More here on the exciting Socialism 2026 Conference in Chicago:
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.”)
We’ve come a long way from Das Kapital.
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.”…
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.”
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