Members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have signed a pledge to support “Chinese socialism.”
“We, Friends of Socialist China, aim to support the People’s Republic of China and to promote understanding of Chinese socialism,” the statement reads. The statement has been signed by residents of a number of countries, including Canada, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Scotland, China, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Sweden, India, Italy, Finland, Kenya, the Netherlands, Taiwan, Russia, Belgium, Norway, and other countries.
Asking “Why socialism?” the pledge declares, “As Marxists, we believe that although capitalism has brought about unprecedented progress in the development of the productive forces, its expansion throughout the world has directly led to the most appalling crimes against humanity.” It claims that capitalist societies have been linked to “war, empire, racism, misogyny, alienation, and environmental destruction.”
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The pledge goes on to assert that socialism ended “European fascism and Japanese militarism.”
It argues that the view that socialism is “characterized by overzealous secret services, prison camps, thought control, stale uniformity, dictatorship, famines, social conservatism, corruption and poverty” is “propaganda.”
The pledge goes on to ask “Why China?” and says that China’s “size and level of development give it an objectively critical role in the global transition to socialism.”
“China is the most prominent force pushing for the establishment of a multipolar system of international relations and a new international economic order; meanwhile, it is emerging as the global leader in the struggle to avoid climate breakdown,” it reads. “As such, the continued survival of Chinese socialism is a crucial matter not only for the Chinese people but for all humanity.” The pledge notes that the “Cold War” between what it claims is itself and “the US-led imperialist system” carries the “danger of a ‘hot’ world war, and as such constitutes an existential threat to humanity.”
The pledge comes as the DSA has endorsed 163 candidates for the 2026 midterm elections.
This article originally appeared on American Faith and is reposted with permission.
For everyone who thinks SocialismCommunism “maybe” has some good outcomes. I asked AI, What utopian idea has caused the most deaths relative to different times of world populations.
It answered:
“When evaluated across different eras of world population, historical consensus points to communism—specifically state-enforced Marxist-Leninist utopianism—as the ideology responsible for the highest absolute number of deaths. [1]
While demographic contexts vary wildly between ancient and modern eras, the massive global population of the 20th century allowed these state-directed engineering projects to reach unprecedented casualties. [2]
## Ideological Deaths by the Numbers
To understand the scale, it is useful to look at the academic estimates of casualties resulting from 20th-century communist regimes, primarily driven by forced collectivization, political purges, and man-made famines: [3]
| Regime & Era An attempt to rapidly transform an agrarian economy into a communist utopia through forced agricultural collectivization and backyard steel production, resulting in the Great Chinese Famine. | 15 to 45+ million |
| Stalinist USSR (1930s) | Dekulakization & Forced Collectivization: The elimination of independent farmers to create state-run agricultural communes, directly causing the Holodomor in Ukraine and mass starvations in Kazakhstan and Russia. | 6 to 9 million |
| Khmer Rouge Cambodia (1975–1979) | Year Zero: An extreme agrarian communist experiment aimed at completely purging urban life, money, and intellectualism to build a classless peasant society. | 1.5 to 2 million (~25% of the nation’s population) |
## Proportional Impact vs. Absolute Numbers
When comparing different times in world population, historians balance absolute numbers against the total population alive at the time:
* In Absolute Numbers: Communist state experiments in China and the [USSR](https://www.google.com/search?kgmid=/m/05vz3zq) caused the most deaths simply because they occurred when the global population was between 2.5 and 4 billion people. The scale alone outnumbers the entire global population of many ancient eras.
* In Proportional Terms: The Khmer Rouge utopia in Cambodia stands out as one of the deadliest ideological projects in human history relative to a single nation’s size, wiping out roughly one-quarter of the country’s population in less than four years.
* Other Radical Movements: While religious utopias (like the 19th-century Taiping Rebellion in China, which caused 20–30 million deaths) and racialized fascist utopias (like Nazi Germany’s “Lebensraum” and the Holocaust, causing over 17 million deaths) also resulted in catastrophic loss of life, communist regimes spanned more decades and larger geographic populations, leading to the highest cumulative death toll.”