On July 10, 2026, two leaders of the American socialist left appeared together and described their project with unusual clarity.
Ashik Siddique, the national cochair of the Democratic Socialists of America, said his organization intends to transfer power from the wealthiest Americans to workers and ultimately “replace capitalism with socialism”. Alexandra Rojas, the executive director of Justice Democrats, described DSA members as comrades and said the two organizations are building political power together through Democratic congressional primaries.
Rojas called the present moment existential. She described the Democratic establishment as having broken the trust of its voters, declared that fascism was at the country’s doorstep and presented her organization’s candidates as the force that must remake the party. Justice Democrats, she explained, supplies campaign expertise, staff, money and independent expenditures. DSA supplies local activists, ideological organization, labor connections and members prepared to work inside elections, workplaces, tenant groups and street movements.
Their alliance is no longer a speculative connection assembled by political opponents. Rojas publicly described Justice Democrats as working alongside DSA, while Siddique explained that elections are only one component of a struggle intended to change ownership, workplaces and the structure of the American economy.
The language surrounding this movement is carefully chosen. It speaks of democracy, dignity, working people, justice and public control. Behind those words is a program that seeks to weaken private ownership, transfer enormous areas of life into political administration, abolish central enforcement institutions and classify American society through racial and economic categories of guilt.
The project is not hidden. It is published on their websites, adopted in their resolutions and repeated by their leaders.
Two Organizations With Different Jobs in the Same Movement
Justice Democrats is a federal political action committee founded after Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. Its purpose is to find candidates, prepare them for congressional races and defeat Democratic incumbents in heavily Democratic districts. The group became nationally prominent after helping recruit Alexandria Ocasio Cortez for her successful 2018 primary challenge against Rep. Joseph Crowley.
Rojas has been one of the organization’s central figures since its early years. Justice Democrats identifies her as its executive director and describes its mission as electing a congressional bloc committed to a “people’s agenda” rather than corporate donors.
DSA is structured differently. Its National Political Committee directs the organization’s political and administrative work, instructs national staff and implements priorities established at its conventions. Siddique serves as one of its national cochairs.
The difference between the organizations is functional. Justice Democrats works primarily as an electoral vehicle. DSA is an ideological membership organization seeking influence over elections, labor unions, workplaces, housing, foreign policy and public institutions.
Justice Democrats recruits politicians who can win Democratic primaries. DSA supplies an organized socialist base that can campaign for them and pressure them after they enter office. Rojas said the groups combine Justice Democrats’ experience in federal races with the local power of DSA chapters. She also described elections as tools for developing class consciousness, whether a candidate wins or loses.
That statement explains the larger strategy. An election is valuable because it can produce an officeholder, but it is also valuable because it can radicalize volunteers, identify enemies, recruit members and teach voters to view politics as a struggle between classes.
The Democratic Party provides the ballot line. Justice Democrats provides the campaign machinery. DSA provides the doctrine and the long term destination.
The Destination Is the Replacement of Capitalism
Siddique’s call to replace capitalism was consistent with DSA’s official position. The organization’s own explanation of democratic socialism declares that capitalism was designed by an owning class to exploit everyone else and “must” be replaced.
The organization does not describe Medicare for All, tuition subsidies or stronger unions as the final objective. It says its vision goes beyond traditional social democracy, the system generally associated with European welfare states. Its constitution describes a future based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning and equitable distribution.
Those words have concrete meaning. Control over production determines who can open a business, invest capital, hire workers, build housing, produce energy and decide what goods should be made. Economic planning transfers those decisions away from millions of property owners, consumers and businesses and places them under institutions empowered to act in the name of the public.
Siddique uses the word democracy to describe this transfer. He argues that democracy should extend into workplaces and eventually determine how the economy operates. That language avoids the harsher vocabulary of confiscation, nationalization and state control, but the ownership question remains unchanged. When private owners lose the authority to direct capital, somebody else receives it.
DSA insists that the recipient will be ordinary people acting collectively. History shows that collective ownership must still be administered by someone. Committees determine priorities. Agencies distribute money. Political officials appoint administrators. Organized factions dominate meetings. Activists decide which industries serve human needs and which owners are obstructing justice.
