Red Scare Again: The Newsweek Cover, the White House Panic, and the Real State of the American Left
Fear Is Not New, the Class Is the Same: From Mamdani to Sanders, the American Left and Capital's Nightmare
Fear Is Not New, the Class Is the Same: From Mamdani to Sanders, the American Left and Capital's Nightmare
Situation Summary
Dear Young Comrades, let us first briefly describe what happened, then move on to the details.
What happened? One of the United States' long-established news magazines, Newsweek, published its 23 October issue on 14 October under the cover "The Socialist Republic of America" (Newsweek). With a design echoing Mao-era Chinese Communist Party posters, the cover placed five names side by side and asked the reader: "Ready to join the American socialist revolution?" The names on the cover are these: Senator Bernie Sanders, Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Michigan's Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, and Turkish-origin streamer Hasan Piker. According to the dossier, demands once ostracised as "socialist" are now the stuff of mainstream politics: universal healthcare, free university, a shorter working week, a wealth tax. Membership of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) passed 120,000 in July 2026. The magazine also noted an irony: the Trump administration bought roughly 9.9 per cent of Intel, yet no one calls the state's partnership in a private company socialism.
What did the White House say? On 15 October the White House issued an official statement. Its title was: "It's Not a 'Socialist Revolution.' It's Misery, Starvation, and Death." The statement accused Newsweek of joining a coordinated campaign to "whitewash, normalise and romanticise" socialism. It claimed the socialist agenda would cost 49 trillion dollars over ten years and that socialist regimes had killed "around 100 million" people. It said the Democratic Party had been "taken over by the radical left" and would turn the country into a "Third World country".
What is the state of communists in the US? Communist parties remain very small. The oldest, CPUSA, has around 11,000 active members. Alongside it there are street-effective Marxist-Leninist organisations such as the PSL, Trotskyist groups, and the American Party of Labor (APL), the US member of CIPOML, of which Türkiye's EMEP is also a member. The APL is a small but principled party: it works for a 30-hour working week, the right of oppressed peoples to self-determination, withdrawal from NATO, and struggle against imperialist wars. The growing structure is the DSA, but the DSA is not a revolutionary party. It has no separate party organisation; it runs its candidates through Democratic Party primaries. The real change is in public opinion: two-thirds of Democratic voters view socialism favourably; those who view capitalism favourably are at 42 per cent.
What are workers doing? The unionisation rate is around 10 per cent, and in the private sector below 6 per cent. But 2026 was a year in which workers moved again. In January a general strike was held in Minnesota against immigration police ICE. In February teachers and nurses went on strike. On 1 May more than 3,000 actions took place in 40 cities. The fuel and cost-of-living bill of the Iran war is also growing anger. Remembering that 1 May was born in Chicago shows where the American working class drew this strength from.
Who are Mamdani and Sanders in reality? Neither is a communist. Both are reformist social democrats. What they want and what they do is not to abolish capitalism but to regulate it: rent freezes, public healthcare, taxes on the rich. They do not touch property relations. For forty years Sanders has been the name that binds the Democratic Party's left wing to the party. Mamdani, for nine months, has been colliding with the limits of a mayor's powers.
What is feared? Capital is not afraid of Mamdani's buses. What is feared is this: a new generation no longer regards capitalism as legitimate. An organised base is forming around material demands such as rent, healthcare and wages, and that base may one day spill beyond the Democratic Party. The White House's "red scare" language is also an electoral tool for the 3 November midterms: it directs anger arising from the cost of living towards an internal enemy.
What do we see? As Knowledge Commons we have been writing for months: capitalism is buying time with technology but losing the future. The young generation sees this before anyone else. This tendency is at work in the US as well. We see that the future in the US too is turning towards a socialist form. We also know that saying this openly will not please Trump at all.
In this piece we will open these headings one by one. Our aim is neither to exalt America nor to belittle it. Our aim is to understand why the ruling class is alarmed. Because those who know why a ruling class is afraid also learn where their own power lies.
The Event: A Magazine Cover, an Official Statement
What does the cover say?
Newsweek is not a left-wing publication. It is a mainstream, centrist news magazine that sometimes leans right. That is why the cover itself is news. The magazine is not defending socialism; it is recording a tendency: in the US the word socialism, after a century, is once again inside mass politics.
The dossier signed by Christopher Roberts, Carlo Versano and Leonardo Feldman (Newsweek, 14 October 2026) opens with this sentence: "Socialism used to be something we Americans picked up freshman year, in the dorm room." That is, an enthusiasm adopted in youth and dropped when one entered working life. The dossier's thesis is that this picture has changed. The main findings are these:
- DSA membership passed 120,000 in July 2026.
- Mamdani, in Quinnipiac's September poll, receives a favourable rating from more than 60 per cent of likely voters in New York.
- Public ownership is not foreign to the US. Millions of Americans get their electricity from companies owned by municipalities or consumer cooperatives. Newsweek asks it like this: many people who will never go to a DSA meeting get their electricity from a municipal company — is that socialism? (Newsweek, X)
- The state does not hesitate to enter ownership when capital wants it. The Trump administration's roughly 9.9 per cent stake in Intel taken in August 2025 is an example (Al Jazeera), yet no one calls that socialism.
- Policies once ostracised under the "socialist" label are now inside mainstream debate: universal healthcare, free higher education, a shorter working week, a wealth tax.
- The five names on the cover are presented as faces of the same wave at different levels: Senate (Sanders), Congress (Ocasio-Cortez), mayor (Mamdani), electoral candidacy (El-Sayed) and digital media (Piker).
The magazine also offered readers a 20-question quiz (the quiz itself). Each "yes" answer is worth one point. Some of the questions are taken from the DSA's 2026 programme:
- Working 32 hours a week without a change in pay
- Free healthcare, free university, cancellation of student debt
- A wealth tax
- Abolition of immigration police ICE, abolition of the Electoral College system
- Transfer of electricity distribution to the municipality, municipal supermarket, free public transport
- Supporting strikes
Other questions concern everyday habits: drinking oat milk, wearing a keffiyeh at Starbucks, carrying an anti-capitalist tote bag, leaving X, not using Airbnb. This second group became part of the debate, because it reduced the class question to a consumption preference. The White House also chose these questions for mockery.
Do those on the cover want the same thing?
No, and this matters. The cover presents five names as a single ideological bloc. Yet:
- Abdul El-Sayed says he is not a democratic socialist, is not a DSA member, and defines himself as a capitalist. Supporting policies such as Medicare for All was enough to put him on the cover (ThePrint).
- Hasan Piker is not a politician; he is a Twitch streamer. He has a wide audience among young people. A section of the Democratic Party also targets him because of his words on Israel and Gaza.
- Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani define themselves as "democratic socialists". But the political practice of all three is inside the Democratic Party.
