Socialism 2026

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8:30am CDT

Morning yoga

Saturday September 5, 2026 8:30am - 9:30am CDT

Join us for a Vinyasa yoga session led by local yogi Angel. We’ll work to sync our breath and bodies to beginner’s poses with just enough challenge to get you out of your comfort zone. This 60-min flow is perfect for all levels. We will have mats available on a first come, first serve basis.

Saturday September 5, 2026 8:30am - 9:30am CDT

Activity

10:00am CDT

The Black Path to Socialism

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

TBA

A recent pew research poll indicates that Black folk have the most positive opinion of socialism of any other race/ethnicity in the US—but there is a contradiction as it pertains to who these folk vote for, the party they support the most, and the “leaders” they allow to speak for and guide them. “The Black Path to Socialism” will explore these contradictions and give historic content as to why and how socialism was always the preferred model for poor and working class Black folk until the rise of the Black Misleadership class and other elements of neoliberalism.

Speakers

Kali Akuno

I

India

Brian Kwoba

Erica Ryan

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
TBA

Black Liberation

10:00am CDT

No Such Thing As NIMBY: The Fight to Protect Our Water

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

TBA

Myopic local site fights have failed to meet the moment. Meanwhile, broad sloganeering and positive visioning around climate justice have not galvanized workers (especially across the South) the way ecosocialists have hoped. This session will explore how the struggle against Corpus Christi's water crisis became an anti-imperialist and ecosocialist struggle.

Speakers

Jenny Espino

Jenny Espino has been organizing across the Gulf South since the Bush era. She has spoken at conferences such as the Southwestern Marxism Conference, the Texas Socialism Conference, Haymarket’s Socialism conference, and on panels and conferences across Europe including Beyond Gas... Read More →

Jake Hernandez

Jake Hernandez is a union steward and the co-chair of Corpus Christi DSA. He has been instrumental in the fight to defend Corpus Christi’s bay and estuaries while connecting local issues like the tax abatements, the drought contingency plan, and water rates to internationalist... Read More →

Chloe Torres

Chloe Torres is a proud lifelong resident of Corpus Christi, Texas and truly believes in the city’s potential to set an example for other Gulf Coast cities on how to fight back against environmental racism. They helped build successful campaigns to elect and reelect a socialist... Read More →

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
TBA

Climate Justice

10:00am CDT

Hustle Culture vs. Solidarity

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

TBA

Hustle Culture offers working-class and poor people a false alternative to organizing that feels:: agency, aspiration, and a path that feels immediate and non-partisan. This panel examines how it shapeshifts across cultural contexts—from MLMs to Girl Boss feminism—and what its appeal reveals about blind spots in how the left communicates solidarity and collective action.

Speakers

Natalie Bencivega

Natalie Bencivenga is an award-winning journalist, producer, and media consultant based in Pittsburgh. She hosts and produces Week in Focus for the Pennsylvania Capital-Star and Just the Source for PublicSource, and is a fellow at Duquesne University's Institute for Ethics and Integrity... Read More →

Chenjerai Kumanyika

Chenjerai Kumanyika is an Assistant Professor at NYU Journalism and Program Director of the Urban Journalism Workshop. He specializes in narrative audio journalism at the intersection of race, history, and media critique. He is co-creator and co-host of Uncivil (Gimlet Media) and... Read More →

Demetrius Noble

Demetrius "D." Noble is a professor, poet, and cultural organizer specializing in African American Literature, Black class antagonisms, and Hip-Hop Studies. A member of Greensboro Socialists, his work has appeared in Tempest, Hammer & Hope, African American Review, Socialism & Democracy... Read More →

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
TBA

Economics

10:00am CDT

Journalism, Authoritarianism and Struggles Against ICE

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

TBA

This panel will explore journalism and other writing about the solidarity networks and mutual aid efforts that emerged in Minneapolis, Los Angeles and other US cities in response to the Trump administration's ICE surge. Speakers include the 2026 Daniel Singer Prize winner Diane de Vignemont, whose winning essay is entitled "Minneapolis Protests Sound a Lot Like the French Resistance," as well as Adam Goodman (Professor at University of Illinois Chicago and author of The Deportation Machine) and Memo Torres (journalist with L.A. TACO and host of the "Daily Memo").

Speakers

Adam Goodman

Adam Goodman, Professor at University of Illinois Chicago and author of The Deportation Machine

Memo Torres

Memo Torres, journalist with L.A. TACO

Diane de Vignemont

Diane de Vignemont, journalist and winner of this year's Daniel Singer Prize

Sponsors

Daniel Singer Foundation

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
TBA

Fighting the Right

10:00am CDT

Gender and Accumulation

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

TBA

Marxist historians note that “primitive” or “original” accumulation preceded capitalism. This early concentration of wealth depended on the theft of common lands, colonization, slavery, and the displacement of Indigenous peoples. It also required the imposition of a modern gender order. This presentation traces the role of gender discipline in both original accumulation and later moments of intensified capitalist accumulation.

Speakers

Eric Maroney

Eric Maroney is a socialist writer and member of the Tempest Collective. His first book, tentatively titled The Anti-trans Turn, is forthcoming from Haymarket Books.

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
TBA

Gender-Sexuality-Liberation

10:00am CDT

Health Fascism, Body Politics, and the Anti-State State (Health Fascism Series)

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

TBA

As governments retreat from care, and health increasingly becomes a signifier of discipline—rather than provision—fitness, disability, fatness, illness, Blackness, impairment, and bodily capacity are mobilized into measures of moral worth and political belonging. This panel examines how health, disability, body size, and race are instrumentalized by the state and being reorganized under health fascism. Da’Shaun L. Harrison, Beatrice Adler-Bolton, and Artie Vierkant will discuss what these transformations reveal about the changing relationship between capitalism, the state, and everyday life.

Speakers

Beatrice Adler-Bolton

Beatrice Adler-Bolton is a disabled and chronically ill agitator and independent researcher. She is the co-author of Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto (Verso, 2022) and a co-host of the Death Panel podcast.

Da’Shaun L. Harrison

Artie Vierkant

Artie Vierkant is the co-author of Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto (Verso, 2022) and a co-host, as well as the editor and producer, of the Death Panel podcast.

Sponsors

Death Panel

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
TBA

Health Politics & Disability Justice

10:00am CDT

Building the Anti-War Movement: Identifying and Organizing Against U.S. Military Subcontractors

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

TBA

What will it take to meaningfully interrupt the U.S. military industrial complex? How can we engage in effective anti-war action against U.S. imperialism? Using the experience of organizing against Howmet Aerospace, a military subcontractor based in Pittsburgh, panelists will show how local movements can identify hundreds of of lesser-known subcontractors that participate in war profiteering and build effective movements to dismantle their power.

