A popular coal-miner’s riddle from the 1930s summarizes one of capitalism’s most visible and absurd contradictions. After a daughter asks her father why their home is so cold, he tells her they don’t have any money to purchase coal. He explains they don’t have money because he lost his job at the coal mine. When the daughter asks why he lost his job, the father answers: “Because we produced too much coal”. For a contemporary example, how many of us have, through a religious institution, school, mutual aid organization, or other community group, participated in a clothing drive, soliciting gently-used clothing to give to those in need? How many of us need to borrow (or bargain-shop for) nice clothes for job interviews or court appearances? One would think the world is short on clothing. The truth is that the majority of the garments we produce go to landfills instead of other workers. In 2018, 60 percent of 100 billion clothing items were trashed. Despite the immense data-tracking technologies, even garment specialists don’t know how many clothes we produce each year, according to a 2024 article in The Guardian. Based on accessible information, however, “between 80bn and 150bn garments are made” annually, and 10 – 40 percent (or up to 60 billion clothing items) aren’t sold. A November 2024 study by United Way NCA provides a more contemporary and data-based illustration of the inhumanity of capitalist overproduction. Analyzing data from the U.S. Census and the Department of Housing & Urban Development, they found “there are currently 28 vacant homes for every one person experiencing homelessness in the U.S.”. There are countless other examples, some more dramatic than others, that show the absurdity of the capitalist system through one of its fundamental contradictions: overproduction. Generally speaking, overproduction occurs when too much is produced compared to how much can be sold at a profit. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/overproduction/

The eighth installment in Liberation School’s series of previously untranslated works by Thomas Sankara is published on the day Sankara was born in 1949. We would like to thank Bruno Jaffré and the editorial team of ThomasSankara.net for letting us translate and publish these works and the following interview dated September 20, 1985. The text is from an interview with Thomas Sankara conducted by a graduate student, which results in, as Jaffré notes in his introduction, a unique style of dialogue. It was originally published in French under the title provided by the student, “At the dawn of the third year of the revolution, the birth of a new society.” Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/thomas-sankara-assesses-year-3-of-the-revolution/

Every year, Pew Research publishes a study on the U.S. population’s political priorities. Their 2024 report shows that, like the previous years, “no single issue stands out after the economy,” with almost 75 percent of respondents rating it the main goal for the next administration, a rate “considerably larger” than any other policy. Yet when we see pundits discuss “the economy” on the news, they speak an obscuring language. The economy is an abstraction, in that there is no such “thing” as the economy. What we call “the economy” is, in reality, the ways that humans produce, distribute, exchange, and consume products or services. In this sense, “the economy” has a history as long as humanity. Yet there are different ways of organizing the economy. Unlike what we’re taught, the capitalist economy is a relatively recent phenomenon and is neither the final, just, most effective, nor possible form of organizing what, how, and why we produce. The introductory article to this series ended with one of the most foundational of the contradictions of capitalism: between use value and exchange value. Understanding this one contradiction goes a long way in helping understand the antagonism between those of us who live by working and the few of them who live by making us work. The conflict between use value and exchange value is an expression of the struggle between classes. This entry explains some aspects of the contradiction between use value and exchange value, how they help us better understand the world around us, and some ways we can wield that understanding to explain the exploitation humans, all living creatures, and the Earth suffer from, which is necessary for eliminating the root cause of that suffering. Read the original article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/use-value-exchange-value/

Hearing or reading about the “contradictions of capitalism” in an article or at a rally might be intimidating, like a foreign language or a term only a certain group can understand. While the contradictions of capitalism are complicated, working and oppressed people can easily understand them for the simple reason that we all live with and negotiate any number of contradictions every day. The contradictions we deal with that are the most confining, that most constrain our capacities and that keep us oppressed are specifically the contradictions of capitalism. On any given day, we find abundant evidence that makes it clear that the capitalist system doesn’t work in practice. Examining the contradictions of capitalism and demonstrating how they are inherent in the system, proves that capitalism doesn’t even work in theory. Understanding capitalist contradictions heightens our agitation and accelerates political consciousness by cutting through capitalist ideology and the various excuses of capitalists, politicians, and their media. Knowing capitalist contradictions better informs our tactics and strategies in any given struggle and serves as a bridge to socialist reconstruction in the U.S. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/capitalist-contradictions-and-revolutionary-struggle-an-introduction/

