Our caucus is a group of NYC-DSA members who’ve come together around a shared set of principles and an approach toward building a red New York. Our arrival at these has been a slow process, which began around the 2018 citywide convention, where our chapter was turning toward the challenge of deciding what to do with two years of enormous growth. We saw a considerable amount of internal organization by comrades towards specific visions for the chapter which we didn’t share; we also saw spirited, if not particularly well-organized, arguments for another way, and some small success in winning people toward it. Those of us drawn to “another way” decided we needed to get together and articulate that vision more fully, so we could find more members with whom to work towards collectively achieving it.
Over the past year, we’ve engaged in the deliberate process of developing this perspective more fully. We’re a pluralistic group, coming to socialist politics from a variety of angles to synthesize an approach toward building the city, and world, we want. We, like most DSA members, came to socialist politics from a variety of paths. No one event, set of circumstances, or specific ideology brought us all together. The past decade and a half has contained a long sequence of radicalizing moments: The anti-Iraq War movement, the ‘08 financial crisis, Occupy, the Movement for Black Lives, the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, Standing Rock, Trump, the travel ban, Trans bans, Charlottesville, teachers uprisings, the migrant exodus, and many more struggles led us to this organization. And those many struggles are all key to the construction of a new class politics and the building of a mass movement for liberation. In Emerge, we seek to sustain the momentum of these struggles and build a movement toward a communist horizon.
For the past year, we have worked diligently to discover and articulate this vision into concrete projects from what was only a nascent affinity. We would like to have your voices added to this conversation and shape a radical vision for a Red New York.