Points of Unity

What is Red Star?

Red Star is a Marxist-Leninist caucus in DSA. Our primary goal, the goal which informs all of our organizing work, is to abolish capitalism and, ultimately, to achieve communism. We do not believe that capitalism can be reformed into socialism – it must be overthrown and replaced.

Red Star conceives of itself as an ideological center in DSA. As a center, we work from a practical and coherent position to push DSA toward our shared vision through organizing, through developing ourselves and other DSA members, through polemics, and by engaging with DSA’s internal democratic processes.

Red Star seeks to cohere a vanguard party. We do not specify exactly how this party will emerge, but we believe DSA can foster its creation — DSA’s resources, broad membership, organizing ethic, and robust democratic processes make it, out of all existing US socialist organizations, the best incubator for such a party.

We are Marxist-Leninists

We understand Marxism as a living, breathing theoretical framework, which is not and never can be a static set of dogmas. We see Marxism as the foundational and most informative lens through which to understand the workings of capitalism, and take these to be its essential characteristics:

• Scientific socialism 
• Dialectical and historical materialism
• An understanding of imperialism
• A revolutionary horizon
• The role of the vanguard in organizing the revolution
• The role of a party with a socialist and democratic character in cohering the vanguard

We operate as scientific socialists

We abide by the frameworks of dialectical and historical materialism and apply a scientific lens to our work. This means that we do not approach things solely from the perspective of virtue or principle — in the consideration of any issue or development of any idea, we give necessary consideration to the causal contradictions and historical specificity that has led to the development, context, and absolute nature of the question in consideration. We use these frameworks to make decisions about where and how we fight, and use them to guide us to the most effective method to achieve our goals. We refuse to reflexively adopt or avoid any given tactic or strategy. Rather, we evaluate the immediate situation and flexibly apply tactics and strategies which will advance us towards our goal. 

It is not only important to us that we identify what can win in a given moment, but that we are willing to change when a strategy fails or ceases to be effective. For this reason, and because we aspire to learn from our own history, we view self-criticism as an essential practice. After all, the scientific method is centered on testing and refining hypotheses. We also advocate for DSA to further formalize this process because we believe self-criticism can help DSA become a more self-aware, and thus a more effective, organization.

Democracy is at our core

Red Star recognizes a relationship between democratic deliberation and scientific socialism, and we place special emphasis on applying a scientific lens to our deliberation and organizing work. We choose our campaigns and strategies by applying a rigorous, dialectical, historical, and materialist analysis to our conditions. We evaluate the outcomes of those campaigns and strategies using the same lens, both individually and collectively, through thought, debate, criticism, and deliberation. The results of that analysis go on to inform future decision making.

As such, Red Star acts in accordance with the following principles:

• All appointments, roles, and directing bodies of the caucus shall be created in accordance with Red Star’s Bylaws to ensure a democratic mandate. All decisions can be reconsidered by the general membership at any time.
• Caucus bodies shall give regular accounts of their activities to the caucus. 
• Democracy is not when everybody gets to do whatever they want. It is when members of a group vote as equals to bind themselves collectively and make decisions in line with democratically agreed upon principles.
• All decisions of higher bodies shall be absolutely binding on lower bodies and on all caucus members. The highest body is at all times the general membership of the caucus.

Anti-imperialism must be at the core of the future party

As DSA is made up of citizens of the imperial core and sits as the largest socialist org within it, we are in a unique position globally and must be mindful of the way that the US sits as the hegemon at the very center of global imperialism and neocolonialism. As Marxists, we maintain a firm anti-chauvinistic and anti-US imperialist line in every facet of our organizing.

Red Star strives to weaken and ultimately dismantle US empire. We acknowledge that while no political project is perfect, to publicly critique a government or movement that stands in opposition to the American government is to do the US State Department’s work for them, from Iran to Palestine. There is no such thing as a third camp; one is either working to support American imperialism or to oppose it. As we do not hold the reins of power over the US military industrial complex, all that can be done with public “nuance” around international political movements is to create consent for empire. We are mindful that facts don’t exist in a vacuum, they are used to advance a narrative, and any narrative that forwards the interests of American empire is one we shouldn’t give oxygen to and is fundamentally for the imperialist camp. We are committed to opposing chauvinism in all forms. The US is rife with confusion about and derision for imperialism’s targets, and there is no place for it in a Socialist organization or movement.

Red Star does, however, engage in a robust internal critique of many international political projects. This isn’t to decide which projects are “good” or “bad” and therefore worthy of abstract support or scorn, but to learn scientifically from what others across the globe are doing and to attempt to emulate winning strategies for enacting a proletarian dictatorship over capital in the US. Red Star and DSA hold close to no power, and until we do, the question of which other countries are worthy of our “support” is a distraction at best, and chauvinism at worst. The opportunity to learn scientifically from projects abroad vastly eclipses any ground to be gained with the working class by engaging in nationalist “nuance” around actually existing socialist states & projects. We must remember DSA is in its utter infancy in comparison to the majority of international projects, and reject western chauvinism from both the political powers that be and within our own ranks.

We believe in the creative, historical power of revolution.

