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.
City Journal’s Stu Smith has highlighted some of the conference’s most controversial livestreamed moments: a Health Fascism panel that described GLP-1s as a “fat genocide” and being “dysgenic” as aspirational; abortion activists presenting Piker with a “Satan’s School of Gay Communism” 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.
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But while Stu closely monitored the livestreams, City Journal associate editor Aidan Grogan reported directly from the conference—especially on panels that weren’t publicly broadcast. Between the two of us, here’s what we saw and heard.
More 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’t allow “comrades” 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 “Black Lives Matter” or “Free Palestine.” Throughout conference spaces, both speakers and attendees spouted left-wing jargon and buzzwords repeatedly: “organizing,” “solidarity,” “praxis,” “resistance,” “liberation,” and, above all, “abolition,” not just of a market economy and private property but also police, prisons, border security, gender, the family, and the state itself.
Accordingly, speakers tended to glorify precapitalist, non-Western, indigenous cultures as possessing moral purity, in contrast to the capitalist system’s greed and exploitation at the hands of “the white man.” As environmental activist Tori Tsui said in the concluding session, “We are nature defending itself.”
Haymarket Books operated its own bookstore during the conference, featuring a whole section of “Marxist Classics.” 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 “racial capitalism” and “settler colonialism” to “identity” and “society.”)
In a session titled “Femme-inism Against Cisness: Bread, Roses, and Hormones, Too,” British Marxist writer Sophie Lewis delivered a talk on concepts such as “whorish artifice” and “transfeminist abolitionism.” At last year’s conference, Lewis provided more detail about what abolition means to her, stating, “When you abolish the police, you do burn down police stations.” This year, she drew on themes from her book Femmephilia: Love Letters to Trans Mermaids, Queer Mothers, and Marilyn Monroe to argue against “cisness,” defined as “the naturalization of assigned sex.”
“In our species, there’s no preexistent or natural sex-gender system,” Lewis said. “The dyad known as ‘men and women’ is a product of culture, which is to say labor, all the way down.” She criticized “capitalist kinship” and the “private, nuclear household” for perpetuating a “cis-sexist motherhood regime” that denies the possibility that “all children might be the responsibility of all of us.”
The other speaker on the panel, A. J. Bohrer, asked Lewis, “what’s the number one thing we can do to make socialism sexier?” Lewis replied: “Spend more time naked together.” Bohrer followed up by inquiring about “the most important feature of a communist sex forest.”
In another sex-focused session, titled “Sex for Pleasure: Controlling your Reproduction Under a Pro-Natalist Regime,” doula Emily Likins-Ehlers argued that restrictions on birth control are likely coming in post-Dobbs America. “The 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,” 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.
The conference dedicated an entire session to family abolition “through a Black feminist lens.” 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 “oppressive container” that “privatizes care, dependency, and resources.” They advocated for “collectivizing care” and a “return to pre-capitalist and indigenous ways of caring for each other and the earth.” Hart reiterated Sophie Lewis’s claim that “all anti-capitalists are family abolitionists. They just might not know it yet.” At one point, Armstead asked the audience what they imagined when picturing the image of the “most culturally celebrated family,” and the responses included (each voiced negatively) “white people,” “private property,” “heteronormative,” “childism and hierarchy,” and “children as belonging to their parents.”
Panelists at Socialism 2026 were as motivated to abolish law enforcement as they were the family. In a separate panel, Georgetown professor Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò insisted that abolishing the police, even if immediately disastrous, is worth the short-term pain on “the long march towards dialectical materialism.” He lamented his struggle to make police abolition sound convincing when he takes off his “commie hat” and puts on his “normie hat.”
On that same panel, a Brazilian leftist asked what to do about the fact that, in his home country, people “actually support the police attacking drug traffickers” and see organized crime as a threat to them. CUNY professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s answer was to wait for them to join the movement through a “growing abolition consciousness.”
Socialism’s virtual panels mirrored the action on the ground. Their absurdity was perhaps best captured by Angela Davis’s call, during one panel, to consider the “complexity and the vastness” 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 “one grain of sand on a huge beach.”
Other presenters mirrored her quasi-religious tones. For example, Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, who doesn’t see Hamas as a “fundamental threat,” discussed her view that activists can see “a face of the divine through organizing.”
Activists did engage the question of whether “Woke 1.0” had gone too far. One activist described woke as “really wonderful linguistic tech” that was unfortunately co-opted. Princeton’s Naomi Murakawa, meanwhile, asked Davis whether the movement needed to choose between “Woke 1.0,” characterized as the “crazy excess of indulgent aesthetics of radicalism,” and the “Marxist understanding of abolition.” Davis rejected the framing and argued that “woke” had been distorted by the capitalist class.
While many virtual panels were absurd, others were legitimately concerning. Some highlighted militant tactics, ranging from the DSA’s efforts to build toward a general strike to claims that militant labor organizing is occurring on the “DL [down low].” Other organizers spoke of labor activists taking a “guerrilla warfare approach,” using “radical incrementalism,” and the “Need to Disrupt Every Union Structure of the Whole City [NYC].” Some activists lionized tactics like the “soft blockade” of ICE vehicles to disrupt their operations or refusing to leave a tree in order to prevent the border wall from being built.
Hasan Piker even weighed in on the state of organizing. He argued that the movement’s most promising areas of activism are tenant organizing, opposition to data-center development, and fighting “mass surveillance” technology like Flock. While socialism’s academics often receive the most attention, the conference also appears to serve as a radical organizing incubator.
Despite its revolt against everything “bourgeois” and its professed “solidarity” with working-class and marginalized communities, Socialism 2026 was a grand spectacle of “luxury beliefs,” 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’t practice what they preach. For example, Lewis, the author of Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation and Full Surrogacy Now: Feminist Against Family, is a married Oxford graduate.
Abolitionist 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 “chains.”