A Small Shift

Tasks & Perspectives Document from the 2024 R&R Convention

By Judith Chavarria and Spencer Mann

The following is a tasks & perspectives document from the 2024 R&R Convention, held in Portland, Oregon on February 17-19. It outlines the authors’ perspectives on a number of questions including the historical development of Trotskyism, a triple crisis and the dual task for Marxists, the political character of DSA, and the challenges socialists face in the coming period. At the R&R Convention a new Steering Committee majority was elected, a new position on Palestine was adopted, and a series of structural reforms were made to revitalize our caucus and facilitate the political development of our members. Since then, we have established a new recruitment curriculum, begun releasing monthly bulletins, and earned a seat on the YDSA National Coordination Committee. 

The analysis made in A Small Shift is meant to be the basis for new approaches and ideas which internalize the breadth of what Trotskyism has to offer as a political and historical tradition. The authors believe that the direction outlined here has begun to, and will continue to, help construct a place for a vibrant Trotskyist presence in the socialist mainstream. It is also the hope of the authors that it can be a contribution not just to Trotskyism, but to the revolutionary Marxist current as a whole. We share this document publicly so that comrades in DSA and on the left can assess our perspectives and come to their own conclusions.

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The growth of Reform & Revolution over the course of the past year – alongside the results and prospects of our engagement with DSA – has given cause to reevaluate the dominant political and theoretical frameworks of our caucus. As our often extensive internal debates have shown, comrades in our caucus have critically different understandings of the transitional method and, by extension, the triple crisis and dual task. In this document, we put forward our understanding of the present and future tasks of Trotskyism which, as we will argue, requires a small shift in the caucus’ overall approach.

1. In the quarter century since the fall of the Soviet Union, the global working class has suffered an objective defeat. This thirty year crisis is a consequence of the sixty years preceding it, which has initiated an intricate task for the socialist movement: learning from the mistakes of the past while simultaneously adapting to the conditions they have created.
2. This requires an honest assessment of the history. At no time, even in moments of significant political upheaval, has Trotskyism proved capable of replicating the success of the Bolsheviks. Though the accomplishments of our tradition – from the Minneapolis Teamster strike to the victories of Militant and the election of Kshama Sawant – point to a way forward, our example remains one of lofty ambitions and limited results.
3. Admitting this fact should not give way to undue pessimism or overcorrection. The practical and theoretical contributions of our tradition, alongside the longstanding strength of its historical analysis, reveal that there is nevertheless a living and even vibrant core to Trotskyism. What’s called for is not the abandonment of our politics, but rather a small shift for a large problem: a simple but meaningful adjustment of Trotskyism from a tendency parallel to the broader movement, to one seeking to develop and operate within the broader movement. 
4. Reform & Revolution’s founders set the foundation for this when they decided to leave Socialist Alternative and begin anew as a caucus in the Democratic Socialists of America, correctly assessing that DSA was the organization with the greatest potential to play the largest role in the development of the revolutionary party. As they wrote in our founding document A New Knot:

68. A central lesson of the painful history of the international class struggle over the past 100 years is that the working class needs a mass revolutionary party with a farsighted Marxist leadership along with a mass revolutionary international to successfully carry out the struggle for socialism. A mass revolutionary party must be deeply rooted in the workplaces, neighborhoods, struggles against sexism, racism, and all forms of social oppression.

69. Our new organization is committed to making an important contribution to this project, the building of an internationalist, multi-racial working-class revolutionary party which is capable of providing the leadership the working class so desperately deserves. 

70. No group on the left, including Socialist Alternative, can claim to be such a force at this point of time. We believe SA as an organization, the individual members of SA, and other activists in the revolutionary left have a key role to contribute. Most important, however, will be a new generation of fighters and revolutionaries that will develop out of the titanic battles that are coming. W​e aim to help forge a principled, democratic, internationalist, revolutionary left that can bring together the best of the different trends on the socialist left along with new radical forces that will develop in the coming period. As part of such a process we hope that we will be able to join together with SA and others again in the future as part of a much larger revolutionary organization.

5. Since then, another wave of members from Socialist Alternative decided to join the caucus in 2021, and a new generation of fighters and revolutionaries is beginning to develop, slowly but surely. Our caucus has tackled new terrains of struggle, passing resolutions at YDSA and DSA conventions for the first time, running candidates for the NPC, improving our recruitment process, and opening our Discord to new and inspiring comrades. Our steps forward have been significant, but they are not enough. To be successful, this starting point must fully overcome the limitations of the sect model, and in particular, must become deeply rooted in DSA as an interwoven part of building the strength of working-class movements. We have a critical role to play, which requires convincing people of our ideas at a mass scale and empowering them to see it through across the whole terrain of struggle. This requires a reevaluation of the transitional method and of how the caucus has implemented it up to this point – of what is working and what isn’t.

