Here’s an attempt to propose a united front that could allow most leftists in the Denver area to collaborate toward common goals.
DRS in the Organizational Landscape
Purpose
This document does two things. First, it maps where DRS agrees and disagrees with the other organized currents we share ground with. Second, it proposes a united front platform — a set of concrete demands broad enough that every one of those currents could sign it without abandoning its own program.
The second task depends on the first. A united front built on papered-over disagreement collapses at the first hard question. A united front built on honestly mapped overlap can hold. Our own points of unity say united fronts should be “temporary, binding, and as broad as we can reach a consensus.” This is an attempt to find where that consensus actually sits.
Part I: Agreement and Disagreement
DSA Denver
Where we agree
- Capitalism produces the crises we’re all responding to, and those crises are structural rather than incidental.
- Anti-oppression politics are integral rather than secondary to class struggle. DSA’s recent national platform has moved sharply toward positions we’d recognize such as abolishing carceral forces, amnesty for all immigrants, and defunding the war apparatus.
- Labor organizing is a primary site of struggle.
- Practical convergence on immediate fights: ICE resistance, housing, healthcare, trans rights.
Where we disagree
- Electoralism. DSA’s strategy runs through ballot-line campaigns, endorsements, and pressure on elected officials. Our points of unity name electoralism explicitly as a pitfall that derails popular struggles, and commit us to not working in the DNC. This is the fundamental divide and it is not a matter of degree.
- Organizational form. DSA is a mass membership organization with no program requirement for joining and no cadre discipline. We filter deliberately. Their theory is that scale creates leverage; ours is that political coherence creates durability.
- Revolution vs. transition. DSA’s radical wing increasingly describes ends we’d share, but the organization as a whole has no theory of how the capitalist state is broken, only of how it is pressured.
Practical assessment: the largest pool of radicalizing people in Denver sits inside DSA. Any united front that excludes them is a united front of a few hundred people. Their left wing is a real partner on concrete fights.
PSL Denver
Where we agree
- The capitalist state cannot be reformed and must be overthrown; police and prisons are instruments of class rule, not neutral institutions.
- No work inside the Democratic Party. PSL runs its own candidates rather than seeking DNC ballot lines.
- Democratic centralism and cadre discipline as organizational method.
- Reparations, Indigenous sovereignty, and self-determination for oppressed peoples as programmatic commitments rather than rhetorical ones.
- Disciplined, high-tempo street mobilization. PSL consistently turns out and consistently shows up.
Where we disagree
- Internationalism — the sharpest split. PSL’s tradition, inherited from Workers World Party (WWP), has generally extended defense to self-declared anti-imperialist states on the grounds that opposing US and NATO power takes priority. Our points of unity reject exactly this: we back emancipatory movements rather than regimes, we criticize authoritarian states that reproduce domination even when they resist Western aggression, and we take positions through geopolitical analysis rather than camp loyalty.
- Lineage. PSL descends from a 2004 split with WWP, a Marxist-Leninist current outside the Trotskyist tradition our own points of unity implicitly work within (our political-revolution/social-revolution distinction is a Trotskyist reading PSL does not share).
- Assessment of existing states. We hold that no current state meets the criterion of workers owning and managing production, and we decline to issue good/bad verdicts on them. PSL’s tradition does issue those verdicts, in the affirmative, for several.
Practical assessment: strong partner on anti-ICE work, Palestine, and police accountability. Coalition work will strain wherever a specific foreign conflict forces the campism question into the open — the platform below is designed to avoid forcing it. Historically, other organizations have struggled to collaborate with local branches, because they insist on calling the shots. They have been bad community members and uncooperative coalition members. If PSL could collaborate rather than dictate and undermine, we have some common ground that we could both benefit from.
Colorado RCA (formerly Colorado IMT)
Where we agree
- The same Trotskyist tradition, broadly. Both organizations base themselves on Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky, aim at a workers’ government and a democratically planned economy, and reject the idea that capitalism can be gradually reformed out of existence.
- Independence from both major parties.
- Democratic centralism and a Leninist party form.
- Both of us are new formations that chose to start fresh rather than reform an existing one.
Where we disagree
- Entrism and its disclosure. Our points of unity require that any coordinated entry into an existing formation be announced and conducted with that organization’s informed consent. The Grantite tradition RCA descends from has a long and openly criticized record of undeclared entrism into mass reformist parties. This is a methodological difference with real ethical weight, and it is the one worth naming first.
- Factions. We explicitly preserve the right to form tendencies and factions outside our core points of unity. The classical Grantite reading of democratic centralism treats standing factions as corrosive.
- Tempo and scale. RCA’s posture is urgent and expansionist — “communists 24/7,” aggressive tabling, visible branding, rapid recruitment across Denver, Boulder, and Colorado Springs. Ours is filtered and slow: ally, prospect, member, cadre. They are betting on numbers; we are betting on formation.
- Analysis of the moment. RCA describes the present as a revolutionary epoch requiring immediate party-building at scale. We do not share that read of conditions.
Practical assessment: closest to us doctrinally, furthest from us in organizational culture. Good faith coalition work is possible; joint recruitment terrain will be contested.
