Liberation Audio

A popular coal-miner’s riddle from the 1930s summarizes one of capitalism’s most visible and absurd contradictions. After a daughter asks her father why their home is so cold, he tells her they don’t have any money to purchase coal. He explains they don’t have money because he lost his job at the coal mine. When the daughter asks why he lost his job, the father answers: “Because we produced too much coal”. For a contemporary example, how many of us have, through a religious institution, school, mutual aid organization, or other community group, participated in a clothing drive, soliciting gently-used clothing to give to those in need? How many of us need to borrow (or bargain-shop for) nice clothes for job interviews or court appearances? One would think the world is short on clothing. The truth is that the majority of the garments we produce go to landfills instead of other workers. In 2018, 60 percent of 100 billion clothing items were trashed. Despite the immense data-tracking technologies, even garment specialists don’t know how many clothes we produce each year, according to a 2024 article in The Guardian. Based on accessible information, however, “between 80bn and 150bn garments are made” annually, and 10 – 40 percent (or up to 60 billion clothing items) aren’t sold. A November 2024 study by United Way NCA provides a more contemporary and data-based illustration of the inhumanity of capitalist overproduction. Analyzing data from the U.S. Census and the Department of Housing & Urban Development, they found “there are currently 28 vacant homes for every one person experiencing homelessness in the U.S.”. There are countless other examples, some more dramatic than others, that show the absurdity of the capitalist system through one of its fundamental contradictions: overproduction. Generally speaking, overproduction occurs when too much is produced compared to how much can be sold at a profit. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/overproduction/

The eighth installment in Liberation School’s series of previously untranslated works by Thomas Sankara is published on the day Sankara was born in 1949. We would like to thank Bruno Jaffré and the editorial team of ThomasSankara.net for letting us translate and publish these works and the following interview dated September 20, 1985. The text is from an interview with Thomas Sankara conducted by a graduate student, which results in, as Jaffré notes in his introduction, a unique style of dialogue. It was originally published in French under the title provided by the student, “At the dawn of the third year of the revolution, the birth of a new society.” Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/thomas-sankara-assesses-year-3-of-the-revolution/

Every year, Pew Research publishes a study on the U.S. population’s political priorities. Their 2024 report shows that, like the previous years, “no single issue stands out after the economy,” with almost 75 percent of respondents rating it the main goal for the next administration, a rate “considerably larger” than any other policy. Yet when we see pundits discuss “the economy” on the news, they speak an obscuring language. The economy is an abstraction, in that there is no such “thing” as the economy. What we call “the economy” is, in reality, the ways that humans produce, distribute, exchange, and consume products or services. In this sense, “the economy” has a history as long as humanity. Yet there are different ways of organizing the economy. Unlike what we’re taught, the capitalist economy is a relatively recent phenomenon and is neither the final, just, most effective, nor possible form of organizing what, how, and why we produce. The introductory article to this series ended with one of the most foundational of the contradictions of capitalism: between use value and exchange value. Understanding this one contradiction goes a long way in helping understand the antagonism between those of us who live by working and the few of them who live by making us work. The conflict between use value and exchange value is an expression of the struggle between classes. This entry explains some aspects of the contradiction between use value and exchange value, how they help us better understand the world around us, and some ways we can wield that understanding to explain the exploitation humans, all living creatures, and the Earth suffer from, which is necessary for eliminating the root cause of that suffering. Read the original article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/use-value-exchange-value/

Hearing or reading about the “contradictions of capitalism” in an article or at a rally might be intimidating, like a foreign language or a term only a certain group can understand. While the contradictions of capitalism are complicated, working and oppressed people can easily understand them for the simple reason that we all live with and negotiate any number of contradictions every day. The contradictions we deal with that are the most confining, that most constrain our capacities and that keep us oppressed are specifically the contradictions of capitalism. On any given day, we find abundant evidence that makes it clear that the capitalist system doesn’t work in practice. Examining the contradictions of capitalism and demonstrating how they are inherent in the system, proves that capitalism doesn’t even work in theory. Understanding capitalist contradictions heightens our agitation and accelerates political consciousness by cutting through capitalist ideology and the various excuses of capitalists, politicians, and their media. Knowing capitalist contradictions better informs our tactics and strategies in any given struggle and serves as a bridge to socialist reconstruction in the U.S. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/capitalist-contradictions-and-revolutionary-struggle-an-introduction/

