A Marxist critique of DSA

Anthony Teso

Platypus Review 186 | May 2026

BY ANY SURFACE MEASURE, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has become a serious political force. As of February 2026, DSA said it had surpassed 100,000 members, and Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City’s 2025 mayoral election gave the organization its most visible municipal triumph to date.^[1] Yet from a rigorous Marxist standpoint, the organization’s present political and organizational trajectory raises deep strategic concerns. The problem is not that its immediate demands are necessarily wrong. The problem is that the methods and structures it has adopted may systematically prevent those demands from ever being realized. This essay argues that DSA’s commitment to electoralism within the Democratic Party, its reformism without a developed theory of the state, its class composition, and its ideologically diffuse “big tent” model together forms a set of contradictions that Marxist analysis reveals as structural rather than accidental.

I. The electoral trap: Parliamentarism without power

The most basic Marxist objection to DSA’s present trajectory is its overwhelming orientation toward electoral politics within the existing bourgeois state. DSA insists that it is “a political and activist organization, not a party,” yet in practice much of its electoral work has centered on supporting candidates running on the Democratic ballot line.^[2] That arrangement is not politically neutral. The Democratic Party is not an empty vessel that socialists can simply occupy and redirect at will. It is a capitalist party whose institutional life is bound up with donor power, managerial liberalism, and the reproduction of the existing social order. The more socialist politics are funneled through that apparatus, the more they are pressured to speak its language, respect its limits, and accept its timetable.

Marx mocked what he called “parliamentary cretinism,” the illusion that legislative maneuver alone can determine the fate of class power.^[3] Lenin later sharpened the point: parliamentary activity may be tactically useful, but only insofar as it serves agitation, exposure, and organization outside parliament, rather than substituting for them.^[4] DSA’s practice largely reverses that hierarchy. Its organizational infrastructure, media visibility, volunteer energy, and political calendar are all disproportionately synchronized to electoral cycles. The result is a rhythm of politics shaped less by the independent development of working-class power than by the deadlines and incentives of bourgeois democracy.

The case of Mamdani illustrates the problem in concentrated form. His victory was real, impressive, and powered by extraordinary grassroots work. But even during the campaign, he insisted that he was running on a platform distinct from DSA’s, and on policing he publicly distanced himself from earlier “defund” rhetoric, pledged to maintain NYPD staffing, and emphasized a more moderate public-safety framework.^[5] Once in office, the pressures of governance only intensify. Municipal socialism does not govern on a blank slate. It governs under the discipline of bond markets, state law, employer confidence, media hostility, and capital’s perennial threat to disinvest or flee. A socialist mayor who tries to move faster than those constraints permit is quickly reminded that city hall is not a workers’ council. What results, all too often, is not socialist transformation but the administration of limits with better rhetoric.

II. Reformism without a theory of the state

DSA’s core demands — Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, free higher education, stronger tenant protections, expansive immigrant rights — are not objectionable in themselves. Marxists have never opposed reforms as such. The question is whether reforms are pursued in a way that deepens class organization and sharpens antagonism, or in a way that stabilizes the existing order. What is missing in much of DSA’s practice is not a list of desirable policies, but a developed theory of the capitalist state.

The capitalist state is not a neutral instrument waiting to be seized by better personnel. Marx’s writings on Bonapartism and the Paris Commune make the point plainly: the state is a historically developed structure whose bureaucracy, coercive institutions, legal form, and fiscal architecture are all implicated in the reproduction of capitalist social relations.^[6] Nicos Poulantzas later refined this argument by insisting that the state is indeed a terrain of struggle, but one whose very form channels political action back toward the reproduction of class rule.^[7] The police, courts, administrative agencies, and budgetary mechanisms are not neutral equipment sitting in a warehouse, ready for socialist use.

