The Compatible Left

Chris Morlock writes:

People are watching viral clips coming out of the Socialism 2026 conference right now and wondering what the hell they are looking at and listening to. In particular, clips from panels around Beatrice Adler-Bolton and this broader disability-justice milieu are being circulated as examples of a politics that seems to treat physical fitness and bodily discipline as somehow fascistic while elevating what amounts to a celebration of dysgenic qualities as revolutionary, for example (which has drawn massive criticism and anger). It's as if this was staged to precisely invalidate any kind of so called "pushing the DNC left" strategy; it appears as a non-starter that immediately classifies any "left wing" political power as de facto absurd.

What most people watching these clips don't know is the political history behind this conference and the people speaking at it. Socialism was historically associated with the Trotskyist International Socialist Organization (ISO), and after the ISO collapsed the conference continued under Haymarket Books, itself founded out of that same political milieu. Adler-Bolton's intellectual world leads directly into Ruth Wilson Gilmore, abolitionism, Angela Davis and the foundation-funded radical left. So rather than just pointing and laughing at another insane viral conference clip, I think its worth asking where this politics actually came from, who built the institutions that reproduce it, who funded some of its major intellectual figures, and why this particular form of “socialism” has become so completely dominant; at least from the institutional side.

The particular form of the enfranchised American “left” which has managed to reproduce itself for the better part of the last 75+ years despite having almost no demonstrated capacity to take political power, build a durable mass working-class organization, or even maintain its own organizations for very long. The names change, the organizations collapse and reappear, and the theoretical vocabulary gets updated every ten or fifteen years, but the basic political tendency remains remarkably stable. What was once the anti-Stalinist, Third Camp, Trotskyist and New Left milieu increasingly became intertwined with radical feminism, abolitionism, the nonprofit world, academic critical theory and eventually the contemporary politics of “disability justice,” intersectionality, queer theory and an ever-expanding collection of supposedly autonomous struggles. I think it is useful to call this the compatible left, because this is precisely the sort of left that the American ruling class has repeatedly demonstrated that it can tolerate, subsidize, institutionalize and even celebrate. It is a left that can sound incredibly radical while remaining remarkably incapable of producing a unified proletarian political movement capable of actually taking state power.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton and the Death Panel podcast are a particularly interesting contemporary expression of this tendency. Death Panel describes itself as a podcast devoted to the political economy of health and currently has around 1,850 paid Patreon subscribers, while Death Panel itself reported 1,991 paid patrons in December 2025. Its exact Patreon receipts are not public, but the scale is significant. If the average subscriber were paying only $5, 1,850 subscribers would represent more than $9,000 gross every month, and at $10 it would be more than $18,000. Death Panel says that this money pays for production, editing, transcription and distribution of the show. What we are looking at here is a professionalized radical intellectual economy in which thousands of largely urban, educated listeners can directly finance a political media operation whose theoretical world is embedded in universities, radical publishing, abolitionism, disability politics and the contemporary nonprofit left.

Adler-Bolton herself is an interesting figure because she did not emerge from the Communist movement, a trade union, an industrial workplace or really any recognizable proletarian political institution. Her background is in art and independent research before moving further into disability studies, including graduate study at CUNY. Her co-author and Death Panel co-founder Artie Vierkant comes even more clearly out of the international contemporary-art world. Vierkant attended the University of Pennsylvania and UC San Diego, became a conceptual and digital artist, exhibited internationally and taught at NYU. His professional history runs through galleries, museums, art foundations and the broader New York art world. Adler-Bolton and Vierkant subsequently published Health Communism through Verso, and Adler-Bolton now has additional books coming through Haymarket. This tells us something important about the social basis of this political tendency. It is not emerging from factory committees or Communist Party schools. It emerges from the metropolitan art, university, publishing and professional intellectual world and then increasingly presents itself as the theoretical voice of the most marginalized sections of the working class.

