Socialism Conference

Andrew Bergman and Judy Wraight speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), the rank-and-file caucus in the United Auto Workers (UAW), made history by challenging long-entrenched business unionists and winning the campaign for top UAW leadership. With a possible strike looming at the Big Three automakers (Ford, GM, Chrysler), UAWD members — newly elect...

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. Join renowned author Naomi Klein for an exploration of our surreal moment in history—with politics plagued by conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers, and demagogue hucksters—and what the right’s uncanny mirror world means for the left’s analysis and strategy. Learn more about the Socialism Conference at www.socialismconferen...

Zafiro Patino, Frances Amador, Cheryl Looney, Eric Kobesak, and René Christian Moya speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by Solidarity. https://solidarity-us.org In this workshop, City Life/Vida Urbana, KC Tenants and Los Angeles Tenants Union will provide hands-on experiences about what it takes to build tenant power. We will focus on two questions: First,...

Renaldo Hudson, Alice Kim, and Damon Williams speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. Abolition of the death penalty in Illinois in 2011 was the result of decades of organizing and mobilizing by grassroots groups, and most important, the intrepid work of Death Row activists themselves as well as their families. Join us to discuss how an abolitionist movement was built step by step as var...

Erik Wallenberg, AG, Chris Furino, and Yordanos Molla speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. From "Don't Say Gay" laws to attacks on Black history education to the destruction of higher education, Florida is at the forefront of a resurgent fascism in this country. Join activists involved in leading struggles against DeSantis and his goons for a discussion of the state of the battle in F...

aja monet and Robin D.G. Kelley speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. Our ability to reenvision and transform our society is what radical social movements are made of. Just as the mechanics of our organizing have developed, every movement demands an evolution and transformation of the heart and mind. Join aja monet and Robin D.G. Kelley for a discussion of poetic vision, collective str...

Maryam Abidi and Naomi Bennet speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. Religious institutions are some of the few remaining sites of genuine community not to be broken up by capital and resold piecemeal for profit; yet they remain an under-engaged terrain of struggle. This panel will discuss the fights happening inside particularly non-Christian religious institutions and argue for social...

Jesse Sharkey speaks in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. The movements in Chicago were key to electing a new mayor–Brandon Johnson, and will be key to building grassroots power going forward. Former CTU President Jesse Sharkey will discuss lessons from the CTU’s experience of strikes and campaigns over the previous decade and what these mean for building the organizational strength of our...

Robin D.G. Kelley speaks in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. Abolition is presence. We combine already-existing activities, suppressed knowledges, and fresh practices to strengthen communities-in-struggle, inventing new futures as we go. The real movement for abolition—of racial capitalism, carcerality, criminalization, borders—reorganizes what is into what we need to make a world in which...

Daniel Faber, Christina Schlegel, and Leigh Brownhill ______ speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by Capitalism, Nature, Socialism Journal. https://www.cnsjournal.org This panel will explain the anti-ecological dynamics of American capitalism, and the threats it poses to both people and the planet. We will explore the opportunities for ecosocialists and ecof...

Liat Ben-Moshe, Leah Harris, and Beatrice Adler-Bolton speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by Death Panel. https://www.deathpanel.net An increasing wave of policies and legislation, from Eric Adams’ stance on involuntary hospitalization to Gavin Newsom’s Care Courts, seeks to criminalize madness and people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. J...

Haley Pessin and Phil Gasper speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by Tempest. https://www.tempestmag.org The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests were the biggest in US history, but three years later there is a full-scale right-wing backlash. This session will draw the lessons of the past few years, explain why fighting racism and other forms of oppression must...

Shelton Stromquist speaks in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. For more than a century, municipal socialism has fired the imaginations of workers around the world. But, at every turn, propertied elites challenged their right to govern. Faced with urban/industrial crises of capitalism, workers invented a new local politics that promised to democratize cities and reclaim the wealth they creat...

M. E. O'Brien, Eman Abdelhadi, and Sophie Lewis speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by Pinko. https://pinko.online Join M. E. O’Brien, Sophie Lewis and Eman Abdelhadi for a panel conversation on family abolition, care, and the family in racial capitalism. Occasioned by the publication of M. E. O’Brien’s Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Ca...

Vicko Alvarez and Graciela Guzmán speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by After Texas Governor Greg Abbott bussed thousands of refugees to sanctuary cities such as Chicago as a political ploy, countless migrants have faced untenable conditions including being forced to sleep in police stations. This talk will look at the roots of this current crisis, and wil...

Alberto Toscano and Ilya Budraitskis speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by Verso. https://www.versobooks.com How can we best understand the right in the US and internationally? The history of ‘fascism’ as a concept has gone through many iterations. This session will explore the meaning and relevance of the term, but also look at contemporary manifestations...

Aaron Lecklider speaks in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session discusses the relationship between homosexuality and the Left in US history, particularly emphasizing the ways radical activists, artists, and writers incorporated sexual politics into their critiques of capitalism, racism, and fascism in the decades before Stonewall. Learn more about the Socialism Conference at www.so...

Darakshan Raja speaks in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by Muslims for Just Futures and Muslim Abolitionist Futures. https://www.muslimsforjustfutures.org https://www.muslimabolitionistfutures.org Muslims for Just Futures will host a workshop session on ways abolition can be used as a framework and an organizing intervention to tackle structural Islamophobia an...

Dina Gilio-Whitaker speaks in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. The concern for injustice toward non-white European people distinguishes the left from the right in the United States. Dina Gilio-Whitaker discusses genocidal dispossession of Native lands as the U.S.’s “original sin” which Americans have yet to fully reckon with, and how justice can lead to a sense of legitimate belonging for...

Güney Işıkara, Erica Jung and Aditi Bansal speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by Science for the People. https://scienceforthepeople.org That humanity cannot resolve anthropogenic ecological crises without radically restructuring social relations is a consensus shared by the degrowth movement and revolutionary socialism. In this panel, we discuss convergin...

Guerline Jozef speaks in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. Migration, the search for life, is a human right and key social justice issue, but while those with the right passports and wealth can migrate, borders dehumanize and kill people fleeing for their lives from places like Haiti, Somalia, and Cameroon. The fight for migrant justice must take on the anti-Blackness central to bordering r...

Premilla Nadasen and Jessica Stites speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by Since the earliest days of the pandemic, care work has been thrust into the national spotlight. The notion of care can seem simple enough. But, as Premilla Nadasen and Jessica Stites will discuss, we have only begun to understand the massive role it plays in our lives as a site of ec...

Mizue Aizeki, Santiago Narváez speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by the Center for Political Education and Surveillance Resistance Lab. https://politicaleducation.org https://surveillanceresistancelab.org/ As part of its ever-expanding migration control regime, the US government is externalizing its digital border infrastructure. This growing surveillance...

David Whitehouse speaks in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. John Brown's 1859 raid on the arsenal at Harper's Ferry helped precipitate the Civil War. Brown’s radicalism didn’t come out of nowhere. This talk will trace some of the connections between the multiracial militant wing of the northern abolition movement and the struggles of enslaved Black revolutionaries to emancipate themselves....

Hafsa Kanjwal, Suchitra Vijayan, and Azad Essa speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. Under Narendra Modi, India has embarked on a project to become an authoritarian Hindu State, building an arsenal of weapons, evoking religious nationalism, dismantling civil society and using the Israeli model to enable settler-colonialism in Kashmir. This panel, made up of authors Hafsa Kanjwal, Suchi...