Socialism Conference

Elce Redmond, Hollis Harris, Hayley Neiling, and Jared Coles speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by EWOC. https://workerorganizing.org The labor movement is on the ascent among workers under the age of 35 for the first time in decades. Join a panel discussion with organizers from the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) and worker-organizers from...

Hélène Cavat speaks in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. Macron’s class war from above in France has generated social instability, generating both a rising right-wing populism and the eruption of social movements. The latter have taken the form of labor unrest on a national scale (the yellow vests) as well as street rebellions against racism among youth in different marginalized communities...

Fritz Edler, Mark Burrows, and Guy Miller speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by Railroad Workers United. https://www.railroadworkersunited.org For 30 years, Wall Street investors have driven the railroads to subordinate all aspects of operations to cutting every expense and maximizing profit. This dangerous, dysfunctional system is hazardous for workers, t...

Hector Rincon and Veronica Avendano speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by Workers' Voice. https://workersvoiceus.org Socialist activists involved with the solidarity campaign with immigrant detainees on strike in the Mesa Verde and Golden State Detention Centers in California will discuss lessons learned from struggles coordinated behind bars: connecting i...

Jimena Vergara and Aaron Amaral speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by Left Voice & Tempest. https://www.leftvoice.org https://www.tempestmag.org To overthrow capitalism, we need revolutionary organization(s). Tempest and Left Voice discuss how these can be built in the U.S. and how to engage with reformist projects. The panel will discuss how revolutionari...

Mon Mohaptara and Rachel Foran speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by Community Justice Exchange. https://www.communityjusticeexchange.org This session will focus on how the expansion of so-called alternatives to pretrial detention and incarceration has been a mechanism for strengthening the Prison Industrial Complex. We will use the history of “alternative...

Donna Murch speaks in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session will focus on racial capitalism and the Black working class in the late twentieth-century United States through today, with special attention to the 1980s. Historian Donna Murch will cover the importance of the public sector to Black workers, the consequences of intra-racial class stratification, and how the framing of the...

Nate Holdren, Artie Vierkant, and Abby Cartus speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by Death Panel. https://www.deathpanel.net Capitalism exploits not just the surplus labor of the working class; it also exploits our health. This panel will discuss Friedrich Engels’ concept of “social murder,” the structural forces within capitalism that abandon populations t...

Daniel Kisslinger, Damon WIlliams, Bill Ayers, and Eva Nagao speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by Respair Media. https://www.respairmedia.com The session will feature clips from a variety of media projects that exemplify this humanizing radical movement media approach, and connect each project to the larger framework of media as a source of activating peo...

brian bean speaks in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by Rampant Magazine. https://rampantmag.com Today’s global capitalism is underpinned by the competition of many states, each of which deploys expanding carceral violence through prisons, borders, and policing. Consequently, the abolitionist project for liberation has been and must be an international one. This...

Esteban Girón, Michael Hollingsworth, Rose Lenehan, Hayden Harwood, and Joshua Taylor speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by Autonomous Tenants Union Network. https://atun-rsia.org Tenant organizers from several different autonomous (member-funded and member-run) tenants unions across the country will discuss how they started their organizations and the str...

Elizabeth Oh, Johanna Bozuwa, Matt Haugen, and Grayson Flood speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by DSA. https://www.dsausa.org The climate crisis intensifies, but the prospects for transformative national legislation are grim. How do we reclaim public ownership and win clean public power at the state and city levels? The Build Public Renewables Act in New...

Zhang Mazi, Bonnie Jin, Dennis Kosuth, and Kang Yang speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by The rivalry between the US and China lies at the heart of world imperialism. The US is determined to maintain its dominance, while China aims to claim its status a great power. This panel will argue that the international left must build international solidarity amon...

Barbara Ransby and Asha Ransby-Sporn speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. Ella Baker (1903-1986) was a grassroots organizer who shunned the spotlight in favor of vital behind-the-scenes work that helped power the Black freedom struggle. What not everyone knows is that she was also a radical with socialist politics. Barbara Ransby discusses Baker's life and her political contributions,...

Leo Zeilig and Robert Cuffy speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus. https://www.dsausa.org/working-groups/afrosocialists-and-socialists-of-color-caucus In recent years, Guyanese revolutionary Walter Rodney and his contributions to Marxist thought, history and political organizing have reached a larger audience....

Paul Le Blanc, Promise Li, and Cliff Connolly speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by Pluto Press. https://www.plutobooks.com Over the last century, the legacy of Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin has been fiercely contested. This discussion with acclaimed scholar of communist history Paul Le Blanc presents a modern take on the revolutionary icon,...

Adam Kotsko, David K. Seitz, and Steven W. Thrasher speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. What popular visions of emancipatory futures might the Left wrest from commercial science fiction mass entertainment? This session will investigate the contradictions and possibilities of Hollywood allegory for critiquing racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and U.S. empire as well as imagining li...

Brendan O'Connor speaks in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. Echoing Angela Davis: it is not enough to be non-fascist; one must be anti-fascist. But what does it mean to be an anti-fascist in practice today? The forces of revanchism are not static, but rather shift and mutate: conjuring a moral panic here, inciting terror there. What might it take to stop reacting to reaction and begin buil...

Ben Davis speaks in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. The explosion of generative artificial intelligence in the last year has dizzying implications for the future of labor, culture, and the economy. Already it is being used as a tool to automate and further alienate aspects of creative production and has played a part in touching off at least one major labor action, the WGA Writers Strike....

Saadat Hashamiyan and Sozan Savehilaghi speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. A panel presentation and discussion led by multi-generational Marxist/anti-capitalist Kurdish feminists on what the Kurdish Freedom Movement can teach us about international organizing and what revolutionary neighborhood/community councils can teach us about liberatory governance. The presentation will thread...

Simon Swartzman and Sandra Puebla speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by 33rd Ward Working Families. https://www.workingfamilies33.org A third straight election expanded both socialist and progressive blocs on Chicago’s city council, and elected a Black, progressive union organizer as mayor. The balance has shifted towards working class organizations, inclu...

Malcolm Harris speaks in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by The New Inquiry. https://thenewinquiry.com Silicon Valley is commonly described as a recent phenomenon, a product of postwar defense spending, neoliberalism, or even the contemporary zero-interest rate policy. Drawing on his book Palo Alto, Malcolm Harris recasts the SF Bay as a center for the world-cap...

Harsha Walia, Chanelle Gallant, Elene Lam, and Robyn Maynard speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. This session was sponsored by Butterfly and Red Canary Song. https://www.butterflysw.org https://www.redcanarysong.net For over a century, Western states have scapegoated Asian migrant sex working women as “temptations” or victims to justify tighter borders, anti-immigrant restrictions an...

Steven Lazarov, Donna Murch, and Adam Cooper speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. Labor organizing and even strikes in higher ed have been a prominent feature of recent labor upsurges more broadly. Strikes at Rutgers and the University of California system in the last year featured massive numbers and innovative tactics. This session will explore the significance of recent higher ed l...

Ilya Budraitskis, Hanna Perekhoda, and Denys Bondar speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2023. In a brazen act of imperialist aggression, Russia attempted to conquer Ukraine. But Ukrainians stopped them in their tracks, mounting a mass military and civilian resistance. Ukrainian socialists Denys Bondar and Hanna Perkhoda and Russian socialist Ilya Budraitskis will analyze the nature of the...