Socialism 2025: Full Schedule

4:30pm CDT

Becoming Working Class Revolutionaries: Lessons from the League of Revolutionary Black Workers for Today’s Class War

Thursday July 3, 2025 4:30pm - 6:00pm CDT

Theoretical study and class analysis are essential for understanding class struggle throughout the capitalist epoch, especially in this moment. We share lessons from the League’s 50+ year personal, political, collective journey of Marxist study and struggle for developing class consciousness and working class unity in today’s resistance against fascism.

Speakers

Jerome Scott

Jerome Scott, a former labor organizer in the Detroit auto plants in the 1960s-70s and a member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, was the founding director of Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty & Genocide. He is a board member of the General Baker... Read More →

walda katz-fishman

walda katz-fishman, a scholar activist and professor of sociology at Howard University from 1970 to 2020, was a founding member of Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty & Genocide. She is active in social justice organizations, including the League of Revolutionaries... Read More →

Thursday July 3, 2025 4:30pm - 6:00pm CDT
TBA

Socialist Strategy

10:00am CDT

Build & Fight: A Strategy to Meet the Moment

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

TBA

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

10:00am CDT

Socialist (Humanism) or Barbarism: On Political Education, Democratic Rights and Where We Go Next

Saturday July 5, 2025 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

TBA

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 for socialists to step in like never before, reviving our tradition of defending and expanding education for democracy and collective human flourishing, and for the embrace of socialist humanism for the freedom and uplift of the entire working class.

Speakers

Michaela Brangan

Michaela Brangan — NNJ DSA/steering, DSA National Political Education/Amherst College

Steve Fraser

Steve Fraser — NYC-DSA/NYC-DSA Academy for Socialist Education

Sarah Hurd

Sarah Hurd — Chicago DSA/Co-chair, DSA National Labor Commission

Mie Inouye

Mie Inouye — Middle Hudson Valley DSA/Bard College

Sponsors

DSA

Saturday July 5, 2025 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
TBA

Socialist Strategy

3:00pm CDT

Organizing, Religion, and Revolutionary Love

Saturday July 5, 2025 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT

TBA

Too many faith communities in the U.S. remain socially organized but politically unorganized and too many leftists overlook them as sites for base-building. How do leftists identify potential comrades, build bridges, and organize more people of faith into formation? Who are the religious revolutionaries throughout history whose legacies could easily or perhaps already unite us? “Revolutionary love,” argues political theorist Joy James, “originates from the desire for the greater good that entails radical risk-taking for justice.” How do we cultivate and nurture this love in solidarity? This Highlander popular education workshop aims to answer these questions.

Speakers

Joy James

Joy James is a political philosopher who works with organizers. Her books include In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love; New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)Life of Erica Garner; and Contextualizing Angela Davis: The Agency and Identity of an Icon. Her edited volumes... Read More →

Adam Vander Tuig

Adam Vander Tuig was born and raised in rural Nebraska and currently works as the Faith-Based Educator and Researcher at the Highlander Center in New Market, TN. A recent graduate of Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York (PhD), he organizes with Christians for a Free... Read More →

Sponsors

Highlander Center

Saturday July 5, 2025 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
TBA

Socialist Strategy

3:00pm CDT

Roundtable: Political Education in the Time of Monsters

Saturday July 5, 2025 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT

TBA

While the fight for spaces within colleges and universities continues, this moment underlines the urgent need to build and expand counter-hegemonic political education on the left to confront and resist the right and put forward a creative new vision for the world being born. Join political educators from a number of organizations to discuss the role of political education in today’s social movements.

Speakers

Allyn Maxfield Steele

Melissa Ferrer Civil

Lo Cropper

Geo Maher

Thomas Mariadason

Sponsors

Center for Political Education

W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School

Saturday July 5, 2025 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
TBA

Socialist Strategy

10:00am CDT

Debate: Socialists, Independent Politics, and the Democratic Party

Sunday July 6, 2025 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

TBA

Speakers

Ashik Siddique

TBD

Bennett Carpenter

Bennett Carpenter is a queer Southern trainer, movement strategist, and member of the National Executive Committee of Liberation Road. They've run campaigns to win participatory budgeting and community based alternatives to policing, elect movement candidates to local and state office... Read More →

Howie Hawkins

Sponsors

Groundwork DSA

Solidarity

Sunday July 6, 2025 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
TBA

Socialist Strategy

12:00pm CDT

All Our Movements in this Together

Sunday July 6, 2025 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT

Amid relentless authoritarian attacks and power grabs, it will take all our movements to bring down the oligarchs and build a different kind of future. Join us for the Socialism 2025 final plenary as we confront a pivotal political moment and ground ourselves to come out stronger on the other side.

Speakers

Mariah Parker

Mariah Parker is an emcee and labor organizer born and raised in the South. Their cultural work and organizing have been featured in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Teen Vogue, SPIN, Al Jazeera, Scalawag and Hammer & Hope. They are a co-editor of No Cop City, No Cop World... Read More →

TBD

Silky Shah

Silky Shah has been working as an organizer on issues related to racial and migrant justice for over two decades. Originally from Texas, she began fighting the expansion of immigrant jails on the US-Mexico border in the aftermath of 9/11. In 2009, she joined the staff of Detention... Read More →

Mikaela Loach

Mikaela Loach is a climate justice organizer, speaker, and the author of Climate Is Just the Start. She is the co-director of the AWETHU School of Organising and co-hosts the YIKES podcast.

Eman Abdelhadi

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

Sunday July 6, 2025 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT

Socialist Strategy