One of Adler-Bolton's most important intellectual influences is Ruth Wilson Gilmore (who also appears on another Socialism 2026 panel), the "Marxist geographer" and prison-abolition theorist who wrote Golden Gulag. Adler-Bolton has explicitly described Gilmore's work as enormously influential on her thinking, and Gilmore has repeatedly appeared on Death Panel. A substantial portion of the conceptual vocabulary running through Adler-Bolton's work, particularly “organized abandonment,” surplus populations, abolition, carcerality and the attempt to connect prisons, policing, health and disability into a single political framework, comes directly through Gilmore. In one Death Panel conversation Adler-Bolton described Golden Gulag as one of those books that appears so frequently in their discussions that it could be part of a Death Panel bingo card. Gilmore is not a peripheral influence here. She sits near the center of the intellectual genealogy of the show.

Gilmore in turn is intimately connected with Angela Davis and the development of the modern prison-abolition movement. She co-founded Critical Resistance with Davis and others, and her relationship to this political world goes back much further than her academic celebrity. Gilmore participated in Black radical politics in the late 1960s, her cousin John Huggins was a Black Panther leader murdered at UCLA in 1969, and she subsequently spent decades involved in anti-prison organizing. She therefore provides one of the principal bridges between an older Black radical political tradition and the abolitionist framework that became increasingly prominent in universities, nonprofits and the American left during the 2000s and 2010s.

Then comes the institutional money. Gilmore was a 2002 Soros Justice Senior Fellow, directly supported through George Soros's Open Society Institute and its Criminal Justice Initiative for her anti-incarceration work. Open Society selected Gilmore, financed her project and identified her work as part of its criminal-justice program. Gilmore subsequently became one of the most influential intellectual figures in American abolitionism and later received a $250,000 Freedom Scholars award from the Marguerite Casey Foundation. Her work meanwhile became increasingly institutionalized through major universities, particularly USC and CUNY, and through the professional academic left. The rise and institutional consolidation of this radical political tendency therefore runs directly through philanthropic capital, university institutionalization and the professional nonprofit ecosystem.

This is precisely where the question of funding becomes political rather than just biographical. Money creates institutional capacity. Institutional capacity creates jobs, conferences, publications, fellowships, research positions, organizations and professional careers. Those institutions determine which tendencies possess the resources necessary to reproduce themselves, train another generation and dominate an intellectual field. The fact that Open Society selected Gilmore's anti-incarceration work for direct financial support therefore matters enormously. The fact that major foundations subsequently continued rewarding and institutionalizing abolitionist scholarship matters. A political tendency does not need to originate inside a foundation for philanthropic capital to help determine its historical scale, professional infrastructure and ideological reach.

Follow the tendency forward and the continuity becomes increasingly visible. Gilmore and Angela Davis help construct the modern abolitionist movement through Critical Resistance. Gilmore's concepts become foundational for Adler-Bolton. Adler-Bolton and Vierkant incorporate those concepts into Health Communism and Death Panel, combining abolition with disability justice and the political economy of health. Death Panel develops nearly two thousand paying Patreon supporters and becomes capable of financing a professional media operation. Adler-Bolton circulates through Verso, Haymarket, universities and the contemporary socialist conference circuit. A relatively specialized abolitionist theoretical tendency becomes part of a self-sustaining metropolitan radical culture capable of producing books, conferences, podcasts, academic positions and professional activists.

The Angela Davis connection takes us directly into another historical current: American radical feminism and the larger Cultural Cold War. Davis was a Communist Party USA member, associated with Black liberation politics and became one of the internationally recognizable figures of the American radical left. Over subsequent decades, however, Davis also became one of the great bridging figures connecting the older Black radical movement with feminism, abolitionism, academia and the nonprofit activist world. Davis and Gloria Steinem subsequently developed a real political and personal association around feminist causes, appearing together and participating in the same broader feminist political culture.

Steinem's own Cold War history is extremely important here because her involvement with CIA-financed activity is established historical fact. Before becoming perhaps the most famous American feminist of her generation, Steinem worked through the Independent Research Service around international youth festivals during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The operation was covertly financed by the CIA as part of the struggle against Communist influence among international youth and students. Steinem acknowledged the CIA relationship after it became public and defended it. This belonged to a much larger American strategy during the Cultural Cold War in which intelligence agencies recognized that conservative anti-Communism alone was incapable of competing with the enormous prestige Communism possessed among workers, students, artists and intellectuals internationally.