Speakers

Matt Fiorillo

Joseph Gumina

Julia Mente

Valerie Wallach

Sponsors

BDS Pittsburgh

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
TBA

Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism

10:00am CDT

Crisis in Venezuela: Socialist Perspectives

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

TBA

This session features contributors to the book Venezuela in Crisis, presenting Venezuelan socialist analyses of the country’s collapse and advancing an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-authoritarian critique of the Maduro regime. It will also assess the post–January 3 U.S. military intervention and the reconfiguration of power, sovereignty, and class relations in its aftermath.

Speakers

Anderson Bean

Anderson Bean is a North Carolina–based activist and editor and contributor of the book Venezuela in Crisis: Socialist Perspectives from Haymarket Books, and the author of Communes and the Venezuelan State: The Struggle for Participatory Democracy in a Time of Crisis from Lexington... Read More →

Gonzalo Gómez

Gonzalo Gómez is a Venezuelan socialist activist and writer who played a key role in the regroupment of Trotskyism in Venezuela and provided critical support to the Bolivarian Revolution during the Chavez era. He is a cofounder of both Aporrea and Marea Socialista, a current that... Read More →

Emiliano Terán

Emiliano Terán is a sociologist from the Central University of Venezuela and has a master’s degree in ecological economics from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is a PhD candidate in environmental science and technology at the same institution. He is also an associate... Read More →

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
TBA

International Politics

10:00am CDT

Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World's Most Powerful Industry

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

TBA

As tech bosses fall in line with the right, tech workers are fighting back. Join Clarissa Redwine and JS Tan as they explore the history and lessons of the tech worker movement that has been taking on their own employers since the early 2020s, drawing crucial insights from this inspiring workers' movement and analyzing the rise of the hostile labor politics that define Silicon Valley today.

Speakers

Clarissa Redwine

Clarissa Redwine helped organize the Kickstarter union and cofounded the tech organizing conference Circuit Breakers. Her organizing work has been featured in The New York Times, the BBC, The Guardian, The Verge, TechCrunch, and elsewhere. She is co-author of Against Tech Oligarchy... Read More →

JS Tan

JS Tan is getting his PhD at MIT and formerly worked in tech. His work has been featured in The New York Times, MIT Technology Review, Dissent, Jacobin, Foreign Policy, The Baffler, and The Guardian, among other outlets. He is co-author of Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance... Read More →

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
TBA

Labor Movement

10:00am CDT

Labor at the Margins

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

TBA

While union representation in the US remains at an all time low, labor organizing is resurgent. But as the US economy shifts from an industrial to a high-tech and service economy, and as the working class confronts intensified forms of criminalization, the sites of worker agitation have expanded beyond the factory floor. In the process, workers traditionally at the “margins” of the labor movement—such as sex workers and formerly incarcerated workers—are reshaping the struggle for worker power and deepening our understanding of how capitalism exploits and punishes workers in the twenty-first century. Moderated by journalist Kim Kelly, this panel will hear from Maya (Sex Worker Organizing Project—Chicago) and Kat (Beyond the Bars) about their organizing and the ways the wider labor movement can learn from labor at the “margins.”

Speakers

Katherine Passley

Kim Kelly

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TBD

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
TBA

Labor Movement

10:00am CDT

Chicago's Educators and Families Defending Communities Against ICE

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

TBA

Chicago public educators and community members reflect on lessons learned on the front lines defending our schools and neighborhoods during Operation Midway Blitz. We united to protect our communities in brilliant acts of multi-racial solidarity, providing a blueprint for the kind of critical resistance demanded in an era of unfettered state violence.

Speakers

Lisset G

Lizette G became involved with the southwest rapid response team during operation midway blitz and is now a key organizer at a day laborer hiring site in her neighborhood of Brighton Park. She is a mother to two CPS students.

Kobi Guillory

Kobi Guillory was born in Atlanta and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is a middle school science teacher on the South side and a CTU delegate. He is also a member of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and Freedom Road Socialist Organization

Raul Islas

Kathryn Zamarron

Kat Zamarrón teaches elementary school music and is a member of the Chicago Teachers Union and Caucus-of-Rank-and-File-Educators (CORE). She is a member of the union's Latine Caucus, PAC, and Executive Board. Outside of union activities, she is involved with community defense work... Read More →

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
TBA

Migrant Justice

10:00am CDT

Attention Economics for Organizers: How Big Tech Hijacked Our Attention & How We’re Fighting Back

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

TBA

While problems of disinformation and distraction are systemic, "common sense" solutions are often about individual choice. There are important roles for publications, media makers, and movements to play in the struggle for our collective attention. We’ll unpack the attention economy for organizers, and examine how movement media makers are balancing meeting their needs and protecting their peace.

Speakers

Sarah Jaffe

Sarah Jaffe is the author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion To Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, and From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, all from Bold Type Books. Her next book, Heterosexuality... Read More →

Cayden Mak

Cayden Mak is the publisher at Convergence Magazine and the host of Block & Build: Roadmaps for the Left. Prior to Convergence, Cayden spent nearly a decade in various roles at 18 Million Rising, including five years as Executive Director and two as Chief Technology Officer, developing... Read More →

Delaney Vandergrift

Sponsors

Convergence Magazine

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
TBA

Organizing

10:00am CDT

Lessons of the Russian Revolution

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

TBA

The 1917 Russian Revolution was one of the 20th century’s most important events. Its early successes inspired workers internationally, but within a decade the revolution had degenerated, and the early gains were replaced with labor camps, show trials, and bureaucratic dictatorship. What lessons does this history hold for socialists today?

Speakers

Phil Gasper

Phil Gasper is co-editor of New Politics, editor of an annotated edition of The Communist Manifesto, and a member of the Tempest Collective.

Suzi Weissman

Suzi Weissman is an editor of Against the Current and Critique. She is an award-winning journalist who hosts “Beneath the Surface” on Los Angeles’ KPFK radio, and the author of Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope.

Sponsors

Critique

New Politics

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
TBA

Radical History

10:00am CDT

Political Education 2: Understanding Dialectics

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

TBA

This workshop will introduce dialectical materialism, giving insight into the Marxist theory of change. Dialectics is a useful framework not simply for its explanatory power; this “theory is a weapon”, honed by revolutionaries seeking to transform oppressive systems over generations and across the world. After establishing a baseline of understanding, we’ll deploy dialectics to better grasp the nature of the developments in the struggle for Palestinian liberation, especially focusing on the period of struggle since October 2023.

