Introduction

Readers of Prometheus Magazine will likely be familiar with the US-based organisation Marxist Unity Group (MUG), a faction of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)¹. Several editors of Prometheus Magazine are rough co-thinkers of MUG, and we are both instances of a Millennial/Gen-Z redeployment of politics inspired by the generally older CPGB (PCC)/Weekly Worker group. It may have even required the transposition of these politics to a younger US-based organisation for them to return to Britain and find a reception among activists who cut their teeth in the Corbyn years and after, rather than among decades-long left activists. In addition, several editorial board members of the current iteration of Prometheus Magazine and others who became founding members of the  Marxist Unity Caucus of rs21 participated in an online reading group of MUG’s political education curriculum before launching their current efforts, broadly characterised by the label “Partyist.”² 

In the Your Party founding brouhaha, MUG’s politics have achieved a further resonance in Britain, as comrades have embraced an idealised vision of the Democratic Socialists of America as a model for a democratically organised party in contrast to the current debacle in which competing cliques of unaccountable leaders stumble through an ill-defined founding process while attempting to maintain their own control over the project. The appeal of DSA as a model is partly a result of DSA’s structure being received by the British comrades through MUG’s theorisation of what DSA ought to be, rather than as it exists at present. This can be seen in the Democratic Socialists of Your Party’s use of the term “Democratic Socialism” to mean something to the left of what it has meant in the Labour-Left tradition, and perhaps closer to MUG’s attempt to identify the term with an Orthodox Marxist outlook equivalent to the historical use of Social-Democracy³, and its adoption of DSA-specific organizational terminology in its draft constitution for Your Party, such as National Political Committee (NPC) for the elected central leadership and Socialists in Office Committee (SIO) for the fractional body coordinating the activity of elected officials⁴. No doubt the appeal is also owed to the fact that DSA, as a mass left project, dates to around the same time as the start of the Corbyn leadership of Labour, but has had greater staying power than any of the pro-Corbyn groups, such as Momentum, in large part due to its genuine internal democracy.

Given this wider resonance of the politics and writings of the Marxist Unity Group in the current British context, this article will give an overview of the origins and history of MUG from the perspective of a founding member, so that the wider layers of comrades encountering references to MUG will understand what it is, where it came from, and what it seeks to achieve. I will also cover MUG’s organisational structure and how it relates to DSA as an organisation and the other factions within DSA. I hope to show the strength of formally organized factions with clear and distinct politics as a generative force in a mass organization like DSA or Your Party and to demonstrate the possibilities for factional collaboration and competition, as well as provide material for navigating some of the organizational and political controversies that have been surfaced in the Your Party founding process with reference to the past several years of party-building and factional developments in DSA. 

American Macnairites

The story of MUG starts with a small set of American comrades with generalised experience organising among the various instances of the US left in the 2000s and 2010s, from the remnant of the old socialist party, the Socialist Party USA (SPUSA), to the various so-called Leninist sects, to the disorganised Occupy milieu, to the extant iteration of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), to smaller left-communist circles. Despite these disparate experiences, what the comrades all found lacking was a centre of gravity, an organised political expression of the working class that could encompass its whole advanced layer (the broad layer actively in struggle) and unite it around a common program for political power and class leadership of society – a party that would be both mass and in the vanguard of the class struggle. The comrades were in search of an explanation for this absence and a path forward and felt the need to reexamine the history of the Marxist left to uncover both aspects.

From here, they came across both a novel historical analysis, that of Lars T. Lih, Ben Lewis and others reconstructing the politics of the Orthodox Marxist “centre tendency” of the Second International and freeing it from the misconstruals of Cold Warriors, “Leninists,” and anti-Leninist ultraleftists alike, and the writings put out by the CPGB (PCC). Engaging with this material and using it as a basis for understanding the role of the reforged mass communist party they sought to bring about ever since the dissolution of the old CPGB and the end of their factional struggle within it as The Leninist⁵. Especially impactful was the book Revolutionary Strategy by the CPGB’s Mike Macnair⁶, which was originally written in the context of debates within French Trotskyism on revolutionary unity and broad front projects such as the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, but which transcends its immediate context to expose the historical and intellectual roots of the competing strategies taken for granted by the contemporary left and offer an alternative rooted in building a mass Marxist party of opposition. For Macnair, such a party would be united around a minimum-maximum program composed of both its long-term aims (communism, or the maximum program) and a program for working class rule through a radically democratic republic, described by Engels as the specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat (the minimum program). The party would not be expected to contain unanimous views on tactical or historical/theoretical questions, and thus offer members the right to form factions and publicly argue for their views⁷.

