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.
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.
The Dream on Layaway: How Capital Repossessed American Adulthood
The "Great Postponement" isn't just about delayed dreams; it signals a devastating structural collapse for young adults trapped in a never-ending cycle of dependency and disempowerment. Despite holding jobs, many remain shackled to their parents' homes, unable to participate fully in adulthood due to spiraling rents and crippling inequality. The system deliberately obscures the true nature of this crisis, homogenizing individual struggles into mere statistics while upholding a status quo drenched in inherited privilege and racial disparity. The solution lies in organizing tenant unions and collective action—because waiting for change is no longer an option. The American Dream is not postponed; it's been stolen.
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.
The World Got Richer, You Didn’t: Capitalism’s Quadrillion-Dollar Balance-Sheet Lie
Fortune says “global households” became $40 trillion richer in 2025. But when the richest 10 percent already own three-quarters of the world’s wealth, that headline is less a report than a magic trick. The new abundance came largely from rising equities, inflated asset values and expanding financial claims—not from productive investment or improved living standards. Behind the quadrillion-dollar balance sheet lies a system where private fortunes swell while public wealth stagnates, workers lose power, tenants lose security and the Global South services the debts of the imperial core. This is not shared prosperity. It is class power written in the language of accounting.
The Thieves Opened the Vault: From Comprador Corruption to Imperial Receivership in Venezuela
The betrayal of Pedro Binaggia, a Venezuelan informant for U.S. authorities, is just a microcosm of a much larger imperial drama. While Binaggia recorded evidence of a $1.2 billion oil fraud, he found the American government he served turned its back on him after extracting what it needed. This tale is framed as his personal tragedy but obscures the broader context of imperial overreach. The U.S. not only investigates and prosecutes alleged crimes but assumes control over Venezuela’s oil revenue, reducing a sovereign state to a pawn in a power game. The theft of national wealth is cleaned up by a facade of legality, while corrupted officials and foreign interests conspire in the shadows. It's a grim reminder: in this twisted narrative, the real crime lies in the extraction, not just the theft.
The Market Was Born with a Gun: Colonial Plunder, Neoliberal Rule, and the Worker-Peasant Road Beyond Capital
Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik’s groundbreaking analysis dismantles the myth that capitalism flourished independently within Europe, revealing a system intricately linked to colonial exploitation. They illustrate how colonialism not only financed European industrial growth but also perpetuated poverty and dependency in colonized nations. The authors articulate that capitalism's survival hinged on subjugating external economies. With the unraveling of colonial structures leading to depression and famine, they propose a radical rethinking of revolutionary potential through a worker-peasant alliance, emphasizing organized power as essential to dismantling capital's dominance. Ultimately, their work challenges the notion of capitalism's self-sufficiency, exposing its reliance on imperial mechanisms for survival.
Free Trade Behind Barbed Wire: Europe’s Treaty War on China
The Council on Foreign Relations claims Europe must “take on China” to save free trade. Behind that contradiction lies a wider campaign to turn tariffs, export controls, investment screening and trade agreements into a coordinated architecture of containment. Western governments subsidize their own industries while treating Chinese planning and technological advance as violations of the market. This essay exposes how “free trade” becomes selective access for European capital and selective restriction for China, tracing the struggle back to imperial domination and forward to the danger of economic war becoming military confrontation. The answer is organization before the fine print becomes a front line.
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.
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.