Some parts of this article I talk about, I already did in Great Man Theory & Fascism Is a System
In 1883, Otto von Bismarck — a man who banned socialist newspapers, jailed socialist organizers, and called the Social Democratic Party a threat to the German state itself — invented the modern welfare state. Health insurance in 1883. Accident insurance in 1884. Old-age pensions in 1889. He did not do this because he had a change of heart about workers. He did it, in his own government's stated words, because repression alone was "not to be sought exclusively" — that something "positive" was needed to make workers "feel that the state was their friend." The single most important founding document of the modern welfare state was written by its enemies, as a weapon against socialism, and it worked exactly as designed: the Social Democratic Party of Germany never recovered the revolutionary momentum it had before 1883. That is the story every social democrat conveniently forgets to lead with, and it is the story this entire piece is going to keep circling back to, because a century and a half later, in a different country, wearing different clothes, it is still the only story that actually explains what happened to Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani.
Social Democrats, Liberals, and the Sheepdogs: Why Neither Communists Nor Anyone Else Should Trust the Reform
The Reform Was Never the Point
Every welfare state concession you can name was extracted the same way, and every one of them was granted for the same reason: to prevent something worse, from the ruling class's point of view, from happening. Bismarck built social insurance to starve the SPD of recruits. Franklin Roosevelt built the New Deal in the middle of a decade when Communist Party membership in the U.S. was climbing, sit-down strikes were shutting down entire industries, and capitalism's legitimacy was in genuine, open question — and Roosevelt's own allies described the New Deal explicitly as a rescue operation for the system, not a repudiation of it. Britain's postwar welfare state, built on the 1942 Beveridge Report, was assembled by a wartime coalition government that watched the Soviet Union's prestige soar as the army that broke the back of the Wehrmacht, and needed British workers to believe capitalism, not communism, would reward their wartime sacrifice.
None of this is a coincidence you have to squint to see. It's the visible mechanism, admitted in the planning documents, every single time: reform is what a ruling class purchases to avoid revolution, priced exactly as high as the threat requires and not one penny higher.
Why the Exploitation Has to Continue Underneath It
Here is the part liberals and social democrats genuinely cannot answer honestly, because answering it honestly ends the argument: where does the money for the reform come from? It comes from the same extraction the reform is supposedly civilizing. Domestically, welfare states are financed by taxing the surplus value still being pulled from workers' labor — the reform redistributes a slice of exploitation's proceeds without touching exploitation itself. Internationally, the reform is frequently financed by something even less defensible: Lenin's argument in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism was that the "labor aristocracy" of the imperial core — the unionized, welfare-covered, comparatively comfortable workers of Britain, France, and later the United States — were being materially bribed with a slice of the super-profits extracted from colonized labor and resources elsewhere. The metropole's welfare state and the periphery's plantation, mine, and sweatshop are not two separate stories. They are the same balance sheet, viewed from its two different ends. A reform bought with someone else's exploitation is not a repudiation of exploitation. It's exploitation with better public relations.
Why "Good" Isn't Even Good
This is where the argument gets uncomfortable even for people sympathetic to it, so it's worth being precise rather than glib. A pension, a public hospital, a minimum wage law — these things are not fake. A worker with health insurance is materially better off than one without it, today, in the only life she gets to live. No serious materialist analysis pretends otherwise, and any version of this argument that tells suffering people their relief doesn't count is not radical, it's cruel.
The deeper claim is narrower than "these goods are illusions." It's this: a "good" that functions primarily to make an exploitative system durable is not neutral relative to that system — it is one of that system's load-bearing components. The welfare state doesn't just coexist alongside capitalism. It's one of the specific mechanisms that has kept capitalism from collapsing under its own contradictions every time those contradictions got sharp enough to threaten it — 1880s Germany, 1930s America, 1940s Britain. Judged only by "does this help the person receiving it right now," the reform is good. Judged by "does this bring the exploitative system closer to its end or further from it," the same reform is functioning as an immune response. Both descriptions are true simultaneously, and refusing to hold both at once is how liberals end up defending the welfare state as an end point rather than what it actually is: proof that the system can always find one more concession to buy just enough consent to keep running.