The Dynamism of the Transitional Method

6. The transitional method is the means by which we can accomplish our political tasks, entailing a profound engagement with the struggles currently happening all around us and with an intense focus on their development. It is the method we use to construct, present, and fight for demands in such a way that the development of consciousness actually occurs.
7. In The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, Leon Trotsky described the function of transitional demands as such:

The strategic task of the next period – prerevolutionary period of agitation, propaganda and organization – consists in overcoming the contradiction between the maturity of the objective revolutionary conditions and the immaturity of the proletariat and its vanguard (the confusion and disappointment of the older generation, the inexperience of the younger generation). It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demand and the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.

8. The purpose of the transitional method is to connect “today’s consciousness” to the “socialist program of the revolution.” If we fail to create that bridge, then the transitional method has not been implemented successfully. In our view, successful implementation of the transitional method does not happen in a vacuum, but through the context of DSA as the organization most capable of facilitating a broader working class movement. The implications of the transitional method must be brought out more fully as a means to put our politics into practice in the daily process of struggle.
9. A key part of this task is sharpening the presentation of our politics to convince people within DSA. Our politics will not self-evidently recruit people. When engaging with them we cannot only put our ideas forward in an argumentative style; we have to be curious, interested in people, recognizing their potential, taking their hand and walking them through our politics.
10. Where there is opposition to our politics, we should be trying to win the people who are as yet unaligned. But it is not a clash of diametrically opposed sides until one force proves stronger, but rather a careful dance which also requires us to prove the validity of our ideas through the careful work of organizing. It is about letting people see our politics with their own eyes, alongside clearly elucidating them in discussion. Most of R&R’s membership did not begin their political relationship with DSA or the caucus with Trotskyist conclusions, it took a thorough process of failure and success, conflict and collaboration, and above all, direct engagement with the inner life of DSA.
11. Additionally, there is an emotional dimension to consciousness too. We must be willing not only to address the political contradictions of someone’s ideas, but also to do this in a way that recognizes their agency, ability, and potential. If we engage with people at the very start as part of a zero-sum game, we’ll alienate people who could have been receptive to us and demoralize people who are genuinely trying to learn.
12. There is a mistake that our caucus and other Marxist tendencies make when we completely separate the subjective and objective factors of revolution. The subjective conditions of the pre-revolutionary period are a barrier to the objective interests of the working-class coming to the fore. An approach which attempts to navigate this exclusively by hamfistedly appealing to the reality of those objective interests is insufficient for bridging from today’s consciousness, one which is fundamentally characterized by the presence of these subjective conditions, to the necessity of “the conquest of power by the proletariat.”
13. At the same time, we also don’t do a good enough job of thinking through and clarifying, internally or externally, our vision for a program of revolution and socialist state. This hinders our preparation to connect transitional demands to a long term plan, to win over people in DSA who are looking for a dynamic and revolutionary political tradition to be a part of, and to provide a compelling alternative to other visions for the state and revolutionary movement in DSA.
14. We must critically evaluate what people will agree with and how we can get them to organize for it. We must understand concretely how we can move people from what they believe now to what we believe – what is necessary for victory. Subjective conditions, how people feel about and understand what is in their own interests, have their own life. We are not just trying to robotically replace this with our analysis of the objective conditions; we are attempting to shift the former toward the latter.
15. This does not mean abandoning our beliefs. What must change in this analysis is not our political principles, but rather how we can best represent them in our practical activity. The solutions we pose must resonate with people and effectively address their desires, with a plan of action which can critically develop their consciousness right now. The point is not to change our politics to tail consciousness, the point is to change our approach to connect consciousness to our politics.

