Commentary

They Booked a Hyatt to Abolish the Country

Posted on by Bill McCarthy

While normal people grilled something over Labor Day, about three thousand of them packed the Hyatt Regency at McCormick Place in Chicago to spend four days explaining how your country is a crime scene. Twenty-fourth year of the same conference. More than a hundred and eighty panels. Opening night headlined by a woman who still introduces herself as a communist, abolitionist, internationalist, and revolutionary. They streamed some of it so the people who could not get a room could take notes.

They are not hiding. That is the news.

The program is the confession. Abolition of prisons, of the death penalty, of psychiatry. Palestine as the master key. ICE as the domestic occupation. Data centers as theft. School boards as targets. A New York mayor as proof that the brand can win a city. A political program titled, with a straight face, “Workers Deserve More,” which is not a raise. It is a brochure for life after private property.

They stay at a Hyatt. They talk about seizing the means. The gift shop sells the contradiction. The sessions do not.

Twelve Takeaways

  1. They showed up in force. Roughly three thousand in overheated rooms on the South Side. Organizers say it is the biggest edition. That is not a book club. That is a bench.
  2. New York is the exhibit, not the exception. There were panels on the mayor versus Wall Street, on “sewer socialism” and city bonds, on nurses striking in the Mamdani era. They think a socialist in Gracie Mansion means the model travels. They are already arguing about how to finance the next city without the bond market telling them no.
  3. The official program is not “be nicer.” The big socialist outfit rolled out “Workers Deserve More” this summer and put a streaming star and its national co-chair on a Friday stage to sell it. Human flourishing. Peace. Not exploitation. Read the fine print and you are past welfare and into who owns the plant.
  4. Abolition is the spine, not a slogan. Death penalty. Prisons. “State violence.” A Monday session on psychiatric abolition treats the ward like the cellblock. If the state can lock a man for a crime or for an episode, they want the lock gone. That is not reform. That is a demolition permit.
  5. Palestine is the organizing principle. The opening plenary was Palestine, internationalism, abolition. Other rooms: end the “genocide behind bars,” free Palestinian prisoners, confront Zionism, build a people’s embargo, “weaponizing antisemitism,” break the university board. A labor caucus bragged that a major auto union finally voted to dump Israel bonds. This is not a foreign-policy plank. It is the loyalty test.
  6. They train the next disruption. Workshops on mapping arms subcontractors, squeezing secondary contractors, pressuring trustees, working K-12. That is a field manual. The target is not a senator’s press release. It is the supplier in a mid-size city and the school board that still thinks it runs the building.
  7. ICE is the American villain. Chicago educators and families “defending communities.” Journalism and ICE. The border agency is framed as the occupation you can touch. If you think midterms are about inflation, they think midterms are about who gets to enforce the line.
  8. Disagreement with their medicine is “health fascism.” There is a whole series. Trans care in the age of health fascism. Body politics. The anti-state state. If a legislature limits a protocol, it is not a vote. It is a regime. That language does not leave room for a parent.
  9. The new class enemy wears a hoodie and owns a server farm. Against the tech oligarchy. Against AI. Against data centers eating community power and water. Rural townships organizing to stop the build. They have noticed that the same people who lecture you about climate want a warehouse of chips in your county. They want that anger pointed left, not at the zoning board.
  10. Land and money are on the list. Reparations. Landback. Collective liberation. A session title is not a statute. It is a tell. The conference does not treat those words as poetry. It treats them as homework.
  11. They fight each other in the hallway. Even the hometown paper led with promise and disagreement. Sects, caucuses, purity tests, who sold out to the Democrats, who is insufficiently revolutionary. That is good news for the country and bad news if you assume they are a cartoon. Split movements still win school boards.
  12. They said the quiet part into a microphone. Lessons from the Russian Revolution. Seize the means. Fascism as the name for whoever is in their way. A livestream so the kids who could not afford the Hyatt still get the catechism. Midterms are two months out. They are not waiting for a seminar in 2029. They are staffing the next race with people who just spent a long weekend being told the police, the prison, the border, the board, and the factory are all the same fight.

What It Means for Normals

You do not have to decode a manifesto. They printed the agenda. A luxury hotel full of people who think your commute is imperialism and your sheriff is a remnant of slavery. Some of them will go home and run for something small. Some will chain themselves to a fence. Some will take the New York playbook to the next city that streams better than it votes.

The political problem for them is that most of the country still likes private tools, locked doors, and a border that means something. The political problem for you is that they no longer bother to hide the maximal version, and a slice of the other party would rather adopt the vocabulary than fight it.

They had four days. You have November. They were very clear about what they want. Believe them.

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