By Grace Salvatore
Thursday, July 30, 2026
We cut through Seward Park in the dying March light, then
down East Broadway in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Lauren, my cousin visiting
from Nebraska, was always game for something weird and niche and classically
New York. On past trips, that had meant mostly underground musicals. This time,
it was a Socialism 101 course with the NYC Democratic Socialists of America.
We rounded the corner onto Jefferson Street. A group of
joggers stood sipping water from paper cups in front of a graffiti-laden
storefront. Posters littered the windows: “OUR TIME for an Affordable NYC,”
“Zohran, for a New York You Can Afford,” and “Solidarity Forever!” Alongside
them hung the mayor’s campaign promises: freeze rent, build 200,000 affordable
homes, provide universal no-cost childcare, make buses fast and free, and
guarantee cheaper groceries through city-owned grocery stores.
Inside was a humble box: cement floors and a
black-and-white mural on a red wall. “Hi folks, welcome!” an instructor said,
waving us over. Lauren and I took seats house left beneath a poster I
recognized from my friend’s college dorm room: “Tax the Rich.”
The room quickly filled with a dozen chatty, enthusiastic
people: Behind us sat a mother with her two teenage children in tow. Her son
chatted with the male instructor, who said he was excited to convince him of
the merits of socialism. “I don’t think you’ll have to do much convincing!” her
son said with a smile. The woman next to me wore heeled black boots and the
Sézane Clyde coat, the same $355 piece I’d begged my husband for for my 30th
birthday.
Everyone here seemed disarmingly warm, though I knew how
cold collectivism could be. I’d spent the last nearly four years working at a
nonprofit with young people who’d suffered immensely under socialist and
communist regimes in places like Venezuela, North Korea, China, Cuba, and
Eritrea. All had risked their lives to come to the United States for a better
life. I’d read all the literature, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises and
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
I was interested in how the DSA representatives would
answer my questions. How did they reconcile these histories with the movement
they were building? How had an ideology that had left such a devastating mark
on the 20th century energized some of the brightest young people in
Manhattan?
“Welcome to Socialism 101,” said the curly-haired male
instructor. “My name’s Ray, my pronouns are he/him, I’m based up in the Bronx.”
Raised in Connecticut, Ray joined the Peace Corps after college and spent time
in Guinea. “I pretty much saw that our job was just like propaganda,
essentially,” he said, describing what he saw as the consequences of “us
extracting from the populations.”
After reading Algerian philosopher Frantz Fanon’s The
Wretched of the Earth, Ray said he “worked backwards into Marxism.” He
later arrived at Columbia University, where involvement in campus organizing,
including the 2024 anti-Israel encampments (he proudly mentioned that he helped
plan these), connected him with Young Democratic Socialists of America. From
there, he joined what he called the “grown-up version” of that movement, or the
DSA.
Founded in 1982, the Democratic Socialists of America
spent decades as a small intellectual movement on the fringes of American
politics. That changed after Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, when
democratic socialism found a new generation of adherents disillusioned by
rising costs, institutional distrust, and a sense that the American promise had
failed them. DSA membership surged from roughly 6,000 members before Sanders’s
campaign to more than 90,000, transforming the organization from a niche activist
group into a formidable political force. Though membership declined to 50,000
in late 2024, there are now 120,000 members as of 2026.
In the wake of Mamdani’s rise, a broader network of
aligned candidates—like Brad Lander in New York and Abdul El-Sayed in
Michigan—has brought the movement’s language of solidarity into mainstream
discourse. As Lander put it after the election night where he won the Democratic
primary in New York’s 10th Congressional District, “The spirit
that’s moving in this city … offers a path forward to a future so much better
than the grim, selfish, zero-sum world that Trump and AI oligarchs are
offering.”
Both Ray and his comrade, clad in a cardigan and dark,
uneven mullet, felt the same. “My name’s Laura, pronouns are she/her,” she
said, stepping in. Laura was radicalized, she said, while living in Seattle
during the Black Lives Matter rallies. Inspired by CHOP (the Capitol Hill
Occupied Protest, a six-block, police-free autonomous zone), she started a
mutual aid network focused on placing free fridges and food pantries across the
city. She soon tired of the “anarchic small group,” and joined the DSA when she
got to Columbia University for her philosophy studies. “I study Marx and all
the, all the big, the big guys, the dead white people,” she said.
Laura and Ray laid out the evening’s agenda: explain the
basic mechanics of capitalism, connect the theory to everyday life, introduce
socialist alternatives to our current capitalist system, and discuss how
society might transition from capitalism to socialism.
“Turn to whoever’s around you, and say your name and your
pronouns,” Ray directed. I instinctively turned straight to Lauren, but saw him
approach us out of the corner of my eye. He sank into the folding chair in
front of us.
“So,” he asked, “what has y’all interested in socialism?”
“Hi. Daley,” I said, using my middle name and choking out
my pronouns. “I think the Zohran campaign was really energizing for a lot of
young people. I’d like to see what that’s all about.” It was true. For years,
the Democratic Socialists of America had been quietly building a home for young
New Yorkers who feel priced out of the city, alienated from traditional
politics, or simply convinced that capitalism had failed them, and Mamdani’s
movement has given them a charismatic standard-bearer. As his campaign gained
steam, NYC-DSA’s dues-paying membership more than doubled (from roughly 6,000
members when he launched his campaign to more than 13,000 by the end of 2025).