So the cover does not show a "socialist republic"; it shows a broad spectrum that looks "left" relative to a centre that has shifted right. Why the right loves this cover so much also becomes clear from here. House Speaker Mike Johnson presented the cover as proof that the Democratic Party had been taken over by a "dangerous Marxist left" and wrote: "This is NOT your father's Democratic Party!" (ThePrint) Le Monde's investigation this month (summary at Daily Beirut) also pointed to the same change: base organising by young activists and candidates who reject big-business donations are becoming increasingly visible inside the Democratic Party. Progressives, for their part, reacted by saying the cover equated their politics with communism.
What does the White House say?
On 15 October the White House published a statement titled "It's Not a 'Socialist Revolution.' It's Misery, Starvation, and Death." (The White House). There is no spokesperson's name under the statement; the signature is only "The White House". In summary the text says:
- Mockery: Newsweek's quiz is ridiculed as the "little red quiz". The oat-milk and tote-bag questions are highlighted.
- Takeover narrative: Socialist ideology is being sold to Americans by a radical left that has "taken over" the DSA and the Democratic Party. Counted as this group's agenda: Medicare for All, open borders, mass amnesty, abolition of the police and prisons, the Green New Deal.
- Cost: According to a new Council of Economic Advisers report, the ten-year cost of this agenda is 49 trillion dollars, up to 400,000 dollars per household. Its results would supposedly be an approximately 30 per cent fall in wages, mortgage rates above 12 per cent, millions of job losses, empty shelves and rationed healthcare.
- Death toll: Socialist and communist regimes killed "around 100 million" people through artificial famine, mass execution and labour camps.
- Accusation: Democrats are "deliberately" destroying America's prosperity, security and freedom. Socialism is a "sick, perverted system".
- Closing: Trump's Truth Social post is quoted: "America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country!!!"
This statement does not stand alone. In its July 2026 "Captive Nations Week" proclamation the White House had also defined socialism and communism as "evil ideologies", and communism as the greatest threat facing the US (BirGün). In the days the statement was published, the right-wing Article III Project was also warning of a "communist-Islamist threat" in midterm ads (Washington Times). The target is clear: to present Mamdani as the face of the Democratic Party and to hit all Democrats together with him on 3 November.
Taking the statement apart
Let us take the statement seriously and read it piece by piece.
An agenda is being invented. The text loads the demand to "abolish the police" onto Mamdani and the DSA. Yet Mamdani kept Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch in post and added 580 officers to the force. The DSA criticised him for this (The Crosscheck). "Open borders" is in neither Sanders's nor Mamdani's programme. The statement debates not with real demands but with an invented agenda. The reason is simple: it is hard to oppose a rent freeze or free healthcare. It is easy to oppose "radicals who want to abolish the police".
The cost accounting is one-sided. The 49 trillion dollar figure comes from the Council of Economic Advisers report "The Real Cost of Socialism in America", published on 1 October and attached to the White House (CEA report, PDF, White House announcement). The report also places opening the borders, abolishing the police and ICE, and closing prisons into the "DSA agenda" whose cost it calculates. So the cost is largely the cost of an invented agenda. There is no independent verification of the figures. The real problem is what the accounting leaves out. The cost of the existing order is never counted: the world's most expensive healthcare system, 1.7 trillion dollars in student debt, a rent burden that grows heavier every year. Free healthcare is an expenditure item for the state budget, but for the worker it is an insurance premium that does not come out of their pocket. The White House shows only one side of the ledger: capital's and the budget's side.
The "100 million" figure is being used. This number comes from the tradition of The Black Book of Communism and is contested even among the book's own authors. It lumps famines, war losses, unborn children and executions into a single line. We do not need to whitewash the repression in Soviet history or the great famine in China. We draw lessons from those defeats (the section "We Learn from Our Defeats" in our Communist Manifesto 2.0 study was written for this). But what is being done here is not a historical debate. Freezing rent in New York and the Gulag are put in the same category. The same method is not applied to capitalism's balance sheet: colonial famines, imperialist wars, those who go untreated for lack of health insurance.
When the state takes property for capital, it is not socialism. The same administration bought roughly 9.9 per cent of Intel. It presents the state's partnership in a private company to protect the chip industry as a "strategic investment". It brands a municipality opening a grocery store as "misery and starvation". The problem is not that property is in the state's hands. The problem is in whose interest that property is used. State partnership to protect capital's profit is counted as legitimate; public ownership for the people's needs is counted as dangerous.
The reaction itself is a confession. The world's most powerful executive office wrote an official statement to answer a magazine quiz. That it did so shows the debate can no longer be suppressed. Ruling ideology stays silent when it feels secure. When it is forced to speak, it raises its voice.
A Brief History of the Red Scare
To understand today's alarm one must look back. Socialism was never a "foreign" idea in the US. But every time it grew strong it was crushed by the state.
First wave: Debs and the Palmer Raids
At the beginning of the twentieth century there was a strong socialist movement in the US. Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs took around 6 per cent of the vote in the 1912 presidential election. Industrial cities such as Milwaukee were governed for decades by socialist mayors. Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison for opposing the First World War. He ran from prison in the 1920 election and received around 900,000 votes. In 1919–1920, in Attorney General Palmer's raids (Palmer Raids), thousands of immigrant workers and leftists were arrested and hundreds deported. This was the First Red Scare.
Second wave: McCarthy and the cleansing of the unions
In the Great Depression of the 1930s the Communist Party (CPUSA) grew stronger. The party reached around 80,000 members by the mid-1940s. It played an important role in organising industrial unions, in Black workers' rights, and in the antifascist struggle. Then the state moved:
- The Smith Act of 1940 made advocating the overthrow of the government a crime. In 1949 party leaders were put on trial. The Supreme Court upheld the convictions in 1951 and more than 140 members were subsequently prosecuted (Wikipedia).
- The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 required union officials to swear they were "not communists". The CIO labour federation expelled eleven unions in which communists were influential in 1949–1950.
- In Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch hunt (McCarthyism), public employees, teachers, artists and scientists were dismissed from their jobs and blacklisted.
- The Communist Control Act of 1954 effectively banned the party. The law was never fully applied, but there was no longer any need. By 1957 party membership had fallen below 10,000, and around 1,500 of those were FBI informants.
The lesson to draw from this is: in the US the communist movement was not liquidated by losing elections but by state violence. What was liquidated was not only a party. The real target was a left intertwined with the unions, with roots in the workplace. Let us keep that in mind, because the object of today's fear is the same.
Where Do Communists and Socialists Stand in the US Today?
Now let us map it out. Thinking of the American left in three layers makes our work easier: small communist parties, a growing democratic socialist movement, and the broad tendency in public opinion.
Communist parties: a closer look
The communist movement in the US is not a single party but an archipelago left by a century of splits. Each one's roots go back to a rupture in the international communist movement: the Soviet revisionism debate of the 1950s, the Sino-Soviet split, Trotskyism, Albania's stance against both sides. Without knowing these ruptures we cannot read today's map.