The Americans who read Revolutionary Strategy initially attempted a handful of short-lived and small-scale political projects around the 2015-2018 period in groups such as the Red Party⁸, the Communist League Tampa⁹, and even a DSA caucus known as Spark, which unfortunately decided to merge into the ill-fated Refoundation Caucus, a mash-up of sundry self-conceived revolutionaries in DSA that quickly fell apart in 2018. The failures of these direct political interventions pushed these comrades, who were coming into closer contact with one another in left-wing social media spaces, to dedicate themselves to further spreading their historical and political outlook while also fostering a general culture of non-dogmatic Marxist historical and theoretical research and debate. This was the mission of Cosmonaut Magazine, started in 2018, which conceived of itself as a movement, rather than an academic publication, sought to foster real rigour in strategic, historical, and theoretical communist thinking, and wasn’t afraid to carry conflicting views and be home to serious debate¹⁰. The success of Jacobin Magazine was certainly one source of inspiration, but without the attachment to reformist social-democracy and with more willingness to get into the nitty-gritty of happenings within the organisations of the left, an approach that also owed something to the CPGB’s Weekly Worker.

Encountering Economism

The proto-MUG Macnairites weren’t the only ones who were unsatisfied with the existing patterns of left activism as they existed in the late 2010s. There also sprung up around this time what was known as the “base-building tendency.”¹¹ This tendency reflected dissatisfaction with the dogmatic approach of the sects, the ephemeral character of protest action and various anarchist-driven projects, and the dominant reformism of DSA, and sought to merge socialist practice with the mass of the working class through concerted organising. What became MUG’s conception centres on doing so on a political basis after achieving unity of self-defined Marxists around a definite program aimed at state power and the struggle for political democracy, and a willingness to engage with the electoral sphere as an opposition party to merge socialist ideas with the workers’ movement at scale. The base-builders, on the other hand, sought to “go to the class” (i.e. make direct contact with a working class they presumably were not already part of and disconnected from) and build the workers’ movement from the ground up as small groups of radicals, introducing the political element later. As we came to understand the difference between these two positions, we related them to the division between the “political” Iskraites who centred the democratic struggle and the “economists” who focused on Social-Democratic leadership of the economic struggle in the early history of Russian Marxism.

In practice, the base-building perspective meant a “dual unionist”¹² approach to labour and tenant organising to ensure the “base-building” was building a base for radicals and not class collaborationists, but without being very open about what distinguished the radicals from the class collaborationists and what the base was being built for. The main organisation of the base-building tendency was the Marxist Center (MC), a loose network of local collectives with wildly different politics and a federal structure at the national level, though the perspective lives on in DSA’s Communist Caucus. Since “base-building” was coming out of a similar milieu as the proto-MUG Cosmonaut founders and shared some impulses with it, it also exerted a significant pull on the Cosmonaut project, with Cosmonaut editors writing a critical but sympathetic report on the founding conference of the Marxist Center and its influence growing over time as some writers became more involved in the organisation¹³. There was also some confusion over what exactly distinguished the two perspectives, with some Marxist Center leaders borrowing language from Revolutionary Strategy and Cosmonaut writing, but using it in a quite different way. For example, the Marxist Center sometimes defined itself in terms of “programmatic unity”, but the “program” was in fact the tactic of base-building, not a definite political program aimed at the state with a core addressing high political and constitutional issues¹⁴.

