Socialism Conference

Kali Simmons, Robyn Bourgeois, and Patty Krawec speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2025. "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters." —Antonio Gramsci. We live in a time of monsters, and the unique perspective of Indigenous horror can teach us how to respond to them without becoming monsters ourselves. The next Socialism Conference will be...

Wayne Au, David Stovall, Jesse Hagopian, Barbara Ransby, Davarian Baldwin, and Bill Ayers speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2025. Book-banning, attacks on Critical Race Theory, Black Studies and Queer Studies, the use of state violence to repress dissent—we are experiencing a furious backlash against modest steps to make education accessible to all children and youth.  How should a...

Shelby Handler, Michael Wolfe, and CP speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2025. This session was sponsored by Jewish Voice for Peace. What does it take to absorb and consolidate a membership base after periods of uprising & mass mobilization? Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) organizers will share their reflections on nitty gritty topics like: creating effective leadership structures, build...

Sean K. Isaacs speaks in this session recorded at Socialism 2025. Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) represents one of the liveliest sites of Marxist debate today. SRT’s theoretical approach highlights the need to view colonialism, race, gender, and other social relations as central to capital’s reproduction. Strategically, this means that struggles beyond the point of production must be recentred i...

Bennett Carpenter, David Duhalde, Montague Simmons, Jayanni Webster, and Cayden Mak speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2025. This session was sponsored by Convergence Magazine, Liberation Road, and Rising Majority. How can organizers take on bold, strategic work to strengthen left-led base building within a broad anti-fascist united front? Our panelists debate the “build” component of a s...

Da'Shaun Harrison, Tea Troutman, Ko Bragg, and Aurielle Marie speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2025. This session was sponsored by Scalawag Magazine. What is the role of Black media under fascism? This is one of the questions we would like to invite others to consider at this year's conference. We hope to delve into a discussion about what we see as our responsibility as an independent,...

Kelly Hayes, Tanuja Jagernauth, and Eman Abdelhadi speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2025. A conversation between contributors to the upcoming anthology Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis, which offers advice and accompaniment to organizers struggling with the conflicts, heartbreaks, and catastrophes that activists so often experience. The next Socialism Con...

Binish Ahmed speaks in this session recorded at Socialism 2025. This session was sponsored by Kashmir Golpush. What happens when an entire people are systematically dehumanized, their histories erased, and their identities weaponized against them? Anti-Kashmiri racism operates at the intersection of imperialism, settler-colonialisms, anti-Asian, anti-Muslim, and anti-Indigenous racism, portraying...

Gary Tyler, Arnita Dobbins, Kyle Hopkins, and Michael Letwin speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2025. In 1976, high school students of the Red Tide newspaper campaigned to free Gary Tyler, a 16-year-old Black political prisoner on Louisiana's death row. In the process, they forged a multiracial, working-class youth organization of the International Socialists. Half a century later, Gary a...

This session was recorded at Socialism 2025 and sponsored by Speak Out Socialists. Trump’s new policies have driven an increased militarism, nationalism, and patriotism across the world aimed at rallying workers in each country behind its own governments. Internationalism is the only perspective that can advance the interests of the working class. Hear revolutionary activists in France, Germany, a...

Kamau Franklin, Micah Herskind, and Mariah Parker speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2025. The Stop Cop City movement is a decentralized effort to stop the construction of a $120 million police training facility and the destruction of 170 acres of the Weelaunee Forest outside of Atlanta, Georgia. Featuring a range of tactics, and in the face of enormous state repression, the SCC movement...

Dylan Maraj, Alvin Gaine, and Ira Pollock speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2025. This session was sponsored by Logistics Workers League. While the urgent needs of organizing and fighting the boss naturally take top priority for union organizers and committees, political education of workers in struggle is a crucial but hard to prioritize investment that can turn committee leaders into c...

Emily Janakiram, Eman Abdelhadi, Katie Gibson, and Olivia Katbi speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2025. How should the left relate to the family? Socialist analysis makes clear that the nuclear family form is an inherently repressive, racist, and hetereo-sexist institution that functionally reinforces and reproduces capitalism. But what does this mean for our organizing, especially when...