According to the United Nations Population Fund’s 2009 report, 2008 was the first time in history that over 50 percent of the world’s population resided in cities instead of rural areas. Because of the different ways countries define cities, others date the qualitative shift to as recently as 2021. Regardless, across the spectrum it’s undisputed we now live in an “urban age” and, as such, transforming the relationship between cities and the natural world is essential for climate change adaptation and mitigation. The international capitalist institutions like the World Bank that are increasingly taking up the issue of cities and climate change can’t explain the various factors behind urbanization nor can they pose real solutions to its impact on or relationship to climate catastrophes. Cities consume 78 percent of the world’s energy resources and produce 60 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2022 UN Habitat report. Under the capitalist model, urban planning lacks a holistic approach, leaving human well being and ecological needs as an afterthought, which will continue to have a degenerative effect on the environment and global climate. Marx and Engels lived during a time in which capitalist urbanization was a nascent phenomenon concentrated mostly in some European cities, like Manchester, the English city about which Friedrich Engels wrote his first and classic book, The Condition of the Working Class in England. Engels demonstrates how the “great town” of Manchester, the first major manufacturing center in England, was great only for capitalist profits. The concentration of capital required for the invention and adoption of machinery outproduced independent handicraft and agricultural production, forcing both into the industrial proletariat of the city. There, they had to work for the capitalists, whose wages were so low they could, if they were lucky, live in overcrowded houses and neighborhoods just outside the city limits. Because the city was produced chaotically for capitalist profits, no attention was given to accompanying environmental impacts. As the masses were driven from their land into the urban factories, the ancestral ties to the land and ecological knowledge of how to live sustainably on that land was lost. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/capitalist-urbanization-sponge-cities/

Note: Following the original publication of this article, Alex Saab was extradited to Miami on October 16th 2021, and remains in prison awaiting an appeal. On March 18, The Cape Verde Supreme Court approved the extradition of Venezuelan government envoy Alex Saab to the United States. Saab was en route to Iran to secure food and medicine deals for Venezuelan public programs last year when he was arrested in Cape Verde, at the request of the U.S. government under Donald Trump. He has been imprisoned in Cape Verde since June 2020. Saab is appealing the extradition. The arrest of Saab is part of the U.S. government’s larger attack on Venezuela’s CLAP (Local Committees for Supply and Production) food distribution program. It is also a blatant violation of national sovereignty spanning several continents as the U.S. demands the right to arrest anyone, anywhere, for pursuing economic development free of U.S. dictates. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationnews.org/extradition-of-alex-saab-u-s-takes-effort-to-starve-venezuelans-to-new-lows/