Our Place in DSA

16. R&R understands that we cannot simply go around DSA to appeal to the wider class. One of the great flaws of the sect model is that it holds that through the strength of its political positions alone, it will be the force to attract the working class without any help.
17. Likewise, we cannot appeal to DSA as a substitute for the whole working class. We build DSA by working to appeal to the wider working class and getting DSA to engage on those terms, and we appeal to DSA members by successfully demonstrating the ability of our ideas to connect to the wider working class.
18. There is a dialectical engagement between resolving the crises of organization, consciousness, and leadership. As a caucus, we should have no illusions about being able to fulfill our tasks alone. We must win people within the organization to our positions if we hope to act on them at a mass scale. At the same time, we cannot stop implementing our tasks while we seek to win over people within DSA; to the contrary, we implement our tasks as a critical part of the project to win people over. 
19. Our duty is to combine the most effective work with the most effective analysis, and through this to win over the most people we can. To achieve this, we must make a deliberate effort to be seen as effectively building DSA, and if we are not perceived that way, an adjustment must be made.
20. Engagement in DSA should be done in a way that roots us into the organization. This is done not by dissolving our politics, but by making the practical representation of our politics – that is to say, the work which reflects our caucus’ ideas through specific organizing – the leading expression of our principles. Principles exist in and are understood in action, and our principles allow us to accomplish the dual task only if we are constantly engaged in productive action that convinces DSA members.
21. Within DSA, we must be aware of and engaged with the primary tasks of our chapters and committed to fulfilling those tasks over the long term. To implement the transitional method effectively means recognizing that the political and organizational are interrelated, asking: “where in my chapter can I make the most efficient use of my time, represent my politics clearest, prove them through struggle, and bring people into the struggle through that work?”
22. We must also build our legitimacy as leaders through DSA’s national functions. National committees and elected bodies are one of the primary terrains in which people can see our politics at the national scale, and if we hope to affect things at this level, we must be willing to devote time and effort to building these structures, even when it is not connected to the most obvious current movement upsurge. The best way we prepare for that upsurge is by doing the slow work of engaging with these extant structures where they are deficient and turning them into mass campaign structures. We must devote time to supporting and preparing our members to engage in and be leaders in these national bodies.

Criticism and Consciousness

23. There are two sides to DSA’s leadership. One side is straightforwardly opportunist; the other side is not sufficiently, effectively, or proactively fighting the opportunists because they are revolutionary in word but not in deed. The problem in DSA is an artificial limitation on our sense of the possible – both the left and the right are accepting that DSA is stuck in its ways, and the left holds that this must be changed very slowly. R&R holds that DSA can be changed more urgently. There is a lack of dynamism and creativity in DSA. What we need to do is provide the clearest and most effective route for actually moving forward. We have a radical understanding of the situation, but no illusions of the measures required.
24. We are the caucus which, more so than others, needs to have a plan for what the left can do. If we have a good plan and it’s adopted, we have put forward positions which are widely understood to help DSA. If the leaders of the organization refuse to implement such a clear and practical plan, we expose differences and emerge as leaders ourselves. We must give DSA a direction toward which it can usefully turn. In contrast, holding our more radical and aggressive understanding without a clear plan that is widely understood is totally inadequate to the challenges of the situation. 
25. This is why our interventions cannot prefigure the organization we want to see. The new DSA cannot be built in isolation from the old. As much as possible, we must be integrating our vision for socialism with DSA’s practical and current existence because the base of organizers and developing Marxists who we must win over to build that new DSA are being reared in the context of DSA’s current existence.
26. The main issue is not that R&R criticizes DSA and the broader left too much, it’s that we make these criticisms in ineffective and unconvincing ways. DSA is an ecosystem. To be impactful to DSA is to be a productive part of that ecosystem. That means, in short, getting things done – even when it is not immediately connecting to a section of the wider working class. The solution is not just to put forward the most effective program and tactics for the moment (the demand which can win over the most people), the key is to equip DSA with the means to implement this program and these tactics.
27. It’s the latter that we’ve struggled with. We are essentially trying to circumvent the internal culture of DSA, at best unaware and at worst actively hostile to it, and the result is that instead of being the people on the team with the best ideas, we are the people outside the team chasing the work that has already been done. We lack initiative before the opportunity arises, and we lack follow through after the opportunity has faded. In this respect, we consistently orient to the parts of DSA which have, for the moment, become most relevant, and which have typically been built by other people. 
28. When we engage in this fashion, we lose sight of how to make criticism consistently productive: how it contributes to party building over time. To render our criticisms tangible, we must exist as part of the ecology of DSA, constantly pursuing and implementing proposals to address our criticisms. DSA is our responsibility too – when we see something wrong with it, we must also be seen as trying to do something to fix that. 
29. This is why our chapter work is so important. It is not enough to just engage with a chapter’s administrative work while we seek out the organizing space most relevant to the working class right now. Our persistent organizing work must be for a long term aim. There is a transition we must make here too, from distance to the everyday functioning of our chapters to substantiating our politics throughout the entire corpus of the chapter.
30. This does not reduce our ability to engage with upsurges of consciousness. To the contrary, it expands it. By organizing in one part of DSA, over a consistent period of time, when upsurges arrive we are embedded in the organization, and that gives us greater weight to make interventions elsewhere. This strengthens our interventions and criticism. This grounds our criticism as based on our conscious, ongoing effort to build DSA in the short and long term. Our criticism will only make sense if it clearly comes from a place of sustained, embedded organizing work. We are not separate from DSA, criticizing from the outside; we are a part of DSA, criticizing in the context of trying, relentlessly, to make things better. 
31. Criticism, to be most effective, has to have very clear ideas for how our alternative can be achieved. This is the point at which we are losing most of DSA. We are not making it understood how DSA can reflect the transitional method in practice, consistently, as an organization. Too often we are simply trying to implement the transitional method ourselves, and hoping DSA is won over by the clarity of the ideas. 
32. As it is essential to tailor our approach to win over the working class, it is also essential to frame our criticism in a way which does not unnecessarily produce excessive rancor in our opposition. This is a point Lenin made, in 1921, as he battled against the ultra-left “Theory of the Offensive.” Paul Levi, a German communist, had also opposed this theory, but, as Lenin said:

