For a Communism for the 21st Century

Our emergent strategy draws from global liberation movements while adapting to present circumstances.

Our framework: The need for working class revolution in our lifetime is urgent. Our world’s resources should be used for the wellbeing of all people — but instead, oligarchs enrich themselves at the expense of our lives and the planet. As the working class is exploited by the capitalist class, so too is the Global South by the Global North. Imperialism and colonialism continue to appropriate the bodies and ecologies of the peoples of the world to develop the excesses of Western society. 

Our moment: At home and abroad, liberation movements resist the poverty and war the U.S. government imposes upon them. The world system ruled by 20th century capitalism is ending. If we are going to take a meaningful role in that transformation, we must engage in a parallel struggle, stitching together diverse social forces to organize a mass front against global imperialism and domestic carceral fascism. To construct a world-changing solidarity, we organize locally, identifying where class confrontation is already happening — in the street, at the ballot box, against prisons and detention centers, and in our neighborhoods. Our organizing aims to erode relationships of domination and build collective power, so that we may chart our shared destiny in unity. 

Our inspiration: To ground our principles and inform our tactics, we look to Marxist theory and liberatory projects around the world. We study how communist parties operated in the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban Revolutions, and how anti-colonial movements fought for liberation in Algeria, Vietnam, and Burkina Faso. We look to historical struggles in the U.S., like Reconstruction, the rise of the Black Panther Party, and the American Indian Movement, and reflect on the gains and challenges faced by recent projects like the Palestinian resistance movement, the Latin American Pink Tide, and the George Floyd uprising. 

Our implementation: We are partisans of this global tradition, analyzing, criticizing and continuing the work of generations before. But we also intend to transform along with our conditions. Thus, we emphasize deliberation, democracy and diversity as keys to our adaptive method. We are proudly a multi-tendency communist caucus. We view our diversity of ideologies, roots and lived experiences as a tool in the synthesis of developing new strategies for our present circumstances. 

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For The Abolition of Domination and Exclusion

Liberation requires prison abolition — which we fight for in solidarity with the oppressed on their own terms, against expansion of the carceral state and in pursuit of transformative justice.

Our present society rests on division of the working class through identity-based oppression, upheld by the carceral state. Incarceration, criminalization, and police violence are tactics forged from slavery to visibly keep the marginalized in line, disproportionately targeting Black and brown people. Therefore, we stake our struggle for a communist horizon in abolition, as it unites those whose oppressions intersect: Indigenous, Black, and brown people; women; trans and queer people; disabled people; immigrant, undocumented, and colonized people; sex workers and others outside of the formal economy; and the currently and formerly incarcerated. 

Our practice of abolition centers solidarity. We show up in the streets to combat the criminalization of Black life, houselessness, and poverty. We rally for bodily autonomy for women and all trans and gender non-conforming people. We mobilize against police brutality; we train ourselves and others in harm reduction for drug users. We defend our neighbors against ICE and agitate to demilitarize our borders. We call for reparations for chattel slavery and Jim Crow; for land back and sovereignty to indigenous peoples.

By committing to abolition, we confront the ideology that justifies the carceral state and conceals its true function: as a machine of domination and violence, in service of nothing other than capital. 

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For Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism

Unequal exchange binds workers of the world together in an exploitative hierarchy, which we must help topple from within the empire.  

Our place in society is largely determined by where we are born. For the same labor, workers in the Global South are paid a fraction of what workers are paid in the Global North, all to fuel development in Western nations at the expense of their own livelihoods and security. The U.S. and its allies, such as NATO, use their militaries and global financial institutions to maintain this unequal world-system and violently smother socialist states and liberation struggles all over the world. As socialists in the imperial core, we must oppose all interventions that uphold the empire — military, economic, or otherwise — and fight for a world economy which is planned to allow all humanity to flourish.

Accordingly, Emerge seeks to incorporate anti-imperialism in DSA’s labor activism and legislative campaigns. Rather than enabling the unequal dynamics of world trade to benefit U.S. workers alone, we must grow the militancy and solidarity of our labor movement so it opposes oligarchy and colonialism everywhere. Likewise, we must advocate not just for “green growth” for the West, but for ecosocialist policy built on principles of just global transition and respect for all life. Beyond working to improve the lives of Americans, our elected officials should publicly oppose the endless warfare and sanctions the U.S.-led regime exports around the globe. To combat capitalism we must confront imperialism.

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For Democratic Working Class Organization and Movements

The working class is not an existing force waiting to be awakened. It must be actively built and unified through local organizing work, street movements, electoral projects, and coalition building.

Given our strategic position between movements, labor, and the state, DSA should be a connective tissue of the left ecosystem and a strong collaborator and leader. This means forging broad coalitions and developing new DSA members by organizing at existing and emergent sites of working class struggle.

Emerge members work in their local communities within organizations like labor unions, tenant unions, and community safety networks, building avenues for working class autonomy and class struggle independent of the nonprofit industrial complex. Emerge also builds with street movements to practice security culture and self defense, both to stand our communal ground and to prepare for direct action in crisis. We believe antifascist organizing is fundamental to building bonds in ongoing collective struggle and keeping attuned to possibilities for revolutionary breaks. 

Electoral work is a critical site of such collective struggle. When socialists are elected, they can popularize demands, legislate to increase working class power, and expose the repressive mechanisms of bourgeois democracy from within. In doing so, their offices can become sites of community organization. However, in Emerge, we do not equate a seat at the table with actual power in an inherently hostile state. To actually transform society, we need independent movements that can open space for our electeds to operate, through applying external pressure and bolstering defense from reactionary forces. 

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For Collective Care, Equity, and Democratic Culture

To sustain our movement through lifelong struggle, we prioritize equity, practice accountability, and enshrine democracy in our internal culture.

The struggle to abolish all forms of oppression begins with our own organizational practices. Aware of our upbringing in patriarchal, chauvinist mores, we strive to maintain gender and racial parity in our caucus membership, to evenly spread reproductive labor, and to guarantee shared ownership of our decisions through transparent processes. Because we view democracy as the means of building socialism, we check the tide of majority rule and actively foster consensus, which sets the foundation for taking nimble action “at the speed of trust” when circumstances require it. 

As disability is a feature, not a failing, of the human experience, we work to dismantle ableist attitudes and infrastructure. We prioritize making our caucus more equitable, and develop practices to ensure our spaces are safe, accessible, and nurturing. We esteem mutual aid as an essential form of political work and a critical element of caucus life, grounding our collective care efforts in its principles. 

We consider debate an important tool to develop our collective thought, and value disagreement as a sign of good faith engagement. We work to meet each other where we’re at with patience and a learning mindset, acknowledging harm when it occurs and seeking opportunities for growth. In doing so, we deepen our politics, our practice as organizers, and our bonds as comrades that will sustain us in the long fight we face together.

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