The promise of rule by everyone becomes rule by the people who control the institutions.
Justice Democrats uses less explicit socialist language, but its platform is designed to move power in the same direction. The organization supports a federal jobs guarantee, Medicare for All, free public college, student debt cancellation, national housing guarantees, sweeping public construction, national rent regulation and extensive new taxes on accumulated wealth. Its economic platform presents the country as a struggle between working people and a wealthy class that has captured government.
Some of those policies can exist individually inside a market economy. In this movement, they are joined to an organization that openly describes reforms as steps toward replacing capitalism.
Justice Democrats Is the Electoral Bridge
Justice Democrats gives the socialist movement access to voters who might support individual benefits without understanding the ideological system behind them.
A voter may favor lower medical costs without favoring political control of production. A student may support cheaper tuition without supporting economic planning. A tenant may want more housing without wanting government institutions to dominate land development. Justice Democrats packages those immediate desires into congressional campaigns, while DSA places them inside a long term struggle against capitalism.
Rojas has described the campaign as a fight for control of the Democratic Party. The organization deliberately targets incumbents in districts where the Democratic primary is the meaningful election. Its victory over Crowley demonstrated that a small but disciplined organization could remove a powerful officeholder by recruiting a charismatic candidate, concentrating activists in one district and framing the race as a conflict between working people and a corrupt establishment.
The strategy does not require Justice Democrats to command the entire party. It requires the organization to build a sufficiently disciplined bloc that can withhold votes, threaten incumbents, control committee negotiations and move Democratic policy.
Justice Democrats calls this building people power. In practice, it is the construction of an ideological faction inside an existing party whose name, ballot access and voter base were built by others.
The Anti Corruption Brand and the Federal Campaign Finance Case
Justice Democrats presents itself as an answer to corruption. It condemns corporate political money, refuses contributions from corporate political action committees and portrays its candidates as independent of the financial networks surrounding established politicians.
Its own campaign structure nevertheless became the subject of a significant Federal Election Commission matter involving Justice Democrats, Brand New Congress, an associated limited liability company, Ocasio Cortez’s campaign and several other political committees.
The case, known as Matter Under Review 7575, involved allegations concerning excessive contributions, reporting practices, payments for campaign services and whether disbursements accurately identified their purposes and recipients. The Federal Election Commission’s official file lists Justice Democrats as the primary respondent and shows that Rojas received notice in her official capacity as the committee’s treasurer.
The commissioners divided three to three over several proposed findings and enforcement decisions. The matter ended without a final ruling that Rojas stole money, accepted a bribe or committed a criminal offense. It also did not produce the clean exoneration often implied by the organization’s defenders.
The federal record documents years of legal argument over financial relationships among a candidate recruitment organization, affiliated entities, consultants and congressional campaigns. Commissioners considered questions involving excessive contributions, descriptions of expenditures and the true source of campaign services.
That is a serious contradiction for a movement that bases its moral authority on claims of financial purity. Justice Democrats condemned opaque networks of money while participating in a political structure complicated enough to produce a prolonged federal dispute over who was providing services, which entity was being paid and how those payments were described.
The most precise conclusion is also the most damaging. The case did not prove personal bribery by Rojas. It exposed an organization whose anti corruption branding was cleaner than the financial machinery operating behind its candidates.
Race Is Not an Addition to the Program
Justice Democrats does not treat race as one policy issue among many. Race supplies the moral framework through which the organization interprets wealth, policing, immigration enforcement, housing and political opposition.
Its platform declares that American democracy gives a megaphone to “corporations, billionaires, and white supremacists”. The construction places economic institutions, wealthy individuals and racial extremists inside the same moral category. A corporation is a legal structure. A billionaire is a person with a particular net worth. A white supremacist believes in racial domination. Combining them teaches supporters to view concentrated wealth and racial extremism as expressions of the same political enemy.
DSA makes the connection even more explicit. In a May 2026 statement, the organization said it is committed to dismantling “white supremacist capitalism” through elections, workplace organizing and street activity.
Its educational materials teach members to examine how the ruling class uses whiteness to maintain power. DSA publications have described capitalism, policing, immigration enforcement, prisons, housing development and other institutions as interconnected parts of white supremacy.