Pang Delgra speaks in this session recorded at Socialism 2025. This session was sponsored by Partido Sosyalista. From the weaponization of Facebook to successive elections of authoritarian leaders; the Philippines has been a testing ground for the Far-Right. How have the left been able to fight back under such conditions? Hear insights and perspectives from a representative from the newly formed P...

Naomi Bennet and Danny Katch speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2025. As Trump persecutes migrants, trans people, and other scapegoats, the left faces a choice: echo his anti-woke populism, or fight for collective liberation. This session will look at the dangers of antisemitic, conspiracist politics in movements across the political spectrum – and how we keep the focus on capitalism, not...

Michael A. McCarthy speaks in this session recorded at Socialism 2025. If you’re a socialist, what do you know about democratic planning? Socialism isn't bigger state bureaucracies, endless meetings, or even turning out votes. Instead, it is empowering ordinary people to have a greater say over the institutions that affect us all. Join social theorist Michael A. McCarthy to explore how the working...

Jason Wozniak, Gabriel Winant, Sherry Wolf, and Chenjerai Kumanyika speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2025. Repression of student protests on campuses and existential defunding threats from the White House have combined to change the face of higher education and call into question its very future. Join us for a discussion of the current state of the movement to save and transform higher...

Chloe Torres and Jenny Espino speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2025. BIPOC communities along the Gulf South have long been treated as sacrifice zones by corporations like Chevron and Valero who have also been instrumental in fueling genocide in Palestine. This panel will explore what it means to build solidarity in communities often overlooked and seldom seen as crucial sites of struggl...

Howie Hawkins, Tanya Vyhovsky, Elias Seidel, Dianne Feeley, and Suzi Weissman speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2025. This session was sponsored by Ukraine Solidarity Network-US. Trump’s political alignment with Russia’s Vladimir Putin is reshaping international politics while posing a serious threat to the Ukrainian people’s resistance to colonial domination and occupation. This panel w...

Michaela Brangan, Steve Fraser, Sarah Hurd, and Mie Inouye speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2025. This session was sponsored by DSA. In the wake of the state’s anti-left attacks on the university, public education, and access to knowledge in general, liberals have failed to uphold their own institutions through neoliberal decline and the new right’s aggressive encroachment. It’s time fo...

Audrey Nicolaides speaks in this session recorded at Socialism 2025. This session was sponsored by the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. This lecture will retrace the theoretical and historical evolution of left-internationalism from the mid-19th century onward, paying particular attention to the problem of practicing international solidarity from within the imperial core. What is left inter...

Sophie Lewis, Melissa Gira Grant, and Beatrice Adler-Bolton speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2025. This session was sponsored by Death Panel. As the state intensifies its assault on gender, sexuality, and reproduction—criminalizing abortion, trans care, and pregnancy outcomes, dismantling government functions to fight "gender ideology," and defining "real women" under the guise of prote...

Silky Shah, Mon Mohapatra, Hannah Riley, Stevie Wilson, Maha Hilal, and Zhandarka Kurti speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2025. This session was sponsored by Community Justice Exchange. The new, authoritarian, administration has promised to expand prison infrastructure, requiring remobilizations of efforts against expansion, construction, entrenchment, and net-widening. Alongside the rel...

Allison Duerk, Mark Burrows, and Guy Miller speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2025. This session was sponsored by Railroad Workers United. After the 1894 Pullman Strike was violently crushed by the federal militia, Debs advocated for socialism to his dying day. Imprisoned for opposing US involvement in WW I, he received almost a million votes for president in 1920. What can we learn from...

Harley Pomper, Raymond Youngblood, A'Keisha Lee, Micah Clark Moody, and Liat Ben-Moshe speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2025. This session was sponsored by the Jail Solidarity Network. In prison and jail where people must put themselves at risk to have their basic needs met, how do we think about disability? We will challenge people to see how incarceration disables and how disabled peo...