He did not criticize, but was one-sided, exaggerated, even malicious; he gave nothing to which the party could usefully turn. He lacks the spirit of solidarity with the party. And it is that which has made the rank and file comrades so angry, and made them deaf and blind to the great deal of truth in [his] criticism, particularly to his correct political principles.

And so a feeling arose – it also extended to non-German comrades – in which the dispute concerning the pamphlet, and concerning Levi himself, became the sole subject of this contention, instead of the false theory and the bad practice of the ‘offensive theory’ and the ‘leftists’. They have to thank Paul Levi that up to the present they have come out so well, much too well. Paul Levi is his own worst enemy.

33. In a mass membership organization, we will rarely get the best of a situation. The best is usually only attainable when the good of the organization itself is prioritized; that is, in the sect. Yet we cannot ignore the need for change within DSA. We must envision and articulate the best, while fighting for the better. If we only engage in the former in absence of the latter, then it will make DSA members “deaf and blind to the great deal of truth” in our criticism.
34. At times we play the role of a Levi, giving “nothing to which the party could usefully turn.” Our positions are rooted in correct principles but little else which can clearly be seen. The result is that we do not actually give DSA a meaningful alternative, we do not open up the potential for a different course. We overemphasize an analysis of the errors of the current course as itself an alternative, but it is not.
35. In being so reticent to fight for the better, it’s clear to much of DSA that we lack “the spirit of solidarity” with DSA. We do not act as part of the organization, we do not admit that our fate is tied to its fate.
36. We need to reground our insights in the practical criticism of DSA. All too often, we develop an analysis of the political situations in front of us without understanding the implications and limitations of the terrain of struggle itself. This leads, not only to criticism made ineffectively, but also ineffective criticism, which does not adequately grasp the heart of the matter. Sometimes we are wrong, and we must be able to recognize those times clearly, against the example of objective results.
37. This does not mean we have to win everyone, but we must be moving toward winning people; if we convince almost no one, however, then there’s a problem with our approach.
38. We believe that many engagements – from the manner in which we argued for Democratize DSA, to our approach to the presidential election, to our current majority two-state position on Israel-Palestine, to elements of our work in Seattle –  are not convincing as many people as we could or as we should. This is because our approach comes off as detached from DSA, self-absorbed, sectarian, unmoored from any practical strategy for implementation, and obsessed at chasing current events instead of building the organization, as if it is not in the service of DSA. This perception is not accurate. But it is a mark of the failure of our current approach to the transitional method that we are seeing this perception and failing to correct it. Too often, our approach makes us our “own worst enemy.”

