Socialism 2025: Full Schedule

arrow_back View All Dates

10:00am CDT

Build & Fight: A Strategy to Meet the Moment

Friday July 4, 2025 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

The Build and Fight strategy is being applied in Jackson, MS. It emphasizes creating autonomous, cooperative institutions (Build) while simultaneously engaging in organized resistance against oppressive systems (Fight). It promotes grassroots economic self-determination, dual power, and mass mobilization to challenge capitalism, white supremacy, and ecological destruction, fostering a just transition. We engage electoral politics on our terms, completely independent of the two corporate parties.

Speakers

Kamau Franklin

Kamau Franklin is the founder of Community Movement Builder, a Black, member-based collective of community residents and organizers. Kamau has been a dedicated community organizer for over thirty years and is a former practicing attorney, beginning in New York City and now based in... Read More →

Kali Akuno

David Cobb

Johanna Epke

Sponsors

Build and Fight

Community Movement Builders

Friday July 4, 2025 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
TBA

Socialist Strategy

10:00am CDT

Building Durable Power: Lessons from Jewish Voice for Peace

Friday July 4, 2025 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

TBA

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, building stronger strategic alignment across a national base, developing concrete organizing skills and capacities with grassroots member-leaders, navigating anti-organizational left tendencies, and practicing principled struggle in response to disagreement.

Speakers

Shelby Handler

Shelby Handler is a writer and staff organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace, based on Duwamish land in Seattle, WA.

Michael Wolfe

Michael Wolfe is a chapter organizer for the Midwest and Mountain region on staff with Jewish Voice for Peace, based on Kaw, Jiwere, Nutachi, and Wahzhazhe land in Kansas City, Missouri.

CP

CP is the Sr. Membership Organizer at Jewish Voice for Peace.

Sponsors

Jewish Voice for Peace

Friday July 4, 2025 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
TBA

Socialist Strategy

12:00pm CDT

The Left and the Family: A Roundtable

Friday July 4, 2025 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT

TBA

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 the family form remains a potent organizing structure for many everyday people, and when the Right constantly positions itself as a party of “family values”? Is a politics of family abolition in tension with a leftist family agenda focused on policies like universal preschool, child tax credits, and more? Join us for a roundtable on the left and the family

Speakers

Eman Abdelhadi

Eman Abdelhadi is a scholar, organizer and writer in the movement for Palestinian liberation.

TBD

Olivia Katbi

Olivia Katbi is the co chair of Portland DSA and a long time organizer with the BDS Movement.

Katie Gibson

Friday July 4, 2025 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
TBA

Socialist Strategy

3:00pm CDT

“The Same Old Tools Don’t Work Here”: The Role of Rural Organizing in Defeating Authoritarianism

Friday July 4, 2025 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT

TBA

What can the Left learn from rural organizers about strategy, innovation, and courage? What will it take for progressives to truly invest in working class rural organizing and see rural people as a critical part of winning the world we need? Join co-founders and members of the Rural Defenders Union, a network of isolated, under-resourced, anti-authoritarian rural efforts who are fighting a wide range of live authoritarian threats, for a conversation about the political landscape of rural America, the powerful antiauthoritarian organizing happening, and the opportunity we have to invest in growing it.

Speakers

Rae Garringer

Rae Garringer is a writer, oral historian, audio producer, and goat farmer based in southeastern West Virginia where they were raised. They are the author and editor of Country Queers: A Love Letter (Haymarket 2024) and the editor of To Belong Here: A New Generation of Queer... Read More →

Beth Howard

Beth Howard, Appalachian Peoples Union Director at Showing Up for Racial Justice and Rural Defenders Union (RDU) co-founder

Shawn Sebastian

Shawn Sebastian, Organizing Director at RuralOrganizing.org and RDU co-founder

Stephen Smith

Stephen Smith, Organizer at West Virginia Can’t Wait and RDU co-founder.

Sponsors

Rural Defenders Union

Showing Up For Racial Justice

Friday July 4, 2025 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
TBA

Socialist Strategy

5:00pm CDT

Fighting Fragmentation: Building Cross-Sectoral Social Movements

Friday July 4, 2025 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT

TBA

Movement organizations often hesitate to engage beyond their immediate focus. This panel highlights organizers who expanded their efforts—a tenant union opposing a police training facility and a labor union joining the fight for a ceasefire in Gaza—demonstrating the power and necessity of a transversal approach to collective action.

Speakers

Bri M.

Yasser Munif

Felix T.

Sponsors

Black Rose/Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation

Friday July 4, 2025 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT
TBA

Socialist Strategy

5:00pm CDT

Hope at the Edge of the Abyss: The Case for Revolution

Friday July 4, 2025 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT

TBA

Amid genocide, Trump’s authoritarian onslaught, climate catastrophe, and the threat of fascism—we are living at the edge of capitalism’s abyss. This meeting will make the case for why revolution is not only necessary, but also why mass struggles of working class and oppressed peoples make it possible. Our approach to the immediate and defensive struggles of today is inseparable from our insistence that ending this nightmare requires the revolutionary transformation of society.

Speakers

TBD

Natalia Tylim

David McNally

David McNally is the Cullen Distinguished Professor of History and Business at the University of Houston and director of the Center for the Study of Capitalism. McNally is the author of seven books and has won a number of awards, including the Paul Sweezy Award from the American Sociological... Read More →

Sponsors

Tempest Collective

Friday July 4, 2025 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT
TBA

Socialist Strategy

5:00pm CDT

Reclaiming the Future: Outer Space as a Site of Organizing and Imagination

Friday July 4, 2025 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT

TBA

Failure of the left to engage with space as both a practical and imaginative realm has allowed the right to weaponize it for its own ends. Space underpins technologies affecting peoples’ daily lives, and space labor happens on Earth. Come learn why space matters for the left’s future… and present!

Speakers

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a theoretical physicist, occasional astrophysicist, and theorist of Black science studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred (2021), The Edge of Space-Time... Read More →

Lucian Walkowicz

Lucian Walkowicz is an astronomer, movement artist, and educator based in Chicago. As co-Founder of the JustSpace Alliance, Walkowicz studies how outer space serves as the site where humanity crafts its futures, and works to make those futures more just (both in space, and on Earth... Read More →

Friday July 4, 2025 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT
TBA

Socialist Strategy, Intro