Around 2020 these differences came to a head, with one “left-economist” wing of Cosmonaut writers decisively orienting towards the Marxist Center and its base building perspective and forming a faction of MC (Spark, not to be confused with the aforementioned DSA caucus) that sought to reinforce MC’s central structures and common culture as against the siloing of the local bodies encouraged by its federalism, and the “political” wing seeking to go through the existing left and unite Marxists in a common organization based on a revolutionary program that could merge with the working class movement at scale. This latter group (I was part of it, having been convinced of what would eventually become MUG politics by the first set of articles in Cosmonaut) decided that DSA was the most fruitful place to make such an intervention, some of us already having been DSA members since 2017 and seeing its decisive shift to the left that year with its exit from the Socialist International and support for the BDS movement at the biennial convention and reinforced by decisions such as the “Bernie or Bust” position on the presidential election at the 2019 convention¹⁵. We also saw the proliferation of caucuses, organised factions prompting competing political visions for the DSA, though often not the most clear on what their differences were, as a positive sign of its organisational democracy. While the parting of ways between the two wings of Cosmonaut ended up being somewhat acrimonious, the magazine survived, though with less energy behind it as the main political project of a tendency, and after the collapse of Marxist Center (its federal structure turned out to be a house of cards with only a few members of each group having any investment in the national project) most of the “left-economists” eventually joined MUG and some now occupy seats of its leadership or represent us on the NPC, having been brought around to the political approach by their experience in MC.

Marxist Unity Slate

The Cosmonaut “politicals” started planning together in a group chat called “Kautsky Gang,” but that name didn’t last. We settled on the idea of a Marxist Unity Slate (MUS), not a leadership slate but one of proposals for the upcoming 2021 DSA convention. The idea was to rally the thousands of self-identified Marxists in DSA around a vision for transforming the organisation into a mass communist party. This would preserve DSA’s positive aspects, like the presence of real organizational democracy, a concern for upholding principled anti-imperialism, an orientation to reform struggles in the labor movement, and a pro-active approach to running socialists for office with an expectation of accountability to the organization, and raise them to a higher level with greater programmatic clarity about our democratic and socialist aims, definite expectations of democratic discipline for elected officials, and a more coordinated approach to nationwide struggle. We hoped this would also show Marxists outside of DSA that it was the place for them to fight to bring about a Marxist party. We chose to start with a convention intervention rather than starting by recruiting to a membership group because of the challenges we had seen with broad left caucuses like Refoundation in DSA before, where people agreed on being more “r-r-radical” than the DSA, but not on what specifically should change in the organisation¹⁶. 

Our politics were unique enough that we wanted to have a chance to get our voice out there before worrying about setting up membership structures that would allow a faction to work out its strategy democratically once more people understood what we were advocating for. We also chose to do this as an independent formation rather than joining one of the existing caucuses and advocating for our views inside of it, as a comrade in Bread and Roses (B&R) encouraged us to do with their caucus. This was because we saw the convention as a key moment where our ideas could shine, and we wanted to make sure we could reach all of the DSA and the broader Marxist left by contesting it, rather than just the membership of a single caucus. We also weren’t sure that the internal structures of the existing caucuses would be amenable to people joining to contest their politics.

The Marxist Unity Slate consisted of three proposals – “Programmatic Unity”, “Tribunes of the People”, and “A Socialist Slate for the House.” ¹⁷“Programmatic Unity” was an amendment to the DSA constitution that would have redefined membership around acceptance of a national political platform, which the organisation was considering for the first time. It explicitly included the recognition that “[a]cceptance does not mean agreement with every point of the platform, and members are free to organise within DSA to make specific changes to the platform. Rather, it means committing to fight for the platform as the overall expression of the movement’s aims.” This was an attempt to ground DSA in a definite programmatic approach to US society and politics and move it away from seeing its unity in terms of a vague affinity to the brand of Democratic Socialism, while retaining the right of members to organise to change its programme¹⁸. “Tribunes of the People” was a resolution aimed at building on DSA’s successes in electoral organising and setting a new standard for national endorsements based on the best practices in its electoral work, which centred the practice of election campaigns on DSA as a party in substance if not legal form due to the structure of the US electoral system. It called for nationally endorsed candidates to pledge that they accept and will fight for DSA’s national political platform, and if elected, to meet regularly with DSA leadership at the level relevant to their elected office and to caucus and vote as a bloc with other DSA members in office while rejecting the discipline of any other party¹⁹. “A Socialist Slate for the House” was another resolution that sought to operationalise this approach to electoral politics and initiate a bold nationwide political intervention centred on the DSA, by running members for the US House of Representatives on a common slate²⁰. The cost of winning a US House seat for a leftwing challenger has gone up in recent years with AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups spending around $15 million to unseat Cori Bush in 2024 compared to the under $2 million spent by AOC in her 2018 primary victory, changing the calculus on the feasibility of a strategy focused on these seats, but coordinated nationwide struggle remains core to MUG’s approach²¹.

