Points of Unity

Adopted by the 2026 R&R National Convention – January 18th, 2026

Reform & Revolution (R&R) is a Marxist caucus in DSA. We are building DSA into a force capable of carrying out a socialist transformation of society: a revolution to smash the capitalist state and build a workers’ state.

We stand in the revolutionary tradition of Marxism and scientific socialism, and draw inspiration from the ideas of Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, and other revolutionaries who have come before. Our strategy emerges from the lessons of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, in which the working class seized state power and used it to transform society in its own interests and the interests of humanity. Our caucus continues to build upon that tradition and its subsequent development through the Left Opposition and Trotskyism.

The fragmentation and disorientation of Marxist forces in the wake of the bureaucratic ossification and collapse of the Soviet Union poses a challenge for the revolutionary left. However, the growth of new left formations and new terrains of class struggle present enormous opportunities. Our period is characterized by crises of organization, leadership, and consciousness, which together form a Triple Crisis. R&R aims to tackle this Triple Crisis by carrying out a Dual Task, the approach of simultaneously building mass campaigns and broader socialist organizations, while also developing the revolutionary core within those struggles.

We are organizing to build DSA into a mass socialist party, one capable of winning over millions of workers to Marxist politics through independent working class organization and popular campaigns rooted in clear socialist messaging. We envision a party that raises the horizon of the working class and confronts capitalism. We are building this party by employing the united front and transitional method, articulating our principles in word and action, and linking immediate demands and campaigns for reform to a revolutionary program for the conquest of power and socialist transformation of society. Our members are organizing across DSA, in unions, protest movements, electoral campaigns, and anti-imperialist struggle in service of our revolutionary goals.

Our Points of Unity

We Are Marxists and Scientific Socialists

We are Marxists. We recognize that society is divided between the ruling class, who own the means of production, and the working class, who live by the sale of their labor and their bodies. The vast majority of people fall into the working or – proletarian – class. Capitalists are constantly working to lower wages so that they can make even larger profits for themselves. To resist this tendency, the working class organizes into unions and political parties to fight for our immediate interests, including better wages and working conditions.

This is how society is currently organized, but it has not always been this way, and it will not be this way forever. As Marxists, we work to expand working class struggle beyond the fight for immediate material interests into the realm of revolutionary politics. We view history as the unfolding of class struggle, and we fight to bring about the end of not only capitalism, but all forms of class society.

Further Reading:

We are for a Mass Socialist Party

Reform & Revolution fights to transform DSA into a mass socialist party, an instrument of struggle fighting for working class political aims on all fronts. There must be an inseparable relationship between the socialist electoral project and the mass movements and institutions of class power on which it rests. The party we fight for is, like DSA, providing a common framework to work together, share lessons, and test out ideas. It would serve as a counter-hegemonic force, bringing working people together through our shared experiences under capitalism and providing revolutionary hope.

Even in the desperate conditions we face, the party that our class needs will not just emerge spontaneously; DSA must build it consciously. This requires mass struggle against the bourgeois parties, a fight that socialist electoral campaigns can advance if built on a party-like basis of bold demands, strong links to DSA, and consistently oppositional messaging and practice. We support all the steps DSA has taken towards acting like a party, but this is only the beginning. Building a socialist party requires Marxists humble enough to learn from the working class and audacious enough to put forward revolutionary ideas in living movements. This is the cadre that R&R is developing through the struggles of our period.

A mass socialist party would constitute a tremendous step forward. But independence and a mass base alone do not guarantee victory for our class. Such a party would also need to hold a revolutionary program and strategy for the overthrow of capitalist class rule. A revolutionary party cannot be simply proclaimed by a small group; it must emerge from the roots we have grown over the past decade. DSA is the principal means through which such a party can be developed. Our caucus organizes to build a strong Marxist wing of DSA and to win DSA to a revolutionary program. 

Further Reading:

We Work Towards a Revolutionary Program through the Transitional Method

We believe that effective socialist organizations must center themselves around a revolutionary program, constructed through the democratic deliberation of its members. A revolutionary program’s demands must be constructed and applied dynamically, as a product of the social and political conditions impacting today’s working class, rather than through a repackaging of the demands of past conditions. R&R fights to build DSA into such an organisation and to develop such a program with the tool most appropriate to the task: the transitional method. 

