Socialism Conference

Nyle Fort, Damon Williams, Ash-lee Woodard Henderson, and the Dream Defenders Choir speak and sing in this session recorded at Socialism 2024. This session was sponsored by Haymarket and the Dream Defenders. SunDDay School is a space for us to explore and experience the spiritual life of social movements. As we move through profound grief in our world, this program, curated by the Dream Defenders,...

David McNally, Shireen Akram-Boshar, and Eman Abdelhadi speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2024. This session was sponsored by Spectre. This panel will explore the significance of the Palestinian struggle in terms of anti-capitalist politics of global liberation. Questions of internationalism, feminism, and anti-racism will figure in a discussion of the current global upheaval as constitu...

Ray Acheson, Janene Yazzie, and Oscar Sanchez speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2024. This session was sponsored by CounterPunch. This panel will explore the frontline, grassroots struggles, and ongoing resistance to imperialism in so-called Sacrifice Zones, from battles against AUKUS in Australia to uranium mining in New Mexico to the toxic legacy on the Southside of Chicago. The next S...

Rafael Bernabe, Binish Ahmed, Denys Bondar, and Shireen Akram-Boshar speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2024. This session was sponsored by The Real News Network, Ukraine Solidarity Network, Against the Current, and Tempest. Oppressed nations from Palestine to Puerto Rico and Ukraine are fighting for liberation from their imperialist and sub-imperialist overlords. First in a series of pan...

Rev. Dr. Naomi Washington-Leaphart, Aidan Orly, Ben Lorber, Rev. Cristal Silva-McCormick and Annie Wilkinson speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2024. This session was sponsored by Political Research Associates. Researchers and anti-Zionist Christian faith leaders/organizers will explain what the Christian Zionist movement is and how it mobilizes Christians in the US and beyond to build su...

Michael Lujan Bevacqua, Monaeka Flores, Aren Quenga Kerr and Nathan Samayo speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2024. This session was sponsored by DSA. Guåhan (Guam), with its remote location in the Pacific and modest population of less than 170,000, is frequently neglected in discussions about US imperialism and decolonization. Despite this, the Chamoru people have resisted Western imperi...

Alan Dettlaff, Maya Pendleton, Josie Pickens, and Connease Warren speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2024. This session was sponsored by upEND Movement. The state has used the forcible separation of Black children from their families as a tool for over 400 years, and this continues today through the modern child welfare system. This session will discuss the harm this system perpetuates an...

Abdel Razzaq Takriti speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2024. During the 1948 Nakba, most of southern Palestine was ethnically cleansed by settler-colonist militias. Many refugees ended up in Gaza, playing a key role in the development of Palestinian revolutionary thought and practice. This talk examines the centrality of Gaza to Palestinian liberation, as well as the repeated settler-col...

Jasson Perez and Rousemary Vega speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2024. This session was sponsored by Rampant Magazine. A massive effort by working people in Chicago to put former CTU organizer Brandon Johnson in office. This session will bring together Chicago organizers to assess both the positive and negative results of this experiment, the contradictions of the mayoral office itself...

Hanif Abdurraqib speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2024. Join Hanif Abdurraqib in exploring both politically radical poems and love poems from June Jordan's body of work and mapping how those two impulses (love and a radical politic) intersect, and are not at all disparate. The next Socialism Conference will be held in Chicago, July 3-6. Learn more about the Socialism Conference at www.s...

Phil Gasper, Nancy Holmstrom, and Robert Cuffy speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2024. This session was sponsored by New Politics. Since it was first written in 1848, The Communist Manifesto has been translated into more languages than any other modern text. All across the world it has been debated, shared, brandished, invoked, banned, burned, and even declared “dead." This session will...

Noura Erakat speaks in this session recorded at Socialism 2024. Since the early 20th century, Palestinians have leveled a racial and anti-colonial critique of Zionism. That critique crystallized vividly during the apex of Third World Revolt particularly in the UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 condemning Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. While the Oslo Agreement offered Isra...