Once the draft 2021 DSA national political platform was released in the lead-up to the convention, a fourth item was added to the Marxist Unity Slate, a platform amendment titled “Winning the Battle for Democracy”. MUS collaborator Parker McQueeney had been appointed by DSA’s National Political Committee to the platform drafting committee and he was able to advocate for a revolutionary minimum-maximum vision both on that body directly and in the educational materials put out by the committee in the pre-convention period, but due to the heterogeneity of the political composition of the body and DSA’s lack of experience in considering programmatic questions, the draft platform was a muddle that was too long, lacked a consistent sense of political vision, and fell short on several programmatic measures. 

“Winning the Battle for Democracy” added key democratic-republican (meaning associated with the form of a radically democratic republic through which the working class an exercise sovereignty) political demands to the platform, such as party-list proportional representation for all legislative elections, “abolition of the independent presidency in favor of an executive directly accountable to and revocable by the legislature,” abolition of the Senate and the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review, and replacement of the standing army by a people’s militia, as well as “[a]n expanded Bill of Rights with strengthened economic, political and civil guarantees for all people, including unrestricted right of free speech and publication.”²² While the initial draft platform, and thus the final unamended text, included “[a] new political order through a second constitutional convention to write the founding documents of a new socialist democracy,”²³ we wanted to sharpen DSA’s vision of a democratic republic which could serve as “the political form… under which to work out the economical emancipation of Labour.” and have a chance to get the word out about why consistent democracy and radical republicanism were so important to Marxist politics²⁴. 

The process of bringing proposals to the DSA convention was managed by a subcommittee of a convention planning committee appointed by the NPC. Proposals required an initial 100-member signatures to show that they were supported by a significant number of members, and later, once delegates were elected, they were polled on their support for the qualifying proposals. The planning committee then used this information to assemble a draft agenda and consent agenda, which could be altered by the convention delegates once seated according to the procedures for doing so under Robert’s Rules of Order, the main parliamentary authority used in US civic and political organizations²⁵. Gathering the requisite signatures for our proposals was the first test, and in doing so we were able to draw on the existing diffusion of our politics through Cosmonaut as well as the dissatisfaction of many Marxists in DSA with the organization’s reformism and class collaborationism and their desire for an alternative, but not one that fit in the mold of the bureaucratic centralist sects, which had also proven themselves to be a dead end. Eventually, the goal would be to draw this network of supporters into members of a democratic organisation, but for now, it was enough to engage in common work to advance the slate’s proposals at convention.

In the end, the “Programmatic Unity” amendment to the DSA constitution was the only one of the Marxist Unity Slate proposals that the convention planning committee placed on the agenda after polling delegates on their support for the various proposals that had gained the requisite signatures. It made it to the floor and was voted down with about 35% in favour. We hadn’t expected it to pass, given the state of political development in DSA, and we took this to mean there was a sizeable minority in the organisation that had an appetite for our politics, given that only three out of the eight MUS authors were present as elected delegates. Overall, we interpreted the 2021 convention as a shift to the right for DSA after a monumental shift to the left and towards greater coherence and centralisation in 2017 and 2019, respectively. The mood was one of conservatism and uncertainty, with the arguments of the class collaborationist caucuses generally swaying delegates more than those of the left calling for more independence, principle, and initiative. The left was also fragmented and unclear about who its opponents were or what direction it should be fighting for. The pre-convention period had seen an attempted lash-up of a few self-defined communist caucuses with a formation now generally seen as having been on the right of the organisation, the Collective Power Network (CPN), to defeat Bread and Roses, which was to the left of CPN on labour and electoral strategy, but “third campist” / social-imperialist about international politics. CPN then suffered a bitter implosion full of interpersonal grievances immediately before the convention, leaving its left-wing partners out to dry. It was also not uncommon to hear members of the Libertarian Socialist Caucus (LSC) at this time say that they preferred the leadership of Socialist Majority Caucus (SMC), the most right-wing caucus with any representation on the NPC in recent years, to that of B&R, because although the former were more electorally opportunist, they were less likely to interfere with mutual aid projects at the local level. Although MUS defined the key conflict at the 2021 convention as between liquidationism and class independence, others would not have identified themselves according to that dividing line²⁶.

