Revolutionary Socialism: We believe the working class is the key to ridding the world of capitalism. Revolutionary Socialism is a framework that uses Marxism as a tool to unify workers around shared class struggles in order to organize the revolution.
Being in struggle together from below increases our critical consciousness about capitalism’s inherent violence, which builds our resistance to accepting the status quo. It is the vehicle in which the class can force change. When we say from below we mean working class and poor people. We do not count on politicians to do anything for us. The working class has historically made the most effective change when we have confronted and fought against dividing factors like anti-black racism, transphobia, etc. The working class leads the way to radical change against the ruling class, which maintains these divisions to distract from their exploitation of workers and uphold capitalism.
As an organization, we engage with revolutionary socialism as our guiding theory of change, as we believe it is a pathway to radical change that centers the needs of all. We draw especially on the legacy of Black and Indigenous socialist movements to inform our work. We recognize that many movements that we align with may identify in different ways and we stand in solidarity with Indigenous autonomy, Black liberation, and workers’ rights movements around the world.
As Fred Hampton said, “We say that we will work with anybody and form a coalition with anybody that has revolution on their mind.”
Housing First is a framework that prioritizes individuals’ immediate needs and supports their agency and independence in having stable housing. Thompson House hostees are not required to go through a number of service programs or meet federal/state requirements to be housed. Housing first also supports people to access and use whichever resources they want, which could include schooling, trauma counseling, job support, childcare, etc.
Abolition is the elimination of systemic violence manifested through capitalism, prisons, borders, nation-states, imperialism, police, caste, fatphobia, settler colonialism, Zionism, and landlords.
As Fred Moten and Steven Harvey write: “What is the object of abolition? Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society” (The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study).
Solidarity through sustained mutual aid, kinship strengthening, political education, direct action, and movement building. We understand that solidarity is not a transactional relationship, but one built on a mutual understanding that our liberation is tied to one another. Solidarity is building collective power.
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