{ "archive_path": "archive/1789063217.23074", "base_url": "www.city-journal.org/article/socialism-2026-conference", "basename": "socialism-2026-conference", "bookmarked_date": "2026-09-10 18:00", "canonical": { "archive_org_path": "https://web.archive.org/web/www.city-journal.org/article/socialism-2026-conference", "dom_path": "output.html", "favicon_path": "favicon.ico", "git_path": "git/", "google_favicon_path": "https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=www.city-journal.org", "headers_path": "headers.json", "htmltotext_path": "htmltotext.txt", "index_path": "index.html", "media_path": "media/", "mercury_path": "mercury/content.html", "pdf_path": "output.pdf", "readability_path": "readability/content.html", "screenshot_path": "screenshot.png", "singlefile_path": "singlefile.html", "warc_path": "warc/", "wget_path": "www.city-journal.org/article/socialism-2026-conference.html" }, "domain": "www.city-journal.org", "extension": "", "hash": "19H921HK06X5SKFFGWKP", "history": { "archive_org": [], "dom": [], "favicon": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--max-time", "120", "--output", "favicon.ico", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=www.city-journal.org" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-09-10T19:16:48.988483+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "favicon.ico", "pwd": "/data/archive/1789063217.23074", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-10T19:16:48.654341+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "git": [], "headers": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--head", "--max-time", "120", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.city-journal.org/article/socialism-2026-conference" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-09-10T19:16:49.344441+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "headers.json", "pwd": "/data/archive/1789063217.23074", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-10T19:16:48.997111+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "htmltotext": [], "media": [], "mercury": [ { "cmd": [ "/app/node_modules/@postlight/parser/cli.js", "https://www.city-journal.org/article/socialism-2026-conference" ], "cmd_version": "1.0.0", "end_ts": "2026-09-10T19:17:07.505026+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "mercury", "pwd": "/data/archive/1789063217.23074", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-10T19:17:03.206800+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "pdf": [], "readability": [ { "cmd": [ "/app/node_modules/readability-extractor/readability-extractor", "/tmp/tmpvr930jrj", "https://www.city-journal.org/article/socialism-2026-conference" ], "cmd_version": "0.0.11", "end_ts": "2026-09-10T19:17:03.193316+00:00", "index_texts": [ "Over Labor Day weekend, X caught fire with clips from the 2026 Socialism conference, hosted by the radical-left Haymarket Books in Chicago. More than 3,000 socialists descended on Hyatt Regency McCormick Place in the South Loop to participate in the four-day event featuring radical activists and authors such as Angela Davis, Sophie Lewis, and Hasan Piker.\n\n\n\nCity Journal\u2019s Stu Smith has highlighted some of the conference\u2019s most controversial livestreamed moments: a Health Fascism panel that described GLP-1s as a \u201cfat genocide\u201d and being \u201cdysgenic\u201d as aspirational; abortion activists presenting Piker with a \u201cSatan\u2019s School of Gay Communism\u201d hat; Weather Underground alumni Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn in attendance; and professors from Columbia, CUNY, NYU, and the University of Illinois, Chicago promoting radical activism.\n Finally, a reason to check your email.\nSign up for our free newsletter today.\n \n\n\n\n\nBut while Stu closely monitored the livestreams, City Journal associate editor Aidan Grogan reported directly from the conference\u2014especially on panels that weren\u2019t publicly broadcast. Between the two of us, here\u2019s what we saw and heard.\n\n\n\nMore than three years after the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, the conference required attendees to wear masks at all times except for when speakers were actively presenting. Some of the sessions were overcrowded, hot, sweaty, and smelly. Conference staff didn\u2019t allow \u201ccomrades\u201d to sit on the ground in the aisles, because it was considered a safety hazard for attendees with mobility issues. Rather than professional attire, the typical outfit consisted of denim jeans and radical T-shirts and buttons displaying slogans like \u201cBlack Lives Matter\u201d or \u201cFree Palestine.