The most famous expression of this strategy was the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The CIA covertly financed an enormous international network of magazines, conferences, intellectual organizations and cultural projects involving liberals, democratic socialists, ex-Communists, anti-Stalinist Marxists and avant-garde intellectuals. The brilliance of the operation was that these people did not have to become conservatives. They could remain radical, experimental, bohemian, socialist and even anti-capitalist in their language while being organized politically around hostility to Soviet Communism and the Communist movement. American intelligence understood that a left against Communism was vastly more useful in intellectual and cultural circles than another conventional conservative organization attacking Communism from the right.

This is the historical origin of the problem I am calling the compatible left. The ruling class learned that it could intervene inside the ideological development of the left itself, strengthen tendencies compatible with American geopolitical and class interests and build an institutional environment in which those tendencies possessed the resources to reproduce themselves. The Congress for Cultural Freedom provided magazines, conferences, publishers, cultural prestige and international networks. The larger Cultural Cold War similarly operated through student organizations, intellectual societies, labor organizations and cultural institutions. The objective was not simply propaganda in the crude sense. It was the construction of an entire intellectual ecology capable of separating radical cultural politics from revolutionary Communism.

The parallels with the contemporary foundation and nonprofit world are impossible to ignore. The mechanisms have changed, the institutions have changed and the political vocabulary has changed, but the material question remains remarkably similar: which left receives institutional resources, which left acquires professional legitimacy, which left is welcomed into universities and foundations, and which left is excluded? Open Society's financing of criminal-justice activism and Gilmore's Soros Justice Fellowship belong to this history of philanthropic institutions materially supporting particular political tendencies. The contemporary abolitionist left can therefore describe itself as fundamentally revolutionary while simultaneously possessing a material infrastructure running through foundations, universities, nonprofits, professional publishing and the metropolitan cultural world.

This is also why the relationship between the older Trotskyist/Third Camp world and the contemporary radical left deserves considerably more attention. The International Socialist Organization, founded in 1977, belonged explicitly to the anti-Stalinist Third Camp socialist tradition. Its politics defined itself against both Western capitalism and the Soviet model, and it became one of the more visible American Trotskyist organizations before dissolving in 2019. But organizations disappear while their institutional infrastructure, personnel and political culture survive. Haymarket Books, founded by people from the ISO milieu, survived the organization's collapse and became one of the major radical publishers in the United States. Haymarket today operates the annual Socialism Conference, which remains one of the principal gathering points for this broader American socialist and activist milieu.

The 2026 Socialism Conference provides an almost perfect snapshot of this political synthesis. Angela Davis delivered the opening plenary, “Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Palestine, Internationalism, Abolition.” The following morning Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant appeared on “Health Fascism, Body Politics, and the Anti-State State.” Here an institution descended directly from the American Third Camp/Trotskyist milieu provides the organizational space in which abolition, disability justice, contemporary identity politics and the intellectual descendants of Gilmore and Davis are synthesized and presented simply as “socialism.” The old organizations may be dead, but the political tendency is very much alive.

The chain is therefore worth laying out clearly. The Cultural Cold War establishes an American ruling-class strategy of cultivating an anti-Communist compatible left. Gloria Steinem directly participates in CIA-financed Cold War youth activity before becoming one of the central figures of American feminism. Steinem later becomes politically associated with Angela Davis. Davis becomes one of the major figures in contemporary abolitionism and co-founds Critical Resistance with Ruth Wilson Gilmore and others. Gilmore receives direct financial support from George Soros's Open Society Institute through a Soros Justice Fellowship and later receives a $250,000 foundation award. Gilmore's theories become enormously influential on Beatrice Adler-Bolton. Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant build these concepts into Health Communism and Death Panel. Death Panel develops nearly two thousand paying Patreon supporters. Adler-Bolton then appears at the Haymarket-run Socialism Conference alongside Angela Davis, within an institutional environment descended from the ISO and Third Camp socialist tradition. These connections illustrate how political tendencies travel across generations through organizations, foundations, universities, publishing institutions and activist networks.