Breaking From the Sect Model

39. Decades of defeat, repression and demoralization left the socialist movement scattered in a series of minuscule sects, isolated from the working class. This trend was reflected across the left, and we believe that the decades of Trotskyist groups organizing in small, exclusively Trotskyist sects has degraded the principles on which the movement was founded. The sect model has created a deficient Trotskyism. 
40. The sect model overstates the dangers of engaging with the wider movement and recruiting from it, and understates the dangers of staying separate from the wider movement. It places at the heart of its revolutionary strategy an almost idealistic belief that no force can advance revolution effectively except for the principles of a small group of sect-leaders. Because of this, sects cannot learn from the wider movement, and can only rarely connect to it – they tend only to grow by parasitically orienting to mass movements and recruiting extremely small numbers of people, enough to sustain itself, but never to meaningfully expand toward a mass organization. In moments of rapid growth, sects shatter, bending rapidly toward opportunism without structures to cohere their politics, or stay isolated, preserving their cohesion by continuing their irrelevance. 
41. R&R is not like these sects. Trotskyism, and the CWI tradition in particular, emerged from a place of recognition of the crisis of the wider left. At each stage, we have attempted to resolve that crisis. Our tradition understood the lack of mass organizations and mass consciousness as intertwined in shared importance with the crisis of leadership. R&R, uniquely among modern Trotskyist forces, was willing to break with the arrogance of the sect model, and recognize that: “No group on the left, including Socialist Alternative, can claim to be such a force [that can lead the revolutionary movement] at this point of time.”
42. We view the principles of this document as logically extending from the principles of A New Knot and A Triple Crisis and A Dual Task. We see this small shift to our tactics as continuing to carry out the task laid out when our caucus was founded. 
43. There are significant aspects of our organizational structure and political approach which carry over harmful elements of the model that we have inherited from Socialist Alternative. These are barriers to carrying out our task, and they are inadequate to advance Trotskyism and revolutionary Marxism. 
44. Our current Steering Committee majority act like they are doing the right thing unless it is conclusively proven wrong. We are a caucus with shared principles, who overwhelmingly agree on our analysis and broadly on our approach. But we face three key difficulties, and instead of addressing these problems effectively, we have, like the sects of past generations, simply insisted they are unavoidable outcomes of consciousness and conditions:
    • Not sufficiently rooted in DSA as our political home. This means too often, we don’t view working through DSA, and convincing members of DSA to be the primary way to advance our ideas. We do not place a great enough importance on carefully, critically, dynamically, and self-reflectively winning over DSA to our positions. Instead, we are too quick to write off disagreements as outcomes of DSA’s inevitable and inherent underdevelopment. 
    • Not effectively applying the transitional method, and not effectively judging how we apply it. This means our criticism is not up to the task of pushing things in the right direction, and when our criticism fails to move people, instead of reflecting on why, we carry out an identical approach elsewhere. 
    • Not trusting our own members to be adequate representatives of our politics, nor to match up to and even surpass the influence of current leaders. Members are not assisted in bringing our politics forward internally and face significant barriers to doing so, barring exceptional stubbornness. In so doing, members are not fully trusted to become leaders of the organization in their own right. 
45. Trotskyism (and Marxism) is not a static set of perfect principles already arrived at, which must simply be carried into power, but a living organism, which must grow into power. Our Trotskyism must be vibrant and living, changing and evolving as it expands and grapples with the new situation. Not losing its fundamental character, but being adjusted carefully as the road ahead shifts.

