Socialist Register 2025: Openings and Closures. Socialist Strategy at a Crossroads

Aug. 31, 2025

 Listen here: https://socialistproject.ca/leftstreamed-video/sr25-openings-closures-socialist-strategy/

Since the 2016 upsurge in enthusiasm for electoral organizing and party-building, the terrain has shifted. It was not so long ago that a new wave of democratic socialist organizing exploded onto the scene – but the defeat of candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, following on the crumbling of the “new parties” in Europe, had a deflating effect. As Greece’s Syriza, Spain’s Podemos, and Portugal’s Bloco let down the leftist movements that brought them to power, those inspired by Hugo Chavez in Latin America also saw the Bolivarian revolutions hit an impasse. We find socialist strategy again at a crossroads, pressed by the urgent need to find new directions forward amidst mounting crises.

At this new conjuncture, what is left of the strategy, tactics, and organizations that had seemed so promising? Is the ‘new socialist’ left starting over, or moving on? Socialist Register 2025 engages with the openings and closures of at the crossroads of Socialist strategy, with case studies from Britain, US, Pakistan, Argentina, Germany, Bolivia, Barcelona, and Turkey, engaging with topics such as social struggles over climate change, Palestine solidarity, public banks, re-municipalization of utilities, and unions.

Vol. 61: Socialist Register 2025: Openings and Closures. Socialist Strategy at a Crossroads

Subjects include:

• Legacies of the New Left: ‘Transforming the state’ today
• Socialist strategy: Trade unions, elections, and social movements
• Analysis of the “new left” European parties, Momentum, and DSA
• The current state of the “pink tide” and left forces in Latin America
• Left political organizing in Turkey and the role of international law in Palestine-Israel
• The German Left at a crossroads
• North American unions and the ‘rank and file strategy’
• Limits of liberal internationalism and the law—the Gaza case
• Confronting radical libertarianism and the Millei government in Argentina
• The failings of identity politics and Afro-American politics
• Radical ecology, civil disobedience and the left
• In search of new socialist movements and strategies

1. Public Banks – Thomas Marois (0:00)
2. Climate and Suffrage Struggles – Feyzi Ismail (49:02)
3. Making Services Public – David A. McDonald (1:38:36)

Interviews conducted by C.S. Soong for Against the Grain. He has degrees in history and law; he’s also done graduate work in both philosophy and political science. His written work has appeared in Socialism and Democracy, The Best American Nonrequired Reading series, and other publications.