According to the United Nations Population Fund’s 2009 report, 2008 was the first time in history that over 50 percent of the world’s population resided in cities instead of rural areas. Because of the different ways countries define cities, others date the qualitative shift to as recently as 2021. Regardless, across the spectrum it’s undisputed we now live in an “urban age” and, as such, transforming the relationship between cities and the natural world is essential for climate change adaptation and mitigation. The international capitalist institutions like the World Bank that are increasingly taking up the issue of cities and climate change can’t explain the various factors behind urbanization nor can they pose real solutions to its impact on or relationship to climate catastrophes. Cities consume 78 percent of the world’s energy resources and produce 60 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2022 UN Habitat report. Under the capitalist model, urban planning lacks a holistic approach, leaving human well being and ecological needs as an afterthought, which will continue to have a degenerative effect on the environment and global climate. Marx and Engels lived during a time in which capitalist urbanization was a nascent phenomenon concentrated mostly in some European cities, like Manchester, the English city about which Friedrich Engels wrote his first and classic book, The Condition of the Working Class in England. Engels demonstrates how the “great town” of Manchester, the first major manufacturing center in England, was great only for capitalist profits. The concentration of capital required for the invention and adoption of machinery outproduced independent handicraft and agricultural production, forcing both into the industrial proletariat of the city. There, they had to work for the capitalists, whose wages were so low they could, if they were lucky, live in overcrowded houses and neighborhoods just outside the city limits. Because the city was produced chaotically for capitalist profits, no attention was given to accompanying environmental impacts. As the masses were driven from their land into the urban factories, the ancestral ties to the land and ecological knowledge of how to live sustainably on that land was lost. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/capitalist-urbanization-sponge-cities/

Note: Following the original publication of this article, Alex Saab was extradited to Miami on October 16th 2021, and remains in prison awaiting an appeal. On March 18, The Cape Verde Supreme Court approved the extradition of Venezuelan government envoy Alex Saab to the United States. Saab was en route to Iran to secure food and medicine deals for Venezuelan public programs last year when he was arrested in Cape Verde, at the request of the U.S. government under Donald Trump. He has been imprisoned in Cape Verde since June 2020. Saab is appealing the extradition. The arrest of Saab is part of the U.S. government’s larger attack on Venezuela’s CLAP (Local Committees for Supply and Production) food distribution program. It is also a blatant violation of national sovereignty spanning several continents as the U.S. demands the right to arrest anyone, anywhere, for pursuing economic development free of U.S. dictates. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationnews.org/extradition-of-alex-saab-u-s-takes-effort-to-starve-venezuelans-to-new-lows/

Despite its association with sovereign nations involved in wartime alliances, the term “ally” has become influential in activist circles on the US left. Attention to debates over what it means to be an ally reveal the limits of the politics of allyship. They also provide an opportunity to reflect on the difference between allies and comrades. Allyship is anchored in liberal politics. People committed to revolutionary politics need to be comrades. Over the last decade, there have been intense discussions on social media and among community organizers who can be an ally. Generally, allies are understood to be privileged people who want to do something about oppression. They may not consider themselves survivors or victims, but they want to help. So allies can be straight people who stand up for LGBTQ people, white people who support Black and brown people, men who defend women, and so on. I have yet to see the term used for rich people involved in working-class struggle. Allies don’t want to imagine themselves as homophobic, racist, or sexist. They see themselves as the good guys, part of the solution. As is frequently emphasized in debates around allyship, claiming to be an ally does not make one an ally. Allyship requires time and effort. People have to work at it. Much of the written and video work on allyship is thus instructional, often appearing as a how-to guide or a list of pointers—how to be an ally, the dos and don’ts of allyship, and so on. The instructions for being a good ally are mini lifestyle manuals, techniques for navigating (but not demolishing) settings of privilege and oppression. Individuals can learn what not to say and what not to do. They can feel engaged without any organized political struggle at all. The “politics” in these allyship how-tos consists of interpersonal interactions, individual feelings, and mediated affects. The pieces on how to be a good ally that circulate online (as blog posts, videos, editorials, and course handouts) address the viewer or reader as an individual with a privileged identity who wants to operate in solidarity with the marginalized and oppressed. This potential ally is positioned as wanting to know what they can do right now, on their own, and in their everyday lives to combat racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression. The ally’s field of operation is often imagined as social media (in knowing the right way to respond to racist or homophobic remarks on Twitter, for example); as charitable contribution (in donating to and setting up GoFundMe campaigns); as professional interaction (in hiring the marginalized and promoting the oppressed); as conversations at one’s school or university (in knowing what not to say); and, sometimes, as street-level protests (in not dominating someone else’s event). Even more often, the ally’s own individual attitude and behavior is what is targeted. The how-to guide instructs allies on how to feel, think, and act if they want to consider themselves as people who are on the side of the oppressed. Their awareness is what needs to change. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/from-allies-to-comrades/

