DSA at 100,000 Members

As skyrocketing prices and plummeting wages shatter the social contract, a generation facing terminal capitalism is getting organized. Mass disillusionment is fueling radicalization and record growth in organizations like the DSA, transmuting despair into revolutionary energy.

I used to be able to go to the corner store and get 2 packs of peanuts for $1, or 69 cents each. Now those same peanuts are $2.29 each, or you can get two for $4.

This price increase has happened over the last six years or so. How do I know? I used to get those peanuts every day before work. One of my first jobs was digging trenches for internet cable. I got it after working as a landscaper. That was how I got into working in tech, as a help desk technician and then a system administrator. I trenched the cables the internet ran on. Damn near every day, those peanuts were part of my morning purchase, up until COVID, basically.

Wages have only actually gone down, though. Sure, some places have raised wages, but the hours worked shift. These capitalists will do anything to avoid giving the working class a dime. So the standard dropped from 6-hour days for a part-time job to a 3-hour shift. Want to survive? Get a second job, maybe a third. Oh, look at that, we have created new jobs! (new shifts for the same group of ever tired workers) This was Bidenomics in action. Now, a year into Trump, we are seeing a net negative of job creation when combined with the mass layoffs. I wouldn't hesitate to say that over a million workers have been laid off since the beginning of 2026. The rate of profit continues to fall. We've got Klarna for paying rent now, though.

Living with roommates was the norm before I became an adult. Now, working and being homeless is rapidly becoming the norm. The question remains: how long can that, in combination with rising prices, continue? The soft power of the hegemony, the social contract of the empire, has all but evaporated.

In the 1970s to 80s? It was "get any job, buy a home, you're good," more or less. Work hard, maybe start a business, maybe just retire early. These people still control our society deeply.

Then in the 90s it shifted. Get a white-collar job, and you can have a decent life. It might not be as grand as your parents', but still decent. It's the end of history, after all—this is the best possible system. Look at a movie like Office Space. The alienation is deeper now, the alienation remote, via zoom calls. As AI continues to gut white collar jobs, it's hard to imagine the "alienated fake email job" is going to be around for much longer. The office setting is tard to relate to in the post-COVID era. This vision of history ending, the neoliberal victory, did not hold. The development of the yuppie PMC class was a consolation for the working class. Sure, most will toil, and the slice of the pie is ever small, but a small portion will be given these meaningless "bullshit jobs" as David Graeber calls them.

In the post-2008 era, the narrative shifted again. Work hard, take extra hours, go into massive amounts of debt, pick the right "career-friendly" degree (probably STEM), keep your head down, get a side hustle, and you can have an okay life. You'll never own a home, but you can rent somewhere nice. I remember being a kid watching OWS. Hearing about Obama's change. What changed? The descent into hyper-exploitation only accelerated. The gigification of the proletariat was the change—the birth of Uber-oriented, techbro capitalism. Think about how being a taxi driver used to be a stable career that people would work their entire lives before Uber. I have never called a taxi cab.

"Capitalism produces innovation!"

Now, in the mid-2020s, the narrative shifts again. There is no decent life promised. White-collar jobs are being rapidly cut down, and solid paths like comp sci or engineering see massive unemployment. The hegemony has shifted to anti-intellectualism. Both those who study STEM and those who study liberal arts are without options. Companies race to lay off as many people as possible. What contract is there? Join ICE, kidnap a brown person, and you won't end up in the camps with them? Keep your head down so you can pay off your Cash App Afterpay that you spent getting a new outfit from a reseller? Become a reseller? Maybe grift online to right-wingers? Did you even get an education if you went to school during COVID? Probably not really.

So now the idea of a job is more or less something that's a societal expectation with minimal benefits. More and more people are simply dropping out. 50% or more of the homeless have jobs. That's a 2018 stat. Our understanding of unemployment is incredibly skewed by the use of regime-backed statistics, which cull people "not actively looking for work, or people who haven't worked in over six months" (paraphrasing). That means large amounts of people simply aren't counted as unemployed. There was a Politico article that pointed to potentially 25% of working-class Americans being unemployed or so underemployed they are living in poverty. Like me, working two 3-hour shifts a week at McDonald's. That's not including homeless people, and the definition of homelessness is again skewed by the regime's definition. Couch surfing? Not homeless. Stay at one place for more than a week? Not homeless. The homeless stats are also based on what can be reported by shelters and other organizations that work with them. A whole lot of people simply don't exist in these statistics. The top 10% of earners in the US—read, people making $250k or more—make up over 50% of economic spending. The average person is simply not part of the economy or the culture that drives it.

"Man is above all else mind, consciousness — that is, he is a product of history, not of nature." —Antonio Gramsci

Is it any wonder that you read emails in these files between the uber-rich, talking about how they can literally get rid of all of the poor people? If you're making $30k or less, you're contributing a sliver of the economy, but yet you drive the entire machine. The machine still needs people to be exploited; labor still creates; the capitalist still exploits. The shattering of the social contract, the hegemonic soft power of the capitalist, only serves to accelerate its defeat. What can they promise us at this stage in the game? Seriously. What is on offer? Gambling apps? What's the over/under of revolution? What's the Kalshi odds on socialism winning? Instead of trying to 'escape the matrix', why don't you try to destroy it?