Denver Communists / Firebrand
Where we agree
- Nearly everything, on paper. Same lineage — the ISO tradition, held together after 2019. Same claimed inheritance from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and Luxemburg. Same distinction from social democrats and anarchists while working alongside both. Same commitment to intervening in movements and labor struggles to win fighters to revolutionary socialism.
- Same assessment of the state, the party form, and the necessity of revolution.
Where we disagree
- Not primarily theory — praxis and internal accountability. The divergence originated in a leadership that would not engage a written strategic critique. That is a failure of organizational responsiveness, not a line dispute.
- Structural response to that failure. Our provisions exist because of it: the explicit right to form tendencies and factions, a graduated cadre pathway with defined responsibilities, and a requirement that coordinated entry be transparent. These are mechanisms designed so that a critique like the one that went nowhere has somewhere to go.
- Assessment of campaign strategy. The Drip Café campaign remains the concrete case where we assessed the tactic as counterproductive and the organization declined to assess it at all.
Practical assessment: this is the case study that justifies the phrase in our preamble about leadership “entrenched in such a way that reform is either incredibly difficult or impossible.” Our preamble already commits us to setting individual grievances aside, so we will.
Freedom Road Socialist Organization
Where we agree
- Revolution rather than reform; the capitalist state as a repressive apparatus serving the ruling class.
- No participation in the Democratic or Republican parties. FRSO states directly that oppressed nationalities should not limit political participation to electoral politics generally or those parties specifically.
- Anti-oppression struggle as revolutionary in significance rather than a distraction from class politics.
- Party-building patience. FRSO is explicit that none of the three preconditions for revolution currently exist in the US, that a party cannot be proclaimed into being, and that it must emerge from fusing Marxism with an actual workers’ movement. That is closer to our own founding logic than any other group here.
- A near-identical labor program: organize the unorganized, repeal Taft-Hartley, workers’ right to refuse unsafe work, no privatization, international solidarity against “buy American” chauvinism.
- Abolitionist and anti-carceral demands; end to ICE raids and document checks.
Where we disagree
- Theoretical tradition. FRSO is Marxist-Leninist and names Stalin and Mao among its principal theorists. We work within a tradition that treats the bureaucratic degeneration of those states as requiring political revolution, not defense. We still concede that there’s much to be learned and admired from Stalin and Mao and other movements such as the Huks and the Naxalites.
- Internationalism. FRSO states plainly that it is glad the socialist countries exist and stands with the PRC, Cuba, DPRK, Vietnam, and Laos, and evaluates the USSR and Eastern Europe positively. This is the clearest statement of the position our points of unity reject.
- The national question. FRSO’s program centers the Black Belt thesis: African American, Chicano (Aztlán), and Hawaiian nations with territorial self-determination rights up to secession. We treat national and racial oppression as central without adopting this nation-within-a-nation territorial framework. This is a genuine theoretical difference, not an emphasis difference, and we should be able to say why.
- Class analysis granularity. FRSO’s stratified map, monopoly and non-monopoly capitalists, three strata of petty bourgeoisie, three sections of the working class, lumpen proletariat, is more developed than ours. This is a gap on our side, not a disagreement.
Practical assessment: FRSO’s program is the most programmatically serious document in this landscape and the one most worth studying, including where we reject it.
The DNC
Included for contrast only. The DNC is not a peer formation; it is the electoral apparatus of a capitalist party, a cross-class coalition funded substantially by capital, with no program membership, no discipline, and no theory of state power beyond winning office within the existing order. Its internal fights are about electoral positioning.
It is worth noting what this reveals: refusal of the Democratic Party is the single point of near-total consensus across this entire landscape. DRS, PSL, RCA, FRSO, and Firebrand all independently rule it out. DSA is the sole exception, and that exception is the primary line of division in the American left today.
Part II: A Proposed United Front Platform
Design principles
- Built on action, not theory. Every demand below can be agreed to without conceding anything about Stalin, the class character of China, the Black Belt thesis, or the correct reading of democratic centralism. Where a demand would force a theoretical concession, it is excluded.
- Concrete and losable. Each item names something that can actually be won, lost, or fought over in Denver and the Front Range.
- Temporary and binding. Per our own points of unity: united fronts are temporary, binding while they last, and as broad as consensus permits. Signing does not merge organizations or suspend criticism.
- Worker-led. Bourgeois or institutional support may be accepted case by case, at arm’s length. Organizing remains worker-led.
- Criticism preserved. Every signatory retains the right to publicly criticize every other signatory’s politics. The front covers joint action, not joint messaging on contested questions.
The Platform
1. Defense against immigration enforcement
- An end to ICE raids, detentions, and deportations in Colorado.
- No cooperation between local law enforcement, employers, landlords, or public institutions and federal immigration enforcement.
- An end to document checks as a condition of work, housing, healthcare, or education.
- Full access to public services regardless of immigration status.
- Material and legal support for those detained and their families.
2. Against political repression
- Defense of everyone facing prosecution for protest, organizing, or solidarity work.
- Material support and correspondence for political prisoners, including the Prairieland defendants.