Speakers

Samer Araabi

Samer Araabi, Arab Resource & Organizing Center/ Center for Constitutional Rights

Thomas Mariadason

Thomas Mariadason is the Executive Director of the Center for Political Education

Chika Okoye

Chika Okoye is the Lead Educator for the Center for Political Education

Sponsors

B-REAL

Center for Political Education

W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
TBA

Socialist and Marxist Theory

10:00am CDT

Song for a Hard-Hit People: Building Anti-Racist Solidarity in Appalachia

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

TBA

Appalachia is often framed as a place to escape from, where people are hateful, lazy, and bring tragedy upon themselves. Join Beth Howard to discuss the powerful history of white Appalachians fighting alongside Black and Brown people, pushing back against billionaires who gain power by using racism to divide them. Appalachia has not only been hit hard; it is the place to wage a freedom struggle.

Speakers

Beth Howard

Beth Howard is the Cultural Strategist for Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), the largest national organization bringing white people into the fight for racial and economic justice. She grew up in a rural white working-class community in Eastern Kentucky and has organized in the... Read More →

Jerome Scott

Jerome Scott was a labor organizer in the auto plants of Detroit in the 1960s-’70s, and a member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. As a community organizer, popular educator and author in the South since the 1970s, he was a founding member and former director of Project... Read More →

Saturday September 5, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
TBA

US Politics

12:00pm CDT

Cross-Walls Solidarity Against Carceral Infrastructure

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT

TBA

Incarcerated and detained people have always played a complex role in the movement to end caging and free them all. This session brings together abolitionist organizers focused on permanently closing facilities without replacing them to discuss the process of building cross-walls solidarity beyond campaigns. Speakers will discuss how closure impacts those inside facilities, as well as lessons learned from responding to retaliation, censorship, and a constantly adapting carceral state.

Speakers

Kendra Drysdale

Kendra Drysdale, California Coalition for Women’s Prisoners (FCI Dublin Fight)

Berty Hernandez

Berty Hernandez, California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance (Shut Down Adelanto)

Mon Mohapatra

Mon Mohapatra (Community Justice Exchange)

T

TBD

Sponsors

Community Justice Exchange

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
TBA

Abolition

12:00pm CDT

Debates in Prison Abolitionist Theory and Practice

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT

TBA

Scholars and organizers will discuss live questions of abolitionist theory and practice, from how to think about taking on police vs. ICE vs. the military (or county jails vs. prisons vs. warehousing projects) within this conjuncture of authoritarianism and imperial decline to the relationship between Marxism and prison abolition.

Moderators

Amna Akbar

Speakers

Amelia Kirby

Silky Shah

Silky Shah has been working as an organizer on issues related to racial and migrant justice for over two decades. Originally from Texas, she began fighting the expansion of immigrant jails on the US-Mexico border in the aftermath of 9/11. In 2009, she joined the staff of Detention Watch Network... Read More →

Jack Norton

Zohra Ahmed

Zohra Ahmed is an associate professor of law at Boston University, USA. She writes and teaches about U.S. militarism, domestically and globally. She is a former public defender, and works closely with grassroots movements challenging criminalization.

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
TBA

Abolition

12:00pm CDT

The Merciless Society: Incarceration, Dehumanization, and American Empire

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT

TBA

In our age of carceral imperialism, the return of longer and more brutal punishments reveals the pretense of civilization slipping away. As mercy toward the marginalized is demonized by a steady diet of disinformation about crime and punishment, the worst-case scenarios are quickly becoming more and more possible unless we confront the merciless society head on.

Speakers

Lyle May

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
TBA

Abolition

12:00pm CDT

Art and Propaganda: On Learning from Paul Robeson, Why the Artist must Take Sides

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT

TBA

Join award-winning poet and performer Saul Williams for a discussion of his new book, Song My Mother Taught Me: Why The Artist Must Take Sides, a clear-eyed exploration of radical poetry, art, and the role of the artist in these times.

Speakers

Saul Williams

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
TBA

Culture and Art

12:00pm CDT

Socialist Fiscal Strategy for the 21st Century: Dispatches from New York City’s New Era

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT

TBA

Socialism is sweeping America’s cities, bringing urgent questions on socialist fiscal strategy. Join researchers with New York’s Fiscal Policy Institute to discuss the fiscal issues facing NYC’s socialist movement, from supporting and expanding the movement to tax the rich to combating the myth of capital flight.

Speakers

Elizabeth Cooper

Elizabeth Cooper is the Housing Policy Analyst at the Fiscal Policy Institute. She received an MA in economics from the New School for Social Research. She is also the research coordinator for North Jersey DSA's electoral working group.

Ciarán Finlayson

Ciarán Finlayson is Communications Director at the Fiscal Policy Institute. He is a student in the economics department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, and received an MA from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, United K... Read More →

Zainab Firdausi

Zainab Firdausi works jointly at FPI and the Institute for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Yale writing a dissertation on US administrative state’s varying sources of political legitimacy between 1870 and 1930. Zainab... Read More →

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
TBA

Economics

12:00pm CDT

Break the Board: Neoliberalism in Crisis and the Popular University as Abolition

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT

TBA

This panel introduces the Board of Butchers framework, an abolitionist project in opposition to the neoliberal university, actualized through the pursuit of the Popular University. The panel further strategizes how academics and intellectuals can use their skills to effectively support the Palestinian liberation movement and the abolition of the university.

Speakers

A

Adam

A

Alex

F

Fiona

L

Laith

Sponsors

National Students for Justice in Palestine

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
TBA

Education Justice

12:00pm CDT

Sex for Pleasure: Controlling your Reproduction Under a Pro-Natalist Regime

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT

TBA

In a post-Dobbs era, are restrictions on birth control next? Probably. Learn about alternative contraception methods in a hands-on workshop with a doula + herbalist. **this is not medical advice, educational in nature **

Speakers

Emily Likins-Ehlers

Emily Likins-Ehlers is a full spectrum doula and educator in Illinois. They have been working with contraceptive plants and Fertility Awareness for over a decade.

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
TBA

Gender-Sexuality-Liberation

12:00pm CDT

Class Struggle Infrastructure: Tenant Unions and Socialism

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT

TBA

Under capitalism, housing is commodified — a primary site of extraction and exploitation of ordinary people. But the fundamental need for a home remains a shared human experience. From this contradiction the tenant struggle emerges: the fight for a dignified home against the profiteering landlords who control housing. Tenant unions are the infrastructure we use to transform isolated tenant fights into a collective class struggle. Come learn why socialism needs the tenant movement, why the tenant movement needs you, and how to get involved in tenant organizing where you live!

