The downfall of powerful leaders, the implosion of establishment parties, the rapid rise of far-right demagogues and the eruption of economic crises have become regular features of twenty-first century capitalism. The ensuing accumulation of discontent has in turn repeatedly triggered mass protests, riots and rebellions, such as those currently unfolding in Spain and France. The challenge for socialists today is to transform these explosions of discontent into durable, mass socialist organisations.
For decades, significant sections of the radical left were deeply sceptical about organisation building. Social democracy’s embrace of neoliberalism and the collapse of Stalinism seemed to discredit the idea. The emphasis shifted to horizontal organising, the valorisation of leaderlessness and a liberal version of anarchism.
In the early 2010s, the pendulum swung back a bit. The rise of SYRIZA in Greece and Podemos in Spain embodied this trend, with both new left parties arising from mass anti-austerity struggles. Their initial success inspired similar attempts in other advanced capitalist countries.
This immediately raised questions about what kind of socialism these new parties advocated—or whether socialism was their goal at all. Though breaking with moderate centre-left politics, they frequently replicated the reformist politics and practices of older left-wing parties, with predictable results.
In July 2015, for example, SYRIZA Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras capitulated to European creditors, accepting a harsh bailout and stricter austerity just days after Greek voters rejected them in a landslide 61 percent popular vote against such measures. Podemos, having condemned traditional political elites and media bosses as “la casta”, entered a coalition with the centre-left Socialists in 2020, abandoning its anti-austerity platform and accepting the repression of the Catalan independence movement. By the early 2020s, most of these new left parties had stagnated, plunged into internal crises, or collapsed.
In the US, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) membership fell from 93,000 in 2021 to under 60,000 by 2024, alongside a growing sense of aimlessness. This decline was driven by critical support for Joe Biden’s administration—defending Biden even as his own party turned on him. Aligned figures like Bernie Sanders and “the Squad” shifted rightward, with Jacobin writer Branko Marcetic noting in 2023 that the Squad went from being leftist darlings to targets denounced as “sellouts” and “warmongers”.
Germany’s Die Linke faced a profound crisis in 2023 and 2024 after top politician Sahra Wagenknecht left to form a rival party; polling dropped to 3 percent and tens of thousands left the movement. La France Insoumise (LFI), led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, faced similar challenges: its presidential vote share fell from 19.58 percent to 10 percent between 2019 and 2021, membership dropped to 300,000, and its deputies lacked political clarity.
Today, however, the landscape has changed yet again. The DSA has now surpassed 120,000 members, securing key electoral wins including six members of Congress post-midterms, strong representation in New York alongside Mayor Mamdani, and 50 state legislators nationwide.
Die Linke experienced an even sharper revival. After surging to 8.8 percent in the February 2025 elections, membership doubled to 123,000. It now leads in Berlin and among voters under 30, and in August it overtook the SPD nationally for the first time, polling more than 12 percent.
In France, LFI may well end up in a presidential run-off against the far-right National Rally (RN). Holding 71 deputies and 500,000 members under a younger leadership generation, LFI has eclipsed traditional centre-left parties. Elsewhere, Belgium’s Workers’ Party (PTB-PVDA) expanded to 25,000 members and 15 MPs, while Austria’s Communist Party (KPÖ) dominates Graz and is rising in other urban centres.
The membership of these parties is less active and politically developed than the memberships of the mass socialist and communist parties of the past. And there are important exceptions where the situation is much less favourable: initially promising attempts to launch Your Party in the UK stalled disastrously, Greek leftists still struggle with SYRIZA’s legacy and Spanish social democrats reclaimed support during Podemos’s crisis.
Nonetheless, mass left-wing parties with tens of thousands of members are now permanent fixtures across many advanced capitalist countries. The compounding crises of modern capitalism—COVID-19, Gaza, the rise of Trump and the far right, inequality, AI threats, and imperialist conflict—have expanded the audience for the left.
This revival has also been aided by some parties adopting greater organisational and ideological seriousness, embedding themselves in movements, and in some cases shifting to the left.
Two examples are worth looking at in more detail.
The first is Die Linke. Following Sahra Wagenknecht’s 2023 departure, Die Linke revived itself by building chapters rooted in working-class communities, local party organisers, recruiting activists, and mass door-knocking campaigns.
Despite initial scepticism, this strategy laid the foundation for the party’s 2025 revival, supported by educational programs from the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. Die Linke also sank strong roots into anti-fascist movements against the far-right Alternative for Germany, recruiting heavily on campuses and high schools to support left-wing candidates like Ferat Koçak in Berlin. Left currents like Marx21 led these protests, providing a bridge into party membership.
On Palestine, however, Die Linke clings to liberal Zionist politics. Despite internal pressure from its youth wing and left branches, the leadership has repeatedly suppressed solidarity events, prompting a public fallout with the LFI after they cancelled a Berlin meeting with LFI parliamentarian and Gaza Flotilla participant Emma Fourreau. Younger members push for pro-Palestine politics while older leaders resist.
