Hello from Red Star! Curious about what we’ve been up to? Read on to find out!

In response to ongoing and escalating ICE activity in Minnesota, Red Star is amplifying an urgent request for donations to Twin Cities DSA so they may continue to organize to counter ICE, and prepare for a general strike on January 23rd with the goal expelling ICE from the state. To our comrades and everyone who is standing up in solidarity against ICE, we commend your bravery and anxiously await whatever lessons can be learned from this flashpoint of struggle as the Trump administration continues its campaign of lawless violence against our communities. ICE out of Minnesota and everywhere!

Fund the Base, Build the Party! Updates from Red Star’s Work on the NPC and GDC

Red Star has been using its influence on the National Political Committee and the Growth & Development Committee to fulfill our commitment to fund the base and build the party. Below is an update on our progression towards that goal.

Red Star worked with Springs of Revolution to merge our previously submitted chapter grants and incentives program into a reworked version of their Locals First proposal, making $1 million in grants available to chapters this year. We commend our SOR comrades for their work building consensus on the NPC, with members of Groundwork also co-signing the final merged proposal.

During the NPC meeting, we successfully defeated an amendment from Groundwork that would have exponentially weighted grant allotments towards the largest chapters. We also voted down another amendment from Reform & Revolution and Marxist Unity Group that would have removed grant support for cross-chapter organizing events, regional conferences, chapter onboarding events and leadership trainings. We see these as key components of building a strong national organization and developing tighter relationships across chapters. This reflects our continued commitment to building the foundation to raise the roof.

While the infrastructure for disbursing some of these grants is still being set up, the chapter office matching funds program has hit the ground running under the leadership of Red Star NPC member Hazel W. At the NPC meeting, we also approved increasing the office matching fund to $100,000. Check out the kickoff call on Wednesday the 21st to learn more about how your chapter can level up its organizing and deepen roots in your local communities.

Red Star NPC members also voted in favor of paying $1K/month stipends to all at-large NPC members, demonstrating our commitment to paid political leadership. However, we did not support paying $2K/month for all at-large NPC members, feeling the cost could not be justified for the full body when weighed against other political priorities. The 27-member NPC has so far encountered many of the problems we anticipated when opposing NPC expansion at this past convention.

Growth & Development Committee Update

Red Star members played a crucial role in the success of the Growth and Development Committee’s Fall Drive, which saw DSA’s membership increase by over 10,000 as we surpassed the 90,000 member mark for the first time ever. The Drive was a multitendency project that successfully metabolized input from a number of political perspectives, a major accomplishment for the GDC after Red Star led the effort to revitalize and overhaul the body last year.

Stars were present in all aspects of the Drive – building the workplan and ensuring lessons from the State of DSA report were reflected in emphasizing stronger onboarding and retention work, leading development of the toolkit rolled out to chapters, serving as coaches mentoring chapter membership leads, and developing and leading trainings for chapters. Currently, Red Star members are also helping lead the Fall Drive debrief and preparing a report back to membership next month, as well as leading the Member Data Subcommittee, which shares out data and analysis monthly on DSA chapter and membership growth.

Red Star in the Spotlight: Our Members Share their Socialist Analysis

Since our last newsletter, Red Star members have been actively engaging with the broader Left, contributing vital socialist perspectives on a range of critical issues.

Red Star Writes

Red Star compiled a list of books, articles, interviews, and podcasts covering the history of the Bolivarian revolution and the U.S.’s campaign to subdue it in response to the bombing of Caracas and kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nícolas Maduro earlier this month. Check it out here.

Boston DSA and Red Star member Haywood Cabral has written an article for Working Mass, detailing the history of white supremacy in the American socialist movement- from segregated trade unions post-Civil War seeing freed black workers as a threat, to the condescension and intolerance for criticism we see all-too-often from white comrades in socialist spaces today. They also detail a path towards resolving these contradictions, seeing that as the only way DSA could ever form a viable base for a mass party. Read the full article here.

Hazel W. Speaks at San Francisco Rally in Solidarity with Venezuela & against ICE

Red Star NPC member Hazel W. spoke at the “No War, No ICE Rally” on January 10th in San Francisco’s mission district. Over 1,300 people turned out in solidarity with the people of Venezuela as they face down the most powerful empire in the world, and in solidarity with all the victims of ICE. Hazel reiterated DSA’s unwavering support for a Venezuela free from foreign meddling, and American streets free from ICE thugs who destroy families and end lives with impunity. Watch Hazel speak here.

