By Joaquín Bustelo.

On July 26, National Public Radio’s website ran a story, “What You Need To Know About The Democratic Socialists Of America.” A week earlier, Morning Edition had aired a substantial segment on the group, “Getting To Know The DSA.” Two days earlier, CNN had taken its turn with “‘We want to democratize everything’: Inside DSA’s rise with its leader.”

I think these and similar articles should lead socialists and activists in social movements to think about this: the DSA is closing in on 48,000 members.

What’s up with that?

Because a group with 4,000 members is double the size of one with 2,000 members, and one with 8,000 four times as large. But a group with 48,000 members is not just 24 times larger: it is a qualitatively different phenomenon.

DSA began to grow with the Bernie Sanders campaign, but membership really took off after November 2016. Responsible news organizations suggest it had started at around 5,000 and reached 32,000 by the end of 2017.

In 2018 it was 35,000 by April, then 39,000 on June 25, the day before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory. A month later, on July 25, the National Office tweeted that the number had reached 47,000, including the more than 1,000 people had signed up the day after her victory.

That this was due to the extensive and very favorable coverage of a young, articulate and charismatic Latina woman who had just sent the fourth-ranking House Democrat packing is obvious. But it is only part of the story.

The other part is that there were tens of thousands of people who saw that coverage and thought to themselves, “I should join that group,” and 8,000 who actually went to the web site or got a hold of someone and joined.

This is a social and political phenomenon, not just individual decisions. A new mass socialist movement is emerging in this country, and that is a clear sign of increasing class consciousness among working people.

For many decades until the economic crash of 2008, there was no working class movement worthy of the name in the United States. By that I mean a grass-roots movement of working people, comparable to the Black movement or women’s movement. I specifically do not mean the (mostly ossified) “organized labor movement” inherited from the 1930s.

Think about it: for decades there has been mass consciousness about the need to fight sexism, racism, ableism, etc., but nobody talked about “classism.” People got denounced for “playing the race card” but not for “playing the class card.” Gays were accused of practicing “identity politics” but who ever heard criticism of workers as such for indulging in “identity politics”?

That absence of the working class as a self-and-other recognized political force changed in 2011. The Occupy movement with its central slogan, “we are the 99%,” was the first time in decades that there was a mass expression of at least rudimentary class consciousness. And look at the polls from the fall of 2011 that asked about Occupy and its issues. The movement immediately had the sympathy and support of tens of millions of people, and all it had done was to raise the flag of the working class and copy that old movie Network by shouting, we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.

As soon as Occupy happened, mainstream political discourse got flipped on its head. Before, during the summer, there was much hand wringing about the deficit and the regretful suggestions that it would be necessary to reign in “entitlements” (cut Social Security and Medicare benefits).

A month afterwards (mostly empty) rhetoric about growing inequality was the talk of the town on the Potomac.

How could this happen so quickly? Because Occupy was a seed crystal dropped into a super-saturated solution of class grievance and resentment. Once it jelled, it became a powerful political factor, even though the Occupy encampments themselves were dismantled in a couple of months.

Confirmation that working class consciousness is re-emerging in the United States and especially among younger workers came in the form of the Sanders campaign. He began very modestly on a quest to raise issues important for working people. People said he was a Don Quixote tilting at windmills, thinking they were giants.

And then the giants began to fall.

In a few weeks in the summer of 2015, Bernie went from being a crank to a serious candidate and then to a rock star who could fill to overflowing the largest venues holding thousands of people.