Despite its association with sovereign nations involved in wartime alliances, the term “ally” has become influential in activist circles on the US left. Attention to debates over what it means to be an ally reveal the limits of the politics of allyship. They also provide an opportunity to reflect on the difference between allies and comrades. Allyship is anchored in liberal politics. People committed to revolutionary politics need to be comrades. Over the last decade, there have been intense discussions on social media and among community organizers who can be an ally. Generally, allies are understood to be privileged people who want to do something about oppression. They may not consider themselves survivors or victims, but they want to help. So allies can be straight people who stand up for LGBTQ people, white people who support Black and brown people, men who defend women, and so on. I have yet to see the term used for rich people involved in working-class struggle. Allies don’t want to imagine themselves as homophobic, racist, or sexist. They see themselves as the good guys, part of the solution. As is frequently emphasized in debates around allyship, claiming to be an ally does not make one an ally. Allyship requires time and effort. People have to work at it. Much of the written and video work on allyship is thus instructional, often appearing as a how-to guide or a list of pointers—how to be an ally, the dos and don’ts of allyship, and so on. The instructions for being a good ally are mini lifestyle manuals, techniques for navigating (but not demolishing) settings of privilege and oppression. Individuals can learn what not to say and what not to do. They can feel engaged without any organized political struggle at all. The “politics” in these allyship how-tos consists of interpersonal interactions, individual feelings, and mediated affects. The pieces on how to be a good ally that circulate online (as blog posts, videos, editorials, and course handouts) address the viewer or reader as an individual with a privileged identity who wants to operate in solidarity with the marginalized and oppressed. This potential ally is positioned as wanting to know what they can do right now, on their own, and in their everyday lives to combat racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression. The ally’s field of operation is often imagined as social media (in knowing the right way to respond to racist or homophobic remarks on Twitter, for example); as charitable contribution (in donating to and setting up GoFundMe campaigns); as professional interaction (in hiring the marginalized and promoting the oppressed); as conversations at one’s school or university (in knowing what not to say); and, sometimes, as street-level protests (in not dominating someone else’s event). Even more often, the ally’s own individual attitude and behavior is what is targeted. The how-to guide instructs allies on how to feel, think, and act if they want to consider themselves as people who are on the side of the oppressed. Their awareness is what needs to change. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/from-allies-to-comrades/

Liu Liangmo’s story is as remarkable as it is unknown. An anti-imperialist, pro-Communist Christian, with a significant relationship to the Black Liberation Movement and the Indian Freedom Struggle, Liu lived in the U.S. as a diplomat after participating in the ongoing Chinese revolution. He wrote a column for the prominent Black newspaper. The Pittsburgh Courier, before returning to his home country and attaining a fairly high-ranking position there. His story offers notable insight into the history of pre- and post-revolutionary China and its approach to the Black freedom movement in the U.S. It also reveals much about the turbulent “Second Popular Front” era in China, during which time Communist forces obtained broader legitimacy. This has largely been erased from U.S. political and historical consciousness, which helps explain Liu’s relative marginality. Most radical movements since the late 1960s have rightly critiqued the legacy of the Popular Front for blurring the lines between reform and revolution and, by extension, capitalism and communism. They see the Popular Front as an opportunist approach to building unity where radical ideas and the independent working-class program were subordinated to maintain legitimacy among left-liberal reform currents. What is lost in such sweeping generalizations are the unusual concrete circumstances and strategic conundrums that Communist forces faced worldwide in this moment, especially among the struggles of oppressed peoples against colonialism and fascism. Liu Liangmo’s story provides an opportunity to critically examine this period anew. His Courier columns covered a wide breadth of “popular front” political activities and the relationships expressed in those writings speak to both the strengths and the weakness of Communist political activity during World War II. On the one hand, there was unprecedented vitality and significance to Communist-led interventions while, on the other hand, there was a lack of strategic clarity that forestalled a larger political breakthrough. Using Liu’s columns as a foundation, we can address this moment and draw important international parallels. Read the full story here: https://www.liberationschool.org/liu-liangmo-pt-2/

Liu Liangmo (1909-1988) was a prominent Chinese anti-imperialist, religious leader and, from 1942-1945, columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier—at that time the nation’s widest circulating Black newspaper. Liu’s columns (and actions as an organizer) were a significant part of efforts by progressive Chinese people, on the mainland and in the diaspora, to build alliances with the Black Liberation movement as part of a broader effort to shape the post-war world. His words linked the causes of ending colonialism, imperialism, and race discrimination—from the Yangtze to the Ganges to the Mississippi—mirroring the words and actions of millions of others involved in similarly-minded struggles around the world, including Liu’s favorite U.S. singer: Paul Robeson. Liu’s columns represent the efforts of Communist and aligned currents to turn the allied effort in the favor of the exploited and the oppressed. This was counteracted in the so-called “Cold War,” as imperialist forces worked to make the world “safe for capitalism” in the wake of the World War II. His columns and activities offer interesting insight into the struggle within the “Second United Front” in China between the Nationalist Kuomintang and the Communists during the Second World War and their differing approaches to the post-war world: whether China should be an anti-colonial vanguard or seek inclusion in the imperialist “great power” club. The “Nationalist” Chinese government’s chose the latter, heavily impacting their approach to racism in the US. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/liu-liangmo-pt-1/

