Among leftists, the question of why one continues to use the word “socialism” can for most seem almost unnecessary—until one notices how unstable the term has become even within our own ranks. We invoke it constantly, but often as shorthand for very different and sometimes incompatible political projects. For some it means Scandinavian social democracy with better branding. For some it means municipal reformism plus militant rhetoric. For some it means the memory of October before Kronstadt; for others, after Stalin but before neoliberalism; for others still, worker self-management, council democracy, or simply anti-capitalism without a worked-out institutional horizon. The word remains in circulation not because we have clarified it, but because the conditions that made it necessary remain with us, and because no substitute has displaced it.

The social relations socialism arose to confront have not disappeared. Capital remains the organizing principle of social life. Production is subordinated to accumulation rather than need. Wealth and power are concentrated to grotesque degrees. Labor remains fragmented, disciplined, and increasingly precarious. Social reproduction is privatized and destabilized. Public life is hollowed out and increasingly administered on behalf of markets. Democratic forms survive in attenuated ways, but democratic control over economic life remains largely nonexistent. The ecological crisis deepens under imperatives of endless growth and competition. War and militarization remain structural features of the world system. None of this is new. What is new is only the degree to which these realities are normalized. Under these conditions, socialism remains the name of the unresolved historical question.

I use the word historically, not devotionally. I do not mean by it a model, a state form, or a ready-made program. I mean a historical current of struggle and thought stretching from the nineteenth-century workers’ movements through the revolutionary ruptures of the twentieth century, through anti-colonial national liberation movements shaped by Marxist and socialist traditions, through the defeats, bureaucratizations, and ideological decompositions that followed. The word contains the Paris Commune and the SPD; 1917 and Kronstadt; the factory councils and the Five-Year Plans; Spain in 1936 and Hungary in 1956; Bandung and Havana; May ’68 and Solidarnosc; Eurocommunism, Western Marxism, Third World Marxism, council communism, libertarian socialism, and the long post-1989 fragmentation of the left. It contains aspiration, defeat, betrayal, adaptation, and survival.

That historical density matters. I am suspicious of attempts to escape it through linguistic reinvention. “Post-capitalism,” “solidarity economy,” “economic democracy,” “commons-based production”—these may illuminate particular aspects of the struggle or identify institutional fragments worth fighting for. But they often function as evasions, whether consciously or not: efforts to retain the aspiration while shedding the burden of history. Yet the burden of history is not incidental. The defeats of the twentieth century are not detachable from the future of emancipation. The bureaucratic degeneration of revolutionary projects, the integration of social democracy into capitalist management, the failures of developmentalist state socialism, the limits of national liberation regimes, the collapse of labor movements in the metropole—these are not embarrassments to be rhetorically managed. They are constitutive of our political situation.

This is why contemporary electoral revivals of “democratic socialism” should be approached soberly. The recent rise of Zohran Mamdani in New York, following Sanders and the AOC moment, has once again made “socialism” a visible and publicly claimed identity in U.S. politics. That matters. It breaks ideological ground. It normalizes anti-capitalist language in a country where anti-communism long disciplined political speech. It introduces younger layers to ideas and demands once excluded from legitimacy.

But leftists should be clear-eyed about what this is and is not. Mamdani is not a harbinger of dual power. He is not the opening phase of revolutionary rupture. He is a democratic-socialist municipal executive operating within the fiscal, legal, and institutional constraints of capitalist urban governance. His program—rent regulation, public transit expansion, municipal provisioning, progressive taxation, childcare, and modest decommodifying reforms—is intelligible as left-Keynesian urban reformism. Such reforms may materially improve working-class life and can shift political consciousness. They should not be dismissed out of sectarian reflex. But neither should they be mistaken for socialism in the historical sense.

The pattern is familiar. Electoral socialists reopen ideological space. They weaken neoliberal common sense. They attract militants and sympathizers into political activity. Then the machinery of governance imposes compromise, adaptation, and selective retreat. The right mobilizes anti-socialist panic. Liberals insist on moderation and discipline. Parts of the radical left respond with denunciation, often abstractly, as though structural constraints were personal betrayals. The cycle repeats. The problem is not the moral weakness of individual politicians. The problem is structural: capitalist states, especially at the municipal level, are not neutral instruments awaiting capture. They are institutions embedded in property relations, fiscal dependency, and class power.

This does not mean electoral work is useless. Nor does it mean every reform is merely recuperation. Reforms can improve lives, build confidence, create organizational openings, and expose structural limits. But without independent class organization, without durable institutions rooted in labor and communities, without forms of struggle capable of contesting capital outside electoral cycles, municipal socialism becomes administration. At best, it can become a school in political contradiction. At worst, it becomes branding for competent management.

And this brings us back to the word itself. “Socialism” remains worth using precisely because it names more than redistribution, more than municipal reform, more than a more humane administration of capitalism. It names the abolition of class domination, the democratization of production, the socialization of economic power, and the transformation of social relations at their roots. It names a break, not merely an adjustment.

Yet to speak that word seriously now means speaking after defeat. After Stalinism. After the crushing of workers’ insurgencies. After the domestication of social democracy. After neoliberal globalization and deindustrialization. After the decomposition of organized labor in much of the capitalist core. After the conversion of politics into spectacle and administration. After the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the ideological triumphalism that followed. After the fragmentation of the left into moral communities, activist NGOs, electoral machines, and micro-sects.

The task now is not to revive formulas. It is to think strategically in the actual conditions we face while retaining continuity with the historical project. I continue to use “socialism” because no softer word adequately names the scale of transformation required. Because anti-capitalism alone describes opposition but not an alternative. Because “economic democracy” is too narrow. Because “post-capitalism” is too abstract. And because abandoning the word concedes too much—to the right that demonized it, to liberalism that diluted it, and to defeat itself.

The conditions remain. The antagonisms remain. The need remains. So the word remains—not as nostalgia, not as branding, and not as catechism, but as the still-unfinished name of a struggle to move beyond a world organized around profit, exploitation, hierarchy, and the commodification of life.

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