal of socialism, of overcoming capitalism. Of course, this would depend on how they saw capitalism as a problem: it would need to be more than a matter of mere distribution; it would require seeing capitalism as something other and more than an efficiency problem. Socialists should want more than a change in management. The Millennial Left, unfortunately, has cashed out — or cashed in? — as offering new managers for capitalism: new policies for the state; and new cultural standards for society. Today, it is the rise of “democratic socialism” — within the Democratic Party. This is not and cannot be Marxism. [4]

This is why Marxism — Marxist “theory” — remains important: in setting the goal of socialism — of overcoming capitalism. Specifically, Marxism as “critical theory” — as setting criteria for socialism: it must be seen as a matter of freedom.

The confrontation of present societal realities — the reality of labor in a technological society with the limitations of the bourgeois definition of freedom: the freedom to sell one’s labor and buy the products of others’ labor; the freedom of commodities, to circulate and be bought and sold — provides some sense of what freedom beyond capitalism might mean. But it would be the fulfillment of the avowed desiderata of liberal capitalism — “meritocracy.” It would also seem to fulfill the criteria of bourgeois freedom: autonomy within social production. Despairing of this freedom has produced a reactionary anti-capitalism that would negate it, reestablishing fixed societal roles and political authority. The desire of the intellectuals is to establish a clerisy or indeed perhaps even the clergy. It is for rational bureaucracy — rational religion. What this leaves aside is its inevitable subordination to capitalist irrationality. There is no way out.

Anti-neoliberalism has produced a great deal of confusion about and obscured what Marxism originally aimed for in socialism, whether in favor of or opposition to it: a generation on both the ostensible “Left” and the avowed Right has regressed to pre-Marxian forms of socialism, mostly statist but also anarchist in character. The pre-neoliberal high 20^th century has become an object of nostalgia and has thus occluded what an actual post-capitalist future could be.

Even the intellectuals’ agonizing over their status as PMC betrays an anxiety about “what is to be done?” — to put it in Lenin’s famous and indelible phrase. Specifically, the question is “what is to be done” in order to overcome capitalism. A Marxist answer would remind that the past two centuries have produced no changes beyond capitalism but only within it. Marxism, properly understood, forces us to confront how what we want is actually improved capitalism and not something beyond it. Marxism must task and challenge us on this score.

But this is not an exhortation to do better. This year marks not only the 250^th anniversary of the American Revolution and its promise of freedom, but 100 years after the death of Eugene Debs as the preeminent American socialist in the time of high Marxism. [5] Was he a moral figure of political principle, or an actual Marxist contemporary of others such as Lenin? Recently, it has been suggested that the DSA Democratic Socialists of America has now surpassed the historic high-point of Debs’s SPA Socialist Party of America, in terms of numbers of members. This is a strange distraction from the substance of their differences.

The DSA is a “progressive” faction within the Democratic Party as a ruling capitalist party. The SPA was an independent working-class socialist political party of intransigent opposition to capitalism, which was crushed by the capitalist state. The DSA’s “Marxism” is only a cultural artifact of professed values, a shared language of the educated and initiated; whereas Marxism provided the actual guiding theory and strategy of the SPA. The Millennial DSA’s growth has been spurred by disgruntled PMCs inspired by Bernie Sanders to fulfill Obama’s program of capitalist reform from two decades ago, nostalgically harking back to the 1960s and ’30s for their symbols, but really trying to resurrect the 1980s, as if to undo the Reagan Revolution. [6] The original SPA grew out of the working class’s own struggle for socialism, charting new ground in undiscovered territory, for which Marxism provided consciousness of its historical mission. But such struggle is not taking place today.

The question is what will motivate a proper understanding of the Marxist critique of capitalism. It cannot be accomplished on an abstract theoretical or conceptual level alone, since concrete realities will always confuse, mystify and divert the mind from its true object and goal.

This is a problem that cannot be solved theoretically ahead of time. For the issue is what objects we are looking at to begin with. If we are only looking at the capitalist state and its actions and policies, we will be immediately misled. If we regard capitalist corporations and other enterprises only negatively, we will be driven to the state to try to remedy them. It means adopting what could only be a dissident ruling class and thus capitalist perspective. For what makes the state capitalist is not its collaboration with or compromise by the capitalist class, but that it upholds the needs and imperatives of capital-accumulation. This puts the state and its ruling class in inevitable war against society, even and especially when it claims to be acting on its behalf. The Marxist term for this was “Bonapartism.” In Marx’s time, the most thorough Bonapartists claimed to be “socialist.” This is still true today. The eunuchs of the capitalist state are just what the avowed Right thinks they are.