Think about it. There's absolutely a timeline wherein the capitalists do some social democracy, FDR-type shit. In that timeline, I might not be running the most trafficked politics site on neocities.org; I might not be a revolutionary. They are their own gravediggers, after all. The capitalist class had their chance to do that with Bernie or even Yang. Get some social programs, some basic UBI. People keep consuming; people continue to allow the system to exist as it is. Sure, you'll never own a n y t h i n g—not a book or a movie, let alone a car or a home. But you can get the subscription service, call the Waymo or Uber, rent the shared home. Whatever. This was that last gasp of millennial optimism we saw with the rat-fucking of Bernie in 2016 and 2020. But you've now got a generation of adults where half of them have never even seen the promise of what could have been.

If you're 23 right now, you have known nothing but intense struggle in a collapsing world. If you're approaching 30, you've only seen the failures of change and every promise society has ever made to you be broken. If you're just turning 18, what is there for you? Hyper-exploitation? Scamming? Or maybe the internet could be finessed. Maybe you could be an NPC streamer on TikTok. But no matter what part of this generation you are, you're hyper-alienated: from yourself, from society, from the past, and from a future that has been stolen from you.

I am for Socialism because I am for humanity. —Eugene V. Debs

Is it a shock that we see such high levels of reactionary thought emerging? The descent into fascism? It's a reaction to something—the death spiral of the material conditions in late-stage capitalism. Terminal stage capitalism. 73% of the Earth's wildlife has died in the last 50 years. That's the age of a lot of our parents. That's less time than my mother has been alive. The shifts are happening faster than we can imagine. Time is collapsing. There will always be people who claim "now is not the time" or "the revolutionary potential isn't high enough," but to those people I say: it's life or death. It's an ever-decaying existence within a rotting system of death, or it's liberation into a system of socialism that gives dignity to a life without exploitation.

So then, is it any wonder that the numbers of the DSA have swelled? Some say over 150% growth in the last two years—100,000 members. How many more people are members of mutual aid groups? Unions? Informal groups? Or various other collectives? Fanon said that every generation must find its purpose. Well, it seems that our purpose is either to surrender to total reactionary nihilism—the type that normalizes the actions of those listed in the Epstein files—or to organize revolution. I believe that we will carry out the latter; the signs are already there. The gears of history are already in motion.

This is how you know the beast is afraid. The United States regime has just today announced a federal investigation into the DSA, with Fox News saying that the organization has foreign influence. This has always been how the capitalist class views revolution.

"The error that the Viet Cong insurgency is the work of a fanatical minority directed from outside the country nevertheless persists, fostered by Washington[...] Ergo, the revolution which in fact exists must be due to the machinations of interlopers. The guerrillas must be the dupes or the wily agents of an alien power or, at least, of an alien political philosophy. On the more naive level, it seems to be assumed that people would scarcely choose the revolutionary path of their own accord; certainly not if the revolution in question were out of joint with the political traditions and ideals held dear by Americans." —Robert Taber, [War of the Flea](https://ia903401.us.archive.org/14/items/war-of-the-flea-the-classic-study-of-guerrilla-warfare-robert-taber/War%20of%20the%20flea%20the%20classic%20study%20of%20guerrilla%20warfare%20-%20Robert%20Taber.pdf)

The DSA is, in reality, a mycelium network of various anti-capitalist factions and individuals, many revolutionary in nature, from socialist libertarians, anarcho-communists, democratic socialists, Marxists, labor unionists, and dozens of other strains of thought. It is Freedom of Assembly in it's purest form. It is people from all walks of life, all sectors of labor, all ages, races and creeds. From the professor to the plug. From the gas station clerk to the public defendant. From the cable trencher to the school teacher. It is an organization of "We the People", in many was much more so than anything on capitol hill. We've seen some victories, such as Zohran, which provide a glimpse into what is possible should we win.

This mycelium has grown from the rotting system of capitalist imperialism, from the decay of the American empire, it is organic matter, it is the transmutation of despair into revolutionary energy. The regime does not want to meet us at the ballot box, there is no democracy in the United States, only the illusion of one, the illusion of representation designed to mask that only the capitalist, the corporation, the owner class, has representation. When you read that the government is investigating the DSA—it should be read as "corporations look for means to disenfranchise the working class further." They know there is no deal they can offer us—no possibility of concession—they know that only force and spectacle remain. If the spectacle cannot sedate the masses, then the use of force, and the spectacle of force, is the only tool that remains. There is a reason your feed is full of Gaza bombings and ICE abductions.

If the capitalist can offer no future, then we can take no quarter. We have seen their crimes against humanity: those done in private on billionaire-owned islands, and those done in public in the name of imperialist plunder. We have seen decades of neoliberal "marketplace of ideas" debate against the fascist, against the imperialist, against those who have made an enemy out of life itself. We have met them at the ballot box, but this government only represents the corporations. We have met them on the soapbox, in the streamer debates, and they have doubled down on their positions, taking pride in their hypocrisy. We must meet them with the only box left. We must make for revolution and steal our future back.