Megan R. makes Appearance in “Hands off Venezuela” Mass Call

DSA Co-Chair and Red Star member Megan R. appeared in a mass call hosted by the International Committee, and featuring New York State Senator Jabari Brisport and New York City Councilmember Alexa Aviles, among others. This call was in response to the momentous events of January 3rd, when the U.S. government illegally invaded Venezuela, kidnapped its President and First Lady, and killed dozens of military personnel and civilians in the process. Megan took the opportunity to promote dsausa.org/join so that we may increase our capacity to do this crucial international solidarity work. The mass call detailed the history of the Bolivarian revolution, and the west’s nearly thirty-year mission to crush it. Watch the call here.

Red Star on the Ballot

Red Star member Bob Murrell has written up a case study detailing his 2025 New Orleans City Council campaign, in which he ran as an independent socialist in a partisan race. This report contains lessons that are instructive for independent socialist electoral campaigns in the future.

Murrell concludes in this study that obtaining a “win number” is not the only metric of success, and that a singular focus on reaching such a number may come at the expense of other, equally valuable goals such as pushing class conflict, raising awareness about DSA and its political program, recruiting into DSA, and identifying key areas of support for socialism. Drawing on Marta Harnecker, Murrell argues that if these goals are met, the resources put into a campaign are not a waste, even if electorally the campaign was not successful. From this perspective, Bob Murrell’s city council campaign was still a worthwhile effort for his DSA chapter, since a 30% bump in chapter membership was observed, 13,000 pieces of campaign literature were distributed, and Murrell won the most votes of any independent local candidate since his district was created seven decades ago. Read a more exhaustive summary, or even the full report, by going to the DSA forum post here.

Red Star’s “Reading Now”

Article Review: “Technical Expertise and Communist Production”

This month, Red Stars read “Technical Expertise and Communist Production”, an article written by mechanical engineer and communist Nick Chavez for The Brooklyn Rail. This article argues that the subordination of mass production, particularly high-mix, low-volume production, to a socialist movement driven by organized workers in these industries, is crucial to a revolutionary transformation of society. Chavez posits that high-mix, low-volume production lends itself to a democratization of technical expertise within and without these industries, due to the increased necessity of technical skill and regular communication and cooperation between specialized engineers and lower-skilled laborers. These industrial centers act as more effective chokepoints as well since their varied outputs more often act as inputs for other industrial processes across the globe. Chavez allows himself to speculate on how a revolutionary movement may occupy industrial centers of this kind to not only hold leverage over corporations and the capitalist state, but also begin to build an alternative form of production which serves human needs rather than the profit motive. Read the full article here.

Next Article Review: “Neocolonialism through Debt: How French and U.S. Banks Underdeveloped Haiti”

Be sure to join us for our next article review on February 2nd at 5:30 PST/8:30 EST. This time we will be discussing a Monthly Review article by Steve Cushion, a senior research fellow at the Institute of the Americas, University College London. This article details the first century and a half of Haiti’s punishment for their successful slave revolt and independence struggle against France in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. France’s use of gunboat diplomacy to enforce draconian debt obligations to “recompensate” them for the loss of their chattel slaves is examined, and so is the Haitian ruling class’ willingness to go along with this unfair scheme, as well as to engage in corruption and graft and recklessly accumulate even more debt to the ultimate detriment of the economy. National and class contradictions in the Haitian leadership is pinpointed as a potential reason for this complicity with European & American gangsterism in this period. To learn more about this sobering history and glean the lessons it provides for the neocolonialism of today, read the full article here and register for the zoom discussion here.

Leninist Essentials: “The State and Revolution”

Members of Red Star’s Satellite program just finished Vladimir Lenin’s classic 1917 text “State and Revolution”, one of the rare texts written on revolution while on the precipice of it. Written below are a summary of the major arguments, and a few bits of historical context surrounding this work.