The organization’s 2021 convention adopted a resolution calling for monetary and programmatic reparations to Black Americans. The resolution described reparations as an interim demand in the global fight to abolish capitalism. At the same convention, DSA adopted an abolition resolution rooted in the claim that police, jails and prisons sustain the capitalist system.
This is not ordinary civil rights advocacy aimed at equal treatment under law. It is a comprehensive ideology that uses race to condemn the economic and legal order itself.
How Class Redistribution Acquires a Racial Target
The phrase “tax the rich” can describe a conventional argument over tax rates. Inside the DSA and Justice Democrats framework, it carries a broader meaning because wealth is repeatedly connected to whiteness, capitalism and inherited systems of racial domination.
The factual foundation for that political strategy is easy to see. Census Bureau data show that white householders represented 65.3 percent of American households and held 80 percent of measured household wealth in 2021. Policies targeting accumulated wealth will therefore fall heavily on white households simply because white households hold much of the country’s wealth.
Justice Democrats and DSA then add an explicitly racial theory. They call for taxing wealth, describe capitalism as white supremacist, demand reparations and teach that whiteness has been used to preserve ruling class power. The result is a program in which economic redistribution and racial redistribution reinforce one another.
The racial meaning does not depend on a tax bill containing the word white. Political movements routinely communicate through narratives rather than statutory language. When activists describe wealth as the product of white supremacy and then demand that wealth be redistributed, they have already identified the moral debtor and the moral creditor.
This framework also turns millions of ordinary white Americans into presumptive beneficiaries of oppression regardless of their actual lives. A white factory worker, mechanic, truck driver, cashier or struggling small business owner may possess little wealth and no institutional authority. The ideology still places that person within a privileged racial structure that must be confronted, decentered or made to surrender advantages.
DSA’s own Charlottesville chapter once urged activists to “decenter whiteness” and presented policing, prisons, immigration enforcement, schools, housing development and capitalism as arenas of white supremacy. That language does not judge individual conduct. It assigns moral meaning to racial position.
The practical effect is anti white collectivism. White citizens are treated less as individuals with different incomes, beliefs and histories and more as members of a category associated with domination.
The framework becomes even less convincing when confronted with economic data that do not fit its racial script. Census figures for 2024 placed Asian households above every other major racial group in median household income, with a median of $121,700 compared with $92,530 for non Hispanic white households.
A theory that treats modern economic success primarily as a product of white supremacy cannot easily explain why an officially nonwhite population records the country’s highest median income. The data point toward a more complicated reality shaped by age, education, occupation, immigration selection, geography, household structure, inherited wealth, culture, public policy and discrimination.
The socialist racial framework compresses that complexity into a political accusation because accusations are easier to organize than explanations.
A Politics of Permanent Moral Emergency
Rojas described the 2026 election cycle as a now or never struggle against fascism and white supremacy. Such rhetoric is politically useful because it transforms disagreement into emergency.
A voter who opposes abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement is no longer someone who believes a country must enforce immigration law. That voter becomes an accomplice to xenophobia or white nationalism. A landlord who objects to national rent control becomes an exploiter. A business owner who opposes collective control of production becomes a defender of capitalist oppression. A Democrat who supports Israel or rejects DSA’s foreign policy demands becomes complicit in imperialism.
The vocabulary removes legitimate disagreement from politics. Once an opponent has been classified as a fascist, white supremacist, exploiter or agent of genocide, compromise becomes moral surrender.
That method also protects the movement from accountability. Failed programs can be blamed on corporate sabotage. Public opposition can be dismissed as racial backlash. Enforcement of existing law can be described as fascism. Economic resistance can be framed as the desperation of an owning class trying to preserve illegitimate power.
Every obstacle becomes evidence that the theory was correct.
Abolishing the Institutions That Enforce Order
Rojas said the voters supporting Justice Democrats want to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The organization’s immigration platform treats the agency as part of an unjust enforcement system rather than as an institution that can be reformed while preserving the government’s duty to enforce immigration law.
DSA has adopted similar positions against immigration enforcement. Siddique called for resources to be redirected away from ICE and what he described as militarized enforcement.
