Exploring Revolutionary Alternatives in an Age of Rising Fascism and Failed Liberalism
This is the third in a series of reports from the Socialism 2025 conference held in Chicago in July 2025. In the first report, Axel Fair-Schulz provided an overview of the conference and some of its key activities. In the second report, Lettie Kazian spotlighted the “art of radicalization” at the conference through music, theater, film, visual art, and literature. Here, the two authors take a look at an important session addressing urgent questions of socialist strategy.
One of the most interesting panels of the Socialism 2025 conference was technically not a panel at all but a meet-up. Yet, it functioned like a panel, with several speakers and a subsequent audience discussion, involving people who were present both in person and online.The official title already disclosed much about what listeners could expect to hear, at least in terms of the overarching topic: Rebuilding Revolutionary Organizations: A Meet-Up.
Held on July 5, 2025, the meet-up was co-sponsored by several groups, including the Australian Socialist Alternative, as well as the US organizations Socialist Horizon, Firebrand, and the International Socialist League. What ties those organizations together philosophically is a common commitment to Socialism from Below, which looks at Marxism primarily as the theory and practice of working-class self-emancipation.
Supporters of those organizations, as well as many other socialists, look at exploitation and oppression in terms of not only class but also gender, sex, “race,” and ethnicity. They oppose all forms of discrimination, including sexism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, and the war against immigrants and undocumented people. In addition, these groups advocate for a consequent and consistent Internationalist outlook that rejects all forms of imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, and campism. With the latter, they mean their critique not just of US and Western imperialism, still arguably the biggest threat to our planet, but also the imperialist designs of Russia, China, and other rising capitalist powers.
Beyond electioneering
The meet-up’s theme provokes the question of what exactly revolutionary organizations are and how they differ from more conventional political and activist groups. Several speakers provided some insights, which were later condensed and published by Puntorojo, an online journal sympathetic to the politics outlined above.
Following the Socialism 2025 conference, the Puntorojo Editorial Collective published an overview of the discussion at the meet-up.
A revolutionary organization or party is not primarily intended to win elections in the short run. In the US, doing so is exceedingly difficult given its highly restrictive (by design) two-party system that does not permit third parties to compete fairly. Instead, the main purpose of a revolutionary organization is to coalesce in its ranks the most class-conscious activists - an approach traditionally referred to as the vanguard model.
The panel's participants emphasized that what they wanted to help bring into existence was not an elitist and exclusionary structure but a political vehicle that could educate and develop new layers of activists from the working class and provide the kind of orientation and leadership necessary for meeting this moment when thousands of people are radicalizing and looking for a way forward beyond the current descent of capitalism into open authoritarianism and even fascism.
Facing Democratic Party failures
With about ninety people in attendance in person and online, the presentations and discussions were quite lively, and — as should be expected — not everyone agreed on everything. Robust debate among leftists is nothing new, and whatever disagreements unfolded were dealt with in overall productive and comradely ways.
There was broad agreement on the question of why a working-class revolutionary party is needed. Donald Trump's assault on basic democratic norms, as well as his systematic attack on the rights and indeed the livelihood of working people in the US and abroad, necessitates a strategically and tactically well-coordinated and systematic response. The Democratic Party, which presents itself as the official opposition to the Trump regime, has been spectacularly ineffective and compromised by how much it actually shares with the Trump agenda.
Democratic and Republican leaders in the Oval Office as President Trump signs post-inaugural documents on January 20, 2025. (Photo: Office of Speaker Mike Johnson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Trumpism means the reconfiguration of US capitalism on unabashedly authoritarian terms, combined with the fortification of US imperialism abroad. The leadership of the Democratic Party has always been fully supportive of US aggression around the globe and tossed out its tentative commitment to the legacy of the New Deal, the Great Society, and limited forms of Civil Rights several decades ago in favor of neo-liberalism. The myriad ideological and political accommodations of the Democrats to Trumpism in substance, if not in wording as well, disqualify them in the eyes of tens of millions of Americans as untrustworthy. But who is to take their place?
The consensus at the meet-up was that confronting the dominant ideology of liberal reformism among broad layers of the Left is vitally important. That ideology, while sounding reasonable and pragmatic on the surface, actually defangs and obfuscates working-class power. The panelists presented Revolutionary Marxist theory as a better alternative and advocated for the kind of political education that is rooted in that approach.
It bears repeating that nobody in attendance looked at Marxism as an infallible semi-religion, as was done by the governments of the former Soviet Bloc. Instead, any instrumental Revolutionary Marxist theory always needs to be tested by practical experience and actual struggles. It offers guidance and insights, not certainties or dogmatic phraseology.
“How can one expect the working class to wean itself from [the liberal/reformist] paradigm if it remains the only game in town with no organizational and political alternative in sight? Such an attitude defangs the working-class by lowering expectations. Encouraging working-class people to reach authentically anti-capitalist conclusions by being radicalized in struggles for a better life and true democracy requires a visible and tangible revolutionary perspective in competition with liberalism and reformism. ”
Some socialists have argued that while the eventual building of revolutionary mass organizations is indeed necessary, the time is not ripe. The Tempest Collective, for example, has made the case for this take. Those sympathetic to such an approach usually argue that the degree of class consciousness and the size and/or political development of working-class organizations in the US today are still at an all-time low. Thus, the more immediate task should not be the construction of a revolutionary party but independent working-class organizations that operate fully outside the orbit of the Democratic Party or any other ruling-class formations. Revolutionary socialists ought to support already existing working-class institutions and not engage in quixotic and counter-productive efforts to design a roof when the foundation is not yet properly laid.
Meeting the moment
The panelists ultimately rejected those arguments, in favor of postponing the building of revolutionary organizations, by pointing out that this amounts to accommodation to the dominant liberal-reformist ideology. How can one expect the working class to wean itself from that paradigm if it remains the only game in town with no organizational and political alternative in sight? Such an attitude defangs the working-class by lowering expectations. Encouraging working-class people to reach authentically anti-capitalist conclusions by being radicalized in struggles for a better life and true democracy requires a visible and tangible revolutionary perspective in competition with liberalism and reformism.
Thus, building a revolutionary party that unites the most class-conscious, the most organized, the most active, and the most determined segments of the working-class cannot be postponed until some ill-defined and distant future. The state of our world, with the climate emergency, the acute danger of thermo-nuclear war, the massive increase of inequality, racism, sexism, transphobia, and a host of other calamities — including the widespread collapse of even the limited forms of bourgeois democracy that most countries in the capitalist core of our planet were accustomed to during the decades since the end of WWII and the rise of right-wing authoritarianism and new forms of fascism — does not allow humanity an endless window for necessary changes before the point of no return is reached.
