Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818 in Trier, where he received a classical education. He studied jurisprudence at Bonn and later in Berlin, where, however, his preoccupation with philosophy soon turned him away from law.

By the early 1970s, the global revolutionary tide of socialist and national liberation struggles was at its apex, and the tide was washing over the U.S., with expanding and increasingly militant social movements and political organizations.

Every working person is keenly aware that prices are up.

In 2013, five unelected judges gutted the right to vote for tens of millions of African Americans and others. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Shelby v. Holder overturned a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) that prevented voter suppression.

This is the first English translation of this interview and the opening installment in a Liberation School series of previously untranslated work by Thomas Sankara. This translation series is the result of a collaboration with ThomasSankara.net, an online platform dedicated to archiving work on and by the great African revolutionary. 

In 2022, after a handful of unelected judges serving lifetime terms in the U.S. Supreme Court eviscerated the hard-won and overwhelmingly popular right to abortion, masses of people took to the streets to defend this democratic right to bodily autonomy.

In history and civics classrooms all over the United States, students are taught from an early age to revere the “Founding Fathers” for drafting a document that is the bulwark of democracy and freedom—the U.S. Constitution.

Throughout most of recorded history, Asia has been the wealthiest region in the world.

Rodney’s most recent, posthumously-published text, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World, offers an important perspective on the time period in which it was written and the internal position of the author. Rodney’s family worked with Robin Kelley in taking Walter’s extensive lecture notes on the Russian revolutionary era and forming them into a complete manuscript.

Karl Marx wrote to Lincoln in 1864 that he was sure that the “American anti-slavery war” would initiate a “new era of ascendancy” for the working classes for the “rescue…and reconstruction of a social world.”

Originally from Chicago, Ill, George L. Jackson grew up in California. In 1961, a young Jackson convicted of armed robbery for allegedly stealing $70 from a gas station. Outrageously, Jackson was sentenced to one year to life, despite assurances from his attorney of a favorable deal if he plead guilty.

Wen’s vision is of a China which would be increasingly self-reliant, delinking from the American dominated global capitalism and developing its own key technologies and productive capacities, while at the same time continuing to engage with other emerging economies which share a desire to be free of Western neo-imperial control.

Although Marx himself only mentioned the “base” and “superstructure” in (by my count) two of his works, the base-superstructure “problem” remains a source of serious contention for Marxists, our sympathizers, and our critics.

Mumia Abu-Jamal has spent nearly 40 years unjustly imprisoned after he was framed and convicted of killing a white police officer in Philadelphia.

Imperialism began when the colonizing powers had already divided the world between themselves. The only way to expand from that point on was to re-divide the colonial territories, which inevitably meant war. Such redivisions were at the roots of the First and Second World Wars.

All revolutionary processes are educational.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel announced Aug. 31–in a special meeting of scientists and health professionals–that by November, 92.6% of Cuba’s entire population will be fully vaccinated with the three-shot process.

Frantz Fanon’s influence on Paulo Freire’s thought is well known, but the Brazilian educator also drew considerably from Amílcar Cabral, the revolutionary intellectual from Guinea-Bissau.

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.

For any working period—whether it be a day, an hour, or five minutes—part of the period is “necessary labor” and another part is “surplus labor.”