Its hard to imagine a more fitting activity for Labor Day weekend than attending the annual Socialism Conference in downtown Chicago, which is now in its 24th year. Oh, go ahead, grill something. Soak in the extra day and sleep in. Not to make you feel bad, but regardless of how you feel about socialism, while you’re taking it easy, about 3,000 socialists and radical activists and community organizers were meeting in overheated conference rooms at the Hyatt Regency at McCormick Place and hashing out strategies for American workers to seize the means of production and resolve the class struggle.
Of course, nobody is holding their breath.
Cooperative artists Roger Peet, left, and William Estrada, center, help Michelle Le at the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative booth during the Socialism Conference at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place on Sept. 4, 2026. (Eileen T. Meslar/Chicago Tribune)
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Cooperative artists Roger Peet, left, and William Estrada, center, help Michelle Le at the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative booth during the Socialism Conference at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place on Sept. 4, 2026. (Eileen T. Meslar/Chicago Tribune)
The leadership of the Democratic Socialists of America — beneath a large red banner that reads #TrySocialism — said they see victory as a horizon, an ideal to steer towards.
Plus, nobody talks these days about only seizing the means.
The Socialism Conference is a big-tent gathering, created in 2002 by the International Socialist Organization (and taken over in 2019 by Uptown-based publisher Haymarket Books) to promote social justice, community and activism. So for four days, there were discussions of Midway Blitz and its blow-back; organizing in rural townships; protesting data centers; protesting AI; journalism and ICE; fascism and health; the tech oligarchy; the story of Eugene Debs, cofounder of the Socialist Party of America; the surprise of seeing socialist Zohran Mamdani in the mayor’s office in New York City; and, of course, the remarkable resurgence of interest in the past decade in the core beliefs of socialism.
Indeed, attendance, according to Haymarket, has never been bigger.
That makes sense, since socialism itself, which is having a moment (and perhaps more), has never seemed more popular in this country. DSA membership has hit record highs in recent years; meanwhile, socialist candidates across the country have outperformed several long-time incumbents. In the fall, socialists are expected to be contenders for major offices in Los Angeles, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Providence, Rhode Island.
Inside a ballroom full of vendors and tables promoting progressive organizations, Ant Smith, of Philadelphia’s W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition and Reconstruction, sat between the Chicago Union of Tenants and a group selling the traditional Palestinian scarves called keffiyeh. He considered what this moment meant.
“People see the popularity of socialism, they see Mamdani, and maybe they see what is happening as a fad — for some people, it may be a fad,” he said. “But if you’re here at this conference, you probably want to build something lasting and create a smarter way for everyone to move through the world. We got an ongoing billionaire class pushing AI, for starters. And how could we meet that? And how fair could the world truly be if we try?”
Just outside the room, sitting on the hallway floor, sorting through a vast schedule of panels and workshops, meet-ups and lectures, screenings and histories — in fact, more than 180 of them — Asha Barnes and Rakaya Abda of Chicago, themselves organizers on the South Side, said this was their first time at the conference. Initially, they were wary of coming. They liked that activist Angela Davis — a self-described “communist, abolitionist, internationalist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, feminist, Black, queer, pro-working class revolutionary intellectual community builder” — was speaking Friday.
“It’s inspiring to be in the room with people who made major changes,” Barnes said.
“And I need to be inspired right now,” Abda added. “But I also just wanted to see what socialism actually looks like, I guess. Being a Black woman in Chicago, I feel very disconnected from (socialism). I’ve always seen it as a lot of white guys yelling at each other. To be honest, at first I thought Democratic Socialists of America put this (conference) on themselves, and I’ve been in those circles. … It’s a lot of white people who want to connect to the West and South Sides but never want to go there.” So far, they said, sounding hopeful, they’d seen a fair number of people of color attending.
They’re far from the only ones with reservations.
A sizable majority of the country, according to polls, generally regard socialism as a bad idea, though opinion splits widely among generations, especially on the point of what socialism actually represents. (Broadly, older voters tend to think of it as income redistribution and overreach, while younger voters see it as economic equality and forcing the wealthy to pay taxes.) On Friday, before the conference began, Republican gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey capitalized on that history of ambivalence and held a press conference outside the Hyatt, pointing out that inside there was a socialism conference, in a hotel owned by the relatives of his challenger, Gov. JB Pritzker.
“I’m clutching my pearls,” deadpanned an attendee, watching from a window.
Flanked by his running mate Aaron Del Mar, candidate for governor Darren Bailey hosts a press conference in front of the hotel venue for the Socialism Conference near McCormick Place, Sept. 4, 2026. (Arthur Maiorella/Chicago Tribune)
That said, the more socialists you talk to at a socialism conference, the more you’re reminded of the endless philosophical divides within the Democrat and Republican parties over what most makes a Democrat or a Republican. Mel Bienenfeld, 79, a retired community college math teacher from New York, his hair a wispy white halo, has been coming to this conference for a decade, since Bernie Sanders ran for president, he noted, a watershed moment for socialists. Still, Bienenfeld has been calling himself a socialist since the 1960s, since he was drafted for the Vietnam War. He’s a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, he explained, “just not a representative one.”
