Red Start Past Sessions

Red Star runs an ongoing educational series, Red Start, which began in early 2020. The original goal was to provide an accessible, friendly, political education series for DSA members amidst the isolation associated to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.  

For a bit more detail on What The Whole Deal is, check out the FAQ.

Below is an archive of the past sessions of Red Start. They’re organized by thematic units, and gives a sense of what we found useful to read together. The links should bring you to the collaborative Google Doc that we used as the reading material for the sessions, some of which are excerpted in a way that you might find useful (we have stripped the comments from participants for privacy's sake).

Basics of Marxism, Historical / Dialectical Materialism

• Wage Labor and Capital - Karl Marx - 12/9/20
• "Left Wing" Communism: an Infantile Disorder - V.I. Lenin - 12/23/20 and 12/30/20
• Socialism: Utopian and Scientific - Friedrich Engels - 1/6/21
• Four Essays On Philosophy - Mao Zedong - 1/13/21 and 1/20/21
• Dialectical and Historical Materialism - J. Stalin - 9/5/21

Organizing and Politics

• Power Anywhere Where There’s People! - Fred Hampton et al. - 2/3/21
• Reform or Revolution - Rosa Luxemburg - 2/17/21
• The State and Revolution - V.I. Lenin - 3/3/21
• Robert’s Rules of Order - 10/3/21

Imperialism and Its Discontents

• Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism - V.I. Lenin - 3/17/21 and 3/24/21
• Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism - Kwame Nkrumah - 3/31/21 and 4/7/21
• The Wretched of the Earth - Frantz Fanon - 5/5/21 and 5/19/21

Internationalism

• Red Start Group Chat: Left Perspectives on China - 9/18/21

Our Zines

We wrote these pieces to help clarify our politics and to share our ideas. Reach out to us at hello@redstarsf.org if you have any questions or feedback!