1The international conference “Engaging in Left-Wing Politics in the United States: The Left, Social Movements and Institutional Politics (19th-21st centuries)” took place on December 4-5, 2025, in Aubervilliers. It was co-organized by eight members of “Du Socialisme en Amérique”, a research group focusing on the US Left founded in 2018: Kalilou Barry (Université Paris-Est Créteil), Alice Béja (Sciences Po Lille), Grégory Bekhtari (Université Paris Nanterre, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), Jeanne Boiteux (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier), Mathieu Bonzom (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), Marie Menard (Sorbonne Université, Université Paris-Est Créteil), Marie Plassart (Université Lumière Lyon 2), and Hélène Quanquin (Université de Lille, Institut Universitaire de France). Funding was provided through the support of the following French academic institutions: Centre d’Études et de Recherches Administratives, Politiques et Sociales (Ceraps), Centre Européen de Sociologie et de Science Politique (CESSP), École Doctorale Cultures et Sociétés, Études Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone (EMMA), Institut des Mondes Anglophone, Germanique et Roman (IMAGER), Littératures, SAvoirs et Arts (LISAA), Institut des Amériques, Institut Universitaire de France, Triangle, and Sciences Po Lille. The event featured scholars from various fields of the humanities, activists and organizers from both sides of the Atlantic who came together to share results, insights and practices on the study of the Left in the United States. In their opening remarks, the organizers insisted on the conference’s significance in supporting, implementing and expanding collaboration and research in a global context of deteriorating work conditions and increasing pressures on academic freedoms.

2In their introduction “Studying the US Left from France” – chaired by Marie Plassart (Université Lyon 2/Triangle) – Darius Devos (Université de Lausanne, EHESS/CENA) and Marie Rabecq (Université Lyon 2) offered a historiographical characterization of the French production on the US Left. After outlining the major themes and perspectives to which French academics have contributed, they discussed the specificities of studying the US Left from abroad. Their talk served the double purpose of both shedding light on the existing French research and introducing US and European participants to its preferred topics, methodologies and orientations.

3On Thursday, December 4, the first panel, dedicated to “the US Left from a Transnational Perspective,” was chaired by Marie Menard (Université Paris Est-Créteil/IMAGER). Flavia Canestrini (European University Institute) presented a paper on the Campaign to Oppose Bank Loans to South Africa (COBLSA), which was created in 1977 in the US as an umbrella organization for various grassroots initiatives of the Anti-Apartheid movement. COBLSA linked researchers with grassroots, by researching and identifying banks who supported the Apartheid regime and using their results in classes on activism and financial literacy. This case study thus informs on the emergence of non-state actors in the process of financialization, contributing to redefine international financial markets as spaces for political contestation. International relations were also at the heart of the presentation by Mikael Lyngaas (University of Oslo), entitled “Immigrant Socialists within the Socialist Party of America: Radical Potential, Nativism and Neglect, 1910-1920.” Focusing on the decade during which the Socialist Party started including its non-English language federation, Lyngaas concluded that US socialists neglected the rights of its most vulnerable, foreign party members, thus leading to the coalition’s breaking apart in 1919.

4Kalilou Barry (Université Paris Est-Créteil/Imager) chaired the second panel, dedicated to “Mobilization Sites at the Grassroots Level.” Marie Plassart (Université Lumière Lyon 2/Triangle), developed a historical analysis of the political orientation of eighty-six women who registered to vote in a precinct in rural Oklahoma in 1918. Drawing on the study of voter registration records, Plassart showed that at a time when declaring oneself as a socialist was transgressive, it was especially so for women. Besides, in order not to risk upsetting family loyalties, they were more likely to register as independents. The two presentations that followed centered on the contemporary period. Bradley Smith (Université Paris Nanterre/CREA) proposed a case study of Community Wealth Building. Focusing on the initiatives implemented in the city of Chicago after 2019, this paper sought to characterize the objectives, approaches, strategies and consequences of the program, drawing especially on the works of Erik Olin Wright. Smith suggested that while local actors can create alternative models to capitalist ownership, their scope is limited by their reliance on political support, thus showing that change cannot arise through municipalism alone. Stepping away from the municipal scale, Elodie Edwards-Grossi (Université Dauphine-PSL/IRISSO/Institut Universitaire de France) emphasized the role and the strategies of the Richmond Progressive Alliance in defending the interests of those impacted by refinery-induced petrotoxicity in Richmond, CA. By reclaiming democratic socialism as its founding principle, the RPA succeeded in imposing environmental issues among its demands. Through its drawing links with other spaces impacted by petrotoxicity, this organization thus successfully reframed its fight in a transnational perspective.