Without an actual working class socialist movement and politics, we cannot even see the problem of capitalism in its true form, for we will not see its actual limits: the constraint on freedom that capitalism actually is. We will only see practical and moral or even merely ethical failures within a structure that we take for granted and naturalize as unchangeable; and we will only offer corrections to the system that will help maintain things in capitalism.

In order to have any hope of overcoming capitalism, then, the dangers of the party must be courted and potentially reproduced. There is a risk of producing a new bureaucratic elite. But the danger of the party isn’t from the intellectuals, but from the party itself. 

Lenin, in What is to Be Done? (1902), pointed out that socialist consciousness comes not from the workers but the intelligentsia. But this was not original to Lenin or unique to “Leninism” but was the “merger formula” of workers and intellectuals articulated by Karl Kautsky as the official Marxist perspective (with which others such as Rosa Luxemburg [7] of course agreed — for it did not even originate with Kautsky but with Marx and Engels themselves). The socialist party was where both workers and intellectuals transcended their traditional roles in society through becoming party militants. But if socialist consciousness comes from “outside” the workers’ own movement, which can only remain within “trade-union consciousness,” then where does it come from? It originates not from intellectuals as a sociological group but from history: the theoretical and intellectual tradition of socialists. It is not immediate but historically mediated consciousness. The party was meant to embody that history, preserving at a practical level the historical experience of the movement. 

But the spontaneous tendency of that movement was not beyond but within capitalism. Trade unionism was considered an intrinsic part of capitalism, necessary for workers to realize the value of their labor as a commodity. Other civil-social non-remunerative or “decommodified” activity i.e. “unpaid labor” by the working class created forms of social cooperation that Marx regarded as a “free gift to capital” and part of the conditions for capitalist production.

So, the intellectuals in the party preserved the goal of the movement that the movement could not on its own. This was not a static proposition, because the goal would itself develop and change, becoming more focused and clarified, through the history of the movement, concretizing the meaning of the task of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This concrete meaning changed in the history of capitalism, and was affected by the growth and development of the workers’ movement for socialism. Without the continuity of the party across substantial historical experience, including through its own internal conflicts as well as its antagonism to dominant society and politics, the goal of socialism could not be maintained in a concrete but only in an abstract and hence partial or even one-sided and thus misleading way. Marxism’s Hegelian-dialectical view meant recognizing how it could even become reversed across the course of history. Without this consciousness, the movement cannot actually succeed in its goal. 

As Arthur Rosenberg pointed out, in his book, The History of Bolshevism: From Marx to the First Five-Year Plan (1932), the history of Marxism itself demonstrated how both the movement and its goal became internally divided and opposed: Was the movement to achieve socialism or rather to secure the place of the working class in capitalism; was the goal to establish workers’ democracy to manage capitalism, or the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat to overthrow it? How could these different sides of the movement as well as its goal be separated out, let alone divided, since they depend on each other? And yet Marxism in its history did become so internally divided and opposed. What was a means to an end became an end in itself.

The party provided the basis for making these issues concretely political and not merely abstract principles; and the intellectuals provided the theoretical perspective through which they could be reflected upon and recognized, especially through their historical changes. Marxism provided the basis for this consciousness of history, specifically through the critique of socialism — the critique of the workers’ movement for socialism. 

If this process were to be resumed, it could be that Marxism will be surpassed in such a struggle and development. For now, Marxism haunts us uncomfortably, with its greater vision, higher aspiration and deeper critique than any alternative perspectives on offer today or for the last hundred years. If “Marxism” is more than a code-word for progressivist state capitalism, then its meaning is too painful to bear. 