Marxist Unity Group

The key event that catalysed the DSA’s Left into operating with greater coherence and defined MUG as it transitioned from a narrow group of cothinkers to a membership-based faction with a well-defined place in DSA was the “Bowman affair,” an organisational reckoning with the votes of endorsed member Representative Jamaal Bowman for billions of dollars in military aid to the state of Israel and his presence on a propaganda tour of the country sponsored by the liberal Zionist organization J Street²⁷. This involved multiple chapters passing motions calling for Bowman’s expulsion from the organization and the nationally chartered BDS and Palestine Working Group calling for this as well. The NPC, with a right caucus majority, responded by saying it was conditioning future Bowman’s re-endorsement on some unannounced political expectations related to Palestine, but that it would not consider expelling him and that it was further revoking the charter of the BDS and Palestine Working Group and suspending its leaders from leadership of national bodies²⁸. In this controversy, the then-in-formation Marxist Unity Group (MUG) made a name for itself by consistently calling for discipline for Bowman and defending the BDS Working Group’s right to publish material critical of the NPC’s stance²⁹. Comrades close to Cosmonaut who would later join MUG also wrote the For an Internationalist DSA petition calling for a reversal of the dechartering of the BDS Working Group and the suspension of its leadership, which MUG supported and which garnered around 1,300 signatures and caused the NPC to reverse the dechartering while retaining the leadership ban³⁰.

While we actively intervened in this organization-wide political controversy on the side of principled anti-imperialism, higher expectations for elected officials associated with DSA, and the democratic rights of members and lower bodies to object to leadership’s decisions, we were also in the process of founding MUG as a membership organization and developing the comrades who we had connected to both in the convention period and the Bowman affair into active participants in the project. We started by drawing up draft points of unity, rules, a code of conduct and an arbitration procedure. The points of unity were written to be a sharp, clear, concise, and inspiring formulation of our political vision starting from where DSA is and ending with a vision for how a mass revolutionary party could win mass support for a program to replace the sclerotic and undemocratic constitutional order with a democratic socialist republic that would put the working class in power, take US imperialism’s boot off the neck of the workers of the world, and place society on the road of transition to communism. They were seven short points each, followed by explanatory text³¹: 

1. Political independence.
2. Programmatic unity.
3. Electoral discipline.
4. Nationwide struggle.
5. Fight the Imperial Police State.
6. Fight the Constitution.
7. Demand a New Republic. (This point amended in 2025 to include Finish Reconstruction)

It’s worth noting that we chose to structure ourselves around points of unity rather than a minimum-maximum program, even though one of the points is “programmatic unity.” This was because we saw unity around a minimum-maximum program as the appropriate form of unity for a mass vanguard party of the class, but we were a faction within the party-movement and necessarily narrower than the party itself. So while the points of unity include programmatic content, they also include some positions on tactics and an assessment of DSA as an organisation, which would not be appropriate for a minimum-maximum program. We also didn’t feel equipped to produce such a program as a very small group, nor did we have the time to do the necessary research before initiating the membership phase of MUG. Later, in 2024, such a process of study was carried out, and in 2025, MUG adopted a draft minimum-maximum program we advocate be taken up by DSA as a Marxist party³².