- Opposition to terrorism and conspiracy charges used against organizers.
- An end to surveillance, infiltration, and informant operations against left and community organizations.
- A shared commitment that no signatory cooperates with federal investigations into another.
3. Against the police and the carceral state
- An end to police killings, and prosecution when they occur.
- Divestment from police budgets toward housing, healthcare, and mental health infrastructure.
- Closure of private and for-profit detention facilities, including GEO Group operations in Colorado.
- An end to cash bail, and bail support in the interim.
- Opposition to the expansion of jails, prisons, and detention capacity.
4. Labor
- The right to organize, strike, picket, and honor picket lines without legal penalty.
- Repeal of Taft-Hartley and Colorado’s Labor Peace Act.
- Organizing the unorganized, with priority on the lowest-paid and least protected sections of the class.
- Recognition of contractors and subcontractors as employees.
- The right to refuse unsafe work and to stop production when safety standards are unmet.
- Solidarity across borders; opposition to protectionist and chauvinist framings of labor’s interests.
5. Social provision
- Housing as a right: rent control, an end to no-cause eviction, public housing construction, and an end to sweeps of unhoused people.
- Universal healthcare, including full gender-affirming and reproductive care.
- Free public education at all levels; opposition to privatization and charter expansion.
- Free childcare and paid family leave.
6. Against oppression
- Full legal and material equality regardless of race, nationality, gender, sexuality, disability, or immigration status.
- Defense of trans people against legislative and street attacks.
- Defense of reproductive freedom, including abortion access.
- Indigenous sovereignty, treaty enforcement, and land return.
- Reparations for slavery and for the forced deportations of Chicanos.
- Accessible organizing: physically accessible spaces, and accommodation of access needs as a standing organizational obligation rather than an afterthought.
7. Against war and empire
- No US military intervention, occupation, blockade, sanction, or proxy war — anywhere, without exception.
- An end to US military and financial support for the Israeli state; full support for Palestinian liberation.
- Closure of foreign US military bases; an end to military recruitment in schools.
- Independence for US colonies.
- Opposition to war spending and to the domestic repression that accompanies war.
Note: this section is deliberately phrased as opposition to our own state’s conduct. It does not require any signatory to endorse or condemn any foreign government. Signatories disagree about the character of those governments and will continue to. The demand is on Washington.
8. Against the far right
- Coordinated defense of communities, workplaces, and organizations targeted by fascist and white supremacist formations.
- No platform for organized fascists.
- Shared security practice and threat information between signatories where it protects people at risk.
9. Working-class political independence
- No subordination of any signatory’s program to the electoral calendar or to the Democratic Party. (This will strain some factions of this coalition)
What the front does not cover
Honesty about the limits is what makes the rest credible:
- The character of existing states. Signatories disagree fundamentally. The platform’s anti-war section is written to function regardless.
- The national question. Signatories disagree on whether oppressed nationalities in the US constitute nations with territorial self-determination rights. Concrete demands are shared; the theory is not.
- Party form and the road to power. Not the front’s business.
- Electoral strategy. Named above as the primary limit.
- Historical assessment. Stalin, Mao, Trotsky, the USSR, 1917, 1956, 1968. Not the front’s business, and any front that tries to settle these will not survive the attempt.
Proposed operating norms
- Consensus on joint actions, with any signatory free to abstain from a specific action without leaving the front.
- No signatory speaks for the front without agreement; each speaks for itself always.
- Criticism is handled by category, not by blanket rule. Three distinct kinds, three different norms:
- Conduct within the front : a partner breaks an agreement, mishandles security, no-shows a committed action. Internal first, always. Raised through liaisons and given a real chance to be resolved before it goes anywhere public. This costs nothing and is simply good faith.
- General political line: campism, entrism, electoralism, party form, assessment of historical states. Stays public. This is how tendencies define themselves and how the broader left works out its disagreements. It is not an attack on a partner and must not be treated as one.
- Individuals, and factional maneuvering : off-limits permanently, inside the front or outside it.
- The line/conduct distinction must be legible to partners, not just to us. A theoretical critique of a current will still land as “they attacked us” unless the norm is written down and agreed to in advance. It should be stated explicitly in whatever founding agreement the front adopts, with examples.
- DRS publishes under pen names, and the organization owns every word. Nothing we publish arrives with plausible deniability attached, and no DRS writing sits outside these norms. Signatories should know this up front that it is a commitment, not a caveat.
- Any time-limited moratorium is bound to a campaign, not to the front’s existence. “No public criticism of partners for the duration of the ICE defense campaign” is a real and honorable commitment with a defined end. An open-ended moratorium is a surrender of voice, and it falls hardest on the smallest organizations at the table, which is us.
- A named liaison per organization, as our points of unity already specify for organizational allies.
- Fixed review point. The front is temporary by design. Set a date to reassess rather than letting it drift into a permanent structure nobody chose.
- A conduct floor. Shared minimum standards on harassment, security culture, and accountability, agreed before the first joint action rather than improvised during the first crisis.
Is this a workable foundation for a united front? Reach out and let’s hash it out.