The Partitioning of Politics and Organization

46. The gravest weaknesses of the sect model are a structure which is inadequate to advance its own politics and an incapacity to adjust that structure. We have carried these flaws with us, albeit in a weakened and reduced form. 
47. Too often, we approach problems as idealists. We treat our stances as symbolic, necessary to attract people through ‘correct principles’ which are stripped of their context and mechanically applied. We promote the idea of an independent socialist movement, yet do not have an approach which is capable of developing the forces which are needed to embody it. DSA is taken as a platform for our politics, but not as one with its own definite ecology of relations we need to work within, as described above.
48. Our disinterest in the relation between politics and structure leaves us ill equipped to fight for our politics on the terrain of DSA, where we can actually put them into action. Our principles, and the structures and forces that have to substantiate them, are bound up in a dialectical relationship. Our politics need to be substantiated by structure.
49. As an example, most of the major caucuses have developed regular newsletters outlining political perspectives on issues of the moment in DSA and on the left, along with highlighting the national and chapter level organizing their members are doing. In spite of their weaker politics, other caucuses are able to inspire DSA members and win them over through these methods, members that could be connected to and won over to our politics if we had more developed means of delivering them.
50. Experience shows that we will not succeed until we do something fully. For example, if we want to influence DSA’s international work, then we must be part of the International Committee – with all its flaws. If we want to create a campaigning, fighting socialist organization, we must do more than propose fighting campaigns, we have to be the rank and file leaders of those campaigns in every chapter possible. We must engage comprehensively with its structures in our analysis. What this means is that if we want to get people in DSA to do something, then we must put forward a plan for how it can actually be achieved; it must be a plan good enough to convince DSA members and one we’re willing to see through to the end.
51. The structure in which we organize is what facilitates the effective revolutionary approach outlined by the transitional method. When we think of our structures as simply vehicles for our politics rather than an essential part of the politics themselves, we struggle to transform our ideas into practice, and struggle to bring people along to our principles. 
52. The result of the sect-form for R&R is that we blame the political underdevelopment of the left for problems which are actually partially caused by our own inability to convince and develop the left. We underestimate the importance of tactics and structures, and underestimate the degree to which improving, changing and critically engaging with our tactics and structures could improve the way we advance our politics, and thereby improve the politics of the broader movement. We too often treat the politics of DSA, of other organizations, caucuses, and individual members as static, neglecting the significant extent to which we have the capacity and responsibility to impact them. This leads to us underestimating the potential of DSA, underestimating the level of recruitment and political agreement we can find in DSA members, and under-resourcing caucus projects to those ends.
53. The most significant expression of the link between politics and organization is our branches. We need to emphasize the practical and political utility of branches more, their ability to create new and better leaders, and to resolve short and long term goals. In sum, we need to completely bring out the potential in members, chapters, and organizations in a conscious and deliberate manner. Successful branches can cause political rebirth in their own chapters before anyone even realizes it’s happening. We must seek to do this everywhere.
54. The sect-model leads to abstract political discussion without actionable goals at every level of our caucus. In contrast, these two things are dialectically related. Principles and tactics are distinct but also interrelated, and we cannot discuss one in isolation from the other. Attempting to do so has a paralyzing effect, as we sever our principles from the living struggle through which people come to understand them, and we sever “tactical concerns” from the political roots from which they stem. It can also lead to opportunism: arguing that flagrant violations of our principles are in service of ‘tactics’ due to their total separation.
55. At times, we approach political development in too linear a fashion, producing a stagest conception of principles and tactics. We treat internal political cohesion as a separate prerequisite to political action. We operate as though change occurs because we arrive at the correct ideas and then simply apply them. But for a caucus in a vibrant socialist organization, talking about ideas without action is impossible. While cohesion is essential, achieving it requires not only ideas but structures and an engagement with our principles through effective tactics. To do otherwise leads to abstract political discussion without actionable goals while our internal organizational flaws undermine our ability to create consistent spaces for political education. This has a paralyzing effect, severing our principles from the living struggle through which people come to understand them.
56. This drives opportunism on the one hand and sectarianism on the other, or often both at once, with opportunistic approaches applied in a sectarian manner. It serves to confuse principles and tactics – our muddled approach mixes education with debates, debates with strategies, and ideas with beliefs. Tactics inevitably seep in, but instead of being formally and fully discussed, the pace of organizing in a multi-tendency organization, and the progression of current events, it results in us inevitably accepting the tactics of the most experienced members without understanding the underlying principles or analysis.
57. This incoherent approach is maintained only by an unofficial consensus around the uninterrogated instincts of the Steering Committee majority. In this way, complicated theoretical debates give way to a simple reality: one must understand things in the same way as the Steering Committee majority in order to be trusted.
58. There is no way through to our politics except through the structures we have in our caucus. A flawed structure creates a dead end in the process of political development – a roadblock to realizing someone’s potential and turning them into a cadre member.
59. There are structures in our caucus – the Editorial Board, the overconcentration  of work in the Steering Committee, the lack of a developed internal organizing apparatus – which replicate the dysfunctional form of the sect model, where too few people are tasked with too much responsibility, and too many people are on the outside looking in.
60. Too many R&R members do not know how to get involved in national work, and we do not know how we expect those members to get involved in national work. The current approach of the Steering Committee majority is to only invite members into responsibility when they reach some undefined point of development to warrant trust. This way of doing things is deeply undemocratic, despite the formal rules of the caucus being democratic.