CPUSA (Communist Party USA). The oldest party, founded in 1919. In the 1930s and 1940s it played a major role in organising industrial unions, in Black workers' rights, and in the antifascist struggle. It was crushed in the McCarthy period. Throughout Gus Hall's general secretaryship from 1959 to 2000 it remained loyal to the Soviet line. Angela Davis was the party's vice-presidential candidate in 1980 and 1984. Today it is led by co-chairs Joe Sims and Rossana Cambron. The party says it has taken 20,000 registrations since 2016, but that around 9,000 of these have dropped away. Active membership is around 11,000. These figures are the party's own declaration; there is no independent verification (The National Pulse). For long years the party's main line was to support the Democratic Party against the right. In 2025 it re-entered elections with its own candidates and won city council seats in two small cities: Ithaca in New York State and Bangor in Maine.
American Communist Party (2024). In 2024 a group split, accusing the CPUSA of trailing the Democrats and abandoning Marxism-Leninism. The new party stands on a strange line called "MAGA communism", which winks at right-wing populism. It tries to combine class politics with nationalism and cultural conservatism. This experience is a sign of America's ideological confusion: class anger is so widespread that even the right tries to harvest it under the name of "communism".
PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation). Founded in 2004 by a split from the Workers World Party (Wikipedia). Through the ANSWER coalition it is one of the largest organisers of anti-war and Palestine solidarity actions. It entered the 2024 presidential election with its own candidate. Strong in the street, relatively weak in workplaces and unions.
Trotskyist organisations. The Revolutionary Communists of America (RCA) is the US section of the International Marxist Tendency. In 2024 it dropped its former name, Socialist Revolution, and took this one. There are also other Trotskyist structures such as the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and Socialist Alternative. Socialist Alternative member Kshama Sawant served on Seattle City Council from 2014 to 2024 and became a symbol of the 15-dollar minimum wage campaign.
American Party of Labor (APL). This party, which has a special place for us, we describe in detail below.
The American Party of Labor: Who Is It, What Does It Work For?
Dear Young Comrades, among the communist parties in the US the one closest to us is the American Party of Labor (APL). The APL is the US member of the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations (CIPOML), of which the Labour Party (EMEP) in Türkiye is also a member (CIPOML). CIPOML was founded in 1994 in Quito, the capital of Ecuador. Today it brings together parties and organisations from more than twenty countries, from Europe to Latin America, from Africa to South Asia. Its organ Unity and Struggle and CIPOML's joint statements are also published on the APL's site (APL, CIPOML 1 May statement).
Its origins and line
The APL was founded in 2008. It defines itself as the US's "only openly anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist party". What does "anti-revisionist" mean? A section of the communist movement characterised the turn that began with the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 as "revisionism". This section argued that Marxism's revolutionary core — that is, class struggle, proletarian power, and intransigence towards imperialism — was diluted in the name of "peaceful coexistence" and "parliamentary transition". The Party of Labour of Albania and its leader Enver Hoxha first opposed the Soviets, then at the end of the 1970s China's "Three Worlds Theory". The CIPOML tradition rises on these two criticisms.
The APL lists its intellectual sources as Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. To these it adds Enver Hoxha and national liberation leaders such as Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh (InfluenceWatch). This detail matters. In an imperialist centre such as the US, the APL sees the liberation struggle of peoples crushed by imperialism as part of its own struggle.
What does it work for?
The APL's programme, in brief, is this: to build a vanguard party representing the working class in the US and, through revolution, to establish a socialist republic based on proletarian power (CIPOML). That means the APL does not see elections as a goal. It does not refuse to take part in elections and trade-union struggle, but it sees these not as an end but as a means of organising the class.
The main points of the programme are these:
- Property and labour: It defends the view that value is created by human labour, and wants the abolition of private ownership of the means of production and their socialisation. As short-term demands it puts forward a 30-hour working week and a universal basic income.
- Oppressed peoples and the right to self-determination: It defends the right of oppressed peoples within US borders — that is, America's Indigenous nations, Chicanos, Native Hawaiians, Guamanian people and Puerto Ricans — to self-determination. It wants an end to Puerto Rico's commonwealth status.
- Migrants: It wants the abolition of deportations and immigration laws, and an end to the militarisation of the US–Mexico border. It sees migration as a result of neoliberal policies that displace people.
- Imperialism: It wants the withdrawal of US troops from bases abroad, US exit from NATO, an end to military and foreign aid to Israel, Colombia and the Philippines, and the cancellation of poor countries' debts.
How does it work?
The APL's organisation is small relative to the size of the US, but widespread. It has branches in California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin. Its National Chair is Camilo Lazo, its National Spokesperson Alfonso Casal. The party has a Labor Commission concerned with the workers' movement and a Women's Commission.
Its publications are these (APL publications):
- The Red Phoenix: The party's newspaper. It appears in print every two months and publishes online daily (redphoenixnews.com). Its aim is to give workers a platform and to offer a class-conscious perspective.
- Marxist-Leninist Currents: A theoretical journal published twice a year. It discusses the damage revisionism has done to the workers' movement and how theory can guide struggle.
Field work ranges from food and clothing solidarity campaigns to anti-war actions, from migrant solidarity to workplace organising. In January 2024 the APL supported the march on Washington for Gaza, and in July 2024 the march against the Republican Party convention in Milwaukee.
What has it been saying recently?
Articles published in Red Phoenix in recent months show the party's priorities (Red Phoenix):
- On Mamdani: The title of the party's piece on Mamdani's election says it all: "The rulers' fear of someone who is reformist in policy, socialist in declaration." This is the same conclusion we reach in this piece. Mamdani's programme is reformist, but the ruling class fears the word "socialist" meeting the masses.
- War against Iran: The APL issued a "Call to the peoples of the world" against the US and Israeli attack on Iran. It recalled that the Iraq war began with the "weapons of mass destruction" lie, and that the "nuclear programme" pretext against Iran serves the same purpose.
- Repression against migrants: It characterised ICE raids in Los Angeles and the deployment of the National Guard against protesters as "a fascist war against the people".
- Latin America: It issued a series of statements against US intervention in Venezuela.
- Misogyny in the workplace: The Labor and Women's commissions issued a joint statement after the killing of 20-year-old welder Amber Czech in Minnesota by a workplace colleague. The statement assessed the murder as a tragic expression of misogyny in the world of labour.
Party members described what 1 May means to them in Red Phoenix as follows (APL). For Polina Brik of New Jersey, 1 May is "both love and war". For National Spokesperson Alfonso Casal it is a day of pride on which labourers hold their heads high and declare that the future belongs to them. John Palameda of Illinois says American workers are constantly pressured to be ashamed of being workers, and defines 1 May as the day of bringing what has been won in unions and local elections to every worker.
What can we learn from the APL?