Nearly three-quarters of New York voters under 30 would eventually vote for
him, and youth turnout reached levels the city hadn’t seen in decades for a
mayoral race.
After a brief break, it was time to start the lecture in
earnest. Ray began where any conversation about socialism had to begin, he
said: capitalism. The explanation hinged on dividing society into two classes.
First were the capitalists, who “own the things that make other things,” or the
“means of production,” like factories, machinery, or businesses. Then came the
workers, “the ones who actually do things,” transforming raw materials into
products or providing services.
Ray boiled it down to a simple formula: “Capitalists own.
Workers do.” The capitalist hires workers, pays them wages, and keeps the
difference between what their labor produces and what they’re paid. That
difference, he explained, is Marx’s concept of “surplus value,” or profit. From
a socialist perspective, he said, profit exists because “the worker produces
more value than he actually gets for himself.”
Laura jumped in. The DSA’s view, she explained, was
fundamentally different from the modern Democratic establishment: Inequality,
exploitation, and the concentration of wealth were “baked in” to capitalism’s
design and cannot be separated from the system.
Ray turned back to us for questions, and the mom behind
us raised her hand. “So, business ownership has certain risks involved in it,
too,” she said, almost apologetically. “Under socialism, are the benefits and
risks spread out equally among everybody? How does that work?”
“Great question. … I have been a business owner. I used
to own a coffee shop,” said Laura. “I definitely am sympathetic, but I am, at
the end of the day, a socialist.”
“I did try to cooperatize my coffee shop,” she added,
“but trying to transition to one place within a larger system—we didn’t own the
building. We had a landlord. We had to pay rent … if you sell less and you’re
splitting less, you don’t have that guaranteed pay that you would in a
capitalist system,” she said. Socialism really had failed everywhere it had
been tried, I thought—including Laura’s coffee shop.
“The worker has a huge degree of risk that they take on,”
Laura continued. “Even the fact that they are not guaranteed employment
tomorrow.” She mentioned those who relocate for jobs, uprooting their families
and lives, and those who work in dangerous industries. “And to say that Bezos
incurs more risk and that’s why he deserves to rule over us like a king is just
kind of disproportionate,” she said.
I looked behind me to see if the mom was buying her
argument. She nodded, but furrowed her brow and sat back in her chair. “If we
had someone in office who actually cared about this, there are ways to mitigate
these things,” Laura said. “Part of this is just, like, opening our mind to the
actual breadth and depth of the human imagination.”
Sézane coat girl raised her hand. “In defense of
capitalism, I feel like I hear a lot of the same things,” she said. “One being
the social mobility aspect. Opportunities that, say, feudalism didn’t afford
people—the opportunity to move from the poverty level to, you know, the
American success story, the American Dream, whatever that is.”
“I’ll take that,” said Laura. Capitalism was an
improvement from feudalism, she said, because it allowed social mobility. You
weren’t tied to something that was inevitable, she explained. “But poverty is
still inevitable,” she said. “If you have wealth, your grandchildren and
great-grandchildren will probably also have it. There is a certain degree of
inevitability to the class system and the reproducibility of the class system.”
“There was a philosopher named John Rawls,” she said. “He
thinks of even something like intelligence and hard work as being contingent or
accidental. How is it that you get to be somebody who has the discipline to
look at flashcards for an hour and a half? How is it that you acquire the skill
of reading?” she asked us. “These things are not things that people are born
with. It often involved having a parent that was attentive, a teacher that was
attentive.”
“You didn’t choose where you were born,” she continued.
“If you were born in Nepal and you were a woman, you probably had to walk eight
miles a day to get water for your family. You don’t get to go to school. I
didn’t choose to be born in the United States. These are all accidental
features that produced me.”
She looked around the room at us. “So … how much are you
really responsible for who you are?”
There it was, I thought: the crux of the great works by
Hayek, von Mises, and later Thomas Sowell. The fundamental ideological divide
wasn’t merely economic, but philosophical: a heart-posture toward human agency,
responsibility, and the nature of man. Do we see people as capable actors in
their own lives, able to make choices, create, build, and rise, or as products
of their circumstances, waiting to be shaped by others? The American experiment
was built on the radical hope that ordinary people, given freedom and
responsibility, could do extraordinary things.
The socialists, at least on that March day, seemed aware
of this fact—and poised to deconstruct it. “Part of the idea here is to develop
a different sense of values, a different way of orienting yourself towards your
fellow person,” Laura said. “We’ll just change your entire psyche. Just flip
the whole thing around.”
The room was buzzing by the end of class. The mom and her
kids caught Ray to sign up for local volunteer initiatives. Sézane coat girl
and her friend walked over to me to give me a list of podcast recommendations.
“Are you on Twitch?” she asked. “Start with Hasan Piker.” Others milled about,
pulling board games and books from the shelves.
Lauren and I shimmied our coats on and scraped the door
open, stepping back into the cold. After over two hours, I couldn’t tell you
what socialism was, or capitalism, for that matter. But that didn’t seem to
matter. In fact, that seemed to be the draw: Socialism was whatever you wanted
it to be.
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