The rules were initially borrowed from the CPGB with only slight adaptations³³. They placed the power decisively in the hands of the membership, which, as constituted in the Congress, was the highest body, and combined an expectation of unity in action and the subordination of lower bodies to higher with the explicit recognition of the right to form factions and to advocate for a change in political positions, tactics, or leadership both internally and publicly. The five members of the central committee were to be elected by single transferable vote, a proportional method, to ensure representation of majority and minority political trends in the faction. We chose to describe this as “genuine democratic centralism” both because it is accurate to the meaning of democratic centralism as used by both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks in the RSDLP as well as the stakes of the debates in the German SPD that caused both factions to enshrine it as a principle³⁴, and because using this term was an explicit challenge to the infamous “democratic centralism clause” of the DSA constitution, which stated that a member may be expelled if they are found to be “under the discipline of any self-defined democratic-centralist organization.” We were challenging the presence of the clause itself and DSA’s historic anti-communism, which was responsible for its presence, but we were also challenging left groups outside DSA. We knew that the democratic centralism clause hadn’t been used at all by the national organisation since DSA’s political transformation in and after 2017, in spite of the presence of members of self-defined democratic centralist groups. Yet, Marxists outside DSA often invoked the existence of this clause to justify their lack of participation in the organisation, saying they’d be expelled under the clause if they joined. We expected not to be expelled based on our assessment of the balance of forces in the organisation, but if we were, then we would be demonstrating that genuine democratic centralism, as we were using the term, provided more factional rights than DSA itself, which would be suppressing members’ political self-organisation. If DSA decided to expel other groups which used democratic centralism to include a ban on factions, but not us, we would also be demonstrating that the issue was not democratic centralism, but bureaucratic centralism, providing an opportunity to clarify our position³⁵. As it turned out, there was never any attempt to expel us for being a self-defined democratic centralist organization and the clause was removed from the DSA constitution as part of the Democracy Commission reforms in 2025 without anyone putting up much of a fight to keep it³⁶.

When it came to recruiting to a membership formation, we faced another challenge, which was that we had made enough of an impact through Cosmonaut’s popularity, our convention proposals, and our intervention in the Bowman affair that we were a shiny object for the left both within and without DSA, but the strategic ideas and historical perspectives underlying our tactical interventions were relatively unknown. People saw the word Marxist, the hammer and sickle in our logo, and some of what we put forward, and slotted it into their existing worldview shaped by Stalinism, Trotskyism, or some other trend that happened to be popular on the internet. We are very willing to exist in a party with comrades who hold those views, but as we sought to build our faction, we wanted members to at least have a solid familiarity with the historical context and strategic principles underlying our approach, on top of an agreement with a majority and acceptance of all of the points of unity. If comrades came to disagree with our historical or broader strategic perspective, we wanted it to be out of an engagement with the material itself, rather than an unexamined adherence to one of the dominant schools of thought on the left that our approach originated as a response to. Therefore, we devised a nine-week study curriculum titled A Reader on Marxist Strategy for applicants for membership to read and discuss. The contents included selections from Lars Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered, Ben Lewis’s translated volume Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism, Mike Macnair’s Revolutionary Strategy, historical examples of the minimum-maximum program, and other historical and theoretical materials that informed our strategy³⁷. The specific contents of this reader and our pedagogical methods have evolved, but the reading group remains central to the process of joining MUG, and it provides us with a common set of referents and a baseline of understanding from which our political disagreements proceed, something DSA as a whole tends to lack. 

Once the first cohort of MUG members had joined the organisation, we held our first Congress, at which the rules, points of unity, a perspectives document, and resolutions on organisational and strategic matters were debated, amended, and ratified. Out of the five initial members of the first elected central committee, three had been among the eight authors of the Marxist Unity Slate proposals, and none of these authors were elected to the central committee for multiple years, until the most recent Congress in 2026. On top of annual Congresses, MUG has kept up a schedule of monthly general meetings, which deal with organisational and political matters, and their powers are only distinct from the Congress in that they cannot amend the rules or points of unity. 

MUG’s structures have become the democratically possessed property of an increasingly politically sophisticated membership, not just a transmission belt for the founding leaders to carry out their vision. As the faction has developed, these members have played a crucial role in creatively applying MUG’s overall vision in a wide range of local contexts and on national DSA bodies, which has had an observable effect in raising the political level of both MUG and DSA as a whole.