Speakers

Chicago Union of Tenants

Sponsors

Chicago Union of Tenants

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
TBA

Housing Justice

12:00pm CDT

Rank and File Lessons from a New York Nurses Strike in the Mamdani Era

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT

TBA

Hear how the rank-and-file leaders of the longest nurses’ strike in NY history defeated multimillionaire hospital CEOs on the freezing picket lines by defying concessionary agreements from their own leadership and using open bargaining strategies to build unity, to win pay raises, staffing/workplace safety standards and protections against ICE.

Speakers

Roxana Garcia

Roxanna Garcia has been an active a member of NYSNA, throughout her 14 year career as an RN and NP. During the January 2026 strike, she served on the Contract Action Team and as a Strike Captain, acting as a liaison between members and leadership, supporting colleagues, and helping... Read More →

Beth Loudin

Beth Loudin is a NYC Union nurse who specializes in cardiac neonatal intensive care while leading her local bargaining unit as president of NYSNA at NYP. Beth lives in Brooklyn with her husband and toddler.

T

TBD

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
TBA

Labor Movement

12:00pm CDT

Revolutionary Socialism from Below: Strategies to Build the Resistance

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT

TBA

If liberation could come from the government, it can be taken away again by that government. But there is a different approach to building socialism—from the bottom up. Strategies for creating socialism from below aim to inspire the creative participation of the multiracial working class through mass protests, long-term democratic organizing in rank-and-file unions, neighborhood-level organizations, and other working-class institutions. Join us to discuss recent examples of such efforts and their critical role in resisting authoritarianism and advancing the revolutionary transformation of society toward ecosocialism.

Speakers

Aaron Amaral

Kristen Guptill-Godfrey

Sponsors

Tempest

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
TBA

Left Strategy

12:00pm CDT

What Is the Muslim Left?

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT

TBA

From Malcolm X and the Black Radical Tradition to anti-imperialist organizing after 9/11, Muslim leftists have shaped US movements while remaining illegible to the broader left. Is the Muslim left a coherent political tradition or a coalition of incompatible projects? Speakers stake out distinct positions on religion, racialization, and revolutionary strategy.

Speakers

Eman Abdelhadi

Eman Abdelhadi is a scholar, organizer and writer. She is an assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago, writes a column for In These Times Magazine and is co-author of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, a sci-fi novel... Read More →

T

TBD

Sponsors

Acacia Magazine

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
TBA

Left Strategy

12:00pm CDT

Migra Watch Training for Illinois Residents

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT

TBA

For more than a year, PUÑO has been building collective power to protect Chicago’s immigrant communities through a variety of trainings and connecting Chicagoans to their local rapid response group. At this training organizers will lead attendees on how to document and record ICE activity, as well as how to combat ICE terror in our communities.

Speakers

Diego Morales

Sponsors

PUÑO

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
TBA

Migrant Justice

12:00pm CDT

Che’s “New Man” and The Bodhisattva Revolutionary

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT

TBA

This panel will examine Che Guevara's concept of the "New Socialist Man" (person) and argue for the necessity of cultivating a revolutionary subjectivity through struggle. Using the lens of Buddhist meditation, it will explore how we can elevate consciousness through love, interdependence, and service to others in the world--creating a truly communist subjectivity in the process.

Speakers

Breht O’Shea

Breht is the host of Rev Left Radio, Co-Host of the Red Menace podcast, author of an upcoming book put out by the left wing publisher Iskra Books titled "A Letter to Young Revolutionaries", a founding member of Socialist Night School (a community based political education program... Read More →

Sponsors

Rev Left Radio

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
TBA

Radical History

12:00pm CDT

Socialism, Liberation Theology, and the Black Church: Lessons from Black Socialist Preachers Past and Present

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT

TBA

Taking inspiration from James Cone’s “The Black Church and Marxism: What Do They Have to Say to Each Other” (1980), this session will explore the organizing of early Black socialist Rev. George W. Woodbey and discuss perspectives on liberation theology, the Black church, and socialist organizing today. (49 words)

Speakers

Andrew Reginald Hairston

Andrew Reginald Hairston is a Black socialist who lives and works in the American South. He serves in leadership at Ebenezer Third Baptist Church in Austin, TX and attends ACTS Community Baptist Church in Oklahoma City.

Charles Holm

Charles Holm is a ‘white’ abolitionist-socialist based in Nebraska and has a PhD in Black Studies from Texas. A former union organizer in Atlanta, he is currently an adjunct instructor in northwest Iowa and is writing a book about George W. Woodbey.

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
TBA

Religion & Spirituality

12:00pm CDT

AI Extractivism: Global Systems, Local Processes

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT

TBA

From colonial cattle economies to gold, critical minerals, and data centers, this session presents AI as an evolving extractive regime of global capitalism that reorganizes governance frameworks. It examines how system logics within emerging geopolitical structures translate into local politics and collective responses, exploring possibilities for transnational resistance and solidarity.

Speakers

Shiera S. al-Malik

Shiera S. el-Malik is Professor of International Studies at DePaul University in Chicago. She teaches and writes on themes of coloniality, politics, and theory. Her research is guided by an interest in the intersection of politics of knowledge and lived experience, particularly in... Read More →

V'cenza Cirefice

Marta Cook

Marta Cook is a researcher, writer, and widely recognized as one of the foremost harpists in Irish traditional music. Her article Subjects of Tradition: Cultural Construction and Irish Comprador Capitalism appeared in Irish Studies Review Volume 32, 2024. Her work on cultural extractivism... Read More →

Fawn E. Pochel

Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
TBA

Science and Tech

1:30pm CDT

Letter Writing to Incarcerated Comrades

Saturday September 5, 2026 1:30pm - 3:00pm CDT

Do you want to build connections with imprisoned comrades, but don’t know where to start? Spend your lunch hour learning the political importance of and best practices for letter writing to prisoners. Participants will have the opportunity to write postcards and letters during the session with guidance and support from formerly imprisoned people. Bring a friend, or two!

Saturday September 5, 2026 1:30pm - 3:00pm CDT

Abolition

1:30pm CDT

Socialist Horizon Meet-up

Saturday September 5, 2026 1:30pm - 3:00pm CDT

TBA

Socialist Horizon is an independent class struggle organization with branches and members across the U.S. Socialist Horizon is a member of the United Left Platform and is the U.S. section of the International Socialist League. Socialist Horizon meet-up with conference attendees will discuss the group's political orientation and collaboration with other Socialist groups, as well as prospects for mass organizing and socialist intervention in the coming year.