The transitional method enables Marxists to bridge the gap between the current consciousness of the working class and the revolutionary consciousness necessary to win socialism. In R&R, we fight for a system of demands that connects to workers’ day-to-day lives, raises the horizon of our class, and brings the movement into a confrontation with the capitalist system itself. The core tenets of our revolutionary program must assume this transitional character: they must link workers’ current issues – say, their disgust with billionaire CEOs – to concrete demands that push the logic of capitalism to its breaking point, such as the call to bring the US’s 500 top corporations under public democratic ownership. The transitional method allows an organization to link the struggle for better conditions in the here-and-now to the ultimate goal of a socialist society.

Further Reading:

We Work for a Socialist Labor Movement

The power of the organized working class is central to R&R’s strategy for winning immediate reforms and for the revolutionary transformation of society. The success of the socialist movement will depend on our ability to speak to and convince millions of workers of our ideas.

We believe socialists have a vital role to play in rebuilding the power of the labor movement, and we fight to build a rank and file base for militant, democratic unions. DSA must build support for socialism among the working class through proudly participating in strike support, adopting a socialist rank and file strategy, and building the power of reform movements in unions. In doing so, we strive to overcome economism and reformism within the labor and socialist movements.

The labor movement in the United States has been weakened by corruption, undemocratic practices, and conservatism. Unions are too often organized in top-down, bureaucratic ways that reduce the power and militancy of rank and file members. Consistently, unions fail to oppose imperialism, racism, and the corrupt two party establishment. Socialists can only change this by directly organizing among the working class, merging the socialist and labor movements by demonstrating to workers that socialist ideas can improve their lives, and fighting for transformative demands that raise the horizon of our class. 

In the last several decades, new surges of militancy have sparked in the labor movement, and as Marxists, we take responsibility for organizing in the labor movement to join, support and strengthen these developments. New organizing in unions can only succeed if it fundamentally democratizes unions. To that end, R&R advocates for an expansive program of union democracy. As we carry out our socialist rank and file strategy, we fight for worker control over contract negotiations, exclusive worker control over starting and ending strikes, direct election of officers, and for union officials taking a salary equal to the average workers’ wage. DSA must not stop merely at the ideas of reform caucuses but instead push further, for policies that fight directly for worker control over the workplace.

Within DSA, we fight for a strong and clear orientation towards the working class. Our aim is to build a party capable of winning workers to militant, class struggle politics through the experience of active struggle against the boss, the labor bureaucracy, and the capitalist system. We believe the power of organized labor has a unique capacity to win transformative reforms and turn popular movements into successful struggles. We work to build up powerful unions, taking a leading role in new organizing and contract fights. We organize for the industrialization of DSA members, and the mass recruitment of union members, into DSA. We organize politically to challenge all bourgeois tendencies within the labor movement, including bureaucratism, labor imperialism, and economism. We organize to politicize our unions, fighting for Palestine solidarity, opposing ICE, and supporting trans liberation. We organize to build a socialist wing within the labor movement, which is openly partyist and anti-imperialist, and can form the nucleus of an independent socialist party.

Further Reading:

We Organize to Merge the Class Struggle and Anti-Oppression Movements 

We believe that the working class is the center of revolutionary potential in society, and that developing a unified working class struggle against capitalism requires proactively organizing for the liberation of all oppressed and marginalized people. Struggles against “social” oppression are not separate from class struggle, they are enmeshed in the fabric of class struggle and only through waging an integrated struggle can we win.

Workers experience oppression in many ways, including racism, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia. These forms of oppression existed before capitalism, but their nature has become integrated with the capitalist system. We see this in how police violence, the carceral system, mass deportations, and bans on reproductive and gender affirming healthcare are used to oppress sections of our class, and how the capitalist state follows up these attacks with brutal divide and conquer methods, stoking divisions amongst workers to neutralize our resistance. 

The capitalist class wages their struggle against us through economic and social terrains. To fight back and win, we must wage a unified struggle on both fronts. We organize for DSA to join social movements for equality. Whether these movements are against imperialism, racism, or other forms of oppression, DSA must join them with our own clear socialist message. We boldly and humbly struggle within mass mobilizations to strengthen our commitment to liberation. This approach is known as the united front, a Marxist method of reaching working class people and developing their consciousness towards revolutionary politics through struggle.

We believe our revolutionary project faces disorienting pressures from two directions. On the one hand, we must oppose the errors of economism and class reductionism, which do not recognize how developing a unified working class struggle for socialism requires shared struggle within ongoing movements for national liberation, anti-racism, and LGBTQ+ rights. On the other hand, we must oppose liberal approaches to fighting oppression which oppose a materialist understanding of exploitation and a recognition of capitalism’s underlying role in all forms of oppression. Resolving this contradiction requires socialists to merge the social struggle and the class struggle. We fight for a socialist analysis within anti-oppression movements, while battling economism and chauvinism within the labor movement and on the left. 

