WTF is Junkie Communism?

Did you know that exercise and being healthy is fascist? That's according to last weekend's Socialism 2026 conference. Where do I even start? Welcome to American Covered, I'm Chris Chappell. From September 4th through the 7th, thousands of activists, academics, and organizers packed into the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place in Chicago for Socialism 2026, an annual conference put on by Haymarket Books. Speakers included everyone from leftist luminaries like Angela Davis to online cranks like Hasan Piker. And the list of organizations who endorsed this conference are a real who's who. From the DSA to open borders activists, prison abolitionists, Palestine supporters, not to mention a number of groups that have been backed by George Soros' Open Society Foundations and its network, like Jewish Voice for Peace, the Adalah Justice Project, Detention Watch Network, and Law for Black Lives. Man, how can I get in on some of that Soros money? Can you imagine how cool it'd be to get paid to just sit around and yap about your pet ideology all day? Unfortunately, I don't have Soros money, but I do have today's sponsor, Outskill. You see, in 2026, AI is more accessible than it's ever been. But the hardest part is knowing which AI tool to use for what. If you're the person at your company who knows more about it than anyone else, then AI won't be coming for your job. Your boss will be coming to you to promote you. So the real question is, how do you become that person? And that's why I want to introduce you to Outskill's 3-hour AI Tools Workshop. The same one my team attended. And we're already using what we learned to help make this show better and save us time. This training is happening live. Again, this Saturday, 10am Eastern, and Outskill has made it completely free for you, my viewers. More than 12 million people worldwide have already attended one of these workshops. And you'll be learning straight from people who've worked at Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Nvidia. By the end, you'll know exactly which AI tool to use for what, how to build agents that plan and report for you, and how to connect tools like Sheets and Notion into systems that just run while you sleep. And the best part? There are bonus sessions that keep unlocking new tools, plus extras like an AI prompt library and a personalized AI toolkit builder worth $5,000 completely free. Three hours can change the next three years. Link is in the description, or scan the QR code before seats close. Alright, so back to the conference. Like it says on the tin, it was about socialism. You know, overthrowing capitalism, building the workers' utopia. All that fun stuff. But just how do you go about doing that? If we go by the propaganda of socialist countries that have actually existed, you'd think the goal would be to build up a society of strong, healthy, and productive workers. The kind of people who could topple the capitalist power structures and create so much abundance that class distinctions would be rendered meaningless. Right? Well, maybe not. You see, being healthy is actually fascist. Beatrice Adler Bolton, co-host of the Death Panel podcast, and co-author of the book Health Communism, had this to say. You have to give up the fantasy of being fitter than the fascists. It's not just that it's cringe or strategically bad. Though it is. Fitness is a measure of relative disposability under capitalism. Our task is not to become less disposable, to become more useful to the ruling order. That's, uh, certainly interesting. Sick of the capitalist class exploiting you? Just make yourself too fat and sick to be worth exploiting. But she continues. The point is not to beat the fascists at their own game. It is not to lay a better claim on their own territory by being fitter, more eugenic. In fact, the more dysgenic, the better, I think. Revolution is not a contest between optimized and properly prepared bodies. That idea is fascist in and of itself, and erases the history of left struggles around the world. The more dysgenic, the better? So badgenecks in the population is a good thing. That's not how any of this works. Revolution, whether communist or not, is absolutely a contest between who's more fit. Many of the Bolsheviks who seized power in Russia were factory workers and soldiers in the prime of their lives. The same goes for the rough, half-starved peasants who slogged their way to victory in the Chinese Civil War. Physically overthrowing a government is not a task for people who still wear masks in the big 26. So it's no surprise that physical fitness has been extremely important for socialist governments. The Soviet Union ran a national fitness program called Fitzkultura, compulsory for large swaths of the population, complete with mass calisthenics in Red Square. In Mao's China, schools participated in state-mandated group exercise, with factory workers and workplaces also joining in. East Germany ran a state-sponsored doping program for Olympic athletes because physical dominance was treated as living proof the socialist system was superior to the capitalist West. And this idea that under socialism, people's bodies aren't disposable? That's pure revisionism, comrade! Soviet collectivism in the early 1930s ran on grain quotas set from Moscow, quotas that kept getting enforced even after harvests collapsed and millions began to starve. It was seen as necessary in order to feed the factories and turn the USSR into an industrial powerhouse. Mao's Great Leap Forward ran the same logic. Modernization at any cost. Take the grain from the farmers and sell it to the Soviets in exchange for industrial equipment and weapons. Hell, force the peasants to try smelting iron in their backyards if you have to. So what if tens of millions of people die? Nobody said revolution was easy. When Adler-Bolton talks about becoming more dysgenic, which is to say, less capable, she's rejecting the founding principles shared by socialist states. If you had a Soviet or Chinese intellectual spouting this kind of stuff, the Party would assume it was Western sabotage. So if healthy people, workers, soldiers, what have you, aren't the key to making socialism a reality, then who is? Who is the leftist coalition supposed to be built around? Author Sophie Lewis seems to have the answer. M.E. writes, we need a communist politics that does not assume respectability or stability, that does not divide the world between the innocently poor and the chaotically dangerous. As freaks and f**k-ups, as f**ks and tr**ks, as wreckers and miserable wrecks, as addicts and crazies, we need a junkie communism. Now that's who you want leading the revolution. Not the disciplined factory worker. Not the innocent poor. No, you want addicts and crazies. Surely this won't lead to disaster. So how did we get here? How did we go from workers of the world unite to junkie communism? Well, the story goes back more than a century. You see, Marx and Engels predicted that the communist revolution would occur simultaneously in civilized Western countries, like Germany. But that never happened. Instead, it happened in a relatively backwards agrarian Russia. The industrialized nations of the West—Britain, France, and the US— stuck with capitalist democracy, while Germany elected the Nazis instead of the Communist Party. Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci tried to explain why history just totally defied Marx's predictions. His answer? The ruling class didn't just control the economy, it controlled culture. In his view, the media, the schools, and religion were manufacturing consent so that workers wouldn't even recognize their own exploitation. This helped start the Western left's shift away from economics and armed revolution, and toward the kind of social issues— race, sex, gender, etc.— that the people at Socialism 2026 spent most of their time talking about. And that suited them just fine. By the 1990s, it was clear to everyone the workers in the capitalist West weren't going to rebel. People figured out that they were better off working with anti-communist trade unions like the AFL-CIO to get better wages than to try and collapse the system entirely. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, had completely disintegrated under its own mismanagement. And China, the last big standard bearer of communism, had transformed into a cutthroat, money-obsessed ethnostate that treats its addicts and crazies about as well as it treats its ethnic minorities. In America, the people still holding onto socialism weren't factory workers or farmers. They were academics, their students, and, in the case of junkie communism, people who had already given up on having a normal life. And the gap between this new socialist idea and what the average person actually wants just keeps getting wider. Private sector, industrial, and trade union members have trended Republican for years now. Ask the average union electrician what he thinks about junkie communism and see how that goes. This is the slopification of socialism. It's a group of people who lost the working class, lost their shining examples abroad, and are forced to argue that actually being a fat drug addict is actually a good thing because capitalism. The good news is that most people find these ideas repugnant. But what do you think? Leave a comment below. And if you're not skilled in using AI yet, there's still a chance to get ahead before everyone else in your industry does. Click my link below and register for Outskill's free AI training this weekend. I'm Chris Chappell. Thanks for watching.