The New Pink Face of US Imperialism: DSA and the United Front

September 04, 2026

Tibor Szamuely

Democratic socialists are a national power and they have worked below the surface to perfect a ground game and a canvassing operation. It’s too late for the Democrats to recreate that. I told people in the Republican Party, and it was dismissed that [Mamdani’s] a flash in the pan, it’s clearly just a New York City thing… Steve Bannon in Politico, July 2, 2026.

Kiros’ campaign was powered by a firestorm of liberal energy, stoked by the Denver branch of the Democratic Socialists of America and the federal super PAC Justice Democrats, which spent more than $500,000 backing her campaign.

Gonzales did not get the same kind of enthusiasm or financial support.

Deep Singh Badhesha, a liberal organizer and provocateur in Denver who backed Kiros, said some on the left didn’t feel Gonzales was committed enough to their platform. Her decision to end her membership with the Denver branch of the Democratic Socialists of America and not endorse Kiros also played a role, he said.

“Why would people go knock doors for you, donate their money if you can’t even say (you support) us,” he said. Colorado Sun, July 2, 2026.

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.

For those of us deeply disinterested in a structural reform of the instruments of the imperialist dictatorship, and concerned only with building the independent combat capacity of the labor movement on the road to workers control, dual power, and worker dictatorship via the disarticulation of that same state, the question is posed differently. We understand that the project of mediation and integration of the class contradiction finds its objective limits in the autonomous intensity of this contradiction itself. Bismarck’s social state was a dependent variable in relation to the expression of a revolutionary alternative by early Social Democracy, the New Deal coalition was a secondary effect of the ruptural impact of the October Revolution and the state it produced.

In classic Leninist terms, reforms are a product of failed revolutions. The current absence of a revolutionary trajectory within the class movement, cause and consequence of its secular weakness following the imperialist rollback from the Volker shock to perestroika, sets sharp limits to what reformism can accomplish. It also sets equally sharp limits to the expectations of the working class and downwardly mobile petty bourgeois strata who provide the raw material of the neo social democratic and left populist experiments. With the basic structural features of capitalism naturalized as inescapable fate and the expropriation of the capitalists and worker dictatorship excluded from the realm of possibility in popular thinking, it is possible for reformist mediation to construct a lasting hegemony without facilitating a significant shift in the balance of power between the classes. Here the examples of Morena and the PT are instructive.

There is no reason that the Democratic Party, liberated from the self sabotage of the centrist faction by the democratic socialist insurgency, could not accomplish a similar feat. Especially considering the incomparably greater resources of the US as an unmatched, albeit declining, global super power.

The low expectations of the working class, conditioned by decades of destruction of concentrations of worker power, restructuring, and atomization within a social body subject to ever more intense control and surveillance can make it possible for the reformist agents of the bourgeois to win relatively stable hegemony at a discount. Likewise, when the reformists fail to cement their rule, this does not by default create an opening for the marginalized and incoherent revolutionary left.

A revolutionary left which is either completely disassociated from the mainstream of working class life, fatally compromised by its “critical” support for the compromises and disappointments of reformism or both. On the contrary the result tends to be a shift of power towards a nationalist right which adorns its more rigorous interpretation of a universally shared capitalist realism with sadistic ritual sacrifice of social scapegoats. This latter result is equally preconditioned by the demoralization of a working class which has lost confidence in its capacity to unite and fight over everyday issues, let alone seize power.

In this context, communist militants have to understand that our duty in relation to the growth of reformist consciousness among the disaffected worker and petty bourgeois strata is two fold. Firstly in relation to the vanguards in formation of advanced elements looking to launch the worker counter offensive against the imperialist rollback, we need to carry out a precise, nuanced and unsparing criticism of the reformist claims to indefinitely moderate the contradictions of capitalism or institute socialism without the harsh, practically taboo realities of worker dictatorship and everything it entails. Secondly in relation to the broad mass of working people who currently pay less attention to the nuances of politics it is necessary to illustrate in everyday practical action the reality of the communist alternative. The first task, although a vital precondition will remain an exercise in esotericism without the second.

The second task itself divides into two. Firstly the reconstitution of independent organizations and processes of worker struggle both within and outside the currently existing unions. Secondly, the exposure of the anti-worker essence of the reformists not simply through polemic and analysis but through the acts of obstruction, sabotage, and repression they will be compelled to carry out against the reassertion of worker confidence. The line of demarcation against the collaborationist line in the labor movement begins with theoretical and programmatic criticism, it ends when significant worker strata cross the “red lines” of the collaborationists in the defense of their interests. The collaborationists, at best, want to run the motor of class contestation as a source of renewal of the energies of a bourgeois dictatorship itself rendered brittle by decades of eclipse of mass politics. We, on the other hand, don’t want to limit ourselves to bargaining over our vital interests. We want to impose them unilaterally and in so doing pave the way to a revolutionary rupture.

In this sense, despite their quantitative incongruity, the leap forward of DSA and the first conference of the For A Fighting Workers Movement initiative form the two antagonistic aspects of the dialectical process of the reconstruction of class subjectivity within bourgeois society. The first condemned by the blind weight of bourgeois spontaneity to affirm its own subordination, the second opening the possibility of reconstructing class subjectivity as a project for the qualitative transformation of the social whole.

DSA’s commitment to govern as a responsible custodian of imperialism in the political sphere, finds its economic ground in the labor bureaucracy that places the peace and order of capitalist profit over the defense of vital worker interests. The only possible ground of a future political alternative to DSA is the construction of a combative class unionism that illustrates to broad strata of workers the possibility of victory through uncompromising struggle. And on the terrain of this unionism, the coalescence of political militants through comprehensive Marxist education and polemic. So long as we remain focused on these tasks, DSA is not an opportunist decomposition to fear, but precisely the enemy we need to accelerate our own accumulation of forces. Insofar as a new class unionism comes face to face with the DSA and Labor Notes agents of capital, these forces will face an irresistible polarization of their own base of support. Rupture with the political expression of reformism requires new practices of anti-collaborationist economic struggle which win real gains.

Whether communist forces are up to this task will determine whether current rumblings of discontent find their ceiling in the grim stagnation of an American Morena or open up authentically new political possibilities.