Liu Liangmo’s story is as remarkable as it is unknown. An anti-imperialist, pro-Communist Christian, with a significant relationship to the Black Liberation Movement and the Indian Freedom Struggle, Liu lived in the U.S. as a diplomat after participating in the ongoing Chinese revolution. He wrote a column for the prominent Black newspaper. The Pittsburgh Courier, before returning to his home country and attaining a fairly high-ranking position there. His story offers notable insight into the history of pre- and post-revolutionary China and its approach to the Black freedom movement in the U.S. It also reveals much about the turbulent “Second Popular Front” era in China, during which time Communist forces obtained broader legitimacy. This has largely been erased from U.S. political and historical consciousness, which helps explain Liu’s relative marginality. Most radical movements since the late 1960s have rightly critiqued the legacy of the Popular Front for blurring the lines between reform and revolution and, by extension, capitalism and communism. They see the Popular Front as an opportunist approach to building unity where radical ideas and the independent working-class program were subordinated to maintain legitimacy among left-liberal reform currents. What is lost in such sweeping generalizations are the unusual concrete circumstances and strategic conundrums that Communist forces faced worldwide in this moment, especially among the struggles of oppressed peoples against colonialism and fascism. Liu Liangmo’s story provides an opportunity to critically examine this period anew. His Courier columns covered a wide breadth of “popular front” political activities and the relationships expressed in those writings speak to both the strengths and the weakness of Communist political activity during World War II. On the one hand, there was unprecedented vitality and significance to Communist-led interventions while, on the other hand, there was a lack of strategic clarity that forestalled a larger political breakthrough. Using Liu’s columns as a foundation, we can address this moment and draw important international parallels. Read the full story here: https://www.liberationschool.org/liu-liangmo-pt-2/

Liu Liangmo (1909-1988) was a prominent Chinese anti-imperialist, religious leader and, from 1942-1945, columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier—at that time the nation’s widest circulating Black newspaper. Liu’s columns (and actions as an organizer) were a significant part of efforts by progressive Chinese people, on the mainland and in the diaspora, to build alliances with the Black Liberation movement as part of a broader effort to shape the post-war world. His words linked the causes of ending colonialism, imperialism, and race discrimination—from the Yangtze to the Ganges to the Mississippi—mirroring the words and actions of millions of others involved in similarly-minded struggles around the world, including Liu’s favorite U.S. singer: Paul Robeson. Liu’s columns represent the efforts of Communist and aligned currents to turn the allied effort in the favor of the exploited and the oppressed. This was counteracted in the so-called “Cold War,” as imperialist forces worked to make the world “safe for capitalism” in the wake of the World War II. His columns and activities offer interesting insight into the struggle within the “Second United Front” in China between the Nationalist Kuomintang and the Communists during the Second World War and their differing approaches to the post-war world: whether China should be an anti-colonial vanguard or seek inclusion in the imperialist “great power” club. The “Nationalist” Chinese government’s chose the latter, heavily impacting their approach to racism in the US. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/liu-liangmo-pt-1/

In commemorating Black August, we commemorate the struggle of those who have fought before us and faced violent repercussions from the state. We uplift the revolutionary history of the Black working class and its fundamental position in forging and leading the struggle for liberation for all. And we recommit ourselves to the struggle for Black Liberation and for the freedom of all political prisoners. When I think of political prisoners, and when I think of those who have relentlessly committed themselves to Black Liberation, I always think of Assata Shakur. From Assata’s story, we are able to learn what it means to be motivated by a deep love for the people and the struggle for freedom—and what it means to embody a determined and unbreakable spirit in the face of crackdowns and government repression designed to stifle and destroy the movement. Account after account from Assata’s comrades and fellow revolutionaries describe Assata as a light, a positive spirit who remained disciplined and committed to the struggle despite incredible hardships. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/assata-shakur-the-making-of-a-revolutionary-woman/