Saturday September 5, 2026 1:30pm - 3:00pm CDT
TBA

Meet-up

3:00pm CDT

Land and Abolition

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT

TBA

Based in concrete struggles throughout what Milton Santos provocatively called “used territory,” this talk traces abolition's emergence as an aspirational totality sprouting from cracks in urbanization and agrarian upheavals.

Speakers

Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, and American Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, USA. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental... Read More →

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
TBA

Abolition

3:00pm CDT

Solidarity Across the Walls and Beyond: Conversation on Inside/Outside Collaborations

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT

TBA

This session is an invitation for abolitionist organizers on the outside to take steps to ensure imprisoned people are part of the movement to abolish the prison industrial complex. Join formerly imprisoned educators and organizers Stevie Wilson and James Kilgore for a conversation on the importance and potential of genuine collaborations between people in prison and their comrades on the outside. This session will also feature reflections from two members of the 9971 abolitionist study group who are currently imprisoned at SCI Dallas in Pennsylvania.

Speakers

Nick Brown

Eddy Fletcher

James Kilgore

Mon Mohapatra

Mon Mohapatra (Community Justice Exchange)

Stevie Wilson

Sponsors

Community Justice Exchange

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
TBA

Abolition

3:00pm CDT

Ocean Deep Solidarity: Reparations, LANDBACK, and Collective Liberation

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT

TBA

As capitalism and empire intensify crises this panel explores how Black and Indigenous struggles for land, reparations, and sovereignty are braided to challenge structural power. Drawing on BLIS Collective research with RISE (Research for Indigenous Social Action and Equity) Center, we examine coordinated organizing, narrative, and strategy for liberated futures.

Speakers

Dr. Aymar Jean Escoffery

Dr. Aymar Jean "AJ" Escoffery (fka Aymar Jean Christian) is the Margaret Walker Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University, Faculty Director of the MS in Leadership for Creative Enterprises, and Faculty Associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center... Read More →

Matthew Harvey

Matthew Harvey is a father, media literacy educator, and award-winning writer born-and-raised in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood. His career is dedicated to empowering communities through access to information, and connecting people through storytelling. He spent nearly a decade as... Read More →

Claire Maracle

Claire Maracle is a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, raised as a guest on Muscogee, Osage, and Cherokee land. This experience directly informs their work in rematriation and their conviction that language is the key to transcending displacement... Read More →

Justin Morgan

Justin Morgan (he/him) is the Applied Narrative Research Analyst at the BLIS Collective. He is a doctoral candidate at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he researches the convergence of health equity, participatory research, community power, and politics. Justin... Read More →

Raven Schwam-Curtis

Raven Schwam-Curtis (they/she) makes disappeared histories visible through accessible education. As a Black, Jewish, and queer educator, Raven’s work emerges from the intersections where communities overlap, clash, and must find common ground. After earning degrees from Cornell... Read More →

Sponsors

BLIS Collective

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
TBA

Anti-colonial Politics

3:00pm CDT

Printing the Revolution: The Role of Art in Organizing and Building Community Resistance

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT

TBA

Speakers

Dio Cramer

Ricardo Levins Morales

Sponsors

Pilsen Community Books

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
TBA

Culture and Art

3:00pm CDT

Resisting Attacks on Schools, from Gaza to Chicago

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT

TBA

This panel looks at K-12 schools as sites of imperial violence and attacks on knowledge, including scholasticide in Palestine and repression in the U.S. Demystifying the Anti-Defamation League’s assaults on antiracist teaching, this session grounds us in the knowledge needed to organize our schools — for Palestine, against racism, and with our communities.

Speakers

Emmaia Gelman

Emmaia Gelman is the author of The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State (UC Press, 2026) and co-editor of The Anti-Defamation League: A Critical Reader (Pluto Press, 2026). She is the director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.

Nora Lester Murad

Nora Lester Murad is a writer and activist. She is the author of the award-winning young adult novel, Ida in the Middle, editor of I Found Myself in Palestine (2020) and co-author of Rest in My Shade (2018). Nora writes commentary for outlets including Mondoweiss, The New Arab, Markaz... Read More →

T

TBD

Sponsors

Chicago Educators for Palestine

DropTheADL from Schools

Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
TBA

Education Justice

3:00pm CDT

Funding Until It’s Free: Building a Movement for Tomorrow While Fundraising for Today

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT

TBA

A conversation with members of direct aid funds in Chicago discussing strategies related to fundraising for and providing direct services in our times. A conversation reflecting on charity vs solidarity and ways to fight for and build a better world while meeting people’s needs now.

Moderators

Mary Coleman

Speakers

Lawrence Koval

Qudsiyyah Shariyf

Em Gonzalez

Sponsors

Chicago For Abortion Rights

Lux

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
TBA

Gender-Sexuality-Liberation

3:00pm CDT

Trans Care in the Age of Health Fascism (Health Fascism Series)

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT

TBA

The struggle over trans healthcare is one of the clearest expressions of how medicine, incarceration, and borders are intertwined. As the US and Britain increasingly govern through prohibition, austerity, and criminalization, the reach of policing and punishment has rapidly expanded—both inside and outside the prison walls. Vicky Osterweil, S. Lamble, and Beatrice Adler-Bolton will discuss the carcerality of the anti-trans panic, its centrality to health fascism, and what abolition can teach us about defending care beyond the limits of the state.

Speakers

Beatrice Adler-Bolton

Beatrice Adler-Bolton is a disabled and chronically ill agitator and independent researcher. She is the co-author of Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto (Verso, 2022) and a co-host of the Death Panel podcast.

S. Lamble

Lamble is a community organizer and Professor of Criminology and Queer Theory at Birkbeck, University of London, and the author of Unsafe: The Carceral Roots of the Anti-Trans Backlash. Their work explores questions of gender, sexuality, and justice with a focus on feminist and abolitionist... Read More →

Vicky Osterweil

Vicky Osterweil is a Philadelphia-based writer, agitator, and worker and the author of The Extended Universe and In Defense of Looting. She is a member of the anarchist journal CAW and has written about the intersections of film, politics, and culture for publications such as The... Read More →

Sponsors

Death Panel

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
TBA

Health Politics & Disability Justice

3:00pm CDT

Connecting with Coworkers to Form Your Union

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT

TBA

Trying to organize your workplace? Want to learn how to have conversations that move people to action? Join the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) for a training on tried and true methods of organizing: how to build relationships, ask good questions, and bring your coworkers in to join the campaign.

