Why Socialism Persists

The Key To Young Voters

Zohran Mamdani bet the house and won a kingdom. He endorsed three progressive congressional candidates and they all won, presumably to go on and win the general election.

This caused the usual uproar. The right gleefully observed the tensions within the Democratic Party, and socialism-panic ensued. The reaction within the Democratic Party was more nuanced. The party, with a rather anemic brand, is always eager for any sort of genuine grassroots enthusiasm. Yet there is still the broad fear that such positions could jeopardize the party success and result in a resurgent right. Moreover, there is now increasing speculation at the prospects of future political realignment.

So why is there a resurgence of left-wing movements? It’s clear that certain left-of-center policies are popular: cost-of-living is rising, healthcare costs are appalling, and nobody’s particularly sympathetic to Amazon. Yet for the longest time, Democrats practiced the “Pretty Woman (1990) Doctrine” regarding left-wing policies: recognize their inner beauty, dress them up to make them palatable, and introduce them to the world. But people like Sanders, AOC, and Mamdani have spun this doctrine on its head: socialism, it seems, is no longer a dirty word.

So we need to re-evaluate our thinking about the left-wing. The classic conservative explanation for socialism’s popularity was simple: people want free things, and even if they understand that nothing’s free, they’ll want things paid for by other people. This explanation, though crude, seemed to carry some water: after all, it’s perfectly in-line with rational choice. Yet the success of Out-Of-The-Closet socialists have shown the limitation of this explanation. And now, socialism’s tangible redistributist promises are no longer unique: Andrew Yang’s UBI campaign never gained this much traction, stimulus checks became a fact-of-life for a year, and moreover, Trump himself signed a stimulus-check bill.

Therefore, there must be something in the idea of socialism itself which explains its popularity. And to understand this, we have to return to the source: Marxism.

Marxism, at a rudimentary level, should be understood as consisting of two elements. The first is familiar: the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, the proletariat realizing they’ve been exploited, the revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the Marxist Utopia. When people argue against Marxism by pointing out Stalin et al., this is what they’re arguing against.

But the second is more subtle: it’s Marx’s metaphysics of money. Marx’s theory of capital is not the sort of money-theory that Ben Bernanke or Paul Krugman might hazard: that is, it’s not strictly empirical. Rather, it’s more a matter of interpretation. In Marx’s labor theory of value, money is not an inert and innocuous tool: rather, capital is to be understood as the engine of exploitation. In other words, there’s something sinister about ownership and profit.

The enduring nature of Marxism is due to its second feature: the analysis of capital. It’s true that some diehard Marxists maintain a certain loveable credulity towards the idea that the proletarian revolution might succeed, but the real meat of the idea is in the capital-analysis.

Mainstream economics, as a social science, is properly agnostic about what money is. For them, capital is simply a variable in an equation; it has no nature outside of what it does. And for most of the 20th century, we were content with this lack of explanation because it worked. The free market brought unparalleled prosperity to the United States, and this mysterious construct of money was mythologized into the American Dream.

But that’s over. The economy, for better and usually for worse, now makes no sense: fake jobs on LinkedIn, billions in cryptocurrency appearing and vanishing for no apparent reason, and increasing collusion between the government and corporations. For people with established jobs and assets, this can be mere background noise. But for young people–the people who so vigorously support Mamdani–the economic world is a sinister masquerade ball to which they weren’t invited.

So all of a sudden, neoliberal agnosticism about money is no longer satisfactory. “Money just works” no longer flies when money doesn’t work. Consequently, people will be curious about how everything got so bizarre and dysfunctional, and then they’ll stumble upon ideas that speak to their experience: charades, exploitation, and sinister billionaires. Much of the working class settled on Trumpian nationalism as the solution: tariffs, deportations and personal, Corleone-esque threats against offshoring plans. But among the urban and educated, the favored solution is some form of left-wing anti-capitalism.

That’s why it’s not enough to have “abundance” or a bigger Child Tax Credit. Young progressives’ experience with the economy isn’t that it works but doesn’t give them a large enough share: it’s that the whole thing is fundamentally phony. That’s what socialism gets at: the phoniness of the economy, and what we can do about it.

And Marx’s theory of capital makes a certain intuitive sense: shouldn’t we value things based on the labor put into it? Shouldn’t we give people the equivalent of their value? Shouldn’t we stop money from making money? Of course policies based on these precepts often lead to disaster, but beneath the policy is a very palpable yearning for something like community: neighbors caring for neighbors, workers and managers hitting the bars together after a lucrative five-hour-shift, and small sacrifices in living standards made for the sense that everybody’s going to be okay.

So whether you agree or disagree with Mamdani, you must take him–and the Marxist school of thought–very seriously. He’s connecting with the nastiest realities of everyday life and the noblest dreams of the human heart. Whatever your political program is, if it cannot connect with the new realities of a generation, it will be represented not in Congress but in the Smithsonian.