By Socialists Without Borders
From August 30 through September 1, 2024, a coalition of nominally socialist organizations, ranging from Haymarket Books to Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), hosted Socialism 2024 at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois. As a new revolutionary organization, we attended this conference as an opportunity to assess the state of the revolutionary left in the United States. We learned a lot.
Knowing that DSA had an important role in determining the political character of the conference, and that the DSA tends to support candidates of the Democratic Party, we prepared a leaflet expressing our position on the 2024 Presidential Election in the United States, urging socialists and revolutionary Marxists to not vote for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and to instead consider one of three independent left candidates running against her. The leaflet also included a QR link to our newly published draft program. The leaflet included an invitation to join us for coffee at a coffee shop at the hotel between 8am and 9am each day of the conference.
The program of panel discussions featured speakers who were academics, representatives of various non-profit corporations, and organizers in unions and oppressed communities. Most of the discussions were multi-disciplinary, focusing on the intersection between different struggles, with each containing an element that related to all of the others. The speakers tended to emphasize decolonization and the empowerment of oppressed communities as a solution to this broad set of problems. Almost no one mentioned socialist revolution as a solution, either because they assumed we all agreed on that, or, as is more likely, they no longer see the revolution as necessary to achieve socialism.
We were able to attend ten of the meetings. Here are some of the highlights of our observations:
The first meeting we attended was a Reproductive Justice Strategy Session, scheduled to take place before the regular panel discussions on Friday. When we arrived, we discovered that the meeting was in fact a DSA organizing meeting on “strategic campaigns” that had nothing to do with a mass struggle for reproductive justice. We went to some lengths to find out what went wrong, and no one was able to answer our question. It is possible that such a session was happening, however, it was definitely not easy to find.
Next, we attended a discussion on Demilitarization and Climate Justice, which included two journalists and two organizers. The speakers detailed the extent of the relationship between the military-industrial complex (MIC) and the world-as-human-habitat-threatening climate crisis, tying it into the importance of the liberation of Palestine to the climate justice movement. Their most concrete proposal was a union struggle for contract terms that allow workers to opt out of work that causes them moral injury, like making a bomb that is then used to kill children. This is not a terrible proposal, however, it seems to us that it will be easier to overthrow capitalism than to realize this proposal under capitalism. When asked what they imagined the social base for demilitarization as a measure towards climate justice, the speakers suggested workers at munitions plants, even after demonstrating a profound understanding of the identity of interests between these workers and the Masters of War.
This meeting was followed by a discussion of environmentalism from below between Professor Naomi Paik and Ashley Dawson, author of the book Environmentalism from Below: How Global People’s Movements Are Leading the Fight for Our Planet. The discussion departed from an ongoing campaign to create an international organization that can link the national and indigenous struggles for environmental justice at the international level to address the problem at its true level and thereby increase its effectiveness, a sort of ‘climate international.’ The author compared the efforts of indigenous groups to the ‘fake fixes’ advocated by mainstream environmental organizations and the governments with which they are affiliated, especially highlighting the work of La Via Campesina (LVC) as a hypothetical model, although further theorization remains to be done as to the form of such an international. Asked to describe the current state of the theory regarding a climate international, and what might be its points of agreement and disagreement with the Leninist-Trotskyist conception of the revolutionary international, Dawson responded that there wasn’t any theory that he was aware of regarding a climate international, and again endorsed LVC as a potential model. Dawson differentiated LVC from the Leninist model as being ‘bottom up’ rather than ‘top down,’ before acknowledging that he was mischaracterizing Leninism. The session closed with an earnest recommendation to buy and read the Environmentalism from Below book.
Friday’s program closed with a conference plenary called ‘All Eyes on Palestine.’ Five speakers, Palestinian and Jewish professors and activists from around the United States were scheduled to speak. The meeting started off with loud hip-hop music, some of which featured the oud, so presumably the artists were Palestinian. Introductory remarks from someone from Haymarket Books identified as a ‘political education coordinator’ included chants with the triumphal energy and enthusiasm of a sporting event, despite the solemn nature of the tragedy unfolding in Gaza. Offended by the tone of the meeting, we left early.
On Saturday, we attended a meeting with the title, “The Genocidal Returns of Lesser Evilism: The U.S. Elections and Left Strategy,” hosted by the Tempest Collective. The presentation was thorough, touching on many of the key reasons not to vote for Kamala Harris and how the left’s support of Democratic Party candidates has made the world a worse place. The presenters came up short on the topic of Left Strategy, proposing that in the upcoming elections, socialists shouldn’t do too much to alienate workers still in the thrall of the Democratic Party, and to basically vote their conscience.
On Saturday, we also attended a meeting titled The World’s Looming Nuclear Threats, with a panel including Joshua Frank, managing editor of CounterPunch; M.V. Ramana, a Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and author of the book Nuclear is Not the Solution; and Ray Acheson, a leading member of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). Acheson connected the struggle against nuclear weapons to the struggle against patriarchy because both are based in minority rule. M.V. Ramana elaborated on the technical process of uranium enrichment for energy and its connection to the development of weapon-grade uranium. Frank denounced the shift to so-called ‘clean energy’ [like solar] because it avoided any mention of the necessity of changing the economic paradigm, suggesting degrowth as an alternative without elaboration. We were not impressed with the urgency of any particular looming threat.
We attended several other meetings, some of which were so boring that we left early. The speakers tended to be well-meaning, well-informed, well-educated people capable of exhaustive factual descriptions of historical, geographical, and social dimensions of political conditions, who were also at great pains to draw any political conclusions from these analyses, other than that we must unite and fight.
We distributed our leaflet, which was well-received. Our coffees were not well attended, however, we did meet some interesting people and have some interesting conversations. Eventually, we were kicked out of the cafe for having a banner with our name on it, which slowed our progress down a lot.
In conclusion, our observation is that the annual Socialism Conference has transformed from an attempt to gather revolutionaries to seriously discuss politics into a flea market of various campaigns that steer clear of mentioning revolution and the building of a revolutionary organization. As far as political conclusions are concerned, these Socialism conferences have diluted beyond recognition their revolutionary – and even socialist — content. We propose that next year, instead of attending the Socialism 2025 conference, we organize a conference for the revolutionary left focusing on analyses of the political perspectives of Climate Change, Palestinian Liberation, and Immigration Policy, aimed at building consensus towards a revolutionary program to address all of these issues. We can call it “Revolutionary Socialism 2025.”