The Democratic Socialists of America has become a full-blown revolutionary communist organization whose leadership openly seeks to overthrow the U.S. Constitution and install a one-party state.
The DSA’s own platform calls for abolishing capitalism, police, prisons, immigration enforcement, and the U.S. Senate — replacing them with a centrally planned “classless society” where government controls all economic life.
But the real story is who now controls the group’s National Political Committee.
Multiple committee members — including one of its two co-chairs — belong to the Red Star caucus, a Marxist-Leninist faction that aims to “abolish capitalism and, ultimately, to achieve communism.”
Others were elected from the Marxist Unity Group, whose stated objective is to “fight to overthrow the Constitution” so the revolutionary working class can “take power by any means necessary.”
“Fight to overthrow the Constitution so that the revolutionary working class can take power by any means necessary and institute a fully liberated classless society: communism.”
A third caucus with multiple committee seats is Reform & Revolution, which describes its politics as rooted in “the Bolshevik Tradition.”
The DSA’s 2025 national convention made opposition to “the Palestinian cause” — including uttering the phrase “Israel has a right to defend itself” — an expellable offense.
When Hamas launched its October 7, 2023, terrorist attacks, the DSA issued declarations of Palestinian solidarity and cries of “long live the resistance!” The group blamed the massacres on the Israeli victims.
The DSA has also found common cause with Marxist-Leninist one-party states such as China and Cuba, and attacked the United States as “the heart of a global capitalist empire that has wrought untold suffering on billions of people and the environment.”
This represents a total betrayal of the group’s founding vision. Michael Harrington, the DSA’s ideological founder who died in 1989, was a committed democratic socialist who explicitly rejected communist totalitarianism. He was deeply troubled by the Port Huron Statement in 1962 because he felt it was insufficiently anti-communist.
Harrington was also avowedly pro-Israel.
The DSA operates as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit funded overwhelmingly through membership dues, which accounted for over 87 percent of its $6.38 million in total revenue in 2024. Despite its modest budget, it commands outsized influence in Democratic Party politics.
The group claims over 120,000 members today — a dramatic surge from just two years ago, when it appeared on the verge of fiscal collapse.
That growth has been accompanied by steady political radicalization. What was once a left-wing democratic socialist organization has become an organ of the revolutionary far-left, with leadership controlled by factions that openly seek communist revolution.
The DSA’s newly updated platform seeks to abolish federal checks-and-balances by making the executive and judicial branches explicitly subordinate to the legislative branch. It calls for defunding the U.S. military and eliminating the Senate entirely.
Robert Stilson, a senior research analyst at the Capital Research Center, notes the group is “neither particularly democratic, nor socialist, nor American” — a Holy Roman Empire-style misnomer.
The DSA’s next move remains to be seen. The American radical left has historically demonstrated a pattern of factional infighting and organizational implosion. Whether the current iteration avoids that fate is an open question.
For now, the undercurrent of revolutionary radicalism that has existed on the American Left since the 1960s has found an institutional home — one with over 120,000 members and growing influence in the Democratic Party.
On July 4, 2026, Democratic Socialists of America passed 120,000 members, making us the largest socialist organization in United States history and surpassing the Socialist Party of America under Eugene Debs, which reached its peak dues-paying membership in 1912.
Join us:… pic.twitter.com/XUFr8eDTyg
— DSA (@DemSocialists) July 5, 2026