Further Reading:

We Fight for Black Liberation and the Overthrow of White Supremacy 

We view the segregation, exploitation, and dispossession of Black Americans as a foundational element of American capitalism, and we believe that to achieve a successful revolution, we must directly confront and overturn white supremacy. 

We look to the Civil War and Reconstruction as an unfinished revolution, one which can only be carried to its conclusion by the defeat of the imperialist, capitalist system that runs our country. More broadly, we recognize that the stratified racial caste system of American capitalism, rooted in slavery and Indigenous dispossession, defines the experience of American workers.

Consequently, we seek to build a DSA which directly acknowledges and confronts these divisions through campaigns for racial equality, reparations, equal voting rights, immigrant rights, and an end to the violent capitalist police system. We believe DSA must boldly and proudly advocate for Black liberation and must seek to organize the Black working class with a special urgency. We stand in solidarity with Indigenous struggles for land rights, sovereignty, and economic justice. We oppose a liberal-reformist approach towards achieving equality and instead fight for a socialist, mass movement strategy capable of smashing both white supremacy and capitalism. We believe the working class can only be unified if we organize proactively against white supremacy and battle racism and chauvinism in our movements. 

Further Reading:

We Are Socialist Feminists

We hold that the violent operation and implementation of patriarchy is the leading edge of reactionary politics in our moment. We consider the gendered division of labor and the exploitation of women to be not merely an incidental feature of capitalism, but a foundational element of it. Alongside women’s exploitation in the workplace, capitalist society perpetuates an unequal distribution in social labor along gendered lines. This inequality reinforces patriarchy in ways which weaken the working class as a whole. For these reasons, we believe that socialists must unequivocally fight for women’s rights, trans rights, and queer liberation, through all our organizing as an integral part of our revolutionary project. 

To overturn sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, we seek to build DSA into a powerful socialist feminist political movement. We advocate for ambitious campaigns for abortion rights, bodily autonomy, and broader struggles for women’s and queer rights. In our unions and within DSA, we seek to overcome chauvinism and sexism, and to create political spaces where women’s and queer rights are prioritized.

The socialist feminism we envision views class struggle as the path forward for women’s and queer liberation, and as the means through which we must unify all workers in struggle against patriarchy, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia.

Further Reading:

We are Anti-Imperialists and Proletarian Internationalists

R&R is dedicated to class-struggle anti-imperialism. We fight to rebuild the power of the international working class in relentless opposition to the U.S. empire and our own ruling class, in line with the Leninist principle of revolutionary defeatism. Our internationalism is rooted in a commitment to solidarity with ongoing anti-imperialist, democratic, and workers’ struggles around the world. We fight for workers’ action to oppose the global imperialist war drive.

Independent class mobilization against imperialism requires a willingness to criticize and oppose bourgeois-nationalist leaders and states who hold back the fight against empire. Only an international socialist movement can defeat the global capitalist-imperialist system. We recognize that the pressures of isolation and imperialism within a global capitalist order lead to profound retreats from workers’ democracy and socialist construction. As we oppose all American intervention, we must also assess these retreats from a Marxist perspective, and understand the impact of objective international conditions and international revolution on the development or regression of socialism.                                                                                                                                                                                                     

We reject both “campist” and “third campist” approaches to internationalism which flatten contradictions within the imperialist world-system and therefore infringe upon the political clarity required in the fight to defend and advance the gains of anti-imperialist struggles. The strategy of permanent revolution, asserting the necessity of proletarian leadership in the struggle for national and democratic demands in the imperialist epoch, is central to our analysis and to our conception of internationalism and solidarity.

Further Reading:

We Develop the Democratic and Political Culture of DSA

We believe that perpetual political education, discussion of Marxist theory, analysis of political conditions, and strategic decision-making and priority-setting are essential components to the healthy functioning of DSA at national and chapter levels, and indispensable to the development of a socialist party. We aim to foster forums for discussion and debate amongst comrades across DSA, whether caucused or uncaucused. We stand for increasing the transparency of DSA’s national functions, which are too often opaque and confusing for rank and file members to navigate, and support fostering forums for mass member democracy, including prioritizing debate and voting at national conventions. We support the development of internal tendencies and caucuses within DSA as an essential part of the political growth of the socialist mainstream, and support the proactive recruitment of workers in the thousands and millions into our socialist organization.

Further Reading:

If you align with our Points of Unity, consider applying to join Reform & Revolution Caucus! We’re excited to organize with you!