The New Generation of Fighters and Revolutionaries

61. It is of vital importance that we trust our members to put our politics into practice, not just externally in their chapters, but within the caucus itself. In R&R there is an implicit culture of paternalism which holds that members cannot become leaders or participants until they have become sufficiently developed, and developed in a very particular way, under the purview of other members who are already trusted to take on caucus responsibilities.
62. For example, various comrades have proposed study groups on books which interest them. The comrades were informed to allow the Steering Committee to authorize such groups and to hold off for now. However, in the wake of the DSA Convention in 2023, such discussions were never had and the comrades were effectively shut down. Instead, the SC’s own study group was organized, members were informed to cease activity, and instead an activity initiated by the Steering Committee and its experienced members emerged.
63. The problem is not the setting of political and organizational standards, but rather that members are subject to unwritten standards imposed from above by the Steering Committee majority and those who agree with their approach, which exist outside of our recruitment process, and informally determine where one is allowed to participate in the caucus. Joining R&R is not considered enough to participate actively in R&R – to be allowed that, a member needs to cross a separate, arbitrary barrier. 
64. This is one of the most significant limitations of our current approach to internal organizing. We cannot continue to say “this person needs to develop more before we allow them into any role of leadership.” In practice, this has a number of interwoven consequences:
    • New members are required to either fight long enough to force themselves into a role they’d like to take on, or give up after a period of implicit rejection. The latter will often come from discussions that the new member isn’t even involved in, and with no intention of clearly informing them of the decision and reasoning. This is demoralizing, giving members the impression that they are not good enough without a clear understanding of why or how to move forward. 
    • Expectations for participation, of what counts as good enough, are entirely unclear even when a member is finally allowed to take up a position within the caucus. They are held to nebulous and unclear standards which are informally set by the Steering Committee majority. Politically, this leaves both the members looking to get involved and the caucus as a whole unprepared to grow and to learn through experience. Practically, it leads to excess micromanagement and hardship.
    • In situations where a member is not qualified enough to take on a particular role for whatever reason, there is not an explicit process for working with them to change this, for working alongside the member and continuing the journey of political development that we are all on as Marxists. Instead, the analysis stops at a member’s inexperience, it almost never begins from this. Instead of stopping there, the necessary framework to use is, “this person will develop more through their participation in this role and the support of the caucus along the way.”
65. DSA has created and grouped together in one place thousands of new, ambitious socialists with varied skills and levels of experience, a growing familiarity with Marxism, and substantial energy. Though not every DSA member can be won over to our ideas and approach, many can. It is these new members which can provide a rejuvenating dynamism for R&R, exemplified by the much more engaging level of political debate that was sparked by creating the supporters’ Discord. Of course, we have to politically consolidate members, but DSA has created a huge number of recruits ready to step into important caucus positions. A member should be able to quickly rise from a new recruit to a trusted position of responsibility, it has been demonstrated repeatedly that even newer members can be trusted to take on formal tasks.
66. It’s important to clarify what the principle of “the working class learns through experience” actually means. Experience is a guide not only in that it allows us to recognize better or worse approaches, but that it also firmly establishes these lessons in the moods of the class. In order for this to occur, however, the discomfort of defeat must be entertained and surpassed over a period of time, sometimes brief and sometimes quite prolonged.
67. This applies not only to the broader class, but to members of the caucus as well. When new members are brought into Reform & Revolution, their potential has not yet been exhausted. In order to bring this potential to bear in the inner life of the caucus and in the socialist movement, they must be allowed to stumble, to fall over themselves, before getting back up and going further. The caucus must walk alongside them, supporting comrades through the mistakes that are an organic part of learning.
68. Furthermore, it’s often the case that the Steering Committee majority does not know what new members want to do within the caucus, and it does not proactively seek out their participation where there is not already an organic desire. This lack of curiosity severs the caucus from its membership to a critical degree, so much so that an analysis of particular members and their potential can become entirely distorted.
69. We do not believe that the undemocratic, informal processes of our caucus are malicious or deliberate. We believe that it comes from an underlying bad approach. This is a link to the sect-model that we must break by empowering the whole of the caucus’ membership to lead. In practice, this isn’t how the caucus functions; rather, the implicit premise is that no one else is fit to lead, and that they cannot be made to lead unless they distrust themselves.
70. As a caucus we don’t specialize, diversify, entrust new members to do their own thing, share responsibilities, or take on criticism enough. We don’t believe in the agency of our members, nor their connection to the caucus. Without this, no one is empowered to become a new leader, nor to believe that they could be leaders.
71. As such, the same trusted members are expected to continue fulfilling the same roles and responsibilities indefinitely, while also inevitably taking on new responsibilities as the caucus continues to change. These important functions of the caucus are not given over to new members, nor are new members perceived as being capable of learning unless they already meet an unspoken standard, and so a minority becomes entrenched in the process of micromanaging the day to day life of the caucus, limiting their ability to make interventions into other important parts of DSA. In refusing to sacrifice some consistency in the short term, we sacrifice the growth, sustainability, and dynamism of our political project, leading to ossification. This is untenable.
72. The only way to address this is by recognizing that new members will make mistakes, and that this is okay. We must trust them to take on progressively challenging roles and through that allow them to develop through struggle in the most profound sense.
73. Between “the confusion and disappointment of the older generation” and “the inexperience of the younger generation” is a dialectical tension which must be allowed to flourish through an honest exchange of ideas and the clarity of objective struggle. Any new leadership in the caucus is bound to make mistakes, act upon miscalculations, or miss opportunities to intervene within a broader movement. This is an organic part of their inexperience, for which only experience itself can act as a guide. But these limitations are precisely what enable new leaders to go further than those before them: they are in a position to learn, and confusion and disappointment have yet to take their toll.
74. It remains true today that: “Most important, however, will be a new generation of fighters and revolutionaries that will develop out of the titanic battles that are coming.” In practice, we are yet to fully draw out the implications of what this generation’s tasks are, and of how Reform & Revolution can best help bring them out for all that they are worth.