Speakers

AK Alilonu

Araya Barnes

Atulya Dora-Laskey

Rumin Sarwar

Dawn Tefft

Sponsors

EWOC

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
TBA

Labor Movement

3:00pm CDT

All Socialism, No Government: An Introduction to Anarchist Theory and Strategy

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT

TBA

Anarchism is often the least understood branch of socialism. Anarchists walk a revolutionary path separate from the brutality of state systems, whether social democratic or Stalinist. Join us to discuss how anarchists are organizing and building toward a directly democratic world without capitalism, the state, and systemic oppression.

Speakers

Heb Braggs

Heb Braggs is a writer, artist, and organizer in Chicago, Illinois.

Ben Eager

Ben Eager is an independent academic and activist in Chicago, Illinois.

Jeremy Jewitt

Jeremy Jewitt is a tenant organizer in Chicago, Illinois.

Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso

Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso is a law student, organizer, and writer in Queens, New York City

Sponsors

Black Rose / Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
TBA

Left Strategy

3:00pm CDT

Black Left Feminism and the Fight Against Fascism: Lessons and Assignments

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT

TBA

Speakers

Barbara Ransby

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
TBA

Left Strategy

3:00pm CDT

How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT

TBA

Masked federal agents are kidnapping and killing our neighbors, on the streets and behind the bars of hundreds of detention centers across the country. In spite of the decades-long growth of immigrant detention, communities have been fighting back against camps—and winning. Join award-winning journalist and translator John Washington and community advocate Johannes Favi as they discuss the community-led fights to shut down these camps.

Speakers

John Washington

John Washington is a journalist covering the border, climate change, democracy, and more. He has written for The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Intercept, and other outlets. He is the author of The Case for Open Borders and The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum... Read More →

Johannes Favi

Johannes Favi is a nationally recognized community leader, human rights advocate, and founder of Caged Dreams, a nonprofit organization advancing healing, leadership, and educational opportunity for immigrant communities. His work bridges lived experience, public policy, and community engagement... Read More →

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
TBA

Migrant Justice

3:00pm CDT

Bridging the Gap: Building Intergenerational Organizing Power

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT

TBA

This pop-ed skills share will explore ways to build strong intergenerational organizing by challenging adultism and reimagining what shared leadership can look like. Together, we'll explore the transition from youth to young adult organizing, unpack how adultist perspectives can be unintentionally reproduced, and discuss how we can build movements rooted in trust, collaboration, and shared power.

Speakers

Essence-Jade Gatheright

Essence-Jade Gatheright is a CFS Youth Organizer

Mari Lee

Mari Lee is a CFS High School Youth Organizer

Sponsors

Chicago Freedom School

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
TBA

Organizing

3:00pm CDT

The Revolutionary Legacies and Lineages of Grace Lee Boggs

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT

TBA

This workshop is an introduction to the life and thoughts of this Detroit-based Chinese-US American labor organizer, Black Power activist, and leftist Asian American icon. We will explore how her revolutionary legacy continues to inform visionary projects in Detroit and global movements. Drawing from the lessons I’ve learned over two summers in Detroit, together we will envision what a visionary, place-based, relational organizing could look like for your local context.

Speakers

Lily Luo

Dr. Lily Luo is a scholar, organizer, and artist based in New York City and working at the University of Connecticut. She recently successfully defended her dissertation titled “Learning to Transform: The Revolutionary Legacies and Lineages of Grace Lee Boggs” at the University... Read More →

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
TBA

Radical History

3:00pm CDT

How the Left Takes on AI Will Determine the Future

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT

TBA

How we respond to AI may define the next decade of organizing. This debate, originally featured at Take Back Tech III, stages opposing perspectives on whether to seize control of or abolish AI systems. Designed to model principled disagreement and sharpen strategic thinking on technology, ownership, and power.

Speakers

Sasha Costanza-Chock

Sasha Costanza-Chock (she/they/ella/elle) is a researcher and designer who works to support community-led processes that build shared power, dismantle the matrix of domination, and advance ecological survival. They are a nonbinary trans* femme. Sasha is known for their work on networked... Read More →

Sarah Hamid

Sarah T. Hamid is Director of Strategic Campaigns at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She brings over a decade of experience as a community organizer working at the intersection of technology, warfare, and punishment-based criminal and border systems. In 2018, she co-founded the... Read More →

Tawana Petty

Tawana Petty, also known by her poetry stage name Honeycomb, is a mother, social justice organizer, poet, author, facilitator and keynote lecturer.

Petty is the founding Executive Director of Petty Propolis, Inc., an artist incubator which leverages poetry, literary and literacy workshops, anti-racism facilitation, political education and community-centered initiatives in pursuit of data and digital justice and racial and environmental... Read More →

Edith Romero

Edith Romero is originally from Honduras; she grew up in a banana town in the north coast of Honduras and moved to New Orleans to begin her higher education. Edith holds a Master’s in Healthcare Management and has experience in community health, Latinx health, reproductive justice... Read More →

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
TBA

Science and Tech

3:00pm CDT

Propaganda Printmaking

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT

TBA

From the Reformation through the modern day, printmaking has served as a powerful tool of political propaganda. In this workshop, participants will be inspired by a brief history of eye-catching works of social justice printmaking, and will learn the process of making a relief print on paper or fabric to express a political message.

Speakers

Danielle Bullock

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
TBA

Skill Sharing

3:00pm CDT

Political Education 3: Slavery, Colonialism, and Primitive Accumulation

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT

TBA

Capitalism has never been just an economic system, but has instead always relied on the use of violence, law, and the state in a process Marx described as "so-called primitive accumulation," which reaches its height in colonialism and slavery. This participatory workshop will provide an introduction to this concept and its ongoing relevance, and guide a collective mapping of its relevance for the present.

Speakers

Geo Maher

Chris Rogers

Ant Smith

Sponsors

B-REAL

Center for Political Education

W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School

Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
TBA

Socialist and Marxist Theory

5:00pm CDT

Fighting the Surveillance Apparatus: Connecting ALPRs to Larger Networks of Policing & How to Build Past Them

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT

TBA

Panel discussion to contextualize the current anti-surveillance organizing landscape & build momentum towards utilizing local budget fights to take back resources currently going to policing/surveillance. Afterwards facilitators will lead a workshop so folks can connect across regions and build towards an anti-alpr or budget campaign.

Speakers

Austin Kral

Austin Kral (he/him) is an abolitionist organizer and geographer based in Atlanta. He is a member of Southerners Against Surveillance Systems & Infrastructure and the Atlanta Abolition Research Collective.