A capitalist society will not be reformed into a socialist one, just as capitalism itself was not born through welcomed reforms to the former feudal order. Popular legislation and politicians with benevolent intentions can help create more favorable conditions for change, but these things alone cannot bring the revolutionary overhaul we seek: a complete upheaval of the present economic system that extracts value from the many for the private profit of the few.

Building For a Revolutionary Situation

DSA can support a Revolutionary movement

Revolutionary situations are generated primarily by the intersection of two factors: by a sustained crisis in the system, and an organization (or organizations) being capable of exploiting that crisis. These crises are continually generated by any inept governance that attempts to suppress class conflict and prop up an unsustainable capitalism or hegemony by force, and include economic crisis, climate change, and war. In 2020 alone, we experienced a triple crisis of a pandemic, a collapse in employment, and a nationwide uprising against police violence. However, even in this acute moment of crisis, there was not a revolutionary situation. 

To knit these pain points and protest movements into something coherent is to form the party superstructure. Our goal is to build the skeleton of a democratic mass organization capable of sustaining and exploiting those situations in our favor. Red Star takes a “3 Scale” approach to this strategy. These scales are the Center, the smallest and most ideologically coherent of the three scales; the Party, a broad, democratic membership organization; and the Class, all members of the working class and all oppressed peoples. The internal Party dimension involves organizing to create democratic structures in DSA and allow for the growth of member organizing skills. The external Class dimension entails the transformation of DSA to support movement struggles outside of its primary concerns, to expand the basis of its ability to represent the class.

Red Star believes in DSA

There is no question that DSA is more effective than any other contemporary socialist organization at engaging the United States working class in substantive socialist struggle. But DSA has accomplished this in spite of its Harringtonite roots, not because of them, and we’re starting to push against the limits of what we can accomplish with its current organizational structure.

While our horizon is revolutionary, our immediate task within DSA is building the party – the organization through which the working class can organize to fight the class war. At present, DSA does not meet our standards for a revolutionary party, but it has potential. Besides being divided between incompatible visions for the organization, DSA does not represent the entire working class, nor does it have the confidence of the entire working class. Because only the working class itself can decide who the party is, there is no list of discrete steps for creating the party. We can, however, make DSA into an organization capable of fulfilling the historical role of an organization that empowers the U.S. left & working class to be capable of Party formation.

The collective, organized activity of DSA member-actors is the basis of the Party

Michael Harrington likely didn’t set out to create a party of professional reformists, but comments from a former staffer sympathetic to membership affirm Red Star’s view that this is the modus operandi of the social-democratic wing of the organization and their aligned staffers. Members are thought to be too unreliable and transient to do the political work of planning and directing strategic campaigns – this crucial political work should be left to paid staffers, while the vast majority of the membership are relegated to the grunt work of canvassing, phone banking, text banking, and bankrolling the organization through dues. This vision for DSA does not value members as thinkers, organizers, leaders, or decision makers. 

Red Star's view is that this organizational mode has been a failure. DSA hasn’t persuaded non-socialist legislators to back our big ticket reforms like Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and the PRO Act, while losing the Bowman and Bush seats shows that there is no clear path to a socialist legislative supermajority. In the post-2016 era, DSA’s strength and success has come primarily from the organizing work of its locals. DSA has flourished not as a vehicle for national reform campaigns, but as a laboratory where socialists have learned and grown through organizing experience and dialogue with one another.  

Our vision is that the most meaningful route forward from the professional reformist model is the full utilization of the membership – DSA has no meaningful method to scientifically and rigorously test, advance, or coordinate the organizing skills of its members, it has no meaningful advancement aside from inviting a member to leave local work for the concentration of authority in the “mega chapter” of DSA National. Developing the capability to effectively coordinate work across locals and utilize the collective skills of our membership is to unlock the ability to meaningfully fight for the class.

The vanguard is larger than us, or DSA

The entirety of the US left, including its most advanced organizers, is disjointed, doing their work in a variety of organizations and formations to advance only a small set of ends that they can attempt to address. As the task of the party is to create a vanguard for the working class out of these sections, Red Star emphatically believes in recruiting other communists, effective organizers, and skilled workers of all kinds into DSA to be a part of the manifestation of an American working class expression of Marxism. This party cannot be formed from the ideological commitment of a few alone, it needs the unity of those who lead in each sphere of struggle working alongside one another, to cohere a vanguard to protect the class.

The Vanguard Party is a superstructure

To cohere from the whole class, DSA and the future party must have the ability to act as an effective superstructure for all political causes relevant to the class, and be viewed as a practically beneficial place for the class to bring their issues and rally for support. In cases where rightist elements prevail in internal struggle, DSA is viewed as and acts semi-oppositional to more ideologically or practically advanced movements, deriding movements that have outpaced its development as “ultra”, insurrectionary, ineffective, or simply accusing them of being more marginal than they are. We work to make DSA a home for all kinds of liberatory political work, rather than an organization willing to cast aside a struggle that becomes too inconvenient a burden to hold alongside electoral minimum-program work. To change DSA in this way is to create the opportunity for it to cohere a vanguard for the US working class and draw the US left into a sharper focus, a focus on the formation of a party as the only structure durable enough to carry out the protection of the class and its demands to the finish line.

The party cannot be declared, it can only be built.