Marxists such as Lenin and Debs stand as example and warning of the task that is required of socialist intellectuals. As in the past, even our most “utopian” imaginations, if realized, will only become dystopian circumstances for the workers: they will be projections of capitalism onto and into the future. The history of the last century — the century after Lenin and Debs’s deaths — proves it: If we are not thinking about an actual proletarian socialist movement and its realities, building a party to serve it, we will not see however dimly beyond it, but remain enclosed within and thinking only of capitalism. | § 

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Postscript on the Millennial DSA

Bhaskar Sunkara is the great success-story of the Millennial Left. He had his vision — of renewing the DSA through uniting the “Left” in it, first by founding a new journal in Jacobin magazine — and he has fulfilled it. But what has this actually achieved?

There were two souls of the Millennial “Left”: one reached to recover the history of Marxism and socialism, harking back to Eugene Debs and his SPA; the other is for achieving “progressive” reforms of capitalism, whether in foreign or domestic policies: ending U.S. “imperialist” interventionism and general war-policy; and implementing economic reforms in the crisis of capitalism — looking to FDR and Henry Wallace, as against Truman and JFK.

There is a specific danger in adopting theories that originate in and imply strategies and purposes that are not acknowledged let alone properly understood. There is also the problem of maintaining a strategy from a different time. This is the case with the Millennial inheritance of the DSA, an organization and framework which was conceived in an earlier historical era and had a very different intention from the one Millennials have sought. The Millennials adopted a position of setback as an advance. When established in 1982, Michael Harrington’s DSA was a defensive and rearguard action.

But the Millennials hoped for more — even if theirs has been a similar move in the face of Trump to Harrington’s under Reagan. I am aware of the repetition of the 1980s, remembering David Dinkins’s DSA NYC Mayoralty as analogue to Zohran Mamdani’s. It took a long time for the “Left” to acknowledge let alone recognize neoliberalism. Bernie Sanders for one started out as a New Left socialist who became an elected capitalist politician criticizing the Democrats for abandoning their New Deal and Great Society agenda to neoliberalism and accommodating Reagan — even as they disclaimed it. The fact that Sanders became inspirational for many Millennials speaks volumes.

Leaving aside theoretical “Marxism,” there is the issue of basic political outlook and strategy. The founder of the DSA, Michael Harrington, was a member and acolyte of the Socialist Party of America when he joined it in the late 1950s as part of a group led by longtime Marxist socialist and former Trotskyist Max Shachtman. There was a capitalist electoral political “realignment strategy” that was suspended by Harrington in forming the DSA in the 1980s. This was a calculation under conditions of the Reagan Revolution and what was perceived as a general turn to the Right in the neoliberal era. The idea was that the best one could do was retain a “Left” position on the margin of the Democratic Party. The electoral realignment strategy he abandoned was not original to Harrington but goes back to Shachtman in the 1950s and ’60s-era SPA Socialist Party of America.

It was based, more broadly, on Shachtman's 1940s theory of “bureaucratic collectivism” as a historical tendency focused on but not limited to the Communist Party-ruled states. It was a theory of Stalinism that applied to the Communist Parties in general. It was Shachtman's answer to Burnham's “managerial revolution” thesis, trying to salvage its descriptive accuracy from its fundamentally anti-Marxist theoretical and political basis. Bureaucratic collectivism was a symptom of the failure and decline of the proletarian socialist movement. Insofar as the historical condition for bureaucratic collectivism was alternative to and in the absence of proletarian socialist politics in the U.S. as elsewhere, Shachtman thought that the New Deal Democrats were potentially the bureaucratic collectivist party — the Communist Party’s involvement in it appeared to prove this. The question for socialists was what to do about it.

The New Deal Coalition was a very heterogeneous electorate and political alliance between Southern conservatives and Northern progressives, Midwestern farmers and urban workers. But this history is usually fudged and thus suppressed. As an example, the histories of Populism and socialism in the U.S. are conflated. But the DSA is aware of the history of Shachtman’s realignment strategy, for example in an article written in the DSA’s journal by Alexander Hernández in 2022: 

What is Realignment?