Why Even Non-Communists Should Notice This
You don't have to want a revolution to find this useful. Every social democratic party in history has, at some point, faced the identical choice Bismarck's SPD opponents faced: soften your demands enough to get a seat at the table, or hold firm and stay outside it. Every time a social democratic party has chosen the seat, the concessions it wins are real, and they are also, provably, the ceiling — not the floor — of what the system will permit before it starts looking for a Bismarck of its own. The lesson isn't "don't take the reform." It's "don't mistake the reform for the destination, and don't trust the people who designed it as a pressure valve to ever hand you the valve itself."
And nowhere is that lesson more visible, right now, in real time, in your own country, than in the three American politicians who have done more than anyone else alive to convince a new generation that socialism and the Democratic Party are the same project. They aren't. Watch what actually happens to each of them once the theory above stops being theory and starts being their actual career.
Bernie: Two Decades of Building the Ladder He Won't Climb
In March 2019, the Democratic National Committee circulated a one-page pledge to every candidate seeking its presidential nomination. It asked each of them to sign a sentence affirming three things: that they are a Democrat, that they are a member of the Democratic Party, and that they will run and serve as a member of the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders — the most famous socialist in modern American politics, a man who spent four decades as a registered independent specifically to avoid that affiliation — signed it. Not reluctantly, not as a stunt. He signed it because the alternative was not being allowed to run. Read that again, slowly, because it's not a metaphor: the most successful socialist politician of his generation had to promise, in writing, to belong to the party of Wall Street's preferred candidates before that party would even let him ask for votes. This is Bismarck's trade, replayed exactly: the seat at the table is real, and so is the price of admission.
Sanders has run for president twice as a Democrat and lost the nomination both times. Both times, the losses followed an identical script: months of drawing enormous crowds, genuinely shifting what was politically sayable on healthcare and the minimum wage, and then — the moment the primary was over — a full, public, unconditional pivot to campaigning for the candidate who beat him. In 2016 he waited until the eve of the convention to endorse Hillary Clinton, a delay Clinton's own book later called damaging to her campaign. In 2020, having learned the lesson of being blamed for that delay, he moved in the opposite direction entirely — endorsing Biden within days of dropping out, standing beside him on a livestream, calling Trump "the most dangerous president in the modern history of this country" and asking every Democrat, independent, and "a lot of Republicans" to unite behind the man who had just spent a year campaigning against everything Bernie's own platform stood for. Notice what happened in that four-year gap: Sanders didn't get more radical after watching the establishment crush him twice. He got faster at surrendering.
Neither endorsement is a scandal by itself — asking anyone to spoil an election for a Republican out of spite is a real argument, and Sanders isn't wrong that Trump matters. What matters is the function this repeats, election after election: Sanders' campaigns reliably identify, energize, and register the most anti-establishment slice of the American electorate — the people angriest about healthcare bankruptcies, about student debt, about a minimum wage that hasn't moved since 2009 — and then reliably hand that energy back to the party establishment his own campaign spent a year explaining had failed them. The DNC didn't need to defeat that energy. Bernie's own loyalty pledge did the work for them, in writing, before a single primary vote was cast. You cannot out-organize a movement that has already promised, on paper, to hand you its army the moment you ask nicely.
And then there's the detail that should sting more than any hypocrisy headline about his three houses ever could, because unlike a lake house, it's not really debatable: in 2019, staffers on Sanders' own presidential campaign — a campaign built entirely around the demand for a $15 federal minimum wage — organized their own union specifically because they were being paid less than that, working eighteen-hour days for a campaign whose lawn signs said "Fight for $15." Sanders' response wasn't to deny it. It was to raise the pay, after the fact, once it became public. A man does not have to be a liar for this to matter. He can be completely sincere about what he wants for the country and still run an organization that could not, in practice, afford the demand it was making — which is precisely the gap this entire piece is about: the distance between what electoral socialism promises the country and what its own internal structure can actually deliver once it has to survive inside capitalism's accounting.
AOC: The Vote That Actually Explains Everything
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez built her national reputation as the loudest voice willing to say what more cautious Democrats wouldn't — the girl from the Bronx who beat a ten-term incumbent, who showed up to Congress without a car or an apartment lined up, who talked about being a bartender like it was a credential instead of a liability. Which is exactly what makes September 23, 2021, worth studying closely, because it's the moment the myth met the machine and the machine won.