5While the question of knowledge transmission and communication had been tackled throughout the day, the third panel, chaired by Jeanne Boiteux (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier /EMMA), gave pride of place to “the Left, Education and the Press.” Charlotte Brivio (Sorbonne Université) argued that the substantial press coverage given to the suffragists’ New Departure Strategy (1868-1875) testifies to the strength of a movement that crossed political lines. By documenting women’s actions as they individually or collectively registered to vote illegally, printed materials shed light on activists who have historically been marginalized – women of color and unaffiliated activists. The sum of publications gave participants in the movement a sense of belonging, even when they did not identify as activists precisely. For labor historian Steve Fraser, schools are sites of production of this sense of belonging, as evidenced in his overview of working men’s schools and radical education since the foundation of the Socialist Party’s Rand School in 1906 to the Academy for Social Education at the DSA chapter in New York City. These educational initiatives have been instrumental in democratizing tools to better understand – and eventually fight – the capitalist order.

6The final event of the day was a roundtable dedicated to “archiving and researching the Left.” The discussion, led by Hélène Quanquin (Université de Lille/CECILLE, Institut Universitaire de France), involved French historians Audrey Célestine (New York University) and Ambre Ivol (Nantes Université/CRINI), as well as archivist Julie Herrada (Joseph A. Labadie Collection, University of Michigan). From their own perspectives, they dealt with their practices and doubts about the processes of selection, constitution and diffusion of archival documents. By bringing into dialogue perspectives from both sides of the request desk, the roundtable gave way to a broader discussion about the shared experience of researchers working on archives. It contributed to evoking the unequal access to key material for researchers, due to questions of ownership, copyright and collection orientations, which is especially crucial in a context of transnational studies on the Left.

7“Labor, politics and Race” was the focus of the first panel on Friday, December 5. It was chaired by Grégory Bekhtari (Université Paris Nanterre/CREA). Anaïs Lefèvre (Sorbonne Université) highlighted the specific place occupied by prison laborers in the working-class. After retracing the evolutions in the relationship that labor unions entertained with prison labor until the late 1970, Lefèvre showed that the court decisions restricting labor unions in carceral settings at that time marked a clear separation between workers outside of prisons and prison laborers. This resulted in the de facto exclusion of inmates from the working class at the end of the twentieth century. The talk given by Max Krochmal (University of New Orleans) was inspired from the research published in two books, Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) and Civil Rights in Brown and Black. Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas (ed. Max Krochmal and Todd Moye, University of Texan Press, 2021). These two works thematize the racial stratification in the South West of the United States, where workers of color often were kept at bay and assigned to rural lives to the countryside. Moreover, Chicano and African American workers tended to constitute separate communities. By emphasizing the advent of political successes through interracial coalitions, the talk advocated a remapping of the Left based on organization across communities. Drawing on the experience of the radical grassroots organization Black Workers for Justice, Anissa Khamkam (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès/CAS) tackled the role of Black union activism at the end of the twentieth century. The group’s strategy of favoring electoral politics in order to advance its workers’ rights agenda rested on the transmission of activist knowledge about class and race across militant generations. The talk thus delineated the genealogy of the movement, drawing from previous experience gained in the early voting rights movement. Black Workers for Justice succeeded in grounding its campaigns locally while investing the national stage by taking part in the Labor Party (1996-2007). The last talk of the panel expounded on the relationship between the Left and labor unions, by reacting to the idea that the Left has long been ambivalent with organized labor, seen as a conservative obstacle to a necessary radicalization of the working class. Richard Wells (State University of New York) provided a triptych of portraits of 20^th-century male activists of the Labor movement. By identifying actions taken by John L. Lewis, Bert Powers and Tony Mazzocchi in strikes or within labor unions, Wells argued that their activism could be best comprehended as a counterpoint to business interests, thus nuancing the supposedly irremediable tensions between labor unions and the Left.