The APL is a small party. There is no point in hiding that. But its value does not come from its size. Its value is that, inside the world's most powerful imperialist state, it openly names the crimes that state commits against its own peoples and the world. That it criticises in principle the limits of the DSA's bond with the Democratic Party. But that in doing so it does not belittle the anger of the masses who elected Mamdani. And that it carries internationalism into everyday politics, from Gaza to Venezuela, from the Philippines to Puerto Rico.
For the debate in this piece, the APL's line enables us to ask this question: the names on the Newsweek cover bring the masses together with the word socialism, but who will carry this mass towards an organised force that can truly surpass capitalism? The APL's answer is clear: a vanguard party rooted in the workplace, the neighbourhood and the union, that does not sever the struggle for reforms from the goal of revolution. Putting this answer into practice in the US is not easy. But the question itself is the right one.
The democratic socialist movement: DSA
The main carrier of growth is the Democratic Socialists of America, that is the DSA. An organisation with a few thousand members in 2016, it grew with the Sanders campaigns and the anti-Trump wave and passed 120,000 members in July 2026.
To understand the DSA one needs to know three things:
- It is not a party. It has no electoral list of its own. It runs its candidates through Democratic Party primaries. In the US's two-party electoral system the path of third parties is closed by legal and financial barriers. The DSA tries to overcome this barrier from inside the Democratic Party.
- There are different tendencies inside it. Marxists, social democrats, trade unionists, tenant-movement activists under the same roof. The debate on "breaking from the Democratic Party" never ends inside the organisation.
- Its real strength is local. In New York the DSA has a serious group in the state assembly and the city council. Mamdani also emerged from this group.
The tendency in public opinion
The real change is not in the organisations but in the mass. According to Gallup's August 2025 poll (Fortune):
- 54 per cent of US adults view capitalism favourably. That rate was 61 per cent in 2010.
- 66 per cent of Democratic voters view socialism favourably. Those who view capitalism favourably are at 42 per cent.
- Among Democrats under 50 the rate viewing capitalism favourably fell to 31 per cent. In 2010 that rate was 54 per cent.
- Favourable views of big business fell from 49 per cent to 37 per cent. Among Democrats that rate is 17 per cent.
Mamdani summarised it at the time like this: "If calling us democratic socialists is no longer enough, you understand that something has changed." These figures are a measure not of revolutionary consciousness but of discontent. But for the first time the name of that discontent is being set as "socialism", and the word capitalism is beginning to turn into an insult. For the ruling class the problem is precisely this.
The map
| Structure | Size | Political line | Place in elections |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPUSA | ~11,000 active members | Continuation of the Marxist-Leninist tradition; long support for Democrats | Local candidates since 2025 |
| American Communist Party | Small | "MAGA communism"; mixed with nationalism | Marginal |
| American Party of Labor (APL) | Small; branches in ten states | Anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist; CIPOML member | Sees elections as a means, not a goal |
| PSL and other ML groups | Small, activist | Revolutionary; campus and street | Marginal |
| Trotskyist organisations (RCA, SWP, Socialist Alternative) | Small | Trotskyist | Local candidates, marginal |
| DSA | Over 120,000 members | Democratic socialist; Marxists also inside | Democratic Party primaries |
| Broad public opinion | Two-thirds of Democrats | Favourable to socialism, without a programme | Democratic voter base |
1 May: The Holiday Born in America, Which America Made Us Forget
Dear Young Comrades, every year when we face the police for Taksim, 1 May is an American holiday. Knowing this also makes it easier to understand why the American ruling class is so forgetful.
From Haymarket to today
On 1 May 1886 hundreds of thousands of workers across the US went on strike for the eight-hour day. The centre was Chicago. On 3 May police opened fire on strikers in front of the McCormick factory. On 4 May, at a protest rally in Haymarket Square, a bomb exploded and police fired into the crowd. Who threw the bomb was never proved. Nevertheless eight anarchist labour leaders were tried and four were hanged in 1887. The Second International in Paris in 1889 declared 1 May the day of unity, struggle and solidarity of the world's workers in memory of the Haymarket martyrs.
The American ruling class found this history hard to digest. Immediately after the 1894 Pullman railway strike was crushed with the army, Congress declared the first Monday of September "Labor Day" as an official holiday. The aim was to sever Labour Day from the internationalist and revolutionary meaning of 1 May. In the Cold War a further step was taken and 1 May was officially declared "Loyalty Day". The world's workers' holiday was to be turned, in the country where it was born, into a patriotism ceremony.
1 May returns
This forgetting largely succeeded, but workers reclaimed 1 May again and again. On 1 May 2006 millions of migrant workers stopped work with the "A Day Without Immigrants" action. It became one of the largest actions in US history. Since then 1 May in America has been above all the day of migrant workers.
From 2025 onwards 1 May became a mass day again. On 1 May 2026 the "May Day Strong" coalition of around 500 labour organisations organised an economic boycott with the call "no school, no work, no shopping". More than 3,000 actions took place in around 40 cities (Al Jazeera, Wikipedia). The main slogan was "Workers Over Billionaires". The demands were these:
- tax the rich,
- abolish ICE,
- stop the Iran war,
- expand democracy.
In North Carolina teachers acted for the school budget and more than a dozen school districts closed in solidarity. In New Orleans nurses demanded a pay rise. In New York protesters demanded that Amazon stop the cloud services it provides to ICE. Mayor Mamdani also spoke at the rally in Washington Square Park.
The same day in Istanbul police attacked those wanting to march to Taksim with tear gas and detained at least 570 people. From Chicago to Istanbul, this is the hundred-and-forty-year story of the same day: wherever capital is, it fears 1 May.
A general strike goal: 1 May 2028
The most ambitious goal spoken of in the American labour movement today is the call by Shawn Fain, president of the auto workers' union UAW. After the great auto strike of 2023, Fain called on all unions to align the end dates of their collective contracts with 1 May 2028 (Jacobin). The aim is to be able to hold a nationwide general strike that day. Other large unions such as the teachers' union AFT also support this call. This is not a dream; it is a timetable being organised. Whether it happens depends on how far the base organises over the next two years.
Unions: From Yesterday to Today
Rise: a class finding itself
The history of the labour movement in the US is one of the bloodiest labour histories in the world. At the end of the nineteenth century the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) were the first large organisations. The AFL was the union of craft workers — that is, mostly white and male skilled workers. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded in 1905, organised immigrants, women, Black workers and unskilled workers under the slogan "one big union". The state and the bosses crushed the IWW during the First World War with mass trials and lynchings.
The great leap came in the Depression of the 1930s. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), founded in 1935, organised factory workers from auto to steel, rubber to electricity in industrial unions. In the Flint sit-down strike of 1936–1937 General Motors workers occupied the plant for 44 days and won recognition for the UAW. The Wagner Act of the same year recognised workers' right to form unions and bargain collectively. A significant part of the most determined organisers of this rise were communists. By the mid-1950s around one-third of wage earners were unionised.
