Here we republish Ahmed Shawki’s speech, “Perspectives for the Left,” from the 2013 Socialism conference held in Chicago. In this speech, Shawki describes the need for a sharp break from the narrow perspectives shared by most small revolutionary socialist organizations of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s (and the vast majority, including the ISO, were very small) as necessary to break out from the margins of sectarianism, so that older generations of revolutionaries could reach out to newly radicalizing layers of people. Issues that separated revolutionaries in the past (was the USSR state capitalist or a degenerated workers’ state, for example) were no longer decisive issues. Reaching out meant abandoning the dogma on the left from years gone by and embracing new ways of communicating socialist ideas that could connect with young people in the context of their own experience.