From a conservative Communist, orthodox Communist or Marxist-Leninist standpoint, the central problem is what progressively disappears from this version of socialism: the proletariat as a universal political class. Marxism does not begin from the proposition that workers constitute merely another oppressed demographic group. The proletariat occupies a particular objective relationship to production, and because of that relationship it possesses the potential to overcome its internal divisions, constitute itself politically, seize state power and reorganize production according to social need rather than private accumulation. The historical Communist movement therefore attempted, however imperfectly, to bring workers of different races, religions, regions and social backgrounds into a common political organization based upon their objective class interests.

The compatible left increasingly moves in precisely the opposite direction. Instead of overcoming the internal divisions of the proletariat, it continually discovers new categories through which those divisions can be theorized and institutionalized. We get racialized populations, disabled populations, carceral populations, queer populations, migrant populations, surplus populations, medically abandoned populations, traumatized populations and an apparently endless collection of increasingly specialized constituencies. Many of the forms of oppression described by these categories are real, but that does not answer the political question. The political question is whether organizing the proletariat through an ever-expanding collection of autonomous identities actually overcomes the divisions produced by capitalist society or whether it reproduces and intensifies those divisions inside the supposed socialist movement itself.

The contradiction becomes almost comical. The American working class has probably never been subjected to more elaborate academic analysis while simultaneously possessing almost no independent political power. Every conceivable distinction within the working population has been theorized, named, historicized and assigned a specialized academic literature. Meanwhile union density has collapsed from its postwar levels, the Communist movement is virtually nonexistent, there is no mass workers' party and there is no revolutionary organization remotely capable of contesting state power. The working class becomes simultaneously the most “intersectionally” analyzed population in history and one of the least politically unified.

At the same time, the ordinary worker increasingly encounters something calling itself “the left” not through a Communist Party branch, a factory organization or even a trade union, but through universities, HR departments, nonprofits, foundations, professional activists, corporate media and the cultural institutions of the metropolitan professional class. He is informed that his inherited social identity is suspect, his language is constantly wrong, his historical culture is reactionary, his family relations require reconstruction and his inability or unwillingness to memorize an endlessly changing theoretical vocabulary demonstrates another form of privilege. The compatible left then acts absolutely fucking astonished when millions of workers conclude that “the left” despises them and turn toward the right. Instead of considering whether fifty years of political strategy has been disastrous, this working-class rejection is itself transformed into another academic subject demonstrating the supposed racism, sexism, nationalism or authoritarian psychology of the proletariat.

This is where the Trotskyist inheritance becomes particularly destructive. Contradiction ceases to be something which a Communist Party must politically overcome through the organization and unification of the proletariat and instead becomes something almost fetishized in itself. Every contradiction produces another autonomous struggle, another constituency, another conference, another theoretical vocabulary and eventually another professional layer responsible for administering it. There is a strange accelerationist quality to this politics in which the continual intensification of social contradictions is treated almost as revolutionary progress in itself. In practice what it produces is an endless culture war which continually fractures working-class identity while strengthening the perception among workers that “socialism” is an ideology imposed upon them by educated urban elites who despise virtually every element of their existing culture.

Culture war, however, has proven extraordinarily compatible with American capitalism. Goldman Sachs can celebrate identity. Lockheed Martin can celebrate diversity. Universities can teach "abolition". Foundations can finance "anti-capitalist" scholarship. Corporations can issue statements condemning structural racism. The Pentagon can advertise inclusion whilst flying a pride flag. Billionaires can finance organizations devoted to inequality. Banks can sponsor Pride Month. Virtually every form of cultural radicalism can eventually be commoditized and incorporated into the ideological apparatus of capital because none of these things necessarily alter ownership of the means of production. What these institutions cannot tolerate is an organized proletariat capable of taking political power, expropriating capital and subordinating private accumulation to a workers' state. That remains the dividing line between cultural radicalism and revolutionary Communism.

Of course the intellectual elites of the compatible left can always claim Gramscian logic: this is the "long march through the institutions." Unfortunately this has become an endlessly long march, as if designed to never conclude...