Decline: from Taft-Hartley to Reagan
The retreat began immediately after the rise. As we described above, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 banned solidarity strikes, gave states the power to weaken unions financially under the name of "right-to-work", and required union officials to swear "I am not a communist". The CIO expelled the communists and merged with the AFL in 1955. The labour movement chose to leave class struggle and build "social partnership" with capital. In return wages rose for a generation, but the movement's political independence was lost.
In 1981 President Reagan mass-fired 11,000 striking air traffic controllers (the PATCO union). This was a signal to capital: strike-breaking was legitimate again. Over the next forty years factories moved to non-union southern states and abroad, and the unionisation rate fell a little further every year.
Today: the story of 10 per cent
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), in 2025 10.0 per cent of wage earners were union members (BLS). The table is as follows:
| Sector | Unionisation rate (2025) |
|---|---|
| All wage earners | 10.0% |
| Public sector | 32.9% |
| Private sector | 5.9% |
| Manufacturing | 7.7% |
| Construction | 11.1% |
| Leisure and hospitality | 3.0% |
| Finance | 1.5% |
In the private sector only six of every hundred workers are unionised. This is the American left's greatest weakness. The DSA's 120,000 members and Mamdani's election victory rest on top of this workplace disorganisation.
The new wave: from Starbucks to Amazon
But something has been stirring in the last five years. Americans' view of unions is at its most favourable since the 1960s. A new generation is organising in workplaces where there was never a union:
- Starbucks Workers United: Organisation that began in a café in Buffalo in 2021 spread to hundreds of shops within a few years. The struggle for a first collective contract continues.
- Amazon: In 2022 workers at the JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island defeated one of the world's most anti-union companies by founding an independent union that emerged from inside the company. The struggle continues, now joined with the Teamsters union.
- UAW: In 2023 the new leadership under Shawn Fain conducted a simultaneous "Stand Up Strike" against the three big auto companies and won the best contract in decades. In 2024 at the Volkswagen plant in Tennessee the first major unionisation victory in the South in decades was won.
- Teachers, nurses, academics: Since the 2018 "Red for Ed" teacher strikes, public employees, healthcare workers and graduate students have been among the most combative sections.
Trump's attack
The Trump administration is using all the state's tools against this wave (Al Jazeera):
- Thousands of federal employees were moved to "at-will" status. It became harder for these employees to challenge dismissal.
- National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) member Gwynne Wilcox was removed and the board's staff cut. The institution that handles unionisation cases was effectively rendered inoperative.
- The budget of the workplace safety agency OSHA was cut; protective rules prepared against extreme heat were halted.
- The federal minimum wage has been 7.25 dollars an hour since 2009. The minimum-wage rule for federal contractors was also removed in 2025.
The class meaning of this attack is clear: capital fears the speed of workers' organising combining with the speed of the spread of the word socialism.
Class in a Year of Crisis: What Did Workers Do in 2026?
War, fuel and the cost of living
2026 was a year in which the American worker paid the bill for war. The US and Israel attacked Iran on 28 February. The price of a barrel of Brent oil rose in a month from 72 dollars to 118 dollars. According to the International Energy Agency, diesel and heating-oil prices in the US rose 94 per cent compared with before the war (Wikipedia). Fuel costs were decisive in low-cost airline Spirit Airlines ceasing operations in May. Thousands were left unemployed.
In September annual inflation rose to 3.7 per cent, and the main items in the last data before the midterms were petrol and diesel (CNN). According to Moody's the Iran war costs every American household around 2,000 dollars (CNN). While the White House says "socialism costs 400,000 dollars per household", it does not talk about the per-household bill of its own war.
Minnesota: a general strike against ICE
The year's first large class action was not for an economic demand but a political one. In January, after federal immigration police ICE were mass-deployed to Minneapolis and St. Paul and two US citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were killed, Minnesota's unions and churches moved. On 23 January a statewide "no work, no school, no shopping" action was held under the name "Day of Truth and Freedom". Dozens of unions including the AFL-CIO took part; hundreds of workplaces closed (Democracy Now, NPR). Most of those who organised the action openly called that day a "general strike". This was something not seen in the US for decades: workers stopped work to protect their migrant class siblings. On 30 January anti-ICE actions spread nationwide (Wikipedia).
The strike wave
In February strikes erupted across the country (WSWS):
- In San Francisco 6,400 teachers went on strike on 9 February for a pay rise, class-size limits and the education budget. In Los Angeles tens of thousands of teachers held a strike vote.
- At Kaiser Permanente 31,000 nurses and healthcare workers struck for weeks against cuts that put profit first.
- In New York 15,000 nurses held a month-long strike.
- At the University of California 40,000 graduate student employees went to a strike vote.
- At BP's Whiting refinery in Indiana workers resisted a contract they found inadequate.
- At UPS, Amazon and in the auto sector tens of thousands of workers struggled against mass layoffs.
The common point of these strikes was inflation, falling living standards and job losses. The crisis pushed workers not into silence but into struggle.
The big contracts on the table
2026 is also a year of major collective contracts. According to Labor Notes' compilation, the following are on the table (Labor Notes):
| Sector | Workplace / union | Number of workers |
|---|---|---|
| Public | New York city employees | More than 300,000 |
| Public | Letter carriers (NALC) | 200,000 |
| Public | California state employees (SEIU) | 96,000 |
| Healthcare | New York hospitals (SEIU) | 80,000 |
| Energy | Oil refineries (USW) | around 30,000 |
| Retail | Stop & Shop (UFCW) | 30,000 |
| Steel | Cleveland-Cliffs and US Steel (USW) | 25,000 |
| Healthcare | Kaiser Northern California (NNU) | 24,600 nurses |
| Communications | Verizon (CWA and IBEW) | 20,000 |
| Aerospace | Boeing Seattle (SPEEA) | 17,000 |
Each of these contracts is a test of whether wages can truly be protected in a year of war and inflation. The contract of New York's 300,000 city employees is also a test for Mamdani. When the "socialist" mayor sits at the table with his own workers, whose side will he take?
The limit of union bureaucracy
The table also has a dark side. The large union confederations largely stayed silent when the Iran war began (WSWS). Some strikes ended with contracts hastily signed by leaderships before the base wanted. Two diseases American unionism inherited from the Cold War persist: dependence on the Democratic Party and alignment with imperialism in foreign policy. The Minnesota general strike, the 1 May boycott and the 2028 general strike goal show that the base is pushing these limits.
Class reading
In 2026 the American working class did three things. It held a political strike for its migrant class siblings. It struck in healthcare, education and industry against the cost of living. It reclaimed 1 May as its own day. None of these three actions alone is a revolution. But together the three show the real reason the White House shouts "misery, starvation and death": the class has begun to remember its own power again.
Zohran Mamdani: Who Is the "Socialist" Mayor?
