Dear Red Star Caucus,
Hello! I’m contacting you, as well as several of the other caucuses of the DSA, in an effort to form a united front for the establishment of a Labor Party, which I believe this country sorely and desperately needs. Now more than ever, in fact, as both working people in the US, and the people of Palestine, are being increasingly crushed and oppressed under the boot of Capital, and its continual crises.
The chief reason for the intensity, now, of this oppression being the hollowing out of any semblance of institutionalized political agency for organized workers. Workers have no representation; the classical political division of labor that once existed for the workers movement has collapsed now, necessarily, into apolitical moralisms. With no distinction, and organic institutional connections, between representatives and represented, representative expectations are thrust upon everyone; everyone now must be a part-time, unpaid intellectual, must be well trained and presentable, must be a leader and innovator in theory and practice, must be cleared of all anti-social attitudes, and must be thoroughly educated on the social workings of the capitalist system. The result of this turn towards ‘education’ has been the utter ruin of consciousness, not its improvement. Workers, to escape the madness, voluntarily abandon the project of self-consciousness entirely, retreat totally from political agency, and take refuge in passive projects of identity with their social lot. Without political representation, the worker’s movement has been decimated, as it’s only organs of protection, unions, are systematically dismantled and hollowed out. Meanwhile, as well, our brothers and sisters in underdeveloped regions are repeatedly brutalized by the hand of the urban regimes we as workers all find ourselves imprisoned in, as a consequence of our own deficiency in political agency. Our only recourse to affect the trend at all is real politics; we must form a labor party.
Consent, contrary to popular notions, is not manufactured in dialogue by workers; it is seized by the ruling class with guns, in the final instance, and urbanized Party-institutions. Consent is created by the political reality that the decisions of urban intellectuals allow to take place, in their irreverence towards the responsibility of giving real, institutionalized political representation to organized workers. Socialists, for too long, have told workers that their ideology is wrong; this is in itself completely backwards and ideological; we struggle against ideology not as workers but as intellectuals. We struggle against ideology for the sake of representation; such that we can win our position as agents of the workers themselves, and accomplish the objective tasks that the failures of the prior ruling classes have created. Thus, it is my sincere wish that Red Star Caucus will join the United Front to establish a labor party in the United States, as we hope many other Caucuses will as well.
I look forward to hearing back from you!
Sincerely yours,
Aimee Zee
