Socialism 2026: Full Schedule

10:00am CDT

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

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 a journalist, scholar, organizer, and professor at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He is the host and creator of Unruly Subjects, produced with Rowhome Productions. Through conversations with organizers, journalists, artists, and scholars, Unruly... 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
W190B

Economics

12:00pm CDT

Revolutionary Socialism from Below: Strategies to Build the Resistance

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

W190B

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
W190B

Left Strategy

3:00pm CDT

Land and Abolition

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

W190B

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
W190B

Abolition

12:00pm CDT

Unsafe: The Carceral Roots of the Anti-Trans Backlash

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

W190B

The 21st century “gender wars” have been driven by a powerful and seductive narrative: that safety can be secured through exclusion, surveillance, and the policing of difference. These punitive logics have gained momentum across the political spectrum, fueling an anti-trans backlash and distorting the meaning of safety itself. Join S. Lamble and Sophie Lewis as they challenge the toxic ideas at the heart of this backlash, and put forward a vision of safety built on collective care and radical solidarity.

Speakers

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 →

Sophie Lewis

Sophie Lewis is a writer, utopian, feminist, and ex-academic scholar based in Philadelphia, hailing originally from the UK, France, and Germany. She is the author of Femmephilia, Enemy Feminisms, Abolish the Family, and Full Surrogacy Now. Lewis’s essays and articles appear routinely... Read More →

Sunday September 6, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
W190B

Gender-Sexuality-Liberation

3:00pm CDT

Care Networks, Abolition, and the Fight Against Border Policing (Health Fascism Series)

Sunday September 6, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT

W190B

Our violent border regimes produce illness, debility, and death while destroying the relationships that people rely on to survive. Families are separated, communities destabilized, and care networks fractured through the constant threat of detention. Silky Shah and A. Naomi Paik discuss border policing as a counterinsurgent attack on health, and how to defend and rebuild collective care in an era of escalating state repression and criminalization, from Prarieland, to the Minnesota 15, to the US State Department’s call for a new Red Scare.

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.

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 →

A. Naomi Paik

A. Naomi Paik is the author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the 21st Century and Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II. She revised and updated Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror for Young People... Read More →

Sponsors

Death Panel

Sunday September 6, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
W190B

Health Politics & Disability Justice

5:00pm CDT

Socialism Beats Fascism: Organizing for a Post-Trump America

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

W190B

Against Trump, how can we keep building antiwar and migrant rights movements? As social forces grow in the US behind the May Day movement, No Kings protests, and Minnesota’s general strike against ICE, what will it take to keep building movements from the streets to transform our whole political landscape?

Speakers

Griffin Mahon

Griffin Mahon is a DC-based union organizer and a cochair of DSA's National Labor Commission. 

Eleanor Babaev

Eleanor Babaev is a member of DSA’s National Political Committee from NYC, and chair of the DSA’s Trump Admin Response Committee.

Bol B

Bol is Political Action Coordinator of Twin Cities DSA. He has been a long time labor and electoral organizer in the Twin Cities area, and a DSA member since 2018.

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 →

Sponsors

DSA

Sunday September 6, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT
W190B

Fighting the Right

10:00am CDT

12:00pm CDT

3:00pm CDT

12:00pm CDT

3:00pm CDT

5:00pm CDT

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