\u201d Throughout conference spaces, both speakers and attendees spouted left-wing jargon and buzzwords repeatedly: \u201corganizing,\u201d \u201csolidarity,\u201d \u201cpraxis,\u201d \u201cresistance,\u201d \u201cliberation,\u201d and, above all, \u201cabolition,\u201d not just of a market economy and private property but also police, prisons, border security, gender, the family, and the state itself.\n\n\n\nAccordingly, speakers tended to glorify precapitalist, non-Western, indigenous cultures as possessing moral purity, in contrast to the capitalist system\u2019s greed and exploitation at the hands of \u201cthe white man.\u201d As environmental activist Tori Tsui said in the concluding session, \u201cWe are nature defending itself.\u201d\n\n\n\nHaymarket Books operated its own bookstore during the conference, featuring a whole section of \u201cMarxist Classics.\u201d Notable titles included Towards a Gay Communism: Elements of a Homosexual Critique; In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action; The Case for Open Borders; Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity; and Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies. (The cover of Surviving the Future calls for abolishing everything from \u201cracial capitalism\u201d and \u201csettler colonialism\u201d to \u201cidentity\u201d and \u201csociety.\u201d)\n\n\n\nIn a session titled \u201cFemme-inism Against Cisness: Bread, Roses, and Hormones, Too,\u201d British Marxist writer Sophie Lewis delivered a talk on concepts such as \u201cwhorish artifice\u201d and \u201ctransfeminist abolitionism.\u201d At last year\u2019s conference, Lewis provided more detail about what abolition means to her, stating, \u201cWhen you abolish the police, you do burn down police stations.\u201d This year, she drew on themes from her book Femmephilia: Love Letters to Trans Mermaids, Queer Mothers, and Marilyn Monroe to argue against \u201ccisness,\u201d defined as \u201cthe naturalization of assigned sex.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201cIn our species, there\u2019s no preexistent or natural sex-gender system,\u201d Lewis said. \u201cThe dyad known as \u2018men and women\u2019 is a product of culture, which is to say labor, all the way down.\u201d She criticized \u201ccapitalist kinship\u201d and the \u201cprivate, nuclear household\u201d for perpetuating a \u201ccis-sexist motherhood regime\u201d that denies the possibility that \u201call children might be the responsibility of all of us.\u201d\n\n\n\nThe other speaker on the panel, A. J. Bohrer, asked Lewis, \u201cwhat\u2019s the number one thing we can do to make socialism sexier?\u201d Lewis replied: \u201cSpend more time naked together.\u201d Bohrer followed up by inquiring about \u201cthe most important feature of a communist sex forest.\u201d\n\n\n\nIn another sex-focused session, titled \u201cSex for Pleasure: Controlling your Reproduction Under a Pro-Natalist Regime,\u201d doula Emily Likins-Ehlers argued that restrictions on birth control are likely coming in post-Dobbs America. \u201cThe fascists want you to have a lot of babies so that they can take them and turn them into warehouse workers and soldiers to be sacrificed at the golden calf of capitalism,\u201d Likins-Ehlers said. The presentation offered advice on how herbs and other plants could be used as alternative contraceptive methods if (or when) a birth-control crackdown occurs.\n\n\n\nThe conference dedicated an entire session to family abolition \u201cthrough a Black feminist lens.\u201d Like a kindergarten classroom, attendees sat in a circle and used Crayola markers to participate in coloring activities. Speakers Alanah Armstead and Marin Hart (research fellows at the Kuluntu Reproductive Justice Center) attacked the traditional nuclear family as an \u201coppressive container\u201d that \u201cprivatizes care, dependency, and resources.\u201d They advocated for \u201ccollectivizing care\u201d and a \u201creturn to pre-capitalist and indigenous ways of caring for each other and the earth.\u201d Hart reiterated Sophie Lewis\u2019s claim that \u201call anti-capitalists are family abolitionists. They just might not know it yet.\u201d At one point, Armstead asked the audience what they imagined when picturing the image of the \u201cmost culturally celebrated family,\u201d and the responses included (each voiced negatively) \u201cwhite people,\u201d \u201cprivate property,\u201d \u201cheteronormative,\u201d \u201cchildism and hierarchy,\u201d and \u201cchildren as belonging to their parents.