Ocasio-Cortez had spent days that month working to strip $1 billion in Iron Dome funding out of a spending bill — a real, substantive, politically costly position to hold. When House leadership brought the funding back as a standalone vote days later, seven of her fellow "Squad" members — Omar, Tlaib, Pressley, Bush, Carson, Newman, Grijalva — voted no, on the record, accepting whatever backlash came with it. Ocasio-Cortez did not join them. After huddling with colleagues on the House floor for several visible minutes, she switched her position at the last second from "no" to "present" — effectively taking no stance at all, while the bill passed 420-9 — and by her own account, and multiple reporters who watched it happen, she was in tears when she cast it. "Yes, I wept," she said afterward.
Sit with what that vote actually is, mechanically, before you decide how to feel about it. A "no" costs you with AIPAC, with major donors, with the institutional Democratic apparatus that decides which primary challengers get protected and which get left exposed. A "yes" costs you with the base that elected you specifically because you were supposed to be the one who wouldn't do this. "Present" costs you with neither. It is, functionally, the least honest option on the board dressed up as the most anguished — and reporters covering it at the time noted the obvious read: a Senate run, or a future beyond the House, requires not making permanent enemies of the same pro-Israel institutional money that ends careers. Whatever the private math was, the public result is not in dispute. The congresswoman most identified with refusing to play the game played it, in front of cameras, and cried while she did it. That's not proof she's secretly a fraud. It's proof the game wins even when you know exactly what it's doing to you while it happens.
Mamdani: The Test That Hasn't Happened Yet
Zohran Mamdani's win in November 2025 was real and remarkable — a DSA-backed democratic socialist, a state assemblyman polling at one percent a year before election day, outspent by a campaign built around Andrew Cuomo and bankrolled by a super PAC stacked with the city's wealthiest real estate and finance donors, building a grassroots operation large enough to pull over a million votes in America's largest city, more than Giuliani or Bloomberg ever received. That achievement doesn't need qualifying, and the coalition he assembled — young renters, immigrant workers, people who had never before been organized by anyone asking for their vote instead of their labor — is exactly the kind of base every socialist movement in this piece needs and rarely gets.
But look at the label on his own official biography: Party, Democratic. Other affiliations, Democratic Socialists of America and the Working Families Party. He ran, and won, as a registered Democrat, inside the same party structure that absorbed Bernie's two campaigns and shapes the votes AOC has to cast. That is not a criticism of his strategy — it may well be the only strategy that could have won a New York City mayoralty at all. But it means the exact mechanism this piece has spent two sections describing is already installed underneath him, humming, waiting for the first vote or budget line where the interests of his coalition and the interests of the party apparatus that controls his committee assignments, his relationship with Albany, and his path to any future office diverge sharply enough to force a choice. Whether Mamdani's mayoralty ends up governing like his campaign promised, or ends up managed into the same accommodations Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez made once inside the machine, is a live, open question precisely because he's barely a few months into the job as of this writing. The honest answer, right now, is: watch the vote that actually costs him something, not the one that doesn't. Every single figure in this piece looked uncorrupted right up until the moment the test arrived.
What Michael Parenti — and Otto von Bismarck — Would Both Recognize Here
Parenti's argument in Blackshirts and Reds — that anti-communist "left gatekeepers" spend more energy attacking the actually-existing socialist tradition than the capitalist class they claim to oppose — has an American domestic mirror worth naming directly and precisely: electoral democratic socialism functions, whether or not any individual practitioner intends it, as a release valve. It gives a genuinely furious, exploited population a place to put that fury that ends, every single cycle, back inside the two-party structure that produced the exploitation in the first place. That isn't a conspiracy theory, and it doesn't require anyone in this piece to be secretly bought or secretly lying. It's the visible, admitted mechanism, over and over, in writing and on camera: a signed loyalty pledge before a single vote was cast, a livestreamed endorsement of the man who beat you, a vote switched from no to present under the exact institutional pressure the system exists to apply, a party label sitting quietly underneath a movement that campaigned like it didn't need one.