8Ivan Bruneau (Université Lyon 2/Triangle) chaired the next panel entitled “From Social Movements to Political Organizations.” Olivier Mahéo (Institut d’histoire du temps présent) focused on the Freedom Now Party (1962-1963) as part of a larger conversation on the relation between Black nationalism and the US Left. After introducing the founders of the movement – William Worthy, Conrad J. Lynn, Albert and Henry Cleague, along with Grace and James Bogg – the presentation identified their strategy. However, despite its intentions to take votes away from the Democratic Party, the Freedom Now Party fell short of its ambition. The next two talks foregrounded the organization of the Democratic Socialists of America. Alisen Boley (Nantes Université/Triangle) detailed the tactical repertoires implemented by DSA in order to define its collective identity and political meaning. By favoring electoral politics, endorsing candidates, and accepting only small donors, the movement has redefined democracy as an opposition between the working-class and corporate interests. This has coalesced into a collective democratic socialist identity. The question of campaign funding was also crucial to the topic developed by Clara Sebastiani (Université Paris Cité/ECHELLES). Using quantitative analyses of campaign finance data, Sebastiani tackled the topic of DSA’s reworking of financing rules in accordance with the theoretical frame of prefigurative politics. While DSA’s sole reliance on small donors has distinguished them from most other political organizations which benefit from corporate and Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions, it has also raised questions as to the role of data vendors to reach individual donors for digital fundraising.

9The second-to-last panel on “Revolution and Counter Revolution” was chaired by Alice Béja (Sciences Po Lille/Ceraps). It was opened by Jean-Louis Marin-Lamellet (Université Savoie Mont Blanc) with a historical analysis of the shifting use of “populism” since the term first appeared in the 1890s. While the concept was first used to define a Left-wing, radical popular political project, its meaning drastically changed after the 1950s when it became identified with a style or attitude by Cold War Liberals. This stigmatization of populism, Marin-Lamellet argued, is a criticism of ordinary people exerting power. Like “politically correct” or “woke,” populism thus features prominently on a list of emancipatory notions that have undergone semantic hijacking by their political detractors. In “Asking the Wrong Question about the US Left,” Van Gosse (Franklin and Marshall College) argued that by discussing the absence of a Socialist revolution in the US, historians have mainly overlooked the truly disruptive potential of Reconstruction. Not only have white historians depicted the Democratic Party in unduly sympathetic terms, but they contributed to discursively exclude the antislavery movement from the Left. Gosse thus suggested to reclaim Reconstruction as a founding moment of the US Left, when actions were taken to integrate droves of formerly-enslaved women and men into the workforce. Dolores Janiewski (Victoria University) studied the transatlantic transfer of counter-revolutionary discourse following the Paris Commune of 1871 through press cartoons. That first Red Scare in the USA witnessed the development of racist and xenophobic arguments along with distrust of working-class radicalism, supposedly to be blamed on the French and British ideologies imported in the 1870s. The moral panic could also be read in newspaper columns, the period witnessing a steep increase of the word “Communism” in the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune in 1871. The revolution at stake for Constantin J. Berlin (Goethe University Frankfurt) in his talk about the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party was about the discussions and tensions leading to the vision of a combined revolution for socialism and Black liberation. Since the early 1930s, the Trotskyists had discussed and organized commissions to define their stance on nationalism in relation to African American workers. However, by 1945, the fight for Black equality appeared to be inseparable from the broader class struggle. This led the Socialist Workers Party to proclaim its public commitment to the Civil Rights movement in 1957.

10Mathieu Bonzom (Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne/CESSP) conducted the last roundtable on academic freedom and activism on and off campus in the Biden and Trump years, with professors Susan Kang (CUNY) and Annelise Orleck (Dartmouth University), labor educator Marsha Neimeijer (board member of Labor Notes) and law student Kaarthika Thacker (University of Berkeley). The discussion started with the observation that the recent years have given rise to fundamental changes both in the political arena narrowly defined, and in the way higher education institutions are run and funded under the combined effects of neoliberalism and rising authoritarianism. The four panelists went on to share their direct experiences and general assessments of curtailment of academic free speech, but also their hopes and some perspectives for action. They advocated the crucial role played by educators globally in providing students with the means to contextualize and better understand the world, as well as joining them in claiming and defending their fundamental rights; and emphasized the support and meaning obtained through transnational networks of scholars of the Left.

11Over the course of these two days, scholars and activists based in the United States, France, but also Italy, Germany and New Zealand, shared thoughts, findings and experience on the past and present of the US Left. In the wake of James N. Gregory’s seminal “ Remapping the American Left: A History of Radical Discontinuity ” (Studies in Working-Class History 17-2, 2020), they drew a comprehensive outline for the Left to be understood within a “larger constellation of social movements that collectively comprised the Left of each era.” The conference was a space for transnational and interdisciplinary dialogue, and a useful reminder that we share common hopes and concerns. More than everything, it also testified to the vitality of research on the US Left today, with eminent and emerging scholars striving to access, debate and evaluate sources.