With authors Greg Albo and Stephen Maher, co-editors of the Socialist Register, in conversation with Sasha Lilley co-founder of Against the Grain and editor of PM’s Spectre Series.

We are clearly facing a transitional political moment, as Donald Trump returns to the presidency, capitalist states fail to take action on climate change, and neoliberal policies become ever more incoherent and delegitimized. Meanwhile, the ‘democratic socialist’ conjuncture – marked by the sudden emergence of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn on the political stage, following the new socialist parties, Syriza, Bloco, and Podemos – now appears to have closed. Thus amidst mounting crises and challenges, socialists are at a crossroads: are we moving on, or starting over?

Greg Albo is a leading figure on the international left who has published widely on global capitalism, the state, and contemporary politics. He teaches political economy in the Department of Political Science at York University in Toronto.

Stephen Maher is an Assistant Professor of Economics at SUNY Cortland, and co-author of The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From J.P. Morgan to Blackrock (with Scott Aquanno) as well as author of Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power.

Sasha Lilley is a writer and radio broadcaster. She’s the co-founder and host of the critically acclaimed program of radical ideas, Against the Grain. While program director of KPFA Radio, the flagship station of the Pacifica Network, she headed up such award-winning national broadcasts as “Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Since Donald Trump entered the presidential race ten years ago, activists and scholars have been debating whether to call his political project fascist. Trump’s second administration has already gone far beyond the first one in its unprecedented efforts to grab power and suppress dissent, making the “Trump = fascism” case stronger than ever before. This talk will explore some of what’s at stake in this discussion: what it tells us about the regime and the concept of fascism, how Trump’s politics have evolved over the past decade, and what it all means for liberatory resistance strategy.

Matthew N. Lyons has been writing about right-wing politics for over 30 years. He is co-editor of Three Way Fight: Revolutionary Politics and Antifascism (2024) and author of Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire (2018). He writes regularly for the radical antifascist website Three Way Fight, and his work has also appeared in a number of other leftist and mainstream publications.