Realignment is a strategy based on Marxist analysis largely credited to Max Shachtman and DSA founding chair Michael Harrington. [In its] classic formulation, the realignment strategy sought to drive conservatives out of the Democratic coalition and consolidate left, labor, and liberal forces within it. In Shachtman’s and Harrington’s view, this consolidation was a prerequisite for both gaining a progressive governing majority and opening up possibilities for a democratic socialist movement in the U.S. [8]

The latter point is left vague. And the class basis is left out entirely: Shachtman and Harrington considered both the Democrats and Republicans to be parties of the ruling capitalist class with middle-class support, to which the working class was tied. They wanted to free the working class from them to form an independent socialist party, but to do so the equivocal and ambiguous basis for the cross-class — capitalist and middle-class — alliance in both Parties had to be clarified and re-sorted: Democrats as progressive middle-class and Republicans as conservative middle-class. This is because the capitalists were understood as needing middle-class support to govern, and to be neither and both progressive and conservative, i.e. free of ideological motivation or even hard policy preferences, and just following exigent necessities, including political ones of finding middle-class support — also among the bureaucracy, without which they cannot affect government policy.

There was a two-step strategy, in which Shachtman wanted to realign the Democratic Party into being the progressives and the Republicans the conservatives, so that there would be space for a working class-based socialist party to emerge and occupy politically. He was trying to restore the conditions of the old SPA from the turn of the 20th century, when the Republicans were the progressive, black and labor party, and the Democrats were the conservatives. This had been reversed by FDR with the New Deal Coalition, which fulfilled the earlier effort by his uncle-in-law Theodore Roosevelt to advance progressivism in the Republican Party: his unrealized attempt to build upon his original Square Deal in running for reelection in 1912 thus became the New Deal agenda for FDR’s election 20 years later.

Anti-black racism and segregation, de jure in the Jim Crow laws of the South and de facto elsewhere in the country, was a key fracture-point in the capitalist Parties. The Republicans routinely put forward Civil Rights legislation under the Democrat Congressional majorities for decades before LBJ marshaled Democrat support to join them in finally passing it in the 1960s. This alienated the Southern Democrats, splitting them. The Republicans, for their part, recoiled at the government bureaucratic administration of anti-discrimination policies by the Great Society Democrats, and came to express voter discontents with the way Civil Rights reform was implemented.

Thus, the realignment eventually happened, but it was through the Republicans’ “Southern Strategy,” in which they won over the Dixiecrats to their side — but not without the hiccup of renegade Democrat Governor George Wallace, whose independent third-party candidacy for President helped elect Nixon in 1968. Reagan was different from Nixon, and even different from Goldwater’s campaign in 1964, with which Reaganism is usually associated. The circumstances changed. The Vietnam War happened, its failure causing disarray among the Democrats. And the Southern Democrats were not pushed out, but left on their own accord.  So it did not have the effect Shachtman wanted. It was part of a conservative reaction against, rather than coming up against the limits of, capitalist progressivism. Nixon winning in 1968 (let alone his landslide in 1972, or Reagan’s victory in 1980) was not part of the plan. When Socialists Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph promoted the Freedom Budget under LBJ, they assumed economic growth that would make it feasible (but perhaps it was meant merely to throw down the gauntlet to the conservatives among the Democrats?). The unanticipated post-1973 economic downturn that led to neoliberalism was the actual basis for Reagan’s eventual success, consolidating the realignment on a conservative rather than progressive basis, as Shachtman had hoped.

Shachtman and Harrington expected a division to develop when the progressivism of the Democrats reached its limits and went into crisis — of its success. But Shachtman did not advocate joining the Democrats (let alone the Republicans), whereas Harrington's DSA did join them — in anticipation of a later break into a renewed socialist party. The role of the DSA was not to advocate socialism but to bolster the flagging progressives of the Democratic Party in the Reagan era. In order to do this and not appear disloyal, the true nature of the former Shachtman strategy Harrington still believed in but had to suspend in the DSA was downplayed or actively suppressed. The Millennials inherited this ambivalence about the Democrats. Their confusion is over how socialism differs from capitalist progressivism.  It’s not a difference of degree but of kind. It’s not about policy, but politics: not what is done, but who is doing it. Will it be the PMC, or the working class?

The recent interviews with Bhaskar Sunkara by Ross Douthat in The New York Times and on Fox News, and the ongoing Millennial DSA’s debates about possibilities for a “clean vs. dirty break” with the Democrats, show the ambiguity and equivocation about this. [9] Sunkara knows but will not explicitly state the strategy — whether Shachtman or Harrington’s. Is it for an independent socialist party or progressivism in the Democratic Party? This sows confusion among the DSA members, preventing a clear discussion of things. Sunkara cannot be excused in this just because, as he told Douthat, he will be “perfectly comfortable” to watch the “centuries it might take” to “enact socialism” from his “hyperbaric chamber.” In the meantime, it is a matter of capitalist progressivism.

