During the radical-left Socialism conference in Chicago over the weekend, speakers included DSA-aligned streamer Hasan Piker, radical-left thought leader Angela Davis, and other leaders in the Democratic Socialists of America. Their plans for launching massive efforts for May Day 2028 were discussed, as well as the DSA’s desire for prison abolition. One speaker also claimed that the deployment of GLP-1 drugs has come about because the world wants to “genocide” fat people.
Angela Davis, who is a Marxist political activist, thought leader, and longtime member of the Communist Party, spoke about the need for a stronger push for the prison “abolition” movement. She said that it is not “okay” to say that someone should be sent to prison.
She argued that the “abolition movement” has made “so little progress” thanks to “carceral ideologies,” or rather, prison systems. She argued that activists need to keep pushing and use victories in the prison abolition movement as a “launching pad” to further abolish prisons.
Socialism 2026 speaker Da’Shaun L. Harrison also said that the deployment of GLP-1 drugs is “fascistic” because the world is “fixated on genociding fat people.”
“This is a structural critique that asks what happens when the conditions produced by capitalism, by public health, by the state apparatus, and by anti-black desire align around a single bodily ideal that leaves little to no room for divergence and punishes any body that does,” he said. “Whereas earlier diet drugs were often associated with vanity or addiction, GLP-1s are positioned as responsible medicine, promising relief rather than restraint.”
Harrison followed up and said that “policing of black fat flesh anchors entire systems of governance.”
