Socialism and Historical Materialism: Radical Thought and Collective Action
By Adabu Jessie Jefwa*
I attended the Socialism 2023 conference last September in Chicago. On the first day, I chaired the panel, “The Environmental Injustices of American Capitalism,” with CNS Editors Linda Quiquivix, Daniel Faber, and Leigh Brownhill. Some 100 people plus filled the room, eager to hear the perspective of CNS of the global ecological crisis. In addition to our own panel, some of the weekend’s most compelling panels included, “Teaching Toward Freedom from Behind the Bars,” “Revolutionary Socialism Means Land Back,” “Abolishing the War on Terror and Building Communities of Care,” “De Venezuela a Los Angeles: The Fight for Housing Justice,” and “From Turtle Island to Palestine”.
A definite highlight was the opening plenary session, “Abolition. Feminism. Now.” with Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, and Beth Richie. They were greeted with raucous applause, before a chant commenced, inspired by Black Lives Matter: “I believe that we will win! I believe that we will win!” After a few rounds, spirits simmered, and the session began.
Angela Davis got to the point: “there can be no abolition feminism without a vision of a radically transformed society, a vision of a socialist society” (1:02:43). Davis proclaimed that “Socialism is internationalism,” and that internationalism is required in struggles against carceral capitalism and as we“demand a radically transformed society – a socialist society” (1:19:33). All the women spoke emphatically about the need to further study carceral systems within global contexts, especially the reproduction of the U.S. carceral system as it is implemented as a development strategy within the global South.
On the final day, after meeting the author while browsing at the Haymarket Bookstore, I bought Janie Paul’s book entitled Making Art In Prison: Survival and Resistance (2023). It is a formidable work of striking visual art and contextualized relationships of love and solidarity between people living in incarceration and people on the outside who believe in their humanity. It was a full-circle moment, again pulling together themes of abolition feminism and socialist activism. I left Chicago more informed, inspired, and connected to the significant causes and historically-rooted movements of socialism today.
In November, I also attended the twentieth annual Historical Materialism (HM) conference in London, UK. An early arrival time gave me the chance to visit the British Museum and view an impressive array of looted wealth from the colonized world collected together under one imperial roof. It set the context for a thought-provoking conference. And there was a LOT to choose from, with hundreds of papers from comrades involved in diverse studies and struggles. I also helped Capitalism Nature Socialism with tabling in the conference common area, which became a meeting place for CNS editors and friends, including Leigh Brownhill, Judith Watson, Simon Pirani, Pritam Singh, Ted Benton, and others with the CNS Red-Green Study Group.
On November 11th the conference schedule was interrupted by the participation of most attendees in a massive public rally against genocide in Palestine. Some 300,000 people marched to chants of “In our thousands, in our billions, we are ALL Palestinians!” Back at the HM conference, one of the most helpful for bringing critical topics and new voices into contemporary socialist discourse was the panel, “Expanding Transgender Marxism: Alienation, Abjection and Accumulation.” Other strong sessions included: The Struggle Against Fossil Fuels; Marxist-Feminism, Social Reproduction and the Politics of Family & Children; and Building Anti-Oligarchic Future: Alternative Forms of Organization & Guerilla Democracy.
What I brought home from London is recognition of the critical need to make stronger connections between theories of socialist politics and methodologies of grassroots socio-political action. A tall order, but no one said changing the world was going to be easy.
*Adabu is a Youth Editor on Decolonization and Anti-Racism with CNS.