Life
Zohran Mamdani was born in 1991 in Kampala, the capital of Uganda. His father is the academic known for colonial studies Mahmood Mamdani; his mother is film director Mira Nair. As a child he moved with his family to New York. He entered politics by doing housing counselling for tenants: he worked with low-income families under threat of foreclosure and eviction. In 2020, with DSA support, he was elected to the New York State Assembly from Queens's Astoria district.
When he set out for mayor in 2025 he was at 1 per cent in the polls. In the June 2025 Democratic primary he defeated former governor Andrew Cuomo. In the November 2025 election he again beat Cuomo, running as an independent, and the Republican candidate. He took office on 1 January 2026. His campaign rested on a single question: why is living in New York so expensive?
Promises and balance sheet
Mamdani's programme consisted of four promises: a rent freeze, free buses, municipal grocery stores and free childcare. All of these were to be financed by new taxes on the rich and corporations. Nine months later the balance sheet looks like this (The Crosscheck, City & State):
| Promise | Status |
|---|---|
| Rent freeze | On 25 June the Rent Guidelines Board accepted it by 7 to 1. Valid from October for around 1 million rent-stabilised flats. Mamdani appointed 6 of the board's 9 members. |
| Free buses | Not implemented. The MTA that runs the buses is a state agency; the financing decision sits in Albany (the state capital). Annual cost between 700 million and 1 billion dollars. |
| Municipal grocery stores | In the planning stage. The first store at La Marqueta in East Harlem, opening at earliest end of 2027. Target of five stores in five boroughs by 2029. |
| Free childcare | In pilot: around 2,000 places in four neighbourhoods, three applications per place. The state's increase of the care budget for two-year-olds was an important gain. |
| Tax on millionaires | Did not pass. Governor Kathy Hochul opposed an income-tax rise. Instead a second-home tax (around 500 million dollars a year) and state aid were obtained. |
| Police | Commissioner Jessica Tisch stayed in post; 580 officers were added. Promises such as removing the gang database were not fulfilled. The DSA criticised. |
Public opinion is split. In Siena's August poll those viewing Mamdani favourably were at 69 per cent. But in an April poll the same year 59 per cent of participants thought the city was on the wrong track.
Class reading: the limits of a mayor
Mamdani's balance sheet is not a story of inadequacy; it is a story of structure. Let us look at what a mayor has in hand and what he does not:
- Taxing power sits with the state. To tax the city's rich, Albany's approval is required. In Albany it is the capital-close wing of the Democratic Party — that is, Governor Hochul — who decides.
- Transport sits with the state. The MTA that runs the buses is a state agency.
- The budget is tied to the bond market. The Financial Control Board says there is a deficit risk of between 6.4 and 8.5 billion dollars through 2030. When New York came to the brink of bankruptcy in 1975, the banks effectively seized the city's budget. That experience rings in every mayor's ear.
- The police are the backbone of the state. By keeping Tisch, who came from the Michael Bloomberg era, in post, Mamdani made a compromise. That compromise shows he does not want to pay the price of direct confrontation with the police apparatus.
Mamdani's November 2025 meeting with Trump at the White House (Al Jazeera) is also instructive from this angle. Two names who called each other "fascist" and "communist" throughout the campaign gave a friendly image before the cameras. The order found Mamdani tolerable. Trump today again calls him a "communist lunatic", because the election is approaching.
Still, Mamdani proved something, and it should not be belittled: at the centre of world finance, a candidate who openly says he is a "socialist" can win an election on material demands such as rent and transport. The rent freeze is also a real gain. Money that stays in the pockets of a million households comes out of real-estate capital's till. In Elif Eralp's election win in Berlin the same axis came to the fore (eliferalp). Housing and rent are again sitting at the centre of politics as the nakedest class contradiction of the capitalist city.
Who Is Bernie Sanders Really?
Life
Bernie Sanders was born in 1941 in Brooklyn, the child of a Jewish working-class family that had emigrated from Poland. In his youth he took part in the civil rights movement and was arrested in Chicago in actions against racial segregation. In 1981 he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, as an independent and governed the city for eight years. From 1991 to 2007 he sat in the House of Representatives, and since 2007 in the Senate, as an independent member.
Independent but Democrat
On paper Sanders belongs to no party. But in the Senate he acts with the Democrats. In 2016 and 2020 he entered the Democratic Party presidential primaries. Both times he mobilised a broad young base, and both times he lost to counter-moves by the party leadership. After losing he supported Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
This picture has a class meaning. Sanders gathered an anger that could spill outside the Democratic Party and then carried that anger back inside the party. A figure who on one side shook the two-party system and on the other kept it standing. On the 2025 "Fighting Oligarchy" tour with Ocasio-Cortez he spoke to hundreds of thousands. But he did not turn that mass into an independent organisation.
Programme
Sanders's "democratic socialism" is a mixture of Roosevelt's New Deal and the Scandinavian welfare state. His basic demands are these:
- public health insurance for all (Medicare for All),
- a high minimum wage,
- free public university and cancellation of student debt,
- a wealth tax on billionaires,
- removal of barriers to unionisation.
In this programme there is no socialisation of the means of production. There are no demands such as nationalisation of the banks, workers' control or a planned economy. Sanders's goal is not to surpass capitalism but to manage it more fairly.
Foreign policy
Sanders's foreign-policy record is mixed:
- In 2002 he voted against the Iraq war. That was a correct stance.
- But in 1999 he supported NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia. In 2001 he voted for the resolution authorising the Afghanistan war. He defended bringing an F-35 fighter base to Vermont.
- In recent years he repeatedly introduced Senate resolutions to block arms sales to Israel. In the April 2026 vote the resolutions were defeated 40 to 59 and 36 to 63. Still, for the first time a majority of Democratic senators supported the resolutions (WTOP).
Class reading
Sanders is a classic social democrat who looks "communist" when viewed from the right-shifted centre of US politics. In Europe he would be counted a solid centre-left politician. Saying this is not to belittle him but to put him in his place. Sanders's real historical role has been to rescue the word socialism from a forty-year ban and to make it heard again by a young generation. This is not a programme; it is the opening of a door. Who passes through that door, and where to, is not Sanders's matter but that of the organising mass.
Who Is Who: The Names on the Cover
| Name | Position | How they define themselves | What they actually want |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bernie Sanders | Vermont senator (independent, acts with Democrats) | Democratic socialist | New Deal-type welfare state, tax the oligarchy |
| Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez | Congressmember from New York (Democrat) | Democratic socialist | Green New Deal, public healthcare, pulling the Democratic Party left |
| Zohran Mamdani | New York Mayor (Democrat, DSA member) | Democratic socialist | Rent freeze, free buses, public grocery stores, tax the rich |
| Abdul El-Sayed | Michigan Senate candidate (Democrat) | Capitalist; not a DSA member | Public health insurance |
| Hasan Piker | Twitch streamer | Left, socialist | Bringing left ideas to young people; Palestine solidarity |
Looking at the table we see this: there is no "Socialist Republic" on the cover. There is a coalition that wants more public services inside capitalism, and whose voice is rising.
