Anything-and-Everything Socialism
27th September 2022
The 2022 Socialism Conference in Chicago earlier this month felt more like an academic conference than, as the promotional materials pronounced, “a place where activists can share lessons from their struggles.” Attendees paid $150 for full-price passes granting access to four days of panels, talks, and social events for professional schmoozing at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place hotel and convention center in Chicago’s swank South Loop neighborhood. Panels hosted academics and writers plugging and signing books that could be purchased at the conference book fair. Keynote speakers gave the kind of rousing and impassioned prewritten talks to restrained applause that one would expect of a literary reading. The only real perceivable difference between the Socialism Conference and, say, the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference was that of genre, which was social justice instead of more traditional literary poetry or prose.
Socialism is the astrology of the modern intellectual class.