Category: Black Power/Black Liberation

The Dividend Is Human: Africa’s Population Boom and the Battle Over Production

The Financial Times provocatively flips the Malthusian narrative on its head, arguing Africa's plight stems from a historical lack of population rather than excess. This revisionist tale criticizes the colonial legacy that stripped Africa of its labor and infrastructure, while the current swell of population, cities, and markets struggles against debt and underdevelopment. The real challenge isn't merely a growing populace; it's whether Africans can seize control of factories, technology, and continental markets. As density increases, the push for organized labor and investment in industrial capacity becomes crucial—otherwise, Africa risks becoming a mere market for foreign goods, trapped in a cycle of dependency despite its demographic potential.

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The Divided Empire: Prashad, Buze and the Contradiction Between Hyper-Imperial Unity and Capitalist Rivalry

In a time when U.S.-led imperialism tightens its grip, nuanced debates emerge about the new American Pole—a daunting fusion of military, financial, and technological power that suppresses dissent while promising security. Vijay Prashad argues for a hyper-imperialism consolidating state control and aggressiveness against external defiance, while Özcan Buze highlights lingering national rivalries within the empire’s core. As cities devolve into ghost towns stripped of industry and sovereignty is commodified, the left is urged to unite struggles for worker power, national liberation, and social ownership. The empire’s contradictions must fuel a revolutionary response—a call to dismantle the machinery that perpetuates exploitation, rather than aspiring for a mere return to past privileges.

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The Revolution Will Not Be Managed: Glen Ford, the Black Agenda, and the Missing Vehicle

Glen Ford's incisive critique shatters the myth of American progress, revealing how conquest and exploitation are cloaked as success. He dissects the deceptive practices of the Black misleadership class and the Democratic Party, showing how they perpetuate capitalist interests while masquerading as champions of Black liberation. Ford demands a radical rethinking of power and accountability, advocating for community control and reparations, emphasizing that true self-determination lies in empowering marginalized voices. Amidst the pandemic and civil unrest, Ford’s legacy calls for a revolutionary movement capable of dismantling systemic oppression rather than settling for token representation. The fight is not just for visibility; it’s for genuine power.

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Democracy With a Gun to Your Head: George Jackson and the American Fascist Order

George Jackson wrote from inside the cage and exposed the system beyond it. In Blood in My Eye, prison, property, racial domination, monopoly capital, and imperial war appear not as separate problems but as parts of one American order. Jackson’s theory of secure fascism revealed how counterrevolution can rule through elections, reform, consumerism, surveillance, and controlled opposition as effectively as open terror. His strategic errors matter too: revolutionary potential is not consciousness, and militant initiative cannot substitute for organized mass power. This review recovers Jackson as a living weapon—one to be studied, sharpened, corrected, and returned to the struggle.

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Wrong Map, Right Empire: Washington’s Blueprint for African Dependency

A State Department map mislabeled every country in Africa during a presentation on new U.S. health agreements. The blunder went viral as a joke about AI incompetence, but the deeper scandal was buried beneath the laughter. Washington may not know where African nations are on a map, yet it knows exactly how to reach their clinics, databases, laboratories, mineral corridors and security systems. Behind the humanitarian language lies a harder imperial architecture built on shrinking aid, conditional funding, data access, military cooperation and investment pressure. The map was wrong. The hierarchy was not.

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Not Every Worker Is Proletarian: J. Sakai, White Labor, and the Settler Bargain

J. Sakai's Settlers shatters the sanctified image of the white proletariat by exposing them as products of a colonial system built on genocide, conquest, and exploitation. He argues that white labor, while subjected to capitalist oppression, has historically defended the very empire benefiting from their privilege. The text dismantles the myth that suffering automatically leads to class solidarity or consciousness, instead positing that loyalty to the colonial project is rooted in material circumstances. Sakai's revisionist approach insists that genuine liberation cannot emerge from complicity in settler structures, challenging the Euro-American left's complacency and demanding a conscious, organized revolutionary defection from oppressive systems.

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The Road, the Rifle and the Rice Field: Ibrahim Traoré’s War Against the Machinery of Dependence

Ibrahim Traoré’s speech is more than a declaration of national resolve. It is a sustained confrontation with the machinery of African dependency: roads promised but never built, minerals exported without transformation, imported goods replacing productive capacity, universities producing credentials instead of machines, and local elites profiting from national weakness. Through the recurring question—“Are we cursed?”—Traoré rejects racial fatalism and insists that Africa’s condition has a history, a structure and beneficiaries. This intervention excavates the speech’s strongest contradictions while asking whether state-led sovereignty can become genuine popular power rather than another project administered above the people.

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The Empire Calls Resistance Subversion: Cuba and Washington’s War on Revolutionary Consciousness

The State Department's report conflates documented espionage with a sweeping indictment of social movements, branding students, revolutionaries, and dissenters as part of a conspiracy orchestrated from Cuba. This narrative denies local struggles against oppression, instead framing resistance as a foreign-directed plot, thus erasing historical context and the material origins of dissent. The document's loose connection between Cuba's influence and contemporary activism serves as a McCarthyite tool against American dissent. By equating genuine political engagement with espionage, it aims to squash revolutionary consciousness and reinforce the status quo, revealing the empire's fear that the oppressed might unite and resist independently.

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Un-American by Choice: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Revolution Liberal Memory Could Not Bury

For generations, the American academy celebrated W.E.B. Du Bois while burying the revolutionary conclusions that defined the final decades of his life. In this Weaponized Intellects review of Bill V. Mullen's Un-American, we excavate the real Du Bois: communist, anti-imperialist, Pan-African internationalist and unapologetic ally of socialist revolution. Mullen powerfully restores Du Bois to the global struggle against capitalism and colonialism, yet retreats into familiar anti-Stalinist assumptions when revolution becomes embodied in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. The result is both an indispensable recovery and a revealing ideological battleground over the meaning of socialism, state power and the unfinished project of world revolution.

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The Rose That Grew From Concrete: Tupac Shakur, Revolutionary Memory, and the Industry That Sold It Back

Dean Van Nguyen's "Words for My Comrades" passionately reclaims Tupac Shakur as a pivotal voice in the Black revolutionary movement, tracing his roots back to the powerful yet fragmented legacy left by the Panthers. While capitalism commodifies Tupac's image, the essence of his revolutionary spirit remains alive, urging listeners to confront issues of systemic oppression and identity. Van Nguyen illuminates the contradictions in Tupac's life, linking them to a larger inheritance shaped by state repression and cultural rebellion. Ultimately, Tupac's significance lies not in providing a finished political framework but in sparking inquiry into collective struggle and revolutionary continuity, creating pathways toward genuine transformation.

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