Bati Bai Rajak, Farhat Jahan, and Jiya S. Pandya speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2024. It will be forty years since the night when a Union Carbide (now Dow Chemicals) factory leaked 27 tons of toxic methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas into the lungs, soil, and water of Bhopal, India, killing 22,000 people and leaving 500,000 still facing the environmental, health, and economic devastation from...

Jeff Schuhrke speaks with Aparna Gopalan in this session recorded at Socialism 2024. This session was sponsored by Verso. A conversation about the new book Blue Collar Empire—which recounts the AFL-CIO’s global anticommunist crusade in the late 20th century, shows how it took place in partnership with the US government’s Cold War-era quest to control labor struggles abroad, and explores what this...

Dissenters members speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2024. This session was sponsored by Dissenters. Join Dissenters to hear from young people who recently traveled to Cuba, the Philippines and Guatemala on political delegations. On this panel, they’ll share vibrant pictures of the impacts of US empire across these three distinct geographies, uplift resistance and organizing from indigen...

Adam Vander Tuig, Amir Marshi, Peter Tanaka, Naomi Washington-Leapheart, and Jennifer Bing speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2024. This session was sponsored by Highlander. Initially after Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza began in October 2023, the broad Christian left seemed largely absent and otherwise unprepared. This panel—comprised of students, scholars, clergy, and organizers—exp...

Billy Che Brooks, Jacqueline Lazu, and Helen Shiller speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2024. This session was sponsored by With pro-Palestinian protests on campuses continuing to grow, comparisons with the student protests of the 1960s abound. In the late 1960s the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords, with an international, intercommunal perspective, challenged the powers that be and...

Patrick Bigger, Khem Rogaly, Jessie Kelly, and Sumaya Awad speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2024. This session was sponsored by Climate and Community Institute. Military domination of public resources and capture of US industrial capacity fuels the climate crisis and fundamentally puts full decarbonization – let alone climate justice – out of reach. To confront the drivers of climate br...

Jose Manuel Almanza, Julio Mateo, and Julie Lee speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2024. This session was sponsored by #StopShotSpotter National Coalition. Since launching in 2022, the #StopShotSpotter national coalition has built a strong national formation with multiple campaigns to cancel contracts in cities across the country. Join members of the coalition for a workshop focused on cu...

Jason Farbman speaks in this session recorded at Socialism 2024. This session was sponsored by Jewish Voice for Peace and Adalah Justice Project. Two things are true: the Anti-Defamation League weaponizes accusations of antisemitism to defend Israel’s genocide; and we must make a real fight against antisemitism a part of a struggle for collective liberation. The next Socialism Conference will be h...

Sarah Jaffe, Eman Abdelhadi, Kelly Hayes, and Lydia Pelot-Hobbs speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2024. Grief is everywhere these days, and yet speaking about it is often foreclosed even in our movement spaces. As we move forward in a time of intersecting crises, how do we create space for our very human needs—for rest, for care, for time to mourn—while we organize to rise to the immedia...

Alexis Pauline Gumbs speaks in this session recorded at Socialism 2024. Join acclaimed writer Alexis Pauline Gumbs as she illuminates how, for Lorde, survival was not simply about getting through, or about resilience. It was about the total stakes of living on, and with, a planet in transformation, her commitment to justice intimately connected to her deep engagement with the natural world. The ne...

Lois Weiner and Sarah Rothschild speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2024. Capitalism has shifted its project to dismantle public education. A new alignment of players (including tech firms, private equity, and venture capitalists), have established a foothold in schools using educational technology to privatize, surveil and control teachers’ and students’ work, often working with the far...

Maryam Abidi, Safear Ness, and Naomi Bennet speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2024. At Palestine solidarity encampments across the country, religious life as part of revolutionary activity blossomed. Seders invited all to imagine a freer world and communities defended Muslims praying in congregation hand in hand. These religious activities also became lighting poles for violence and repr...

Ruth Wilson Gilmore speaks in this session recorded at Socialism 2024. 100 years after Lenin’s death, his exhortations to learn and think in the concrete remain urgent for our movements. What does it mean to approach our political practice not as an abstract set of rules, but as a collective rehearsal of coming worlds? And how can we perceive, expand, and connect contemporary world-experiments reh...