In the face of the multiple compounding crises of modern capitalist society—the mounting debt, rent, and healthcare crises, police terror, unchecked far-right violence and reactionary advances on the political front, catastrophic infrastructure collapse, imperialism’s flirtation with nuclear war, and the potentially civilization-ending threat of runaway climate change—it is easy to become disheartened. The internal pessimist that hounds each of us in moments of doubt tries to convince us that it’s too late, socialism’s window has come and gone and all that remains for us to do is vote for the Democratic nominee every two to four years in the vain hope that the liberal wing of capital might, by some miracle, do something for us for once.

I hope to stave off that lurking pessimism and offer in its place a conditional optimism. The prospects for socialism in this country are promising, but we have to appraise them with clear eyes and have the courage to act on them.

From the point of view of the demoralized socialist, the most serious reason to abandon hope is that socialism simply does not have a mass base of support in America, and likely never will. That isn’t true. According to Pew, around six percent of American adults have a “very positive” impression of socialism. This is indeed a tiny minority, but six percent of the American adult population amounts to over fifteen million people. The percentage expands to thirty-six percent when those with a “somewhat” positive impression of socialism are factored in. Add to that the fact that these figures do not include youth, who are consistently more supportive of socialism than adults, and it becomes clear that there exists a base of up to one hundred million people in the United States waiting to be organized around a socialist program. Of course, that group of a hundred million likely sees socialism in terms of the milquetoast welfare-capitalist model put forth by those who call the Scandinavian countries “democratic socialist,” but the fact remains: tens of millions of people in this country are fed up with capitalism, and moreover are willing to identify the alternative as socialism, a word that was totally taboo in mainstream political discourse just a few short years ago.

The fifteen to one hundred million individuals who make up our prospective constituency are not a majority, but we don’t need one, at least not at first. We won’t build a movement by searching for demands that already enjoy majority support and attempting to use our support for them as a means of steering their supporters towards what we actually want. That strategy is how we end up running in circles trying to pass broadly popular policies like the Green New Deal or a $15 minimum wage without connecting those struggles to the broader struggle for the emancipation of the working class. Instead, we have to seek out the most politically advanced layers of the working class and mobilize them as a militant minority to fight for a socialist program in the here and now. By publicly battling with the forces of the ruling class, that militant minority will raise the class consciousness of millions of other workers and bring our movement closer to winning a majority mandate for socialism.

We already know the advanced layer of the working class is capable of mobilizing for transformative social demands. In the summer of 2020, between fifteen and twenty-six million people participated in a mass uprising that directly challenged the authority of the state, one where the flagship demand existed somewhere on a spectrum between “defund the police” and “abolish the police.” That same year, nine million people voted for a self-described socialist in the Democratic primaries, and candidates running as socialists demonstrated they could win elections in New York City, Detroit, and St. Louis.

All the necessary ingredients for a mass socialist movement exist, or are coming into existence before our eyes. Unions are growing and work stoppages are becoming larger and more numerous. Militant reform caucuses powered by the rank and file are on the move in America’s largest unions: Teamsters for a Democratic Union won the leadership of the 1.4 million-strong Teamsters in a landslide in 2021, and after voting to undo bureaucratic measures implemented to crush communist influence during the Cold War, the United Auto Workers (with an active membership of 400,000) are now on the brink of electing the full Unite All Workers for Democracy slate in their first-ever internally democratic elections. Unions like Railroad Workers United and the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers (UE for short) have openly called for a departure from two-party capitalist politics. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union has paved the way for the re-politicization of organized labor through industrial actions in solidarity with the struggles against police brutality and Israeli apartheid. More exciting still, ties between socialist organizations and the labor movement are growing in strength and number. DSA is in the process of building a strong working relationship with UE through the Emergency Worker Organizing Committee, UNITE HERE in the fight to unionize Starbucks, RWU in the fight against Norfolk Southern, the United Mine Workers in  the ongoing strike against Warrior Met Coal, and more. Socialists outside of DSA are doing promising work in the labor movement as well, including efforts by the Communist Party and Socialist Alternative to help unionize Amazon warehouses.

Beyond the workplace, a mass working-class upheaval is brewing in the tenant organizing movement, and here too lie strong connections with organized socialism. Through its Housing Justice Commission, DSA has played a crucial role in organizing dozens of tenant unions all over the country, from Stomp Out Slumlords in D.C. to the Los Angeles Tenants Union in L.A. Other tenant organizations, like Brooklyn Eviction Defense in New York, have organized independently of DSA but are proving to be vital parts of a growing multi-organization ecosystem including groups from DSA to the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the Communist Party.

The recent labor and community upsurges are reflected in DSA’s meteoric rise in membership from roughly six thousand in 2016 to ninety-five thousand in 2021.

All these developments are encouraging signs, but again, I urge conditional optimism. The ingredients of a mass movement are all there, but ingredients are only as good as what you use them for. At the end of the nineteenth century, American socialists faced similarly promising circumstances. Unions were growing at an exponential rate, rail workers, miners, textile workers, and others were beginning to flex their organizing muscles with strikes of historic proportions like the Pullman Strike of 1894, and the movement for the eight-hour workday was bringing hundreds of thousands into the streets across the country. Socialist organizers of that era seized the opportunity and assembled the Socialist Party of America, which, in the span of a decade, surpassed one hundred thousand members, gained the active support of an estimated two million people, challenged the conservative union bosses of the American Federation of Labor for hegemony over the labor movement, won millions of votes for a radical socialist program, and elected hundreds of its members to public offices up to and including Congress. What has the modern socialist movement done in the equivalent position? What do we have to show for ourselves? DSA failed to fill the leadership vacuum during the uprisings of 2020 despite being the only organization in the country capable of doing so. Our electoral victories have been hollow, a record of our continuous failure to elect anyone willing to act in accordance with our own political platform. Military budget hikes, strikebreaking, and funding for Israeli apartheid all stain the legacy of “our” electeds. The alternatives to DSA are not faring any better. Despite leading some meaningful projects here and there, party-sects like the Communist Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and Socialist Alternative are stuck in a state of perpetual stagnation, doomed to limit themselves with outdated party structures until the inevitable schism splits them into even smaller sects.

If we want a mass movement, we need a mass party. The road to socialist revolution does not lie through forfeiting our political independence as a class any more than it lies through crudely applying the misinterpreted lessons of the Bolshevik experience to twenty-first century America. We must do as the Socialist Party of America did. We must unite the disparate factions of the socialist movement into one internally democratic political party, bring the emerging mass organizations of workers and tenants into the fold to rally the advanced layer of the working class around a party program that speaks to their interests, seek strategic public offices to transform the ruling-class halls of power into sites of class struggle, and fight an all-or-nothing battle for democracy and socialism on our own terms. The stakes could not be higher—we have a world to win.