The sickness and silliness of modern ‘socialism’

An annual conference organised by radical publisher Haymarket Books has just taken place, under the banner of socialism. In the aftermath, X was soon awash with scornful posts lambasting participants for both their ostentatiously ugly personal presentation and their outlandish ‘politics’.

Tickets for the three-day event – Socialism 2026 – went for up to $500 a pop for the ‘sustainer rate’ (discounts were also available). And it was held at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Chicago, a four-star hotel that boasts a ‘creative land-and-sea menu with sustainable seafood and prime cuts’, ‘unparalleled views of downtown Chicago’ and 24 flat-screen televisions in its restaurants and bars. The hotel chain’s parent corporation, run by the politically powerful Pritzker family, has a market cap of $15.6 billion.

Ahem. Rosa Luxemburg would like a word. This ain’t your granddad’s working men’s club socialism, that’s for sure.

‘The political deployment of GLP-1s is fascistic’, Da’Shaun L. Harrison – a fat man in a face mask – informed the audience about popular weight-loss drugs like Ozempic. ‘Not because the individuals take them, but because the conditions under which they become necessary are shaped by a world fixated on genociding fat people.’ Okay, fattie. But the only people surveilling you are the food marketers.

In contemporary socialism, it is perfectly fine – nay, encouraged – to simply invent scenarios, like a genocide of fat people, out of whole cloth and then pretend to be a martyr for them.

Make no mistake, these activists are not representing the streets or the tower blocks of housing estates. They are representing the halls of academia. Harrison gave the game away when he namechecked prominent academic Frantz Fanon and his ‘account of black flesh under colonial surveillance’.

Perhaps my favourite part of the conference was when bearded lady Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg spouted unintelligible gobbledegook about ‘expressions of the divine emerging from movement work’ while a co-panelist solemnly intoned that, in Minneapolis, ‘sites of state murder’ have become ‘sites of continuous ritual’. Me neither.

Socialism 2026 was a non-stop showcase for the fetishisation of victimhood. Organisers informed attendees that they would be expected to wear masks because it was the compassionate response to holding a large gathering of people ‘at a time when Covid is spiking’.

Anything that is good, like say, getting better after being unwell, is now recast by the left as a bad thing. Even universal healthcare, apparently. One speaker, ‘Rev’ Jinzu Minna Jain, warned her fellow leftists against slipping into ‘health fascism when we talk about healing’. ‘We have to be really careful about what healing actually means and what we’re offering’, she said. Got that?

Allow me to explain: in her telling, instead of getting well, people need ‘collective support’ while ‘sitting with the cracks’, ‘sitting with the bones’ and ‘sitting with the horror’ of debilitating illnesses. What ‘we’re offering’, it seems, is the chance to remain a perpetual victim, useless to capitalist society and a drain on its resources, forever. Sounds like a plan, commies!

This was further spelt out by another panelist, who said, ‘We have to give up the fantasy of being “fitter than the fascists”’. Why? Because the socialists’ task is ‘not to become more useful to the ruling order’. Nor is it ‘to beat the fascists at their own game on their own territory, by being fitter, more eugenic – in fact, the more dysgenic the better’.

This new dogma is reflected in a lot of social-media discourse. The word ‘dysgenic’ comes up a lot in both left-wing circles and the right-wingers who watch them. It is a core element of this new version of left-wing politics, where books with names like The Queer Art of Failure are taught at Columbia University (yearly tuition for undergrad $72,800; including housing, it goes up to a whopping $99,700). All so that poor, troll-like, little rich kids can sit around stuffing their faces and screeching about capitalism and valorising failure and ill-health, while uber-successful private-equity mummies and daddies pay all their bills. Welcome to Socialism in 2026.

The truly objectionable thing about this is that this version of left-wing politics has totally replaced genuine grassroots, working-class, trade-union and solidarity movements. This is a zombie social movement that wears the skin of working-class struggle, but actually stands against everything actual working-class culture used to pride itself on: hard work, faith, fairness, family. All of those things are deemed ‘far right’ now.

These spoilt, navel-gazing children of privilege have stolen left-wing representation from the working classes. They even have the audacity to paint normal folk as extremists – for simply being in touch with reality and having the correct amount of scorn for delusional ideologues who say things like men can have babies, or that nations should not have borders.

I have long since abandoned the socialist ideas I flirted with in my youth. But that does not mean that I don’t see the importance of having a healthy left. But not like this. This assortment of freaks and losers represents only themselves and their batty, utterly fringe ideas – and is an active menace to the lower classes that they so stridently claim to represent.