Category: Race/Class 101

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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The Market Came Armed: Sven Beckert and the World Capital Built by Conquest

Sven Beckert demolishes capitalism’s favorite myth: that it emerged from free markets, innovation, and peaceful exchange. His global history shows a system built through conquest, slavery, colonial dispossession, state power, coerced labor, and repeated counterrevolution. Yet Beckert repeatedly turns rebellions, socialist revolutions, and anticolonial victories into episodes in capitalism’s adaptation. This review seizes his historical arsenal while rejecting that retreat, arguing that a world made through organized class and colonial power can be remade only through the organized power of workers and oppressed peoples.

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Communists and Patriots: The Flag, the Class, and the Lie of Imperial Nationalism

Trump says you can be a communist or a patriot—but not both. This essay exposes the historical fraud buried inside that slogan. By reconstructing the nation through historical materialism, it shows that nationalism has never possessed a fixed political content. In oppressed nations, communists repeatedly became the truest patriots because the struggle for national liberation demanded the overthrow of colonialism, imperialism, and comprador rule. In imperialist nations, however, nationalism serves the opposite function: binding workers to the ruling class and its global system of domination. The real contradiction is not between communism and patriotism, but between imperial patriotism and the liberation of the people.

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The Hunger Chain: How Trump Feeds Capital and Disciplines the Hungry

In a striking reveal, Fox celebrates Trump's fertilizer emergency as a boon for farmers, yet this facade obscures the underlying fragility of our food system reliant on state intervention. While fertilizer access gets prioritized, the true cost is hidden: a monopolized market where agribusiness thrives as workers face hunger, suspicion, and administrative punishment. Trump's regime twists food security into a mechanism for capital gain, revealing a stark disparity in state response; when profit is threatened, intervention is swift, but when workers struggle for sustenance, they face scrutiny. The urgent call is for food power—community sovereignty, mutual aid, and a radical rethinking of food as a right, not a commodity.

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One Colony, Two Ships: How Liberal History Splits What Capitalism Built

James Traub's exploration of America's dual origins through the Mayflower and the White Lion is dangerously simplistic. He perpetuates a narrative of moral dichotomy, ignoring the harsh reality that both journeys fueled a settler-capitalist machine built on land theft and enslavement. The framing minimizes Indigenous dispossession and reduces oppressed voices to mere historical subjects. This liberal attempt at reconciliation fails to confront the brutal interdependence between North and South, leaving unchallenged the systemic inequities rooted in conquest and exploitation. Rather than embracing a flawed myth of unity, America must confront its history to dismantle the ongoing consequences of its oppressive foundations.

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Cop City Is the Counterinsurgency Campus: How “Antifa” Became the New Name for the Old Domestic Enemy

The Guardian's coverage of Trump's "antifa" prosecutions highlights a covert escalation of systemic repression rather than the emergence of a new threat. While it depicts the federal indictment against Cop City protesters as a shocking maneuver, this is merely the latest play in a long history of state-sponsored violence rooted in colonialism, slavery, and counterinsurgency tactics. The narrative frames Trump as the villain while obscuring the entrenched architecture of oppression that transcends his administration. The real battle lies in organizing effective resistance, connecting various social justice movements, and building robust defense mechanisms amidst a climate poised for increasing militarization and legislative warfare against dissent.

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No Pride in Empire: Seattle’s Rainbow Classroom and the World Cup War Machine

The Seattle Pride Match is not just a progressive celebration but a vehicle for imperial propaganda, co-opting the cultural struggles of predominantly Muslim nations like Iran and Egypt. This event frames the West as a moral authority while masking the brutal realities of sanctions, military finance, and surveillance that underpin these dynamics. The local organizers, corporate sponsors, and FIFA collaborate to transform a football match into a colonial lesson, undermining the very values they profess to uphold. The real challenge lies in recognizing this manipulation and reframing the narrative: embracing genuine solidarity and resistance against imperial structures, rather than succumbing to an illusion of moral superiority.

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They Called It Ego: Jacobin, Chris Smalls, and the Policing of Black Anti-Imperialist Labor

Chris Smalls, once heralded as a labor hero, now finds himself a casualty of overblown ego in the eyes of Jacobin. Yet, this portrayal dangerously obscures a deeper truth: his evolution from solely confronting Amazon to advocating for Palestinian and Cuban solidarity reveals an unsettling fear among the respectable Left. They're comfortable with labor militancy as long as it remains contained and domesticated; once it branches into anti-imperialism, they recoil. Smalls symbolizes a challenge to the status quo, an unfiltered confrontation with empire that threatens to redefine labor politics as an international struggle. In essence, the fear of a Black worker embracing a global perspective exposes the fragile backbone of contemporary Leftist thought.

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