Finley Rhys is a student at Bowdoin College and a founding leader of Bowdoin Socialists.

Before Zohran Mamdani (Bowdoin College Class of 2014) was elected New York City’s mayor running as a Democratic Socialist, the political establishment dismissed his platform as unelectable.

However, his political coherence, from co-founding Students for Justice in Palestine at Bowdoin to leading America’s largest city, reflects a broader shift in how many Americans think about politics.

Bowdoin Socialists now aims to build student infrastructure for engaging with this sentiment through speakers, lectures and student-led initiatives.

The empirical justification for a socialist organization is straightforward: Gallup polling this year found that 66% of Democrats view socialism positively, while only 42% hold favorable views of capitalism. Among Americans under 30, Cato/YouGov reports that 62% view socialism positively. Axios-Generation Lab’s survey of college students found that 53% hold negative views of capitalism; just 23% feel similarly about socialism.

Maine faces specific challenges around extractive industries, rural economic decline and working-class immiseration. Running on an economic populist platform, Graham Platner’s Senate campaign has drawn 88% of its in-state funding from outside the urban-suburban core of southern Maine.

Bowdoin’s position within this context creates particular opportunities. We intend to develop a speaker series that brings emerging and prominent voices to Bowdoin, coming from Brunswick or from around the world, while connecting students with political movements throughout Maine and coordinating with national and international organizations.

Socialism is not a vague alternative to current conditions, but a framework that describes where value comes from and how ownership structures determine the distribution of wealth. It asks who controls production, who benefits from labor and whether democratic principles should extend to the economy.

These are questions about material relations, not just ethical positions about how society should be organized. These questions become deadly when examining contemporary issues: the relationship between AI policy and financialization, the political economy of climate catastrophe, the material conditions underlying migration or how genocide is enabled.

Each of these subjects demands analysis that moves beyond individual moral positions toward examining systemic arrangements of power and production. Socialist analysis traces how economic structures create the conditions for these crises and why addressing them requires transforming those structures fundamentally.

Our goal is not to replace existing political organizations at Bowdoin but to provide more resources for examining the economic injustice underlying political questions.

Bowdoin Socialists emphasizes sustained engagement with political economy as the basis for understanding contemporary struggles. That means we aim to create more intentional circumstances to engage with dialectical materialism, theories of value, histories of labor struggle and contemporary debates across academic disciplines.

The formation of Bowdoin Socialists is inspired by national political realignment and specific campus needs.

When clear majorities of young people express positive views of socialism, when Democratic Socialists win major electoral contests and when Maine’s working communities mobilize around economic populism, the question is not whether such an organization should exist — it’s how quickly it can begin substantive work.