1.  https://marxistunity.com
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2. Brunhilda Olding, “Partyism in the Australian Context”, Partisan Magazine, Mar 10, 2026 https://partisanmagazine.org/2026/03/10/partyism-in-the-australian-context/
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3.  Rather than Social-Democracy referring to a set of reforms to capitalism under bourgeois class rule as it is often taken now, late 19th and early 20th century Social-Democrats took the two parts of the term to refer to the party’s role “to lead the class struggle of the proletariat and to organise that struggle in both its manifestations: socialist (the fight against the capitalist class aimed at destroying the class system and organising socialist society), and democratic (the fight against absolutism aimed at winning political liberty… and democratising the political and social system…).” V. I. Lenin, ‘The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats’, Lenin Collected Works (Progress Publishers, 1972), p. 328.
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4.  Democratic Socialists of Your Party, ‘Constitution’, Democratic Socialists of Your Party, [n. d.] <https://dsyp.org/yourparty-constitution/> [accessed 16 March 2026].
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5.  Jack Conrad, ‘The Leninist: Before this there was that’, Weekly Worker, 6 March 2014 <https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1000/the-leninist-before-this-there-was-that/> [accessed 16 March 2026].
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6.  Source of the term “Macnairite” used in this section’s header and elsewhere in this article.
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7.  Mike Macnair, Revolutionary Strategy (November Publications, 2008).
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8.  Red Party, ‘Draft Program’, Red Party, [n.d.] <https://web.archive.org/web/20180317101949/http://red-party.com:80/about/draftprogram/> [accessed 10 April 2026].
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9.  Communist League Tampa, ‘Draft Programme’, Communist League Tampa, [n. d.] <https://communistleaguetampa.wordpress.com/draft-programme/> [accessed 10 April 2026].
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10.  https://cosmonautmag.com/
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11.  Sophia Burns, ‘The US Left Has Only Four Tendencies’, The Left Wind, 13 May 2018 <https://theleftwind.org/2018/05/13/the-us-left-has-only-four-tendencies/> [accessed 10 April 2026].
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12.  WIlliam Z. Foster, ‘Ravages of Dual Unionism’, Bankruptcy of the American Labor Movement (Trade Union Educational League, 1922) <https://www.marxists.org/archive/foster/1922/ch03.htm> [accessed 10 April 2026].
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13.  Parker McQueeney and Donald Parkinson, ‘Building Revolution in the USA: Notes on Marxist Center Conference, 2018’, Cosmonaut Magazine,  12 January 2019 <https://cosmonautmag.com/2019/01/building-revolution-in-the-usa-notes-on-marxist-center-conference-2018/> [accessed 16 March 2026].
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14.  Mike Macnair, ‘High politics and the working class’, Weekly Worker, 1 October 2020 <https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1317/high-politics-and-the-working-class/> [accessed 10 April 2026].
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15.  Rosa Janis and Parker McQueeney, ‘For the Unity of Marxists: A Response to Fog & Storm’, Cosmonaut Magazine, 14 September 2019 <https://cosmonautmag.com/2019/09/for-the-unity-of-marxists-a-response-to-fog-and-storm/> [accessed 17 March 2026].
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16.  DSA Refoundation Steering Committee, ‘Dissolution Statement’, DSA Refoundation, [n. d.] <https://dsarefoundation.wordpress.com/> [accessed 17 March 2026].
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17.  Marxist Unity Slate, ‘Mission Statement of the Marxist Unity Slate’, Cosmonaut Magazine, 3 March 2021 <https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/03/mission-statement-of-the-marxist-unity-slate/> [accessed 17 March 2026].
