It’s been way too long since the last one of these, but I’m going to try to go back to them! Friday I’ll post a short note like this highlighting something I’ve read in the last week that I’d recommend. You can read the last one here.
When I saw the Right’s propaganda machine seize on a lot of the sillier stuff going on at this year’s Socialism conference in Chicago, my immediate instinct was to roll my eyes and move on without giving the whole thing any more oxygen than it was already getting. But Ryan Zickgraf’s article about it in Damage (“Victims of Socialism”) is the perfect response—both poking fun at the nonsense and putting it in its proper perspective.
Parts of it made me laugh out loud, e.g.:
Calling oneself a socialist no longer appears to be an electoral liability in mainstream America, so the vanguard has sequestered itself in the communist sex forest1 looking for something more obscure to distinguish themselves from the hoi polloi
Or:
All three speakers identified as “Mad” with a capital M, and one of them, Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu, arrived with a bio written the way other people write grant applications: “(they/she) is a Mad, Disabled, multidisciplinary care strategist/worker, educator, psychiatric survivor, and healing practitioner. They are a white, queer, non-binary person of Puerto Rican and Ashkenazi Jewish descent, rooted in lineages of Disability Justice, Mad Liberation, decolonial resistance, and the reclamation of ancestral and cultural healing traditions.” Nothing says “I’m prepared to organize the workers of the world” like loudly insisting on one’s own mental illness.
Zickgraf’s pushback against all the wagon-circling special pleading was also just right.
The instinct when Fox News or conservative media points and laughs at leftists is to close ranks, and a fair number of writers did just that. Adam Johnson, for instance, asked everyone to consider that Adler-Bolton, one of the health fascism speakers, was “not a cartoon, but a real human and deep thinker driven by a genuine commitment to justice.” Nobody said otherwise. But as Freddie deBoer pointed out, these were adults delivering prepared remarks at a publicly livestreamed conference, and if that isn’t a fair target for criticism, nothing is.
…but what I liked best about the article was that it did a good job of steering around the Scylla of Adler-Bolton-style defensiveness and the Charybdis of reinforcing the Right’s narrative that this stuff is somehow more representative of the overall socialist Left as it exists in 2026 than oh, say, the so-far remarkably successful administration of the longstanding DSA activist who got himself elected mayor of the most important city in the capitalist world. If you’re going to write about stuff like this in 2026, this strikes me as exactly the right way to do it.
Zickgraf calls the conference “a kind of discourse preserve—the last protected habitat where the 2010s still roam free and unhunted.” He also notes (and this part lines up with my own experience of the conference three years ago, which I wrote about a bit at the beginning of this book review) that there’s a decent smattering of good and valuable stuff going on, buried among all the posturing academic bullshit.2 For example, “there were only five panels and talks on economics,” the words “‘abolition’ or ‘abolitionist’ turned up in at least ten session titles, covering the police, prisons, the family, higher education, and more.” More depressingly still, this all represents a considerable move in the wrong direction over the course of the last decade. In the 2010s, this particular conference wasn’t actually a hotbed of the worst of the kind of leftism that decade gave us.
Back when I was a Chicago DSA member, I attended Socialism 2017, and the defining principle then was about workers and capital—you know, actual Marxism. There were sessions called “Where Does Profit Come From? How the Boss Rips You Off,” “Do Workers Still Have Power?” “Why Capitalism Goes into Crisis,” and “Not Just Your Pay Grade: How Do Marxists Understand Class?” Matters of race, gender, or sexuality were certainly not ignored, nor should they be, but it’s telling how many sessions a decade ago had the word “labor” or “work” in the title compared to 2026…
Why the center of gravity at the conference has shifted this far is, I guess, a question for future historians of the academic Left. But Zickgraf suggests, I think, quite rightly, that at a time when the useful Left is having huge real-world breakthroughs, if the kind of academics that fill these panels want to do devote themselves to discussions of Mad liberation and sex forests, they could at least do the rest of us the favor of branding themselves in a way that doesn’t invite confusion between their thing and mainline American socialism.
Call it Abolitionism or the Haymarket Book Club annual retreat, and you’d have truth in advertising.
I’d add: I just co-wrote a book urging the socialist Left not to be satisfied with the “minimum program” of American social democracy but to keep our eyes on the prize of the “maximum program” of overcoming capitalism entirely. (Ahem: Out Tuesday!) And I’d just say that, if you agree with that, it makes the distinction Zickgraf is insisting on that much more important. The more radical the goals that you want to persuade a majority of the public to adopt, the more difficult your task is, and therefore the more annoyed you should be about the characters who seem to devote themselves to making it even harder.
Read the rest of Ryan’s article here.
Thanks for reading Philosophy for the People w/Ben Burgis! This post is public so feel free to share it.
If this phrase seems baffling out of context, all I can say is that it only becomes slightly less baffling in context.
To be clear, I don’t think that being academic makes something bullshit. I’m an academic myself, at least part-time! Undeniably, though, academia generates its own very specific kind of bullshit, and there seems to be way too much of it on display here.
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