What Is Feared?
Now let us come to the real question. If communist parties are small, and Sanders and Mamdani are reformists, why does the White House use such a hard language? Let us open this question with the three questions we always ask: In whose hands? Under whose control? In whose interest?
Crisis of legitimacy
What frightens the ruling class is not a vote share but a loss of consent. Capitalism stands not only by police and army but by people seeing it as "the only possible order". The Gallup figures show this consent dissolving among the young generation. A generation that grew up with rent, student debt, health-insurance premiums and precarious work thinks this order does not promise it a future. The Newsweek cover is this shift being recorded in the mainstream media. What disturbs the White House is also the breaking of the taboo.
The class content of the demands
If we take the demands one by one, each is a reform. But looked at all together they open the inviolability of property to debate:
- "Working 32 hours a week at the same pay" touches the rate of profit directly. The length of the working day, as Marx showed in Capital, is surplus value itself.
- "Free healthcare" narrows the profit field of insurance and pharmaceutical capital.
- "Rent freeze" limits real-estate rent.
- "Wealth tax" reaches towards accumulation itself.
These demands remind capital of this: profit is not a law of nature; it is a social relation. And a social relation can be changed.
Organisation
Scattered anger is a manageable problem for capital. Organised anger is something else. When a DSA of 120,000 members, the unionisation wave rising in recent years in Amazon warehouses, Starbucks cafés and auto plants, and tenants' unions come together, the possibility of a lasting structure emerges. What was liquidated in the 1950s was precisely this: a left intertwined with the union, the workplace and the neighbourhood.
The possibility of a break from the Democratic Party
The US's two-party system rests on keeping the left inside the Democratic Party. Sanders performed this function for years. When names like Mamdani win despite the party apparatus, the capital-close wing of the Democratic Party begins to lose control. That this base might one day turn towards founding its own party is, for the first time in a hundred years, ceasing to be a fantasy. The Democratic Party leadership fears this possibility as much as Trump does. Hochul's blocking of Mamdani's tax proposal is one sign of this.
The function of fear: election and attention management
Part of the fear is real; part is manufactured and used. The White House's statement came three weeks before the 3 November midterms. The "communist threat" discourse serves these purposes:
- it unites the right-wing base,
- it forces Democrats onto the defensive by making them say "we are not socialists",
- it takes the responsibility for inflation, the cost of living and the costs of war in foreign policy off the order and loads it onto an imaginary internal enemy.
In the McCarthy period the logic was the same. As we showed in the piece where we explained why workers vote for the right, right-wing populism is skilled at directing class anger towards non-class enemies (iscilernedensagaoyveriyor).
In whose hands, under whose control, in whose interest?
| Question | White House narrative | Class reading |
|---|---|---|
| In whose hands? | The country is about to pass into the hands of the "radical left". | The country is in the hands of billionaires, big corporations and the two parties they finance. The left cannot yet fully run even a municipality. |
| Under whose control? | Socialism means state control, rationing and scarcity. | Today healthcare, housing and education are under the control of insurance companies, real-estate capital and banks. Scarcity already exists: the tens of millions without health insurance, the homeless, those who leave the city because of rent. |
| In whose interest? | The socialist agenda costs 400,000 dollars per household. | The accounting is one-sided. Public service reduces capital's profit but also reduces the premium, rent and debt coming out of the labourer's pocket. |
| What does history say? | Socialism means 100 million dead. | The number is contested and is being used. A rent freeze and the Gulag are not the same thing. Capitalism's death toll is never counted. |
| What is the real danger? | Socialist revolution. | Capitalism's loss of legitimacy and the possibility of an organised base forming. |
To Young Comrades: What Do We Learn from This Story?
Comrade, let a few things stay in your mind from this piece.
A ruling class's fear shows where it sees its power. The White House is not afraid of CPUSA, because CPUSA is small. It is not afraid of the DSA alone either. What it fears is everyday demands such as rent and healthcare meeting the word "socialism", and that meeting turning into an organised mass. That is, our power is not in big words but in organising demands that touch people's everyday lives.
Let us not confuse reform with revolution, but let us not belittle reform either. Mamdani and Sanders do not propose surpassing capitalism. Saying this openly is our duty. But freezing the rent of a million households is also a real gain. The Marxist tradition sees the struggle for reforms not as an end but as a school in which the class recognises its own power. The question is this: do these struggles increase the mass's organisation and consciousness, or do they hand it back to the management of the Democratic Party?
Elections are not enough, but elections are also a field. Mamdani's balance sheet clearly shows a mayor's limits: tax sits with the state, police with the state, budget with the bond market. Local government can be a point of strength, but alone it cannot change the system. We also discussed this in our Joining Local Government guide: the difference between using the municipality as a tool and getting stuck in the municipality is organisation in the neighbourhood.
Anticommunism is our history too. Whatever McCarthy did in the US, the "communist hunt" of the 1950s in Türkiye, the Counterguerrilla and 12 September did the same (12eyluldosyasi). Crushing a left intertwined with the unions is the common reflex of all capitalist states. That is why recognising the White House's language also makes it easier to recognise our own history.
We know one of the names on the cover. Hasan Piker's Turkish origin is not a detail. A new kind of publishing that builds a bridge between young people and left ideas on digital channels is being born. It has strengths and limits. A stream is not an organisation. A viewer is not a comrade.
Looking to the Future: Socialism in America Too
This cover did not surprise us. Three pieces we wrote at Knowledge Commons in recent months described from different angles the tendency that today reaches Newsweek's cover and the White House's panic.
Generation. In June we discussed The Economist's cover on Generation Z's shift to the left (Gen-Z Socialism: Capitalism's New Nightmare). In that piece we said this: rents, inflation, AI-driven job loss and poverty are not separate problems; they are signs that an order is blocked. The anger of a generation that is not promised a future is capital's greatest fear. Four months later the same fear is voiced this time by an American magazine and the American state. The Economist's anxiety became Newsweek's cover; Newsweek's cover became the White House's official statement.
Technology and time. In the piece we wrote last week in reply to Fikret Başkaya we argued this: the bourgeoisie is buying time with artificial intelligence, platforms and surveillance technologies, but these technologies cannot save capitalism. Only organised labour can bury it (The Bourgeoisie Is Buying Time with Technology, and We Will Bury Capitalism). The US is where this thesis is tested most nakedly. The world's most powerful technology monopolies are there. The most advanced forms of algorithmic surveillance are there. But the rate of young people who view capitalism favourably is also falling fastest there. The more the technology monopolies grow, the more the generation that asks them "in whose hands, in whose interest?" also grows.
Future. In the piece we wrote in July we discussed the revolutionary possibilities of the twenty-first century and the reconstruction of scientific socialism (Revolutionary Possibilities of the 21st Century and the Reconstruction of Scientific Socialism). In that piece we proposed a programme: socialisation of algorithms and data, working time shortened by automation, ecological repair, participatory democracy based on workers' committees. The "32 hours a week at the same pay" question in the Newsweek quiz is the first and most timid step of this programme. If American young people say "yes" to this question, it is not far for them to ask the next: why does the productivity brought by automation turn into billionaires' wealth rather than a shorter working week?