The same pattern appears in criminal justice. DSA’s national convention recorded previous organizational support for police and prison abolition. Justice Democrats calls for reallocating police funding into social programs and describes law enforcement through a framework of racial and class domination.
The movement uses the language of root causes to justify removing power from institutions that confront immediate behavior. Poverty, housing, addiction and mental illness can contribute to crime, but none eliminates the need to restrain violent offenders. Economic hardship can influence migration, but it does not erase national borders or immigration law.
A political movement that abolishes enforcement before eliminating the conduct being enforced against does not produce justice. It produces a vacuum in which law abiding citizens bear the costs.
The burden falls most heavily on working communities that cannot purchase private security, move to protected neighborhoods or absorb the effects of uncontrolled migration and public disorder. The wealthy people condemned by socialist rhetoric often possess the resources to insulate themselves from the policies socialist activists impose on everyone else.
Housing as a Political Instrument
Justice Democrats declares housing a human right and proposes a national homes guarantee, millions of new public housing units and extensive federal involvement in development. Its housing platform argues that housing cannot be left in the hands of corporate developers.
The accusation identifies developers as the problem while ignoring why housing becomes scarce. Construction depends on land, capital, labor, materials, permits, infrastructure, zoning and the expectation that a completed building can earn a return. Governments frequently restrict supply through slow approvals, density limits, environmental review and local opposition.
Rent control can temporarily protect existing tenants, but it can also discourage construction, reduce maintenance and reward people who already possess controlled apartments while newcomers face shortages. Public construction can add units, but government agencies still confront land costs, procurement delays, political favoritism and bureaucratic failure.
The socialist answer to housing scarcity is greater political control over the same processes already distorted by political control. When shortages persist, the movement can blame developers, landlords and investors rather than the regulations that prevented new supply.
Housing then becomes another instrument of political dependency. When government controls access to housing, citizens must petition political institutions for one of life’s basic necessities. The movement gains authority while the individual loses independence.
Democratic Discipline Means Political Obedience
DSA presents itself as internally democratic because members vote on resolutions and leadership. That does not prevent the organization from imposing ideological discipline on elected officials.
In 2024, the National Political Committee granted Ocasio Cortez a conditional endorsement that required changes in her conduct relating to Israel and Palestine. DSA later withdrew the endorsement after concluding that she had failed to meet the conditions. Its official statement listed the political requirements imposed on her.
The politician involved was one of the most prominent left wing members of Congress and one of the figures most closely associated with DSA’s national rise. Her record was still insufficient when she departed from the organization’s demands.
The episode revealed what accountability means inside the socialist movement. Elected officials are not expected merely to represent constituents or exercise independent judgment. They are expected to remain accountable to the organizations that supplied volunteers, endorsements, money and ideological legitimacy.
Justice Democrats follows the same basic model by recruiting candidates for a mission driven congressional bloc. The objective is not a loose coalition in which members disagree freely. It is a disciplined faction capable of acting as a unit.
The movement calls this democratic accountability. It functions as political obedience enforced through endorsements, campaign labor and the threat of organized primary challenges.
Why Socialist Economics Fails
Socialist theory begins with a real observation. Wealth can produce power. Corporations can manipulate markets. Employers can mistreat workers. Monopolies can suppress competition. Political donors can purchase access.
The proposed cure creates a more dangerous concentration. It transfers decisions from imperfect private institutions to political institutions that possess the force of law.
A business can lose customers. An investor can lose money. A corporation can fail. A government agency can continue operating after failure because it finances itself through taxation, borrowing and compulsory authority. Its officials do not personally bear the financial losses caused by bad decisions.
Markets communicate through prices, profits and losses. A rising price signals scarcity and attracts investment. A loss tells producers that resources may be used more effectively elsewhere. Competition allows consumers and workers to leave one institution for another.
Central planning weakens those signals. Political officials decide which industries deserve resources, which prices are acceptable and which forms of production serve the public good. Producers learn to satisfy administrators rather than customers. Local officials conceal failure to protect themselves. Favored institutions receive subsidies. Shortages are blamed on hoarding or sabotage.
The central economic problem becomes a political problem because admitting failure threatens the ideology that justified the system.