DSA has, at least at the level of rhetoric, gestured toward a more serious framework through the language of “nonreformist reforms.” That phrase matters because it points beyond patchwork liberalism toward reforms that increase working-class capacity, visibility, and power. DSA has explicitly invoked the concept, drawing on a tradition associated with André Gorz.^[8] The difficulty is that the organization’s electoral orientation repeatedly drains the concept of its sharper content. Once a demand is routed through candidate branding, coalition management, donor pressure, and media legibility, it tends to be translated into technocratic policy language. A Green New Deal becomes a menu of administrative incentives. Medicare for All becomes an actuarial debate. Structural confrontation is reprocessed as expert management. That is not an incidental corruption of the original idea; it is the normal effect of the electoral form.

III. The problem of class composition

A second problem concerns DSA’s class composition. Even sympathetic analysts of the contemporary socialist revival have noted that the movement has often been disproportionately shaped by educated, downwardly mobile professionals and other young members of the broader professional-managerial strata. In the New York case especially, the organization’s dynamism has frequently come from highly educated renters and activists rather than from the most organized layers of labor rooted in production.^[9] From a Marxist perspective, that is not a mere demographic footnote. It has strategic consequences.

Marxism insists that the working class must be the subject of socialist politics, not merely its moral reference point or intended beneficiary. An organization whose social center of gravity lies elsewhere will tend, despite itself, to think and act accordingly. It will be more comfortable with policy design than with class combat, more fluent in the idiom of representation than in the idiom of collective power, and more likely to privilege legislative advocacy over the slow, abrasive work of building durable organization at the point of production. That does not mean such members are politically useless; far from it. It means only that every organization bears the marks of the social layers that most actively compose it.

To be fair, DSA members do real labor, tenant, and community organizing, and that work should not be dismissed. But the organization’s center of gravity still lies elsewhere. For Marxists, the workplace is not just one site of struggle among many. It is the site where workers encounter capital most directly, where collective power becomes visible in practice, and where institutions capable of contesting social rule can emerge in embryonic form. A socialist organization that consistently subordinates this terrain to electoral work has reversed the strategic hierarchy on which Marxist politics depends.

IV. The big tent as ideological incoherence

DSA’s defenders often present its big-tent character as a strength. The organization includes social democrats, democratic socialists, Marxists, and various hybrid tendencies, and this breadth is said to reflect the practical need for coalition under American conditions. But what looks like inclusiveness can also function as theoretical evasion. Social democracy and Marxism are not merely milder and stronger versions of the same politics. They are rival understandings of capitalism, the state, reform, and historical transition.

Social democracy assumes that capitalism can be durably civilized through redistribution, regulation, and welfare-state management. Marxism insists that such gains are real but unstable, because they rest on a social order whose core relation is exploitation and whose dominant class retains structural power over investment, employment, credit, and the state itself. The difference is not semantic. It concerns whether the goal is to humanize capitalism or to supersede it.

The historical record offers little reason to treat the distinction lightly. The Social Democratic Party of Germany voted for war credits in 1914, and the crisis of postwar Germany ended not in socialist rupture but in bloody repression of the revolutionary Left. In Greece a century later, Syriza rose to power on anti-austerity hopes but accepted a new austerity package under the pressure of the European financial order.^[10] The lesson is not that every reformist formation is identical. It is that organizations operating within capitalist institutions are subject to enormous pressure to manage those institutions rather than break with them. In a big-tent formation like DSA, that pressure does not fall evenly. It strengthens the moderate pole.

V. A counterargument worth taking seriously

A serious Marxist critique must also confront the strongest case on the other side. The United States has no labor party, no proportional representation, and no durable national tradition of independent working-class electoral organization. First-past-the-post rules punish minor parties. Ballot-access laws are restrictive. Media systems marginalize independent politics. Under those conditions, it is not irrational for socialists to use the Democratic ballot line tactically while trying to build something more durable behind it.