This is also why the apparent unpopularity of the contemporary far left should not automatically be interpreted as an unfortunate communications problem. A politics which continually produces forms of social antagonism that alienate enormous portions of the working class performs a useful ideological function for bourgeois society regardless of the inter-subjective intentions of the people participating in it. It makes socialism appear bizarre, metropolitan, academically incomprehensible and fundamentally hostile to ordinary life. Every new cultural battle reinforces the association of “the left” with a professional urban class while the right is allowed to present itself, however fraudulently, as the defender of workers, families, communities and ordinary social stability. The capitalist class receives the best of both worlds: a culturally radical left incapable of threatening property relations and a working class increasingly driven toward bourgeois right-wing politics by its hatred of that supposed left.

This is precisely why the history of the Congress for Cultural Freedom remains so relevant. The lesson was never simply that the CIA once secretly paid for magazines. The deeper lesson was that the American ruling class learned extremely early that it could intervene inside the ideological development of the left itself. It could distinguish between revolutionary Communism, which represented an actual threat to capitalist power, and compatible forms of socialism which could be incorporated into the institutions of bourgeois society. It could promote the latter through publishers, universities, conferences, foundations and cultural institutions and allow that political culture to reproduce itself.

That is why the funding relationships matter. Money is not simply money. Money creates organizations. Organizations hire people. People organize conferences, publish books, award fellowships, train students, establish academic fields and decide which ideas are legitimate enough to circulate. Gilmore's Soros Justice Fellowship matters. The Marguerite Casey Foundation's $250,000 award matters. The professionalization of abolitionism matters. The movement of these theories through CUNY, USC, Verso, Haymarket and the conference circuit matters. The transformation of radical politics into a professional media economy capable of generating thousands of Patreon subscriptions matters. These are the material mechanisms through which political tendencies reproduce themselves and acquire ideological dominance.

And this is ultimately why Death Panel is more interesting than simply being another podcast with fashionable politics. It represents the endpoint of a much larger historical transformation. The old Communist movement attempted to organize workers into a disciplined political force directed toward state power. The contemporary compatible left increasingly organizes politics around the permanent administration of difference. Its intellectuals can be extraordinarily radical in their terminology, demanding the abolition of prisons, policing, borders, gender norms, conventional medicine, traditional social relations and practically every institution imaginable, yet the conquest of bourgeois political power itself remains perpetually postponed. There is always another identity to theorize, another institution to deconstruct, another conference to attend, another podcast to record and another book explaining why the previous conception of oppression was insufficiently intersectional.

After fifty years of this, the results should matter more than the rhetoric. The American Communist movement has been destroyed. The organized working class is historically weak. There is no serious proletarian party capable of taking power. Yet the professional radical ecosystem is enormous. It has universities, foundations, publishers, nonprofits, conferences, podcasts, journalists, academics and thousands of people whose careers depend upon the continued production of radical discourse. The more politically powerless the working class becomes, the more elaborate the theoretical language describing its oppression seems to become.

This is what I mean by the compatible left. The American ruling class does not have to invent every political tendency which serves its interests. It can identify useful tendencies already developing inside the left, materially strengthen them, provide them institutional space and resources and allow them to reproduce themselves. Eventually the process becomes self-sustaining. The foundation selects the activist, the university hires the theorist, the publisher prints the book, the conference provides the platform, the podcast popularizes the theory and the Patreon audience finances the next round. What began historically as conscious Cultural Cold War policy becomes an institutional logic capable of reproducing itself throughout bourgeois civil society.

The question Marxists should ask is not how radical these people sound. The question is what political force their activity actually produces. Does it unify the working class? Does it build an independent proletarian political identity? Does it create institutions capable of contesting bourgeois state power? Does it move society toward the dictatorship of the proletariat? Or does it continually fragment workers into smaller political constituencies while transferring the cultural meaning of “the left” from the industrial working class to an educated metropolitan intelligentsia?

If after half a century the answer remains another conference, another foundation, another podcast, another academic department and another theoretical vocabulary explaining why the working class itself is problematic, then the permanent impotence of this politics should no longer be treated as an unfortunate accident. That impotence is precisely what makes it compatible.