Socialism also underestimates ambition. It assumes that public ownership removes greed, yet the people administering public property still seek status, influence, security and power. Private wealth is replaced by political rank. Competition for customers is replaced by competition for access to officials.
The result is not the disappearance of elites. It is the creation of an elite that controls both political authority and economic opportunity.
The Soviet Famine Shows What Political Control of Production Can Become
The historical comparison between DSA and communist regimes does not require identical tactics. It concerns the institutional danger created when a political movement claims moral authority to control production and suppress resistance.
Joseph Stalin’s forced collectivization campaign seized agricultural production, destroyed independent farming and treated resistance as political sabotage. The resulting famine devastated Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the northern Caucasus and the lower Volga region.
The Library of Congress identifies forced collectivization as the cause of the 1932 and 1933 famine. Stalin’s government confiscated grain, imposed impossible procurement demands and prevented starving populations from escaping affected regions.
The system could not correct itself because political leaders controlled the farms, the food, the information and the punishment. Officials who admitted low production risked being accused of disloyalty. Local administrators falsified figures. The government took food based on fabricated harvests and treated the resulting starvation as resistance to socialism.
Millions died because the state possessed enough power to impose a false economic theory and silence the evidence that it was failing.
Mao Turned Economic Fantasy Into Mass Death
Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward attempted to transform China through agricultural collectivization, communal living, political mobilization and unrealistic production targets.
Officials exaggerated harvest figures to prove their revolutionary commitment. The government then collected grain based on those false numbers. Rural communities were left without food, while admitting failure could be punished as ideological betrayal.
A major scholarly history published by Cambridge University Press estimates that roughly 30 million people died during the Great Leap famine, making it the deadliest famine in recorded history.
The catastrophe was not caused merely by bad weather. It emerged from a system in which political enthusiasm replaced accurate information, collective production eliminated local responsibility and officials feared the consequences of telling the truth.
Mao promised liberation from exploitation. His government created a society in which rural families could be worked, moved, deprived and starved according to political directives issued by officials who controlled every route of appeal.
Cambodia Pursued Equality by Destroying Society
The Khmer Rouge carried socialist class warfare to its most extreme conclusion. It emptied cities, abolished ordinary commercial life, eliminated private property, separated families and forced millions into agricultural labor.
The regime claimed it was constructing a classless agrarian society. Urban residents, professionals, religious believers, educated people and former government employees became enemies of the revolution.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records that nearly two million people died from forced labor, starvation, disease and execution between 1975 and 1979.
Cambodia demonstrates the moral endpoint of an ideology that defines entire classes as obstacles to justice. Once property owners, professionals and political dissenters are stripped of individual innocence, persecution can be described as social reconstruction.
The killing fields were not an accidental departure from the regime’s classless vision. They were the means through which the regime attempted to impose it.
Venezuela Shows How an Electoral Revolution Can Destroy Restraints
Venezuela offers a more recent example of a socialist movement that gained power through elections and gradually dismantled the institutions capable of restraining it.
The country’s collapse had several causes, including dependence on oil, falling petroleum prices, corruption, sanctions and severe government mismanagement. A factual account must include all of them. It must also recognize that Venezuela’s decline began before the broadest American oil sanctions.
Hugo Chávez’s government expanded political control over the economy, expropriated businesses, imposed price and currency controls and politicized the state oil company. Nicolás Maduro deepened those practices as production collapsed.
A Government Accountability Office review found that sanctions worsened the decline but also identified government mismanagement and falling oil production as major causes. Venezuelan oil output had already fallen sharply before the 2019 sanctions on the state oil company.
The political consequences followed the economic destruction. The government weakened opposition institutions, manipulated elections, repressed dissent and used control over resources to preserve loyalty.
The human result became one of the largest displacement crises in the world. Nearly 7.9 million Venezuelan refugees and migrants have left the country, based on figures compiled by governments and the United Nations refugee agency.
Venezuela’s rulers did not begin by announcing dictatorship. They promised dignity, equality, public control and liberation from a corrupt elite. Economic dependency gave the government the leverage needed to weaken the remaining restraints on political power.