In commemorating Black August, we commemorate the struggle of those who have fought before us and faced violent repercussions from the state. We uplift the revolutionary history of the Black working class and its fundamental position in forging and leading the struggle for liberation for all. And we recommit ourselves to the struggle for Black Liberation and for the freedom of all political prisoners. When I think of political prisoners, and when I think of those who have relentlessly committed themselves to Black Liberation, I always think of Assata Shakur. From Assata’s story, we are able to learn what it means to be motivated by a deep love for the people and the struggle for freedom—and what it means to embody a determined and unbreakable spirit in the face of crackdowns and government repression designed to stifle and destroy the movement. Account after account from Assata’s comrades and fellow revolutionaries describe Assata as a light, a positive spirit who remained disciplined and committed to the struggle despite incredible hardships. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/assata-shakur-the-making-of-a-revolutionary-woman/

In early 1956, construction was almost complete on what the Japanese authorities and general public thought was going to be a battery factory in what is now known as West Tokyo, but what at the time was farmland. When the “factory” was finished on April 10 of that year, however, a banner outside the perimeters announced that it was the new home of Korea University, which was previously a series of shacks attached to Tokyo First Korean High School. This episode is part of the much longer and widely unknown anti-colonial struggle of Koreans in Japan, a struggle with implications and lessons for the whole world. It’s a struggle that, just like the Korean struggle more broadly, has been systematically isolated. As such, it’s a struggle that needs more international solidarity, particularly from those of us in the U.S. Yet it’s also a struggle that can provide hope and inspiration for all people fighting against colonialism and imperialism. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/the-chongryon-movement-the-struggle-of-koreans-in-japan/

Our understanding of the state lies at the heart of our struggle to create a new society and fundamentally eliminate the oppression, exploitation, war, and environmental destruction characteristic of capitalism. In a socialist state, people collectively manage society, including what we produce, how much we produce, and the conditions of our work, to meet the needs of the people and the planet. Under capitalism, the state is organized to maintain the capitalist system and the dictatorship of a tiny group of capitalists over the rest of us through the use (or threat) of violent force and a range of institutions that present capitalism as “common sense.” The primary function of the capitalist state is to protect itself, which means it manages contradictions within the capitalist class and between their class and the working class. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/marxist-state-theory-intro/

The Cuban people voted by supermajority on Sept. 25 to approve the Families Code, a revolutionary law that modernizes, recognizes and legalizes all manifestations of families in Cuba. The previous 1975 Family Code was revolutionary for its time, but needed a major updating with almost 50 years of growth in social consciousness worldwide and in Cuba. The new Families Code broadens the family model to be fully inclusive. It includes the right to same sex marriage, expanded rights of adoption, allows surrogacy births, more protection for seniors and grandparents’ rights, stronger protections against domestic violence and explicit expansion of the rights of children. Composed of 471 articles and 117 pages, the hefty code details the fullest inclusion of every Cuban’s family as one sees fit, and “defends equality, non-discrimination, dignity and respect for diversity.” Of 6,251,786 eligible voters, 74.01% turned out to vote. Of these, a supermajority of 66.89% approved the Families Code. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationnews.org/supermajority-of-cubans-vote-for-revolutionary-families-code/