He watched attendees file past wearing T-shirts reading “The Only Minority I Hate is the 1%” and “Fire Your Boss” and “Virginia is for Unions” and “Municipal Socialism Rising.”
“The DSA, they want to build an electoral group of candidates,” he said, “people who will build up the working class through public office. I’m not against public office, but I think once that happens you see a need to cooperate with Democrats and reject basic principles of socialism.” Mamdani and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — who rejoined the DSA last month after a seven-year lapse in her membership — have heard plenty of those criticisms. “I’m also not opposed to compromise, but I guess I don’t see the point if, in the process, you wind up becoming another liberal Democrat.”
Like any ideology, caucuses clash at a conference like this. Albeit, at this one, it can be difficult to grasp if socialism should be a political party or mainly a set of ideals to apply.
The DSA itself, said Megan Romer, the national co-chair, has come to see this conference as more of a development tool or educational space than a recruiting opportunity. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 2024, “we were the radical fringe.” At the Socialism Conference, ironically, they’re just the establishment.
As attendees filtered into the room to hear her speak — so many that eventually there was a forest of socialists standing in the back — she twisted in her chair and sighed and said:
“It’s so hard to explain socialism at times to people who are outside of all this. We really are just a bunch of different movements and theories, all trying to move in the same direction. That’s hard to discuss. And Americans, I think, are conflict-averse. They just want peace. What a funny thing to say about such a violent country, but the old saying about the two things you can’t talk about, religion and politics — you see that here too.”
Throughout much of the 20th century, socialism had fallen so far in the public imagination that a decade ago there were only about 7,000 paying members of the DSA. Yet since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, membership has exploded to 120,000, making it now the largest group of its kind in the history of the country; this past summer, in particular, socialist candidates alarmed Republicans and Democrats, winning (and narrowly losing) major races, often without the endorsement of the DSA.
You could argue that the only thing consistent about American socialism is Chicago.
Eugene Debs, who formed the Social Party of America in Indianapolis, spent a lot of time organizing around the city, most famously pulling together the Pullman Strike of 1894. A decade later, the Industrial Workers of the World — a socialist labor union better known as “Wobblies” — formed in Chicago, topping out eventually with 100,000 members. In 1976, Chicago socialist James Weinstein created the progressive magazine In These Times (which is still being published). And in 1982, Michael Harrington, a University of Chicago graduate, founded the DSA itself. (Bernie Sanders, another UC grad, first joined the Young People’s Socialist League while in Hyde Park.)
Nevertheless, there’s a saying about socialists, repeated a handful of times during the weekend conference: Get 10 socialists in a room, and you’ll have 15 opinions. Socialists like to argue and debate and talk, and talk. At least that’s the dusty image of smoky rooms and long-winded meetings buried beneath the fussy wording of manifestos. As Oscar Wilde supposedly said, “The trouble with socialism is it takes up too many evenings.”
It’s harder to feel that at a Socialism Conference in 2026, whose attendees are tricky to pin down, identifying themselves as Marxist-Leninists, Old School Communists, Utopian Socialists, Libertarian Socialists, Eco-Socialists, Social Anarchists, Maoists and more. There are elderly socialists who have been protesting since the early 1960s, and there are youthful socialists whose voices actually break when you ask them about socialism. An older woman gave her pronouns as “she/her/co-conspirator.” A younger woman, somewhat seriously, said that she’s thinking of creating a communist K-pop group.
In a hallway, two large circles of attendees workshopped how they would organize a union in a coffee house, using Starbucks as a case study. Next door, a group talked up the importance of having a “pod mapping” of friends you can turn to if you’re distressed.
On a different floor, de-escalation training — how to calm down a tense moment. The instructor asked everyone to pair up: one person will rant and rave, the other person will attempt to calm them down. The entire room, a couple of dozen pairs, erupted at once.
A man yelled to his partner, trying not to laugh: “The Bears in Indiana! That’s insane! I hate that! I hate you!” And his partner slowly waved his hands and repeated, “I understand that you’re angry …”
Which just made the Bears fan angrier, socialism being a work in progress.
Musician and cultural organizer Steff Reed leads attendees in movement songs during the Socialism Conference at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place on Sept. 4, 2026. (Eileen T. Meslar/Chicago Tribune)
Meanwhile down the hallway, Steff Reed, a member of a collaborative called Songs in the Key of Resistance, which is building a new songbook for contemporary protests, led a large group through a call-and-response spiritual: “We have not come here alone!” he sang. And then they sang. And then he sang. And then they sang. And sang, and sang, and again and again, and always louder each time, with a rising confidence, until people brushed at tears, and for a moment, an anonymous conference room in a cavernous hall, gray walls, gray carpet, held exactly what the conference promised: only comrades.
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com