Mumia Abu-Jamal's book, Have Black Lives Ever Mattered? addresses the long history of racist police and state repression. It offers contemporary organizers crucial historical insights and lessons, as well as advice, on organizing to stop the war on Black America...
Marxism, capitalism, and nature-society relations: An introduction
Introduction Environmentalists have long stressed limits to human interaction with nature. It’s commonly argued that transgressing “natural limits” caused the environmental crises we face today. While this sentiment might direct our attention to the severity and scale...
Class: The legacy of Asian American struggle
In the most recent wave of anti-Asian attacks, from the shooting of six Asian spa workers in Atlanta to the police killings of Christian Hall and Angelo Quinto, Asian Americans are demanding that Asian American history is told. We want to draw on this revolutionary...
What is imperialism? An introduction
Editor's note: A Spanish translation of this article is available here. In the suffering of the Global South, the brutality of capitalism lies bare. In a footnote toward the end of Capital, Marx wrote that the colonized subject reveals “what the bourgeois makes of...
Paulo Freire’s centennial: Political pedagogy for revolutionary organizations
All revolutionary processes are educational. From organizing meetings and study groups to writing protest speeches and propaganda before the revolutionary moment to creating new revolutionary educational and cultural institutions and training teachers and specialists...
Beyond the sprouts of capitalism: China’s early capitalist development and contemporary socialist project
This article was originally published at Monthly Review Online on March 03, 2021, and has been lightly revised with approval from the author. Introduction The contemporary political economy of the People’s Republic of China, the nature of the Chinese system, has been...
What is ideology? An introduction to the Marxist theory of ideology
Editor’s note: A Spanish translation of this article is available here. Introduction Marxist ideology is one of the most potent weapons the working and oppressed classes have, a weapon that our class can and has used to not only win reforms but to build revolutionary...
Hammer and hoe: Alabama communists during the Great Depression
Robin D.G. Kelley first published Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression in 1990, although he began working on it as a doctoral student in the 1980s. In the book, Kelley narrates the emergence of the communist movement in Alabama during the...
Reading Kelley’s “Hammer and hoe” as organizers today
This article accompanies Liberation School's new study guide for Robin D.G. Kelley's, Hammer and Hoe. As the re-popularization of socialism continues, the practical lessons today’s organizers can learn from the history of the communist movement in the U.S. become...