How do the actual people in charge of corporations manage to remain protected from the consequences of the countless crimes they commit year after year? How is it that when CEOs make clear and obvious decisions that habitually violate every existing worker-won regulation, from the Clean Air Act to the Civil Rights Act, with very few exceptions, they charge the corporation—the “artificial” or “unnatural” person—instead of the CEO—the actual, “natural person” who made those decisions? The legal grounds that corporations have the same protections and rights as “natural persons” is commonly justified by the 1886 Supreme Court ruling in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. As we’ll see, the Court’s decision in the case didn’t establish any precedent for corporate personhood, nor did the Court make any ruling on it. To the extent that the Supreme Court even debated “artificial,” “corporate,” and other kinds of personhood, they did so to facilitate the transition from “free competition” to monopoly capitalism in the country. In this article, we explore the Santa Clara case before turning to debates within the institutions of power in the U.S. over the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. These debates can only be understood if situated within their historical, political, and economic context: the transition to monopoly capital in the U.S. To conclude, we explore the case’s destructive legacy, or the way it was illegitimately used to set precedent for the growth of monopoly capital. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/corporate-personhood-monopoly-capital-and-the-precedent-that-wasnt-the-1866-santa-clara-case/

By the early 1970s, the global revolutionary tide of socialist and national liberation struggles was at its apex, and the tide was washing over the U.S., with expanding and increasingly militant social movements and political organizations. The beginning of “neoliberalism” was a domestic aspect of the coming global counterrevolution, which devastated the world for decades. This article tells the story of how the right wing of the capitalist class came to drive a new set of reactionary Supreme Court rulings, government policies, and ideological battles against democracy and the basic democratic rights our class won and that the right wing soon started rolling back. A key figure in this anti-democratic turn was Lewis F. Powell Jr., a tobacco company executive turned Supreme Court Justice. In the transition between the two roles, he wrote his infamous “Powell Memo.” In hindsight, the private memorandum Lewis F. Powell Jr. sent to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on August 23, 1971—known as the “Powell Memo”—in many ways represents the inaugural moment in this counteroffensive. Titled, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” the Memo clearly expressed the sharpness of the class struggle at that time and encapsulated the capitalist class’ fear that they were losing the battles of ideas and the world. It undoubtedly laid the groundwork for some key components of U.S. imperialism’s new offensive against the global revolutionary upsurge that characterized the immediate post-World War II environment, an offensive that is still with us today. Read the full article here:

In an article published this year for International Women’s Day, Maddie Dery summarizes the various experiences of the women’s liberation movement since the early 20th century: “The history of International Women’s Day teaches us that when we fight, we win”. This spirit, which threads through the historic struggle for women’s liberation and socialism, is easily identified in the revolutionary origins, legacies, and futures of International Women’s Day. At Liberation School, we want to end March—which, since 1987, the U.S. recognizes as “Women’s History Month”—and pull that red thread by publishing Claudia Jones’ historic 1950 speech at an International Women’s Day rally, which was also published in Political Affairs, the monthly journal of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Jones’ speech rooted the contemporary moment of the class struggle in the long history of the fight for Black liberation, women’s emancipation, peace, and socialism, linking together fighters from Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth to Mother Jones and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, from Lucy Stone and Ida B Wells to Williana Burroughs and Clara Zetkin. Born in Trinidad in 1915, Claudia Jones moved to New York City eight years later. She is one of the most significant revolutionary theorists and organizers of the 20th century. After joining the Communist Party in 1936 through the struggle to free the Scottsboro Boys, she rapidly developed as an organizer and intellectual and within two years was the associate editor of the CPUSA’s Weekly Review and after another two years was the lead editor. Pushing the Party to prioritize struggles against male and national chauvinism, in the late 1940s Jones theorized the “super-exploitation” of Black working-class women through their structural location in U.S. society. In one 1949 article, she wrote that “the Negro woman, who combines in her status the worker, the Negro, and the woman, is the vital link to… heightened political consciousness”. For Jones, the heightened oppression of Black women workers and their historic roles as leaders and organizers of their communities made Black women’s participation and leadership essential to the communist and progressive struggle. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/claudia-jones-1950-iwd-speech/