This is the logic of the so-called “dirty break”: run on the Democratic line where necessary, accumulate forces, build organization, deepen class consciousness, and eventually split toward independent working-class politics. That strategy has had real defenders inside the DSA orbit, and it is not reducible to mere opportunism.^[11] Nor should one dismiss the scale of the organization’s growth. DSA was a small group before the post-2016 socialist revival; by 2026 it had become a six-figure organization with real local implantation, a wider political vocabulary, and a much larger audience for socialist ideas than the American Left had possessed in decades.^[12]

Those gains matter. They have introduced thousands of people to socialist politics, trained organizers, supported labor and tenant campaigns, and won offices that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. That is not trivial, but it still does not answer the central Marxist objection. The issue is not whether DSA can win elections, pass reforms, or radicalize a layer of activists. It plainly can. The issue is whether its dominant strategy builds the forms of working-class power capable of surviving collision with capital and the state. On that question, the doubts remain serious. A Marxist critique of DSA is therefore not a complaint that it wants too much; it is the harsher claim that, by tying socialist politics to institutions designed to absorb and domesticate them, it may be constructing the very machinery of its own containment. |P

^[1] Democratic Socialists of America, “Your National Political Committee Newsletter—Socialism Beats Fascism” (February 12, 2026), <https://www.dsausa.org/news/feb2026_npc_newsletter/>; New York City Board of Elections, Statement and Return Report for Certification: General Election 2025: Mayor (December 2, 2025).

^[2] See Barry Eidlin, “When Joe Biden Takes the White House, What’s Next for the Left?,” Jacobin (January 19, 2021), <https://jacobin.com/2021/01/joe-biden-president-left-strategy-dsa>; shared on the DSA homepage.

^[3] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852).

^[4] V. I. Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920).

^[5] See Anthony Izaguirre,“Zohran Mamdani’s been called a communist who’ll defund the police. Here’s where he actually stands,” Associated Press (September 20, 2025), <https://apnews.com/article/zohran-mamdani-nyc-mayor-election-cuomo-59f6a66cd40d4c2b750fdfd06a4f5da1>; “Zohran Mamdani Talks Public Safety,” Vital City (September 12, 2025), <https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/zohran-mamdani-talks-public-safety/>; Peter Dreier, “How Zohran Mamdani Can Succeed as Mayor,” Jacobin (June 30, 2025), <https://jacobin.com/2025/06/mamdani-mayor-socialism-nyc-strategy>.

^[6] See Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871) and Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire.

^[7] See Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1978).

^[8] Joseph M. Schwartz and Bhaskar Sunkara, “What Should Socialists Do?,” Jacobin (August 1, 2017), <https://jacobin.com/2017/08/socialist-left-democratic-socialists-america-dsa>, reprinted in DSA’s Democratic Left (September 11, 2017), <https://www.dsausa.org/blog/what_should_socialists_do/>; André Gorz, Strategy for Labor: A Radical Proposal (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967).

^[9] See Gabriel Winant, “India Walton Is a Sign of What the Socialist Movement Could Become,” Jacobin (July 2, 2021), <https://jacobin.com/2021/07/india-walton-buffalo-mayor-rust-belt-health-postindustrial-workers-socialist-black-vote-race-class>; David Duhalde, “How Democratic Socialists of America Has Developed Into a ‘Movement Party,’” In These Times (February 11, 2026), <https://inthesetimes.com/article/democratic-socialists-of-america-dsa-zohran-mamdani>.

^[10] See Renee Maltezou and Angeliki Koutantou, “Greek parliament approves bailout measures as Syriza fragments,” Reuters (July 16, 2015), <https://www.reuters.com/article/business/greek-parliament-approves-bailout-measures-as-syriza-fragments-idUSKBN0P40EN/>.

^[11] See Ian McClure, “Rashida Tlaib Shows that the Dirty Break Is Viable,” The Activist (YDSA) (January 12, 2023), <https://y.dsausa.org/the-activist/rashida-tlaib-shows-that-the-dirty-break-is-viable/>; Eidlin, “When Joe Biden Takes.”

^[12] Duhalde, “‘Movement Party’”; DSA, “Socialism Beats Fascism.”