WHO WE ARE
Liberation Road is a cadre socialist organization. Founded in 1985, we united sections of the 1970s New Communist Movement, which itself emerged out of 1960s radical groups like Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, and La Raza Unida. Today we are multi-racial, multi-gender and multi- generational, with a majority of our members under 40—not yet born when the Road was formed.
WHAT WE BELIEVE
From the start we have centered the fight against white privilege, women’s and LGBTQ+ liberation, anti- imperialism, ecological justice, and a critical appraisal of 20th-century socialism. While many socialists have since adopted such positions, we are proud to have consistently been ahead of our times, having upheld these political lines since 1985.
WHAT SETS US APART
Three keystones that distinguish us from many other socialist groups are our emphasis on self-determination, our belief in left refoundation, and our focus on governing power. We believe that:
To win socialism in the US, we must build a strategic alliance between racially oppressed nations and the multiracial working class. US racial settler capitalism is based on the subjugation and internal colonization of the Native American, Black and Chicano/a nations, whose struggles for self- determination are inextricable from the class struggle. But racial capitalism exploits class divides within communities of color and race privilege within the working class to promote divides within and between them. To win socialism, we must build a strategic alliance between the two forces with the greatest interest in social transformation: people of color and the multiracial working class.
We must organize for socialism, but the socialist organization we need does not yet exist. While many small groups argue that they are the socialist party, we believe that a powerful revolutionary left, rooted in mass movements of the oppressed, does not yet exist. To build the left that we need, we must transcend group sectarianism and dated divisions—studying many past revolutionaries, but idolizing none, while developing new models for 21st-century socialism. The Road seeks to help build this renewed socialist political organization as an instrument of which we are but one part.
We’re not afraid of winning governing power. While we are far from a revolutionary rupture in the US, and cannot know how it would proceed, we believe it will require both winning power inside the electoral system and building power outside it. Today, our members carry out this inside/outside governing power strategy through our work within IPOs, labor unions, and racial, gender, and social justice movements.
OUR STRUCTURE
We are made up of dedicated, trained cadre who agree with our unity principles, pay dues, participate in joint study, and carry out shared work to implement our strategy.
Cadre participate in geographic districts, national bodies, and units or concentrations based on shared areas of mass work (for instance, a union or social movement sector they are active in).
Every three years, we gather for an organization-wide Congress to summate our work, assess conditions, and democratically determine a shared strategic orientation for the coming period.
HOW WE WORK
Cadre identify concrete interventions they can make to carry out our strategy and central task in their geographic context and movement sector, and implement it through red mass work.
“Red mass work” is work done in a unit or concentration with other comrades, related to a base-building organization, in which we fight to implement our line or in which our line leads, that is carried out with collective accountability and summed up according to common criteria.
Two methodologies characterize our mass work: a “mass line” approach (“from the masses, to the masses”), which emphasizes turning the ideas and experiences of the people into weapons against our enemies, and a “united front” approach, which emphasizes uniting the broadest array of forces against the narrowest target, in order to defeat our opponents one by one.
OUR CENTRAL TASK: BLOCK, BROADEN, BUILD
Based on our analysis of conditions, our strategic objective is to defeat the New Confederacy—an alliance of nativist sectors of capital and white Christian nationalists pursuing a reactionary political program rooted in authoritarianism, cisheteropatriarchy and white minority rule. We believe the central task of all left forces is to block this authoritarian project, working within a broad anti-fascist front that contains centrist forces (with whom we continue to struggle), while building the independent power, organization and initiative of the left. To do this, socialists must help build independent political organizations, increase collaboration among aligned IPOs and related projects, and unite them around a shared political program to defend, expand and transform democracy towards a “Third Reconstruction.”
HOW TO CONNECT WITH US
Subscribe to our Substack newsletter; follow us on social media; and join us for public webinars and events to learn our analysis, connect with our cadre, and find out about ways to take action.
We have a rigorous process for joining the Road. Prospective cadre must be recommended by current members, and are then invited into a recruitment study to assess alignment with our points of unity, methodology, and approach to shared mass work.
If you are interested in membership, or have questions not covered in this FAQ, please contact us at info@roadtoliberation.org