Tag: Political Economy

Factories for the Fortress, Austerity for the People: America’s Imperial Reconstruction

The so-called manufacturing rebound lauded by CNBC is a deceptive mirage masking an imperial crisis. Beneath flashy growth numbers lie the ruins of a deindustrialized America, where financial extraction and reliance on foreign inputs have left vital sectors like semiconductors and military production at risk. Tariffs inflate costs, wars disrupt essential supply chains, and the resulting economic strain is shifted onto workers and marginalized communities. Capital demands industry without meaningful investment in labor or infrastructure, turning factories into fortresses of control rather than engines of prosperity. This isn't a renaissance; it's an imperial scramble desperately attempting to reclaim dominance amid its own financial decay.

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The Billionaire Is a Receipt: America’s Stolen Ledger of Wealth

The Wall Street Journal tells a fairy tale in which billionaires create wealth while workers, enslaved people, Indigenous nations, Black farmers, public institutions, and the Global South disappear from the ledger. This excavation restores the buried history beneath American fortunes: conquest, slavery, land theft, union-breaking, financial extraction, digital surveillance, and unequal exchange. The real divide is not between innovators and envious socialists, but between the masses who collectively produce social wealth and the minority whose property claims grant them command over it. The answer is organization—from the shop floor to the wider struggle for collective control over humanity’s abundance.

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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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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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When the Numbers Revolt: The World Stops Buying the American Empire

The world is turning its back on the American Empire as perceptions shift dramatically in favor of China, a shift underscored by a recent Pew survey revealing greater global trust in China over the U.S. The BBC attempts to downplay this trend, attributing it to America's chaotic leadership under Trump, but the truth lies in a stark reality: nations are weary of U.S. interference and long for a relationship defined by trade, not military might. This reversal signals not just a popularity contest but a fundamental reevaluation of power dynamics. The challenge now is to harness this anti-imperialist sentiment into a mass movement against war with China.

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The Guardrails Are a Cage: AI, Surplus Humanity, and the Technofascist State

Hundreds of economists warn that artificial intelligence could displace millions of workers, but their petition mistakes a ruling-class offensive for a technical oversight. AI is already being used to reduce workforces, intensify surveillance, automate discipline, exclude applicants, restrict public benefits, and strengthen military and counterinsurgency systems. The real danger is not that machines may escape human control, but that monopoly capital is using them to reduce its dependence on labor while expanding the apparatus needed to manage those it renders surplus. Against this technofascist future, workers are organizing to seize control over deployment, data, productivity, and power.

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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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Socialism Without Revolution: Jacobin’s Market Fantasy Against the Socialist World

Bhaskar Sunkara’s market socialism is a bold yet flawed vision that naively overlooks the burdens of imperialism. He critiques past socialist models while proposing that worker-run firms can flourish within a system still embedded in capitalist exploitation. However, the reality is that these worker enterprises would still rely on the global hierarchy that upholds imperial advantages. A true socialist awakening must reject these inherited structures and demands an anti-imperialist framework instead. Without confronting the realities of colonial legacies and ensuring reparative relations, Sunkara’s proposal risks socializing the benefits of imperialism while maintaining its oppressive mechanisms intact.

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