China Escaped Maoist Poverty by Retreating From Maoist Economics
China’s modern economic rise is sometimes presented as proof that socialism can create prosperity. The chronology points in the opposite direction.
The Chinese Communist Party retained authoritarian political control, but its greatest economic gains followed the reforms and opening that began in 1978. The government loosened collective agriculture, permitted private enterprise, welcomed foreign investment and allowed market incentives to play a larger role.
The World Bank reports that almost 800 million Chinese people escaped extreme poverty after the reform and opening period began. Economic growth averaged more than 9 percent a year for decades.
China’s achievement did not follow a return to Mao’s communes. It followed a retreat from the economic system that produced them.
The government preserved one party rule while allowing ownership, investment, trade and profit to reenter economic life. Markets produced the abundance that political planning had failed to deliver.
Scandinavia Is Not the System DSA Is Proposing
American socialists routinely invoke Denmark, Sweden and other Nordic countries when defending their agenda. The comparison depends on confusing a capitalist welfare state with socialism.
Denmark’s own government describes the country as a free market capitalist economy with a strong social safety net. Private companies operate for profit. Employers can hire and dismiss workers. Prices coordinate production. Property rights remain intact. International trade and private investment support the tax base that finances public benefits.
DSA explicitly says its project goes beyond traditional social democracy. It seeks popular control over production and an economy no longer organized around capitalist ownership.
The Nordic model cannot serve as evidence for abolishing the economic system that pays for the Nordic model. Denmark redistributes income produced by a market economy. DSA seeks to replace the ownership structure of that economy.
The distinction is central. Universal health insurance is not the same as collective control of production. Paid leave is not the same as economic planning. A public safety net is not the same as abolishing capitalism.
Justice Democrats sells the benefits. DSA supplies the ownership revolution behind them.
The Moral Corruption of the Socialist Project
The deepest corruption surrounding this movement is larger than a campaign finance complaint. It is the corruption of democratic language itself.
Democracy becomes a word for political control over private economic life. Justice becomes a word for redistribution among racial and class categories. Accountability becomes obedience to movement organizations. Public safety becomes abolition of enforcement. Housing rights become government authority over development and property. Worker power becomes a justification for weakening the rights of owners and individuals.
The movement presents every expansion of its authority as liberation. The citizen is liberated from private medical insurance by becoming dependent on a government medical system. The tenant is liberated from landlords by becoming dependent on public housing institutions. The worker is liberated from employers by placing employment under collective political administration. The voter is liberated from corporate money by becoming dependent on ideological organizations that recruit, finance and discipline candidates.
At every stage, power moves in the same direction, away from the individual and toward the movement.
Siddique and Rojas reject the imagery of old communist governments while preserving the central socialist accusation that produced them: private ownership is exploitation, profit is morally suspect, wealth is political domination and economic life must be brought under collective control.
Their racial ideology adds another layer of coercion. White Americans are placed within a system of inherited privilege, while wealth, policing, borders, housing and capitalism are joined under the accusation of white supremacy. Economic redistribution becomes racial correction. Political disagreement becomes complicity.
Their project does not need secret meetings or hidden manifestos. Siddique says capitalism must be replaced. DSA’s constitution calls for economic planning. Justice Democrats builds the congressional bloc. Rojas describes the two organizations as comrades in a common struggle. Their conventions demand reparations, abolition and political discipline. Their platforms identify the institutions and classes that stand in their way.
The words have been modernized. Class enemies become billionaires, corporations and white supremacists. Nationalization becomes democratic ownership. State planning becomes economic democracy. Revolutionary organization becomes people power. Political obedience becomes accountability.
The substance remains recognizable. A self appointed movement claims the authority to identify oppression, divide society into moral classes, control economic decisions and punish institutions that resist its program.
History has already recorded what happens when such movements acquire enough power to govern according to their theories. Production declines, truth becomes dangerous, dependency expands and political leaders blame enemies for failures created by the system itself.
Siddique, Rojas, DSA and Justice Democrats are not offering a compassionate repair to American capitalism. They are constructing an organized movement to discredit private ownership, racialize economic life, dismantle enforcement institutions and capture political power from inside the Democratic Party.
The slogans promise justice. The program demands control.