Announcing Zenith, a Journal from Red Star

Red Star is excited to announce that a project we've been working on for several months is nearing completion. Late last year, Red Star decided to solicit pieces from our membership to compile into a journal. Today, we are excited to announce Zenith, an occasional journal from Red Star. While there are still some finishing touches we have to put on it, we feel the writing we have put together provides crucial analysis and ideas for DSA members who share our revolutionary political horizon. To that end, we are releasing the first batch of pieces from the first issue of Zenith today.

This journal is the product of a number of discussions Red Star had over the course of 2021, where we took stock of our political project and refined our understanding of its objectives. These discussions resulted in new analyses and ideas that we worked to refine and eventually incorporated into our caucus points of unity. These theories are pertinent to the political challenges that we believe are widely felt in some form or another across DSA, and thus we felt it would be useful to share them. We decided to try to explain and apply our theories, and are publishing this journal to introduce them to any and all comrades who might find them useful, especially those in DSA.

The writing in this journal centers on three main questions.

First: What crises and obstacles are socialists facing in this political moment?

We explore the ambient political themes of the past couple of years, as well as particular challenges on the horizon. The lack of revolutionary situations despite years of intensifying upheaval, the failures of technocratic reformism, the “precarious present” of work and labor, and a socialist movement that is faltering as contradictions sharpen at dizzying rates add up to a grim assessment of our circumstances.

Eugene V: Burning Questions in a Burning World
Evan McL: The Coming Rupture and Our Tasks
Cara H: Failed Techno-Utopias
Joseph H: The Future of Work Looks a Lot Like the Past and Present of Work

Second: What kind of organization do we need to build to overcome those challenges?

We characterize two sets of dangers facing DSA, those of sectarian irrelevance and those of co-option and tactical freeze, and describe how they could manifest in DSA if they are not carefully avoided. We explain both the strategic and practical elements involved in building an organization that is tied to concrete working-class struggle and independent of capitalist political parties.

And third: How do we in Red Star plan to build that organization?

To answer this, we look back at the history and origins of our caucus and examine how we have tried to put our principles into practice. We consider our relationship to DSA writ large, and look back on some of the work we have already done to try and move it in a more revolutionary direction.

We hope to answer these questions in a way that is useful and informative - to shed some light where it is needed within DSA at this juncture. We are excited to be putting this out at such a pivotal moment for DSA, and look forward to continuing to push for a revolutionary vision for it.