Socialism 2026: Full Schedule

2:30pm CDT

Sing, Struggle, Organize: Movement Songs, Political Education, and Collective Power

Friday September 4, 2026 2:30pm - 4:00pm CDT

From picket lines to protest movements, songs have always been weapons of struggle. This interactive workshop teaches movement songs while unpacking their histories and political function, showing how culture builds consciousness, collective identity, and power. Participants will actively practice using culture as a tool for organizing.

Speakers

Steff Reed

Steff Reed is an award-winning musician, cultural organizer, scholar, and liberation theologian whose work uses music and faith as tools to build cultural resistance, political consciousness, and collective liberation. Reed is a GRAMMY-nominated music educator whose collaborations... Read More →

Friday September 4, 2026 2:30pm - 4:00pm CDT
Jackson Park C

Culture and Art

4:30pm CDT

Introduction to Theatre of the Oppressed

Friday September 4, 2026 4:30pm - 6:00pm CDT

Jackson Park C

Play Time! Brazilian Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed provoked director Augusto Boal to develop the Theatre of the Oppressed. He wanted a theatre that the working class could use as community building and as a weapon for revolution. This workshop invites all to participate in TO’s very fun game structures that create instant working relationships. No experience in performance or theatre is required.

Speakers

Douglas Paterson

Friday September 4, 2026 4:30pm - 6:00pm CDT
Jackson Park C

Culture and Art

10:00am CDT

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

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

Jackson Park C

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
Jackson Park C

US Politics

12:00pm CDT

State Fiscal Strategy for the 21st Century: Dispatches from New York's New Era

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

Jackson Park C

Working-class priorities are reshaping fiscal policy across America’s cities, prompting urgent debates on state and municipal budgets. Join representatives from New York’s Fiscal Policy Institute to discuss the fiscal issues confronting movement advocates and elected officials in New York State and New York City, from expanding revenue through taxing the rich to countering misinfomation about millionaire tax 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 →

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

Economics

1:30pm CDT

Socialist Horizon Meet-up

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

Jackson Park C

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
Jackson Park C

Meet-up

3:00pm CDT

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

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

Jackson Park C

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
Jackson Park C

Health Politics & Disability Justice

5:00pm CDT

The US and China: Imperial Rivalry in a Multipolar World

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

Jackson Park C

“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
Jackson Park C

Economics

6:30pm CDT

United Left Platform Meet-up

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

Jackson Park C

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
Jackson Park C

Meet-up

10:00am CDT

Protecting Our Own: Shifting from State Intervention to Community Care in Crisis Times

Sunday September 6, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

Jackson Park C

ICE agents are using family separation tactics central to US state violence. In this interactive workshop on "family policing" participants will examine real-world manifestations and analyze emerging resistance strategies. Workshop will share the tools to build a paradigm shift from "mandated reporting"—which fuels state intrusion—to "mandated supporting.”

Speakers

jaboa lake

jaboa lake phd, is a sister, auntie, neighbor, former foster youth, organizer, and liberation researcher. jaboa’s work has centered liberation of oppressed people and solidarity across movements through using research as a tactic within grassroots strategies. jaboa’s work has... Read More →

Erica Meiners

A writer, an educator and an organizer, Erica R. Meiners lives in Chicago and works with others on a range of ongoing mobilizations for liberation.

Shannon Perez-Darby

Shannon Perez-Darby is a founding member of the Accountable Communities Consortium and a member of the Mandatory Reporting is Not Neutral core group. Shannon Perez-Darby centers queer and trans communities of color while working to address issues of domestic and sexual violence... Read More →

Sunday September 6, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
Jackson Park C

Left Strategy

12:00pm CDT

Psychic Militancy

Sunday September 6, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT

Jackson Park C

This talk argues that in the face of accelerating fascism, we need to take seriously that our psyche is contested space, learn to track psychic intrusions that aim to settle and reconfigure our psychic province and interiority, and most importantly, learn to remain antagonistic to this violence through psychic militancy. Lara Sheehi discusses her new book to distill the mechanics of psychic militancy and how we might engage in refusals against these intrusions and their politically demobilizing work.

Speakers

Lara Sheehi

Lara Sheehi is a Research Fellow at the University of South Africa's Institute for Social and Health Sciences, a licensed clinical psychologist, and the host of the Psychic Militancy podcast. Lara’s work focuses on psychoanalysis, the psychic refusals central to liberation struggles... Read More →

Sponsors

Pluto Press

Sunday September 6, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
Jackson Park C

Left Strategy

10:00am CDT

The Left and the National Question: Building Solidarity without Exception

Monday September 7, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

Jackson Park C

Imperialist powers from the US to Russia and China oppress nations and national minorities. That reality has put question of the left and the right of oppressed nations to self-determination back on the table. How can the left practice solidarity without exception from Palestine to Ukraine, oppose all great powers, and build internationalism from below?

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 →

Socialism 2026

2:30pm CDT

Steff Reed

4:30pm CDT

Douglas Paterson

10:00am CDT

Beth Howard

Jerome Scott

12:00pm CDT

Elizabeth Cooper

Ciarán Finlayson

1:30pm CDT

3:00pm CDT

Beatrice Adler-Bolton

S. Lamble

Vicky Osterweil

Death Panel

5:00pm CDT

Tobita Chow

Ashley Smith

6:30pm CDT

10:00am CDT

jaboa lake

Erica Meiners

Shannon Perez-Darby

12:00pm CDT

Lara Sheehi

Pluto Press

10:00am CDT

Eman Abdelhadi

Reza Rezaian

Simón Rodríguez

Tanya Vyhovksy

The Ukraine Soilidarity Network (US)

Get help with the event