This is, in miniature, the exact same trade Bismarck made with German workers in 1883 and Roosevelt made with American workers in 1935, and it is worth drawing the line as tightly as possible: the system doesn't have to defeat its socialists. It just has to give them enough of a seat at the table that walking away from the table starts to feel like the radical option, rather than staying at it. Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and now Mamdani didn't invent that trade. They inherited it, and each of them, so far, has taken it — not because they're weak, but because the alternative on offer, every time, was not "keep your principles and also win." It was "keep your principles and lose to someone who won't." Bismarck understood this in 1883 well enough to build an entire welfare state around it. The DNC understood it well enough in 2019 to put it on a single page and ask for a signature.
The Honest Complication
Here the argument owes its harshest scrutiny to its own history, on both fronts, because Marxist-Leninists have gotten this exact question catastrophically wrong before, at the highest possible cost. In the early 1930s, the Comintern's "Third Period" line held that European social democrats were "social fascists" — as dangerous as actual fascists, sometimes described as more dangerous, because their reforms supposedly numbed workers to the need for revolution. On this reasoning, the German Communist Party refused a united front with the Social Democratic Party against the rising Nazi movement through 1932 and early 1933, treating the SPD as an equivalent enemy rather than a flawed ally against a genuinely existential threat. Historians differ on exactly how decisive this refusal was, but there is broad agreement that a unified anti-fascist front between Germany's two largest working-class parties might have changed the arithmetic of January 1933, and that "don't trust the social democrats" hardened, in practice, into "let the social democrats and the fascists fight it out," with consequences that need no elaboration here. History does not forgive that mistake just because the underlying critique of reformism happened to be correct.
That history sharpens the one place this entire argument is genuinely dangerous: distrust of social democracy as a strategic ceiling is analytically sound. Distrust of social democrats as people equivalent to fascists, in a moment when only they and you stand between a population and actual fascism, is not radicalism. It's a category error with a body count. Know the difference before you ever repeat the slogan — and know that the same discipline applies to Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Mamdani specifically. Sanders genuinely moved Medicare for All and a $15 minimum wage from fringe positions to mainstream Democratic Party planks — positions that would have been laughed out of a debate stage a decade before he ran. Ocasio-Cortez's office has passed real, material legislation, forced the Green New Deal into national conversation, and organized a small army of first-time candidates who are now sitting in state legislatures because her 2018 win proved it was possible. Mamdani ran on a rent freeze, free buses, and city-owned grocery stores that, if implemented, will materially lower the cost of living for millions of working New Yorkers regardless of what his future accommodations end up looking like — and unlike Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez, he now holds actual executive power over a city budget larger than most countries' GDP, which is a genuinely different and higher-stakes test than either of the other two has ever faced.
This is also worth saying plainly, inside the same essay that's been skeptical of all three: the DSA's own internal debates over exactly this question — whether to work "inside" the Democratic ballot line or build fully independent socialist infrastructure, sometimes called the "dirty break" strategy — are not naive. Serious socialist organizers inside these campaigns know precisely what this piece just argued, and they're making a considered bet that using the Democratic ballot line as a tool, without becoming loyal to the party that owns it, is still the fastest available path to power in an electoral system with only two viable lines on the ballot. That bet might be wrong. It has certainly been wrong for Sanders, twice, in the specific sense that the loyalty ended up flowing one direction. But calling it naive, or calling the people making it fools or sellouts, ignores that they built the only version of socialist politics in this country large enough to actually win a mayoralty of eight million people. Refusing to distinguish "reformist, sometimes co-opted, but genuinely trying, and occasionally winning something real" from "actively hostile to the working class" isn't radical clarity. It's the exact strategic error that has, historically, cost the left its most important allies at its most dangerous moments. Criticize the function relentlessly, the way Bismarck's own admission lets you criticize it with receipts instead of slogans. Just don't ever confuse the function with the enemy standing on the other side of it.
The System, Not the Man — Trump, Obama, Kenyatta, and the Derg
Everything above has a companion error, and it's worth naming because it shows up constantly in how people discuss all of this: the habit of explaining history through individual personalities instead of the structures those personalities operate inside. Mainstream political commentary loves this shortcut — Trump becomes shorthand for American fascism, Obama becomes shorthand for "change," a foreign strongman becomes the whole explanation for his country's crisis. This is, more or less, the "Great Man Theory" of history, a nineteenth-century idea popularized by Thomas Carlyle holding that history is driven primarily by the decisions of exceptional individuals. Marx and Engels argued the opposite: that individuals act within economic and social conditions that produce them rather than personally generating those conditions from nothing. Engels put it plainly in an 1890 letter — if Napoleon hadn't existed, someone else would have filled that historical role, because the underlying conditions in France demanded it.
