Over a weekend in early November, more than 250 socialists gathered in Maryland for the 2025 Socialist Alternative United States Convention. Our members traveled far from more than 18 different cities across the United States, and we were joined by international visitors from the Brazilian, Swedish, and Canadian sections of International Socialist Alternative.
During three days of lively discussion and debate, we voted on a set of guiding documents for our work in the coming months. The 2020s have, on the one hand, massively disoriented working people and the left with war, pandemic, genocide, the rising far right, and environmental devastation. On the other hand, these events and attacks on the working class have sparked historic fightbacks that need to be built upon in order to succeed in overthrowing this rotten system. Marxists need a bold revolutionary program rooted in a clear material understanding of global capitalism to navigate the waters ahead.
The convention began with a discussion on world perspectives, precisely because capitalism is a global system and all political developments flow from the global economic and political situation. The inter-imperialist rivalry between the US and China continues to further destabilize a global economy in crisis, and the ruling class has turned to authoritarianism, militarism, and the reactionary right as tools to discipline the working class and cling onto profits. SAlt members pointed to how this has manifested in the ongoing war of extermination in Gaza, the bloody massacre in Sudan, and Trump’s deployment of troops off the coast of Venezuela in a thinly-veiled effort to secure the US ruling class’s imperialist interests.
A highlight of the convention was our US perspectives discussion. The election of Trump 2.0 has been a political earthquake—his authoritarian regime has launched an all-out assault on the working class: slashing social services, laying off tens of thousands of federal workers, ramping up deportations of immigrants with his personal ICE army, and consolidating executive power around him.
Our members discussed how his agenda represents a distillation of the reactionary turn of the ruling class. This, of course, includes the Democratic Party, which has been paralyzed except to roll over to Trump. The assassination of Charlie Kirk gave fuel to the white nationalist Christian far right which has been emboldened by Trump’s election, but the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City by over one million young and working people has been a decisive rejection of Trump’s divisive politics, displaying the hunger for a real left political alternative.
Most importantly, we discussed what is to be done. Members from New York reported on our participation in the Zohran Mamdani campaign, where we have been fighting for an independent movement capable of winning the demands of his working-class program. We heard from members in Pittsburgh who are building the Anti-Trump Action Committee (ATAC), a working-class coalition fighting to keep ICE’s state terror out of their community. In Milwaukee, our members have joined up with a movement opposing the construction of an AI data center, and earlier this year led a successful job defense campaign for a teacher facing disciplinary action simply for providing information about legal services available to families facing deportation.
We had over 30 members at our student meeting, from high schools and colleges across the country, where we discussed strategy and tactics for building the anti-Trump movement on our campuses. We need escalated mass actions, national coordination, and the involvement of the labor movement to fight repression and go on the offensive against Trump, which is why Socialist Alternative has endorsed the national Students Rise Up campaign that we’re excited to go back to our areas and build.
Our Black Caucus met for an in-person meeting during the convention—with dozens of Black Marxists attending—to discuss the crucial role of the Black working class in struggle and prioritizing organizing in Black neighborhoods. The People of Color Caucus met to discuss building the fightback against ICE across the country.
In a time where the labor movement urgently needs to regain its militant roots and join up with social movements against Trump, our NALC union members are working arm in arm with other rank-and-file members to transform it into a fighting union through the BFN (Build a Fighting NALC) reform caucus. Union educators from nearly every Socialist Alternative branch met up to share lessons from organizing within their schools and unions to stop ICE and fight for better working conditions.
Capitalism has left no corner of the world untouched by its parasitic, bloody pursuit of endless profit, and Trump is an encapsulation of its most vile traits. We need to unite all the struggles and protests against this billionaire-led all-out assault on working-class and oppressed people. If you are outraged and disgusted by the state of the world around you and want to know how you can get involved in the fight against Trump, the far right, and capitalism, Socialist Alternative could be the place for you. Join us!