Dianne Feeley
Posted September 8, 2025
This year Socialism 2025 had over 2400 people who came for the day, or the entire conference.
About a dozen Solidarity members were at the conference. At least eight were able to take shifts at the Solidarity table, where we talked to folks who came by, sold Against the Current and other literature, and passed out about 300 fliers with suggestions on workshops we participated in or sponsored.
Howie Hawkins and I were panelists in the Ukraine Solidarity Network workshop, and several of us attended the organizing meeting afterward. The key campaign the network is taking on is to raise $78,000 in aid to nurses at the front line. If you are a hospital worker, particularly if you are in a union, we ask you to help out on this campaign. There is a flier that outlines the needs.
On Sunday morning Solidarity co-sponsored a friendly debate on socialists, the Democratic Party, and independent political action that was attended by roughly 200 people. Marsha Rummel chaired the session, with Howie (Solidarity), Bennett Carpenter (Liberation Road), Ashik Siddique (Groundwork DSA), and Lee Wengraf (Tempest Collective). The session was recorded.
As the 90-minute session was coming to a close, the audience wanted to continue, so we did for another half hour. I think that is because people are hungry for discussions about strategy. I thought with Zohran Mamdani’s winning the NYC primary, there would be more support in the room for an inside/outside the DP than there was.
Howie outlined the necessity to run candidates for local office, where most are non-partisan. Socialists should avoid running for administrative office (mayor, president, etc.) until we are much stronger, otherwise one is in the position of administering austerity.
Although there were fewer international guests this year, we were able to speak to people from Brazil, Ecuador, Egypt, Colombia, Germany, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Syria.
While the quality of the workshops was high, I felt the problem at this conference was that there wasn’t an overarching theme of how do we fight back against the far right. I found some workshops were so specific about an issue that the focus was exceedingly narrow. It’s not that people don’t call out capitalism and imperialism as the enemy, but when the focus remains so narrow, whether the topic is the family or the state, we become specialists on one issue.
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