Framing fascism as something one man "brought" to the United States skips a longer, documented record. Historian Robert Paxton and others describe fascism as the outcome of specific economic and social pressures — an elite and business class turning to authoritarian nationalism when liberal democratic capitalism can no longer manage a crisis on its own terms. On that reading, the U.S. has flirted with these pressures repeatedly and for a long time, not starting in 2016: the Red Scare prosecutions of labor organizers after World War I, COINTELPRO's documented surveillance and disruption of civil rights and socialist organizations from the 1950s through the 1970s, and declassified U.S. support for authoritarian, anti-labor governments abroad throughout the Cold War, including the CIA-backed coups in Guatemala in 1954 and Chile in 1973. Likewise, "Obama brought change" and "Trump is uniquely the villain" both under-describe the record: the Obama administration continued and expanded the drone-strike program, deported a historically high number of people, and bailed out the financial sector after 2008 largely on Wall Street's own terms — continuities, not ruptures, in the underlying system. None of this claims individuals don't matter. It claims individuals operate inside constraints — economic incentives, institutional pressure, class interests — that shape what "change" is even possible for them to deliver, the same constraints that shaped Bismarck's welfare reforms and shape Bernie's endorsements.
The same corrective applies outside the U.S., and it applies to two histories this newsletter's readers know far better than any American one. Kenya's independence movement is often told as the story of Jomo Kenyatta. But the actual armed uprising against British colonial rule — the Mau Mau rebellion of 1952 to 1960 — was fought and sustained by tens of thousands of ordinary Kikuyu farmers and laborers dispossessed of land under colonial rule, organized through oath-taking networks and forest-based guerrilla cells. Kenyatta was imprisoned by the British in 1953 on charges of directing the movement — a claim historians now regard as weakly supported — and was not commanding the forest fighters from his cell. Britain's own 2013 legal settlement, formally apologizing and paying compensation to Mau Mau torture survivors, is itself an acknowledgment that the conflict was a mass colonial struggle over land and labor, not the personal project of one leader.
Ethiopia's 1974 revolution gets flattened the same way, into "an emperor was overthrown." In fact it was driven by a wave of strikes, student protests carried by the Ethiopian Student Movement through the 1960s and early '70s, and mutinies among junior military officers over pay and the government's catastrophic mismanagement of famine — pressures that built for years before the Derg, a military committee rather than a single ruler, formally deposed Haile Selassie in September 1974. It was a committee, not a man, precisely because the upheaval underneath it was too broad-based for any single figure to claim ownership of it. Structures don't get removed at the ballot box or by swapping one leader for another. They get changed, when they change at all, by organized, collective pressure — which is exactly what actually moved history in Nairobi's forests, in Addis Ababa's streets, and in the Reichstag chamber where Bismarck first calculated what price would buy him quiet.
What the Anti-Communist Ledger Actually Leaves Out
There's a final piece of this argument that needs stating plainly, because it's the part most Western readers have never been shown the other side of: the same institutions that taught you to fear "communism" as a monolithic evil have been remarkably selective about which atrocities they remember and which they arrange to forget.
Start with what's not actually in dispute. The CIA's 1954 coup in Guatemala, which overthrew a democratically elected government for the crime of land reform that threatened United Fruit Company holdings, is declassified, documented history — it ushered in decades of military rule and a civil war that a UN-backed truth commission later concluded killed as many as 200,000 people, overwhelmingly Indigenous Guatemalans. The 1973 coup against Chile's elected government, with direct CIA involvement, installed Pinochet's dictatorship, which killed or disappeared over 3,000 people and tortured tens of thousands more. Indonesia's 1965–66 anti-communist purge, which the U.S. State Department's own declassified cables show Washington actively encouraged and supplied kill lists for, killed at minimum 500,000 people, with credible estimates running over a million. These aren't contested fringe claims. They're the documented, acknowledged record of what "containing communism" meant in practice for the people on the receiving end of it — and worth weighing honestly against exactly how much airtime American schools and news media give to naming them compared to naming any single Soviet-era abuse.