\u201d\n\n\n\nPanelists at Socialism 2026 were as motivated to abolish law enforcement as they were the family. In a separate panel, Georgetown professor Ol\u00faf\u1eb9\u0301mi O. T\u00e1\u00edw\u00f2 insisted that abolishing the police, even if immediately disastrous, is worth the short-term pain on \u201cthe long march towards dialectical materialism.\u201d He lamented his struggle to make police abolition sound convincing when he takes off his \u201ccommie hat\u201d and puts on his \u201cnormie hat.\u201d\n\n\n\nOn that same panel, a Brazilian leftist asked what to do about the fact that, in his home country, people \u201cactually support the police attacking drug traffickers\u201d and see organized crime as a threat to them. CUNY professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore\u2019s answer was to wait for them to join the movement through a \u201cgrowing abolition consciousness.\u201d\n\n\n\nSocialism\u2019s virtual panels mirrored the action on the ground. Their absurdity was perhaps best captured by Angela Davis\u2019s call, during one panel, to consider the \u201ccomplexity and the vastness\u201d of the struggle for liberation and to expand that struggle beyond humans to animals, the planet itself, and even the cosmos. She mused about the Earth being \u201cone grain of sand on a huge beach.\u201d\n\n\n\nOther presenters mirrored her quasi-religious tones. For example, Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, who doesn\u2019t see Hamas as a \u201cfundamental threat,\u201d discussed her view that activists can see \u201ca face of the divine through organizing.\u201d\n\n\n\nActivists did engage the question of whether \u201cWoke 1.0\u201d had gone too far. One activist described woke as \u201creally wonderful linguistic tech\u201d that was unfortunately co-opted. Princeton\u2019s Naomi Murakawa, meanwhile, asked Davis whether the movement needed to choose between \u201cWoke 1.0,\u201d characterized as the \u201ccrazy excess of indulgent aesthetics of radicalism,\u201d and the \u201cMarxist understanding of abolition.\u201d Davis rejected the framing and argued that \u201cwoke\u201d had been distorted by the capitalist class.\n\n\n\nWhile many virtual panels were absurd, others were legitimately concerning. Some highlighted militant tactics, ranging from the DSA\u2019s efforts to build toward a general strike to claims that militant labor organizing is occurring on the \u201cDL [down low].\u201d Other organizers spoke of labor activists taking a \u201cguerrilla warfare approach,\u201d using \u201cradical incrementalism,\u201d and the \u201cNeed to Disrupt Every Union Structure of the Whole City [NYC].\u201d Some activists lionized tactics like the \u201csoft blockade\u201d of ICE vehicles to disrupt their operations or refusing to leave a tree in order to prevent the border wall from being built.\n\n\n\nHasan Piker even weighed in on the state of organizing. He argued that the movement\u2019s most promising areas of activism are tenant organizing, opposition to data-center development, and fighting \u201cmass surveillance\u201d technology like Flock. While socialism\u2019s academics often receive the most attention, the conference also appears to serve as a radical organizing incubator.\n\n\n\nDespite its revolt against everything \u201cbourgeois\u201d and its professed \u201csolidarity\u201d with working-class and marginalized communities, Socialism 2026 was a grand spectacle of \u201cluxury beliefs,\u201d a term coined by Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Rob Henderson to describe ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while imposing costs on everyone else. Many elites espouse luxury beliefs like non-monogamy, a disdain for personal fitness, or abolishing the family and police, but don\u2019t practice what they preach. For example, Lewis, the author of Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation and Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, is a married Oxford graduate.\n\n\n\nAbolitionist ideas may be trendy among the majority-white, urban professionals who attended Socialism 2026, but the abstract theories of human nature and society presented by the academic Left are not well-received in minority and working-class neighborhoods. The Marxists who took to Chicago last weekend still face the same dilemma that confronted past advocates of dialectical materialism and class struggle: proletarians remain uninterested in throwing off their \u201cchains.\u201d\n\n\n\n Aidan Grogan is an associate editor at City Journal, a senior contributor with Young Voices, and a history Ph.D. candidate at Liberty University. 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