Every working person is keenly aware that prices are up. Nasty surprises and disbelief keep turning up at the register. People are being forced to forgo even the most minor and seemingly harmless comfort purchases, adding to the accumulation of the indignities necessary for survival under capitalism. Even worse, the alleged culprits can seem abstract and hard to pin down, like “the supply chain.” Some try to blame good things like higher wages, and others point to enraging levels of straight-up corporate greed. There is a debate raging about which factors cause inflation, with one other “cause” thrown in: government spending. The various explanations serve more as ideological markers than as actual explanations. They all have the virtue of having some “solution” that Congress or the White House can or should pursue immediately. Our indignation at the daily web of injustices we are forced to navigate reflects the contradiction between capitalism and humanity. Inflation reflects the dynamics of a system based on exploitation. Ultimately, there is no long-term solution to inflation or other ills of capitalism without replacing the system. Without such systematic change, all “immediate” solutions produce new cul-de-sacs for the working class. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/value-price-and-inflation-immediate-and-structural-causes/

In a recent book on the ongoing relevance of Walter Rodney’s work, Karim F. Hirji notes that, “as with scores of progressive intellectuals and activists of the past, the prevailing ideology functions to relegate Rodney into the deepest, almost unreachable, ravines of memory. A person who was widely known is now a nonentity, a stranger to the youth in Africa and the Caribbean” and the U.S. Rodney’s theoretical and practical contributions to the socialist movement warrant an ongoing engagement with his life story and major texts. Rodney’s most recent, posthumously-published text, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World, offers an important perspective on the time period in which it was written and the internal position of the author. Rodney’s family worked with Robin Kelley in taking Walter’s extensive lecture notes on the Russian revolutionary era and forming them into a complete manuscript. This essay, which complements our new study guide on The Russian Revolution, offers a brief overview of Rodney’s background historical context. Highlighting aspects of Rodney’s individual life demonstrates that his commitments were not just the result of his own individual experiences and conclusions, but were part of and emerged from the revolutionary crisis ripping through the world at the time. To better comprehend A View from the Third World, we turn to Groundings with My Brothers, which Rodney produced as a relatively new professor in Jamaica. In that book, Rodney reflects on the dialectical pedagogy he developed to make his academic labor part of the global movement against capitalist imperialism, which he also called the white power structure. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/walter-rodney-a-peoples-professor/

The Party for Socialism and Liberation is built on two essential premises. One is revolutionary Marxist theory and analysis on all issues affecting humanity and the environment we live in, especially the most pressing issues facing workers and oppressed peoples. We strive through our literature, newspaper, social media, video, agitational leaflets, and more, to popularize and communicate to our class the truth behind the capitalists’ lies and the urgent need for socialism. But theory and politics would mean nothing without struggle. That is the other essential premise of our organization. Action is the key to progress, the only way to defeat right-wing policies and win rights, and ultimately to achieve the liberation of humanity through socialism. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/party-action-building-peoples-movements-streets/

We are in a period where the world’s poor and working people are waging heroic struggles against imperialist war and exploitation. Millions of people poured into the streets in the last few years to prevent Bush and Cheney’s rush to war against Iraq, only to find that this imperialist war had the backing of both political parties of U.S. imperialism, of the big business media, of the corporations and the banks. The protests were huge—the biggest anti-war demonstrations ever. The anti-war movement spanned the globe. It was an historic demonstration of unity by the people of all continents uniting against U.S. imperialism. Yet the war machine pushed ahead. Today, tens of thousands of Iraqis are dead. Thousands of GIs, workers in uniform, have been killed or wounded, with more being sent to their deaths daily. Politicians of all stripes promise “endless war” — and it is only because of the fierce Iraqi resistance to the Pentagon occupation that has slowed, but not stopped, the plans for the next war for empire. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/founding-statement-of-the-party-for-socialism-and-liberation/