Our Tasks in DSA and the Future of R&R

75. We fundamentally agree with the analysis of our responsibilities laid out in A Triple Crisis and A Dual Task:

Instead of denouncing from the sidelines, revolutionaries should be a part of building these left formations, while building a principled revolutionary pole within them, linked to social movements outside of parliament and arguing for a strategy of developing them into genuinely mass workers’ parties. In this way, Marxists maximize the chances of creating an alternative leadership to the reformists and establishing a mass party which can implement the necessary revolutionary programme. 

76. To accomplish this, we need to change our caucus’ approach, our structure, and our leadership.
77. We need a shift in our methodology for how we consider the route to present our ideas and win people to them. When members disagree with or ignore us, we need to take it much more seriously. Being in DSA is a challenge which places new pressures on us, and we must learn to face them.
78. This does not mean abandoning our principles, it simply means considering more seriously how we advance them. This consideration matters not only internally, a coherent external articulation of a plan for how we implement our politics in DSA is a prerequisite to winning over a substantial segment of DSA.
79. We need to aspire to empower every member with a clear role that they are actively engaged in in the national caucus. Though we will never fully accomplish this, it is in attempting to do so that we overcome the current limits of the caucus.
80. We want to help R&R members become leaders in their chapters and working groups, to elect multiple R&R members to the National Political Committee, to profoundly grow our caucus, to consistently propose and pass resolutions, to lead campaigns which implement and prove our ideas in practice, to become a pillar of DSA not in spite of our politics, nor exclusively because of our politics, but through our politics, and to break beyond the limits of sectarianism.
81. In Into the Socialist Mainstream, the second generation of R&R members to break from Socialist Alternative wrote:

The old CWI leadership treated the disagreements with them as a threat to the CWI as a whole, rather than as an opportunity to collectively learn, correct course, and educate the cadres of the international. The balance sheet of this experience drawn up by the SA/ISA leadership paints this as an aberration, but, in reality, there are not many examples in any section of the CWI over its more than 40-year history of a major debate that posed a real challenge to the leadership and which did not result in an embittered split.

82. We must be the first in this tradition to undergo major debate and the potential for transformation without coming apart at the seams. We’ve already begun the process, but it is ultimately our task to continue it. This document, this small shift we are proposing, is another step in this direction.

[T]he rebirth of a mass socialist workers’ movement in the US, which DSA marks the early stages of, points toward the very real potential to build a living, breathing, powerful Marxist current from among the most serious workers and youth who are looking to get organized in the fight for socialism. It is out of this wider process, not independent of it, that the future mass revolutionary party and international will emerge.

83. Reform & Revolution has the potential to do what few other Trotskyist organizations have been able to do effectively: admit that we make mistakes, and productively confront them, not by making a drastic recalculation, but by making a small shift. We are not strong enough to do it alone, and so we need to become an honest part of the movement which can do it together. With humility and optimism, faith in our revolutionary spirit, but the thoughtful, critical approach that defines Marxism, we can turn our engagement with DSA into a reciprocal and productive one which changes both R&R and DSA for the better. But to do that, we need to be willing to recognize that we have gone off course and that it is time to readjust. The elements of this shift are something we ourselves are still learning to implement, and none of us have done so perfectly.
84. We write this out of a deep love for our caucus, and hope for its potential. We have each chosen to dedicate our time to organizing in R&R, not because we believe our caucus is perfect, but because we see it as the best way to advance toward a better world. Each one of us feels the stifling pains of capitalism in our own ways, and we experience the pains of political disorientation in our own organizations too. Sectarianism stops us from facing both.
85. Without illusions as to the task ahead, we honestly say that R&R can propel us toward socialism in a way no other force in the country can. We are facing the weight of a century of tragedy for the proletariat. But we are socialists. We know that the challenges we have been given, the things that bring suffering, also elevate us. These challenges do not dispirit us, they inspire and fortify us. To be in this movement is not only a great honor, but a great joy. We hope the steps we take now will help it to thrive, until we have played our role, as best we can, in the birth of a socialist world.