More than 3,000 self-described socialists gathered at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place in Chicago’s South Loop over Labor Day weekend for the 2026 Socialism conference, a four-day event hosted by the radical-left publisher Haymarket Books. According to reporting by the Manhattan Institute’s Stu Smith and City Journal associate editor Aidan Grogan — published as part of the MI x DW collaboration — the conference featured panels on topics ranging from weight-loss drugs to family abolition, alongside appearances by figures such as Angela Davis, Sophie Lewis, and Hasan Piker.
Video clips from the event quickly circulated on X, drawing attention to sessions like a “Health Fascism” panel that reportedly described GLP-1 medications as a “fat genocide” and framed being “dysgenic” as aspirational. In one widely shared moment, abortion activists presented Piker with a hat reading “Satan’s School of Gay Communism.” Weather Underground alumni Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were also in attendance, and professors from Columbia, CUNY, NYU, and the University of Illinois at Chicago were on hand to promote radical activism.
Mask Mandates and Marxist Classics
Despite the pandemic having ended more than three years earlier, conference organizers required attendees to wear masks at all times except when speakers were actively presenting. Some sessions were overcrowded and poorly ventilated. Staff prohibited attendees from sitting on the floor in aisles, citing safety concerns for people with mobility issues. The dress code was casual — denim, radical T-shirts, and buttons bearing slogans like “Black Lives Matter” and “Free Palestine.”
The language of the weekend, per the reporting, leaned heavily on a familiar vocabulary: “organizing,” “solidarity,” “praxis,” “resistance,” “liberation,” and above all “abolition” — applied not only to markets and private property but to police, prisons, border security, gender, the family, and the state itself. Haymarket Books ran a bookstore on site that included a “Marxist Classics” section, with titles such as Towards a Gay Communism, In Defense of Looting, The Case for Open Borders, and Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies, whose cover calls for abolishing everything from “racial capitalism” to “society.”
Family Abolition, Coloring Markers, and ‘Communist Sex Forests’
One session, titled “Femme-inism Against Cisness: Bread, Roses, and Hormones, Too,” featured British Marxist writer Sophie Lewis discussing concepts including “whorish artifice” and “transfeminist abolitionism.” Lewis argued that “in our species, there’s no preexistent or natural sex-gender system,” and that “the dyad known as ‘men and women’ is a product of culture.” She criticized “capitalist kinship” and the “private, nuclear household” as perpetuating what she called a “cis-sexist motherhood regime.” When fellow panelist A. J. Bohrer asked Lewis how to make socialism “sexier,” she replied, “Spend more time naked together.”
Another panel, “Sex for Pleasure: Controlling Your Reproduction Under a Pro-Natalist Regime,” featured doula Emily Likins-Ehlers arguing that birth-control restrictions 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,” she said, according to the reporting. The session offered guidance on using herbs and plants as alternative contraceptives should a crackdown occur.
A separate session on family abolition “through a Black feminist lens” had attendees sitting in a circle and coloring with Crayola markers. Speakers Alanah Armstead and Marin Hart, research fellows at the Kuluntu Reproductive Justice Center, described 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.” At one point, Armstead asked the audience what came to mind when they pictured the most culturally celebrated family; responses included “white people,” “private property,” “heteronormative,” and “children as belonging to their parents.”
Police Abolition and the Long March
Law enforcement faced the same abolitionist logic. Georgetown professor Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò argued that abolishing police, even if immediately disastrous, is worth the short-term pain on “the long march towards dialectical materialism,” and lamented the difficulty of making the case when he trades his “commie hat” for his “normie hat.” On the same panel, a Brazilian leftist asked what to do about the fact that, in his country, people “actually support the police attacking drug traffickers.” CUNY professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s answer was to wait for them to join through a “growing abolition consciousness.”
Virtual panels mirrored the in-person program. Angela Davis called for considering the “complexity and the vastness” of the liberation struggle, extending it beyond humans to animals, the planet, and even the cosmos, musing that Earth is “one grain of sand on a huge beach.” Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, who according to the reporting does not see Hamas as a “fundamental threat,” described activists seeing “a face of the divine through organizing.”
Activists also debated whether “Woke 1.0” had gone too far. One described woke as “really wonderful linguistic tech” that was unfortunately co-opted, while Princeton’s Naomi Murakawa asked Davis whether the movement needed to choose between “Woke 1.0” and a “Marxist understanding of abolition.” Davis rejected the framing, arguing that “woke” had been distorted by the capitalist class.
Militant Tactics and Guerrilla Labor Organizing
Some panels — particularly virtual ones — concerned militant tactics, including DSA efforts to build toward a general strike, claims that militant labor organizing is happening on the “DL [down low],” and organizers speaking of a “guerrilla warfare approach” and a “Need to Disrupt Every Union Structure of the Whole City [NYC].” Activists lionized tactics like “soft blockades” of ICE vehicles and refusing to leave a tree to block border wall construction. Hasan Piker also weighed in on the state of organizing, though his remarks were cut short in the available excerpt.
The picture that emerges from the reporting is of a movement comfortable with a sweeping abolitionist vocabulary — one that, by its own participants’ account, is still working out how to sell that vision to a broader public.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-2026-socialist-agenda-features-fat-genocide-and-abolishing-the-family