When we put the three pieces together, the conclusion we reach is this: we see that the future in the US too is turning towards a socialist form. This is not a prophecy; it is a reading of a tendency. Today's movement is reformist, scattered and dependent on the Democratic Party. We showed Mamdani's and Sanders's limits one by one above. But history is written not from the programme itself but from the movement of the mass that carries the programme. Consent is dissolving, demands are hardening, organisations are growing. Even in capitalism's strongest fortress the word socialism is no longer circulating as an insult but as a hope. We also know that this tendency will not arrive at an end of its own accord. Where it arrives depends on how far organisation, unions and an independent class politics strengthen.
We also know that writing this openly will not please President Trump at all. Perhaps he will have a statement prepared for this piece too. Let us give him our answer in advance: Mr President, what you call "misery, starvation and death" is the life millions of Americans live today under your own order. Young people turn towards socialism for that reason. Your shouting will not stop the course; it will only speed it up.
Concrete Tasks
- Retell the news in our own language. Let us not share exaggerated headlines such as "communists are coming in the US" or "America has become socialist", whether as praise or as blame. Let us tell what happened with numbers: 11,000, 120,000, 66 per cent.
- Carry the rent freeze onto Türkiye's agenda. In New York rent was frozen in a million flats. In Türkiye the regulation limiting rent rises was lifted and tenants are unprotected. Let us discuss this example in tenant solidarity networks.
- Learn and explain the difference between social democrat and socialist. Let us read Sanders's programme and ask this question: in whose hands does property remain? Let us also direct this question to social-democratic parties in Türkiye.
- Read the history of the red scare. Let us form a reading group on the Smith Act, Taft-Hartley, the McCarthy period and their counterparts in Türkiye. Those who know how anticommunism works recognise it again.
- Think union and politics together. In the US the left's strength ended when its bond with the unions broke. In our organising too let us strengthen the bond between workplace and politics.
- Publish on digital channels, but without breaking from organisation. The Hasan Piker example shows how wide a reach a publication can have. Let us think of ways to bind that audience to an organisation, to a solidarity network.
- Follow the American Party of Labor and Red Phoenix. Let us translate into Turkish and share the statements of CIPOML's US member. Let us read news from the US not through the eyes of the ruling media but through those of our class siblings.
- Follow the strikes; send solidarity messages. Let us follow the big contract fights of 2026, from Verizon to Boeing, from New York hospitals to Kaiser nurses. Let us ask our own unions to send solidarity messages.
- Tell the history of 1 May. When we are detained in Taksim let us remember Haymarket. 1 May is the gift of American workers, and the 2028 general strike goal in the US also deserves our solidarity.
- Watch 3 November. Let us follow the results of DSA-backed candidates and the "communist threat" discourse in the US midterms and make a class reading of them.
Dear Comrades,
Newsweek made a cover; the White House issued a statement. Both say the same thing, one with curiosity, the other with fear: something is changing in America.
What is changing is not a revolution. What is changing is the decline of capitalism's power to present itself as the natural order. A generation is calculating its rent, its debt, its insurance, and seeing that the sum does not add up. A hundred years later the name of that sum is again being set as "socialism".
The ruling class knows where this can lead. A hundred years ago it put Debs in prison; seventy years ago it cleaned out the unions. Today it shouts "misery, starvation and death". But its shouting is a sign not of its power but of its fear.
The ruling class fears not socialism but the meeting of the word socialism with the rent bill, the pay slip, the hospital receipt. And our job is to organise that meeting.
Our related pieces
City, housing and left municipalism
- A Class Soldier in Berlin: Elif Eralp
- A Communist Traveler in Berlin: The Dialectic of Space and the Trail of Truth
The right, the working class and anticommunism
- Why Do Workers Vote for the Right?
- 12 September: The History, Balance Sheet, and Present of a Class Coup
Future, generation and technology
- Gen-Z Socialism: Capitalism's New Nightmare
- The Bourgeoisie Is Buying Time with Technology, and We Will Bury Capitalism
- Revolutionary Possibilities of the 21st Century and the Reconstruction of Scientific Socialism
Theory and history
Sources
- Newsweek cover dossier and quiz: Christopher Roberts, Carlo Versano, Leonardo Feldman, "Ready To Join the American Socialist Revolution? Take Our Quiz and Find Out", Newsweek, 14 October 2026; Newsweek, 23 October 2026 issue; Newsweek's X post
- Council of Economic Advisers report: "The Real Cost of Socialism in America", October 2026 (PDF); White House announcement, 1 October 2026
- White House statement: The White House, "It's Not a 'Socialist Revolution.' It's Misery, Starvation, and Death.", 15 October 2026
- Cover and reactions: ThePrint, 16 October 2026; BirGün; Cumhuriyet; Velev; CGTN Türk
- Le Monde investigation: Daily Beirut summary
- Intel stake: Al Jazeera, 22 August 2025; Fortune, May 2026
- Mamdani–Trump meeting: Al Jazeera, 22 November 2025
- Red scare history: Eugene Debs; Palmer Raids; Smith Act; Taft-Hartley Act; McCarthyism
- People and organisations: Zohran Mamdani; Bernie Sanders; Hasan Piker; Party for Socialism and Liberation
- Electoral propaganda: Washington Times, Article III Project ads
- Mamdani's balance sheet: The Crosscheck, eight-month assessment; City & State NY, first 100 days; Time, municipal grocery stores
- CPUSA: Wikipedia, Communist Party USA; The National Pulse, membership figures; Wikipedia, American Communist Party (2024)
- American Party of Labor: CIPOML, American Party of Labor (APL); APL publications; Red Phoenix, APL category; APL members: what 1 May means to us; CIPOML 1 May statement; InfluenceWatch profile
- 1 May 2026: Al Jazeera; Wikipedia, 2026 May Day protests; Time
- 2028 general strike goal: Jacobin; In These Times
- Unionisation data: BLS, 2025 union membership
- Minnesota general strike: Democracy Now; NPR; Wikipedia, 30 January 2026 anti-ICE actions
- 2026 strikes and contracts: WSWS, February 2026 strikes; Labor Notes, 2026 contract fights; WSWS, union bureaucracy and the Iran war
- War and the cost of living: Wikipedia, economic impact of the Iran war; CNN, September inflation; CNN, Moody's estimate
- DSA: Wikipedia, Democratic Socialists of America
- Public opinion: Fortune, Gallup August 2025 poll
- Sanders and the Israel arms-sales vote: WTOP, April 2026
CPUSA membership figures are the party's own declaration. The White House's cost and death-toll figures are the statement's own claims and have not been independently verified.
Knowledge Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Reproduce.