Lenin makes pains to emphasize in The State and Revolution that Marx was a materialist, and that he refused to engage in idle speculation about the nature of the coming revolution, or what a potential socialist state would look like. But also that Marx had much more to say on this question in the aftermath of the Paris Commune of 1871, a two-month period in which Paris was controlled by socialist revolutionaries. This is because Marx had a concrete example of what a socialist state might look like, as fleeting as it was. This is why Lenin quotes extensively from Marx’s The Civil War in France in this seminal work on the state. Lenin argues in The State & Revolution that whatever transitional state power is constructed in the aftermath of the revolution will still need bureaucrats, but that these bureaucrats should be accountable to self-directing organizations of the armed proletariat, rather than “special bodies of armed men” which put themselves above society. He believes that a governing body of the proletarian state must be legislative and executive, be paid workmen’s wages and revocable by popular vote at any time, all in an effort to avoid becoming an undemocratic clique.

But Lenin had a broader mission than to describe what the ideal socialist transitional state might look like. With the stakes so high, he could not let distortions about the state in Marxism by his political opponents go unchallenged. He critiques Karl Kautsky, an influential Czech-Austrian theorist from Germany, for his position on the state under socialism- specifically the idea that the proletariat should use the old bourgeois democratic republican form of the state, rather than embrace Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat, the transitional stage wherein the resistance of the bourgeoisie to proletarian rule is crushed. As Lenin sees it, Kautsky recognizes “class struggle” in principle, but does not believe in actually resolving the class struggle once and for all through the ultimate victory of the proletariat. Lenin acknowledges the “withering away” of the state after this point would be a very lengthy process, but was merciless in his criticism of the Mensheviks, Social-Revolutionaries and Kautskyites for refusing to acknowledge this process at all, and for clinging to a “superstitious belief in the state”. During the writing process for State & Revolution, there were dramatic developments in Russia. An attempted military coup in August led a panicked Kerensky to beg the Petrograd Soviet for help to defend his government. This action inadvertently brought the Bolsheviks back into the realm of legitimate politics. Lenin returned to Russia to take advantage of the Bolsheviks’ newfound popularity, and to eventually organize the bloodless revolt that led the Provisional Government to surrender in the face of the armed and well-organized revolutionaries. Lenin left State & Revolution unfinished, saying later, “it is more pleasant and useful to go through ‘the experience of revolution’ than to write about it”. Read The State & Revolution in full here.

Monthly Quote

““The Revolution is indeed living through the hard times of transition and sacrifice. The Cubans themselves have learned that socialism is built with clenched teeth and that revolution is no evening stroll. But afterall, if the future came on a platter, it would not be of this world.”

-            Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America

Recipe Korner

Easy Okonomiyaki (makes ~4 large pancakes)

By Lexi H.

Okonomiyaki in Japanese means “what you like” + “fried”, and while this is not exactly a traditional way to make them, I like to believe my way is in keeping with the exercise while also being fun and easy. They’re absolutely perfect for getting rid of leftovers and doing chaotic pancake experiments.  The version here is probably my most traditional take, but I have also made them with reuben flavors, thanksgiving leftovers, and even a kind of successful carrot cake dessert version, the limit is your imagination!

Image Courtesy Lexi H.

• Ingredients:
• 2 cups of flour (I use the King Arthur gluten free AP flour blend)
• 1 cup of water or broth of your choice (dashi is traditional and what I used here, but you can get pretty wild with it)
• 2 large eggs (beaten)
• 4 cups (packed) of shredded cabbage or other hardy vegetables (if you’re feeling lazy and don’t want to chop it all by hand, coleslaw mix works fine)
• a cup or so of other assorted mix-ins (I used katsuobushi (bonito flakes) here, but again feel free to get a little wild with it)
• a neutral cooking oil of your choice
• a sauce of your choice (I used mayo mixed with chili oil and an extra drizzle of chili garlic sauce, but traditional okonomiyaki sauce is 2 parts ketchup, to 1 part oyster sauce, and 1 part worcestershire sauce)
• Steps:

1. Add flour, liquid, and eggs to a bowl and mix together until a loose batter comes together. If you’re using flour with gluten, be careful not to overmix.

2. Fold the cabbage and/or other veggies along with your mix-in ingredients of choice into the batter until they’re well combined.

3. Heat a well-oiled skillet with a lid (ideally ~10 inches) over medium-high heat. Once the oil begins to shimmer, add in a cup measure of your batter and spread it evenly out to the sides of your pan, covering immediately. Let it cook for 7-10 minutes or until the pancake slides easily along the bottom of the pan.

4. Slide onto a plate and upturn over the skillet to flip (or toss it if you’re very brave or confident in your skills), continue cooking for an additional 5-7 minutes.

5. Slide back onto the plate and top with your sauce of choice and, if using, additional katsuobushi.

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