The second is LFI. Under Jean-Luc Mélenchon, La France Insoumise established the Institut La Boétie in 2019 to address political weaknesses. Modelled on historical Communist Party schools, it offers rigorous training courses in historical materialism, eco-socialism, and techno-feudalism for deputies and candidates, as well as functioning as a research hub.
It has undergone a dramatic political transformation from an electoral shell into a mass party embedded in grassroots activism. Mélenchon forged ties with militant anti-fascist groups like Jeune Garde, and its elected representatives now come directly from strike committees and anti-racist movements rather than traditional political circles.
Politically, Mélenchon and LFI shifted leftward on French nationalism, Islamophobia and Palestine—opposing racist policing, championing anti-militarist and anti-NATO actions, and positioning the party as the most popular left force in France’s working-class and migrant suburbs.
Despite their revitalisation though, these parties have not radically broken with their past politics, and revolutionary critiques from the 2010s remain relevant. Their strategic shift—pioneered by Belgium’s PTB-PVDA—emphasises long-term organisation over rushing into power behind charismatic leaders in response to the failures of SYRIZA, Podemos and former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. However, this shift is largely pragmatic and leaves fundamental political problems unquestioned.
The DSA remains trapped within the Democratic Party—one of the most powerful capitalist institutions in the world. Its elected representatives have repeatedly sought to play nice with party powerbrokers in order to avoid a serious confrontation. There is no plan to build an independent party. Consequently, DSA’s “democratic socialism” aligns closer to left liberalism than European left parties. Should Democrats return to the White House in 2028, these tensions will re-emerge as in the Biden years.
In Europe, left parties face structural crossroads. For Die Linke, the central issue remains its willingness to enter coalition governments with neoliberal parties. Bodo Ramelow in Thuringia raised the possibility of a coalition with the centre-right Christian Democrats. Following the Berlin state elections, coalition negotiations began between Die Linke, the Greens and the SPD. Die Linke’s leadership signed a provisional agreement excluding party members who support BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) or reject Israel’s right to “defend itself”.
There has been opposition to this agreement by sections of the Die Linke membership. One hundred and twenty elected politicians and party officials have signed a statement condemning it. However, even critics of the agreement accept the idea that forming a coalition government with the SPD and the Greens is desirable. This is despite the fact that the Greens are a neoliberal pro-war middle-class party, far to the right of the Australian Greens, while the SPD has followed the same path as the ALP, embracing cuts to social spending, privatisations and tax cuts for the wealthy. The only way Die Linke can form a government with these parties is by compromising its minimum program of significantly expanding publicly owned housing. And Die Linke has a long history of being involved in compromised coalition state governments across Germany, with frankly little to show for it.
If Mélenchon won the French presidency, the country would not be on the road to socialism. Beneath all the rhetoric about ending Western civilisation and starting fresh with a new political and economic model, Mélenchon’s vision is a reformed capitalism. He argues for the creation of a Sixth Republic based on a new constitution that would dilute the centralised power of the French president, shift governance towards a parliamentary system and create more space for popular referendums and citizen councils. LFI’s economic program includes raising the minimum wage, increasing taxes on the rich and expanding public ownership, but it does not call for the expropriation of the banks or large businesses. Mélenchon argues that France should leave NATO and break any military ties with the US and Israel. But he also argues for expanding the French military, is ambiguous on whether French imperialism can play a progressive role in Africa and argues for restructuring, but not abolishing, the police.
The immediate issue that would be raised by Mélenchon’s presidency is whether he could break with the neoliberal economic and political model that has dominated the Western world for decades. Mélenchon argues that his presidency will be different from previous failed attempts, because his government would not back down in the face of capitalist panic. He claims that he would introduce strict regulation of capital movement and financial markets, including public control over key banking channels if necessary. He also argues that his party would only come to power on the back of widespread social unrest and popular mobilisations, which would force the French ruling class to begrudgingly compromise with his presidency.
It is hard not to be sceptical about this. The French ruling class, backed by the rest of the European establishment, will unleash everything they have to stop any attack on their wealth. While Mélenchon has embraced mass protest to a greater extent than other reformist leaders, LFI is still primarily electoral in its focus. His vision of a “citizen’s revolution” is a peaceful election of an LFI government that will shake things up by mobilising people in mass rallies and referendums, but will not empower the working class to wage war against the capitalist system.
In countries where left parties are large, the revolutionary left faces tough decisions about how to relate to these forces and their followers. Working out how to avoid abandoning revolutionary politics for reformism, without alienating workers and students influenced by the new left parties, is a real challenge.
What is certain is that this phenomenon can’t be ignored. The growing recognition of the need to be organised is a step in the right direction. Revolutionaries need to find a way to use these developments to win a new generation to organising to overthrow capitalism.