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18.  Parker McQueeney, ‘Give the Platform Legs to Stand’, Cosmonaut Magazine, 3 August 2021 <https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/08/give-the-platform-legs-to-stand-the-case-for-cb8/> [accessed 17 March 2026].
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19.  Jenna Grove, ‘Tribunes of the People’, Cosmonaut Magazine, 10 July 2021 <https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/07/tribunes-of-the-people/> [accessed 17 March 2026].
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20.  Matthew Strupp, ‘Why DSA Should Run a Socialist Slate for the House in 2022’, The Activist, 12 March 2021 <https://y.dsausa.org/the-activist/socialists-slate-house-2022/> [accessed 17 March 2026].
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21.  Chris McGreal, ‘Cori Bush loses primary after pro-Israel groups spend millions to oust ‘Squad’ member’, The Guardian, 6 August 2024 <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/06/missouri-cori-bush-primary-bell-aipac-israel> [accessed 17 March 2026].
    ↩︎
22.  Marxist Unity Group, ‘Archive of Documents from the 2021 Convention’, Marxist Unity Group, [n. d.] <https://www.marxistunity.com/convention-archive&gt; [accessed 17 March 2026].
    ↩︎
23. Ibid ↩︎
24.  Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (International Publishers, 1933), p. 43.
    ↩︎
25.  Henry M. Robert and others, Robert’s Rules of Order: Newly Revised, 12th edn. (Public Affairs, 2020).
    ↩︎
26.  Donald Parkinson, ‘The Fight for a Marxist Program in the DSA’, Cosmonaut Magazine, 27 October 2021 <https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/10/the-fight-for-a-marxist-program-in-the-dsa/> [accessed 17 March 2026].
    ↩︎
27.  Tempest Collective, ‘Expel Jamaal Bowman’, Tempest, 19 November 2021 <https://tempestmag.org/2021/11/expel-jamaal-bowman/> [accessed 17 March 2026].
    ↩︎
28.  S. Rekeibe, ‘Explainer: DSA, Jamal Bowman, and the BDS Working Group’, Institute for Palestine Studies, 28 April 2022 <https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1652772> [accessed 17 March 2026].
    ↩︎
29.  Marxist Unity Group – Organizing Committee, ‘Beyond Bowman, Towards Electoral Discipline’, MUG Bulletin, 1 (22 December 2021), pp. 3-6 <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OeWLYdcTwQaLpwR2O90ZbUzJYufjLctjP2Os88qVbpc/edit?tab=t.0> [accessed 17 March 2026].
    ↩︎
30.  Jean Allen and Marisa Miale, ‘Socialism of the Oppressed: The Stakes of the Bowman Affair’, Cosmonaut Magazine, 9 April 2022 <https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/04/socialism-of-the-oppressed-the-stakes-of-the-bowman-affair/> [accessed 17 March 2026].
    ↩︎
31.  Marxist Unity Group, ‘Seven Points of Unity’, Marxist Unity Group, [n. d.] <https://www.marxistunity.com/> [accessed 17 March 2026].
    ↩︎
32.  Marxist Unity Group, ‘A Draft Program for DSA’, Light and Air, 24 February 2025 <https://www.marxistunity.com/light-and-air/draft-program> [accessed 17 March 2026].
    ↩︎
33.  Marxist Unity Group, ‘Marxist Unity Group Rules’, Marxist Unity Group, [n. d.] <https://www.marxistunity.com/rules-code-of-conduct> [accessed 17 March 2026].
    ↩︎
34.  Karl Kautsky and Mike Macnair, ‘Origins of democratic centralism’, trans. by Ben Lewis, Weekly Worker, 5 November 2015 <https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1081/origins-of-democratic-centralism/> [accessed 10 April 2026].
    ↩︎
35.  Mike Macnair, ‘Reclaiming democratic centralism’, Weekly Worker, 23 May 2019 <https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1252/reclaiming-democratic-centralism/> [accessed 10 April 2026].
    ↩︎
36.  Metro Detroit Democratic Socialists of America, ‘What is to be done? What is our future? 2025 DSA National Convention Results’, The Detroit Socialist, 14 August 2025 <https://medium.com/dsa-detroit-newspaper/what-is-to-be-done-what-is-our-future-2025-dsa-national-convention-results-b275acbaf9c5> [accessed 17 March 2026].
    ↩︎
37.  The current table of contents can be found here. Marxist Unity Group, ‘MUG Cadre School Curriculum’, Marxist Unity Group, [n. d.] <https://www.marxistunity.com/cadre-curriculum> [accessed 17 March 2026].
    ↩︎