Tynetta Hill-Muhammad

Tynetta Hill-Muhammad (they/them) is an MPH candidate in the Community Health Sciences division at the School of Public Health and works on projects centered on policy and public health initiatives that aim to create meaningful impacts for Black, queer, and women communities, in particular... Read More →

Navjot Heer

Navjot Heer (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist and organizer of south asian-panjabi immigrant descent whose work spans architecture, urban planning, design, oral history, and more. they have supported local and national abolitionist campaigns, such as stop shotspotter in chicago... Read More →

nat palmer

Breanna Champion

Sponsors

Lucy Parsons Lab

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT
TBA

Abolition

5:00pm CDT

Prison Papers in Action: Activating Archives with Walls Turned Sideways

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT

TBA

Join Walls Turned Sideways to learn about their current exhibition, Prison Papers: Organizing Inside/Outside Solidarity. We will do a brief presentation about the history of the penal press, solidarity publishing, and the legacy of print media as a tool for organizing across walls. This will be followed by small group readings and discussions of publications such as No More Cages, Prison News Service, Anarchist Black Dragon, The Abolitionist, and others and a hands-on collage activity!

Speakers

Mira Simonton-Chao

Carlos Ayala

Sponsors

Walls Turned Sideways

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT
TBA

Abolition

5:00pm CDT

Building the People's Embargo for Palestine: Strategy, Assessment, and the Path to Freedom During the Time of Genocide

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT

TBA

Last year, the Palestinian Youth Movement launched the People’s Embargo for Palestine (PEP), a grassroots campaign uniting the international movement for arms embargo under a single banner: by intervening in the weapons supply chain, we can stop the genocide on Gaza. Sharing powerful campaign lessons from the U.S., and Europe, this session will share key insights into the PEP’s strategy and framework while equipping participants on how to identify local targets and take on PEP in their locales.

Speakers

T

TBD

Sponsors

Palestinian Youth Movement

People's Embargo for Palestine

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT
TBA

Anti-colonial Politics

5:00pm CDT

War, Capitalism, and Navigating the Climate Crisis

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT

TBA

We are all living through the most severe ecological crisis in human history, and it can feel overwhelming, disorienting, and hopeless. A vision of a just future seems even more out of reach as capitalism and war continue to dominate the world order. What are we to do? Can our problems be solved politically? Will green energy save us? How can we remain steadfast in the face of an economy dominated by Big Oil, Big Tech, and militarism? In this discussion, prominent climate activist Tori Tsui and journalist Joshua Frank will explore what's at stake and how and why the broader climate movement must think and organize to confront these persistent and daunting challenges.

Speakers

Joshua Frank

Joshua Frank is co-editor of CounterPunch and co-host of CounterPunch Radio. He is the author of Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, and the forthcoming, Bad Energy: The AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who are Selling Off... Read More →

Tori Tsui

Tori Tsui is an environmental activist, author, and climate advisor originally from Hong Kong. She is a senior advisor for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty and a campaigner for the Stop Rosebank coalition. Her work has been featured in British Vogue, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan... Read More →

Sponsors

CounterPunch

Pilsen Community Books

Science for the People

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT
TBA

Climate Justice

5:00pm CDT

The US and China: Imperial Rivalry in a Multipolar World

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT

TBA

“Chimerica” is over. The twin titans of neoliberal globalization are now at loggerheads over everything from trade to high tech, geopolitical alliances, and military hegemony over the Asia Pacific. Today’s global slump, exacerbated by Trump’s disastrous war in Iran, has heightened this imperial rivalry. This panel will examine the roots of the conflict, its trajectory, and how the left can build international solidarity from below against it.

Speakers

Tobita Chow

Tobita Chow is an organizer based in the Chicago area. He researches progressive strategy, great power conflict, and international climate politics. Tobita was the founding Director of Justice is Global.

Ashley Smith

Ashley Smith is co-author of China in Global Capitalism and has written in numerous publications including Truthout, New Politics, Against the Current, and many other online and print publications.

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT
TBA

Economics

5:00pm CDT

They Called Us Non-Compliant: The (Sedated) History of Psychiatric Resistance

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT

TBA

Drawing on the history of psychiatric survivor movements, specific acts of resistance, and the long use of pathology narratives to discredit organizers across liberation movements, this session explores: how do we recognize psychiatric resistance when we've been trained not to see it? And what does solidarity look like once we do?

Speakers

Sarah Broas

Sarah Broas (they/them) is a white, queer, Disabled and Mad careworker. They are a writer, artist, advocate, and organizer focusing on Mad Liberation and psychiatric abolition. Their own experiences of psychiatric survivorship guide their approach, vision, and practice of community-based... Read More →

Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu

Stefanie Lyn Kaufman Mthimkhulu (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... Read More →

Heena Sharma

Heena Sharma (they/she) is a nonbinary, disabled, mentally ill South Asian lesbian striving towards abolitionist futures that center survivors of violence. A lifelong New Yorker, Heena has worked on the margins of decolonial political education, radical accompaniment and solidarity... Read More →

Sponsors

Project LETS

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT
TBA

Health Politics & Disability Justice

5:00pm CDT

“As Goes the South”: Building Multiracial Working-Class Solidarity in the South for a Socialist Future

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT

TBA

As W.E.B. DuBois said “As goes the South, so goes the nation.” Ruling class and authoritarian forces have always prioritized organizing the South as a way to hold power over the entire nation. If we are to defeat authoritarianism and win a socialist future, we must organize a multiracial working-class base in the South.

Speakers

Beth Howard

Beth Howard is the Cultural Strategist for Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), the largest national organization bringing white people into the fight for racial and economic justice. She grew up in a rural white working-class community in Eastern Kentucky and has organized in the... Read More →

Chris Kutalik

Chris Kutalik, a native Texan, is the former Democratic Socialists of America communications director, transit union officer, and editor/director of Labor Notes. He currently works as Showing Up for Racial Justice communications director and is (busy) father of four.

Jerome Scott

Jerome Scott was a labor organizer in the auto plants of Detroit in the 1960s-’70s, and a member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. As a community organizer, popular educator and author in the South since the 1970s, he was a founding member and former director of Project... Read More →

Sponsors

SURJ

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT
TBA

Left Strategy

5:00pm CDT

Movement Lawyering in Times of Retrenchment

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT

TBA

Using lessons from "Lawyering for Liberation: A Toolbox for Movement Lawyers", this session explores how lawyers can support and sustain powerful movements, emphasizing the importance of power building and radical imagining in today’s context. As we face unique threats posed by growing authoritarianism, this need has never been more urgent.

