Socialist Organization and Strategy

Socialist Organization and Strategy is a collaboration between LeftRoots and Liberation Road.

Socialist Organization and Strategy (SOS) Process

According to Nzinga Amani, Bennett Carpenter & Anca Stefan, on behalf of the National Executive Committee of Liberation Road, writing in Convergence:

Externally, we work to build alignment with the organized socialist Left as well as with unaffiliated socialists active in labor and the social movements. This has long been a priority of Liberation Road but we have intensified those efforts as the urgency of the challenges we face increases the necessity of building a stronger and more coherent movement.

To that end, we are excited to be in co-partnership with LeftRoots and many independent socialists around an exciting Socialist Organization and Strategy (SOS) Process—a non-sectarian effort to sharpen our shared impact in the crucial political struggles of 2024 while laying the foundations for a stronger and more powerful Left. Through these and other efforts—including this symposium—we strive to help cohere a broader and more powerful Left that can help to build and align political power, defeat the Right, and advance the struggle for socialism.

About the SOS

From the Socialist Organization and Strategy website:

The SOS Process for Socialist Organization and Strategy is a multi-tendency, non-sectarian process anchored in a commitment to socialism, liberatory strategy, and cadre organization. A decade in the making, it was initiated by LeftRoots in 2023, and has been held in co-partnership with Liberation Road. The core purpose of the SOS is to support the launch of one or more independent cadre organizations in the U.S., equipped with strategies for revolutionary change.

To make this purpose possible, we’re undergoing a process to cohere and align leftists around two strategic tendencies, ground them in healthy, disciplined organizational culture, and provide the necessary resources to grow these new organizations. The vision for this work is guided by two urgent questions: What are the steps we need to take to win liberation for people and the planet, and how can we build organization capable of advancing those steps?

Why Cadre Organizations?

To win socialist revolution, revolutionary Cadre organizations are necessary.

We are leftists who come out of social movements, organizing oppressed and working-class people, to fight the symptoms of this exploitative and violent system. We believe that building our people’s power in mass social movements is key to ending racial capitalism, patriarchy and empire. And right now, after decades of neoliberal assaults and successful right-wing pushes to “take back” the country, turning mass organizing into real power requires rebuilding a strong U.S. Left. A Left with a bold, unwavering offensive strategy to win the socialist liberation that our people, and the planet, deserve. In order to do this, we need revolutionary cadre organizations that can pursue strategy at the scale of our overlapping crises. This strategy, called liberatory strategy, builds the capacity of our movements to shift the balance of power in order to defeat opposing forces and carry out revolutionary change. Currently, such strategy does not exist within our movement ecosystem, and 21st century cadre organizations are a critical intervention towards making that possible.

A healthy movement ecosystem will feature various types of organizations, each playing distinct and, ideally, complementary roles. However, cadre organizations are an essential organizational form needed to advance socialism. Cadre organizations are left formations whose members are united around liberatory vision, assessment, and objective. They have been essential to historic people’s victories across the globe. They work to carry out shared strategy for liberation in a united and disciplined way, going far beyond campaigns and sector-based organizing and work. They are political instruments that can unite movements and offer strategic and political leadership to create a real path to liberation. Many of our strongest left organizations in the U.S. agree that our current level of revolutionary organization is insufficient to the task. The lack of strong 21st century cadre organizations with liberatory strategy is a missing component of the U.S. movement ecosystem currently and a key weakness of the U.S. Left.

Two Strategic Tendencies. One Commitment.

There is no one organization that will get us to liberation. This is why the SOS Process is “multi-tendency.” This means we believe it is important for leftists to have clarity about their strategic tendency (aka their alignment with a particular liberatory strategy) and get into cadre organizations with other people who are aligned with that tendency and committed to testing it. We believe it is important to encourage coordination across strategic tendencies without antagonism or sectarianism, but also without false unity. A strengthened, more resilient Left is possible when we can be grounded in this kind of humility and allow space for multiple strategic tendencies to flourish in principled relationship.

The SOS Process is committed to supporting the potential launch of two cadre organizations aligned with distinct strategic tendencies that emerged out of a sincere and rigorous strategy development process within LeftRoots.

The Arc of the SOS Process: 2023-2024

Cohering a Core

The process started with bringing together movement leaders from across the country representing a wide variety of sectors (such as labor, Black liberation movement, climate, land sovereignty, housing, abolition, and more) to get clear on their strategic tendency and alignment with the SOS Process. It also established two independent core groups of leftists who have taken responsibility for developing the foundational structure, strategy, and program of these future cadre organizations.

Engaging the Left

Now, we are supporting these newly formed cores to engage more leftists across our movements and invite them into the SOS Process.

Launching New Formations

LeftRoots will sunset at the end of 2023. In 2024, new or renewed cadre organizations will launch. They will focus on building their membership, establishing their organizational culture, and beginning a new scale of coordinated strategic political work in principled relationship with other organizations in the movement ecosystem.

Who We Are

LeftRoots emerged in 2014 out of an assessment that the U.S. left suffered from a lack of movement-wide strategy needed to win socialist liberation. The organization originally aimed to develop the cadre capacities of a critical number of social movement leftists who could develop liberatory strategy and then support the Left in testing a shared strategy towards socialist liberation. Over the past 10 years, LeftRoots embarked on multiple initiatives to develop cadres’ ideological and social-emotional capacities, gain political clarity and sharpen collective understandings of strategy. These initiatives included studying strategic plans tested by previous revolutionary movements, crafting sample strategy sketches rooted in our current conditions, and developing a liberatory strategy toolkit and an organizational culture toolkit based on lessons and principled struggle.

Liberation Road traces its roots back to 1985, when several socialist organizations from the ’60s and ’70s merged to build left organization in the U.S. towards a socialist future. Since its founding, the organization has attracted organizers from different generations and tendencies to support revolutionary struggles and build the power of the working class. In the past few years, The Road has pulled from historic lessons and principles to support Left in organizing against Trump, as well as pushing leftists to formulate a path to liberation in the U.S.

Through their development and analysis, LeftRoots and Liberation Road have both come to the understanding that 21st Century cadre organizations are needed for the Left to have a real chance at socialist liberation. LeftRoots and Liberation Road engaged in a series of bilateral conversations, with the purpose of building shared alignment on what it would take to move towards a stronger renewed Left. After this process of principled struggle towards unity and clarity, Liberation Road became an organizational partner of the SOS Process and has played a leadership role in its advancement.