Cuba deserves the same honest weighing. A blockaded island of roughly nine million people eliminated mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis, built a literacy rate near 100 percent, and achieved life expectancy and infant mortality figures in the range of wealthy nations — while absorbing, by its own 2016 accounting to the United Nations, over $753 billion in cumulative cost from the longest-running trade embargo in modern history. Whatever you make of Cuba's one-party governance — and its real, documented restrictions on press freedom and political dissent are not nothing, and shouldn't be waved away by anyone arguing in good faith — the health and literacy numbers are not propaganda. They're the same kind of verifiable outcome data any development economist would take seriously from any other country.
And it's worth naming the specific rhetorical trap this argument keeps running into, because Michael Parenti's real critique of Cold War discourse identifies it precisely: for decades, any data about existing socialist states got converted into hostile evidence no matter which direction it pointed. Full churches meant religion was being tolerated as a pressure valve; empty churches meant religion was being suppressed. Workers striking meant alienation from the system; workers not striking meant fear of the system. A frame built to convict regardless of the evidence isn't analysis. It's a verdict wearing analysis as a costume — and it's worth noticing when the same move gets made about Bernie, or AOC, or Mamdani, where the same tactic gets run in reverse: winning a mayoralty proves the system tolerates just enough dissent to look legitimate, and losing a primary proves the system crushes dissent that goes too far. Both readings can't be unfalsifiable at the same time, and a serious analysis has to risk being wrong about something specific rather than being right about everything by design.
Where the Correction Has to Be Made, Without Flinching
None of that honest weighing licenses the part of this argument that goes too far, and it needs saying without hedging: the Soviet Union under Stalin was not merely the victim of Western propaganda exaggerating ordinary "growing pains." Forced collectivization in Ukraine and the North Caucasus produced a famine between 1932 and 1933 that killed an estimated 3.5 to 5 million people, in a policy environment where grain requisitions continued even as people starved. The Great Purge of 1936 to 1938 saw roughly 700,000 people executed and hundreds of thousands more sent to the Gulag system on fabricated or absurdly thin charges, often denounced by neighbors or coworkers under a climate of engineered terror that reached into every workplace and apartment block in the country. These are not disputed Cold War fabrications. They are established by Soviet archives themselves, opened after 1991, and confirmed independently by researchers across the political spectrum, including scholars sympathetic to the broader socialist project.
This matters for the same reason the KPD's "social fascism" error mattered earlier in this piece: a materialist analysis that's honest enough to name Guatemala, Chile, and Indonesia has to be equally honest enough to name Kolyma and the Holodomor, or it isn't a materialist analysis. It's a switched jersey on the same bad habit — treating one's own side's atrocities as regrettable footnotes and the other side's as the whole story. George Orwell's suspicion of Stalinism, specifically, wasn't manufactured anti-communism from a safe armchair — he formed it after fighting fascism directly in the Spanish Civil War and watching Soviet-aligned forces suppress and purge the non-Stalinist Republican left he'd fought alongside, an experience he wrote about firsthand in Homage to Catalonia before he ever wrote Animal Farm. Discounting that as reflexive gatekeeping erases the actual, lived reason he arrived at it.
The honest version of everything in this piece holds all of it at once: Bismarck's welfare state was a counter-revolutionary tool, and it also genuinely lowered infant mortality. The DNC's loyalty pledge is a real leash, and Bernie's campaigns still moved the Overton window. The CIA's Guatemala and Chile operations were real atrocities memory-holed by the same institutions that teach schoolchildren to fear "communist terror," and the Terror in the Soviet Union was also real, also mass murder, and also not something a serious analysis gets to skip past to keep its argument clean. Pick the side of history that actually wants the working class to win, by all means. Just don't let picking a side talk you into becoming the thing you started out diagnosing — a frame so committed to its own conclusion that it stops being able to lose an argument to a fact.
Sidoc Haytu is an Ethiopian writer and researcher focused on political economy, class dynamics, and anti-imperialist movements in the Horn of Africa. If you are ready to build, not just read, follow Sidoc Haytu on Instagram at @sirapressnews.