If the DSA were to be clear about their status as PMC progressive capitalists — as al-Gharbi advocates — seeking policy reforms in capitalism through the Democratic Party, they would lose their organizational raison d'être. But the latter is based on a lie — or at least a self-deception. As Sunkara said, he doesn’t want the DSA to follow the path of the Congressional Black Caucus betraying their progressive roots in the politics of the Democratic Party — painfully aware as he is that they killed the Bernie Sanders candidacy in 2020, as well as having supported Hillary over Bernie in 2016. Nor does he want the DSA to replicate the experience of the labor union bureaucracy or other NGO base organizations of the Democratic Party. But the DSA has inevitably become just another canvassing unit for candidates in the Democratic Party. And the DSA serves as test-marketing for messaging to the youth and other progressive voters for other Democrats. This is how the Party is evaluating their efforts.

The DSA trying to discipline Democrats by endorsing only its own members as candidates is more a matter of brand-control than actual politics. Their angst about Democrat candidates is a deflection from the actual issue, which is whether and how the DSA could represent the working class, let alone socialism. They grudgingly admit that the Democrats don’t and won’t. For instance, the DSA’s “rank-and-file strategy” for organized labor leads its members to join the union staff: the labor bureaucracy — which is an organized base for the Democratic Party no less than the NAACP, NOW, Planned Parenthood, Human Rights Campaign, et al.; the neo-Stalinist “Left” that criticizes and opposes the DSA is just oriented to the other constituency bases for the Democrats: minority community organizations. The “Marxist Left” has been doing this for generations, now. It has led to ostensible “Marxists” promoting “progressive” capitalist policies in the labor movement or minority community organizations — to representing the “Left-wing” of the Democratic Party.

The DSA does not try to organize the working class, but it does claim to represent them. However, its endorsed candidates have been elected with middle-class professional rather than working-class votes. This follows the more general Democratic Party pattern. Bhaskar Sunkara told Ross Douthat that the DSA can win over professionals to paying higher taxes to redistribute wealth to the working class. Whether that vision is politically viable long-term is questionable, considering the inevitable vicissitudes of capitalism: Won’t professionals ultimately vote in their economic interests and not charity; won’t they (like many workers) need to move to the suburbs and vote Republican for lower taxes?

It seems inarguable that while original historical Marxism was not a PMC phenomenon, the DSA, representing Millennial “socialism,” with its authentic roots going back to the “Left” of the 1930s and ’60s, actually is. | §

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[1] Hal Draper, The Two Souls of Socialism (1966), available online.

[2] See my opening remarks in “1917–2017,” transcript of panel discussion with Bryan Palmer and Leo Panitch, Platypus Review 99 (September 2017), available online.

[3] See Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton, 2024); and interview with Briahna Joy Gray, “Who is responsible for woke?,” Bad Faith, June 25, 2026, available online.

[4] See my “The Millennial Left is dead,” Platypus Review 100 (October 2017), available online; ; and “The end of Millennial Marxism,” Compact, July 1, 2022, available online.

[5] See my “The end of the Gilded Age: Discontents of the Second Industrial Revolution today,” Platypus Review 102 (December 2017 – January 2018), available online.

[6] See my “The Sandernistas: The final triumph of the 1980s,” Platypus Review 82 (December 2015 – January 2016), available online.

[7] See my “Rosa Luxemburg and the party,” Platypus Review 86 (May 2016), available online, also published as “Sacrifice and redemption,” Weekly Worker 1115 (July 15, 2016), available online.

[8] Alexander Hernández, “The case for realignment,” Socialist Forum (Fall 2022), available online.

[9] See Ross Douthat and Bhaskar Sunkara, “A vision of a ‘society without capitalism’,” New York Times (July 16, 2026), available online; “A ‘society without capitalism’,” Interesting Times with Ross Douthat,  July 16, 2026, available online; and interview with Aishah Hasnie, Fox News Channel, July 18, 2026, available online.