In Firebrand’s second visit to the Socialism Conference in Chicago, we took part in discussions throughout the weekend, intervening with Marxist perspectives in a “big tent” event now largely defined by reformism. The Gaza genocide rightly dominated discourse. We spoke to affirm the importance of class independence, class analysis, genuine anti-imperialism, and revolutionary organization.
Contrary to arguments put forward by the editors of Spectre journal, revolutionaries need to organize now instead of waiting for the spontaneous emergence of a vanguard of the working class. Marxists need to integrate with the vanguard as it develops and influence it in a revolutionary direction from the beginning. As the history of revolution has shown again and again, if we wait until the vanguard has grown to a mass scale it will be too late.
Firebrand had a great experience at the 2023 Socialism Conference in Chicago, which took place over Labor Day weekend. The conference is organized annually by Haymarket Books, a publisher founded by our former organization, the International Socialist Organization (ISO). The conference proved to be a site of struggle and for the building of bonds with cothinkers.
Earlier this month, I attended Socialist Alternative’s Socialism conference in Sydney. For readers outside Australia, I’m referring to the Australian Trotskyist organization (which was a cousin of sorts to the ISO in the US before the latter disbanded), and not the...