Speakers

Leena Odeh

Leena Odeh, Exec. Director, First Defense Legal Aid

Christian Snow

Christian Snow, Exec. Director, Law 4 Black Lives (L4BL)

Morgan Wilson

Morgan Wilson, Partnerships Director, L4BL

Sponsors

Law 4 Black Lives

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT
TBA

Left Strategy

5:00pm CDT

The People's Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT

TBA

Radical historian Howard Zinn changed the way Americans think about their history, but his life itself is a lesson in radical commitment. From the Great Depression to WWII to the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam war, he was part and parcel of the social movements that shaped our world. Join Dave Zirin, author of a new critically-praised book about Howard Zinn’s incredible life and author and actor Brian Jones (who played Marx in Zinn’s one man play ‘Marx in Soho’) for a conversation about the life of Howard Zinn and what his vision and work mean today.

Speakers

Brian Jones

Brian Jones is the author of Black History Is for Everyone

Dave Zirin

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT
TBA

Radical History

5:00pm CDT

The Young Lords Speak: Building Revolution on the Streets of Chicago

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT

TBA

In their field jackets and signature purple berets, the Young Lords mobilized their community for liberation and against gentrification, poverty, racism, and police brutality. Join historian Jacqueline Lazu and Chicago 33rd Ward Alderperson Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez as they explore how the Young Lords grew into one of the most dynamic revolutionary community organizations of the late 1960s and early ’70s.

Speakers

Jacqueline Lazú

Jacqueline Lazú is a professor of Spanish and Latin American studies at DePaul University and the author of numerous scholarly articles on the Young Lords in Chicago.

Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT
TBA

Radical History

5:00pm CDT

When Socialists Turned to the Factory Floor

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT

TBA

In 1971 the International Socialists relocated the organization's center to Detroit and pivoted its priority activity to organizing in industry. The experiences of IS members who "industrialized" provided lesdsons that remain highly relevant for socialists in today's workplaces, unions and rank and file movements.

Speakers

Candace Cohen

Jack Weinberg

Sponsors

Solidarity

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT
TBA

Radical History

5:00pm CDT

Spirit of Justice

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT

TBA

What is freedom struggle beyond resisting political systems and improving material conditions? This program, organized by Spirit of Justice - a new spiritual home outside of traditional religion for people committed to freedom - explores this question. Through live music, collective ritual, artistic expression, and intimate dialogue, we will celebrate, grieve, and be inspired to not only change the world but to transform ourselves.

Speakers

nyle fort

Michelle Alexander

Rami Nashashibi

Sponsors

Spirit of Justice

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT
TBA

Religion & Spirituality

5:00pm CDT

The False Choice Between Identity Politics and Class Struggle

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT

TBA

Does building mass political coalitions against the right require us to abandon issues specific to minorities of the population? For many centrists and even some on the left, such a sacrifice has become the new common sense. But history and on-the-ground organizing show a left that ignores the differences within the working class will never build power.

Speakers

Mike McCarthy

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT
TBA

Socialist and Marxist Theory

5:00pm CDT

Standing Up to the National Security State: Collective Defense against Political Repression

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT

TBA

This panel brings together movement targets of Trump Administration repression and representatives of defense committee from the Minnesota 15, the Michigan 9, the Committee to Defend Tom Alter, and the Prairieland defendants. The panel will reflect the urgent need for a massive national, broad-based defense effort that can push back the regime’s offensive on political rights. The discussion will be followed by an organizing meeting that can involve new forces who can take these campaigns back to local areas and hold meetings, host fundraisers, and systematically seek the support of unions, faith organizations, and community groups.

Speakers

Tom Alter

T

TBD

Sponsors

United Left Platform

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT
TBA

US Politics

5:00pm CDT

Who Moves America: Film Screening and Discussion

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 7:00pm CDT

TBA

As the deadline for a historic strike looms, UPS workers across the country navigate the challenges of building solidarity with their 340,000 co-workers. Feature documentary Who Moves America joins Teamsters in New York, California, and Kentucky. Join us for a conversation with Teamsters organizer Antonio Rosario.

Speakers

Yael Bridge

Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm - 7:00pm CDT
TBA

Labor Movement

6:30pm CDT

Abolitionist Zine Writing Workshop

Saturday September 5, 2026 6:30pm - 8:00pm CDT

Join the Jail Solidarity Network, an inside-outside organizing project in Chicago, for this zine-writing workshop. You’ll be invited to read testimony from people jailed in Cook County and then respond with art that we’ll compile into a zine for insiders. You’ll also have the opportunity to connect with mutual aid organizations in the area organizing against jailing.

Saturday September 5, 2026 6:30pm - 8:00pm CDT

Abolition

6:30pm CDT

Songs for Liberation

Saturday September 5, 2026 6:30pm - 8:00pm CDT

Songs for Liberation is a Chicago protest music collective that sings at protests, fundraisers and community events. They were formed in response to the genocide in Gaza, and for several months were the "house band" on Friday mornings at anti-ICE protests in Broadview. Hear the collective sing, and stick around afterwards to discuss how to duplicate our model!

Saturday September 5, 2026 6:30pm - 8:00pm CDT

Culture and Art

6:30pm CDT

United Left Platform Meet-up

Saturday September 5, 2026 6:30pm - 8:00pm CDT

TBA

The United Left Platform, a coalition of six U.S.-based Socialist groups (Tempest, Solidarity, Workers’ Voice, Speak Out Socialists, International Marxist Humanist Organization, Socialist Horizon) was founded at the 2025 Socialism Conference in Chicago. The ULP has worked over this past year to create a non-sectarian space for socialist organizing, self-defense, and political intervention. The ULP meet-up will share its accomplishments and hold a public conversation with conference attendees about prospects for building out a broader space for mass organizing and socialist intervention in the coming year.

Saturday September 5, 2026 6:30pm - 8:00pm CDT
TBA

Meet-up

8:00pm CDT

Neighbors Get Ready: Forging New Solidarities and Defeating ICE

Saturday September 5, 2026 8:00pm - 9:30pm CDT

TBA

When ICE goose-stepped into our cities to raid and terrorize, regular people from all walks of life forged new solidarities to throw them out. Join activists from the front lines of the struggle to defend our neighbors for a plenary on getting organized and ready for what’s coming.

Speakers

Silky Shah

Silky Shah has been working as an organizer on issues related to racial and migrant justice for over two decades. Originally from Texas, she began fighting the expansion of immigrant jails on the US-Mexico border in the aftermath of 9/11. In 2009, she joined the staff of Detention Watch Network... Read More →

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TBD

Saturday September 5, 2026 8:00pm - 9:30pm CDT
TBA

Migrant Justice