After Donald Trump fired FBI director James Comey--whom he had praised during his presidential campaign--the Richard Nixon Watergate scandal re-entered public discourse in a serious way. Parts of the political establishment who are opposed to Trump are comparing...
Free to agree: Exposing the fallacy of political freedom in America
In the opening weeks of the Trump administration, thousands of progressive students on college campuses in Seattle and Berkeley shut down professional demagogue and Breitbart propagandist Milo Yiannopoulous. Leftists in the United States were unanimous in their...
No more illusions: Missouri cops talked peace, prepared war
Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has just declared a State of Emergency. It includes the creation of a Unified Command of police forces and the activation of the National Guard to “ensure public safety” in the face of new social unrest. This can only mean that an announcement...
Class unity: a weapon against police violence
Police brutality is one of the sharpest and most widely recognizable reminders that we live in a society dominated by an oppressing class. The cops commit some of the most shocking atrocities against poor and working people on a regular basis, and a broad section of...
Cops: enforcers for the capitalist class
Tools of repression For decades, into the 1980s, school districts across the country employed the “Officer Friendly” program that brought local cops into kindergarten and first-grade classrooms. Their point was obvious: to “educate” children with the belief that the...
The racist history of police militarization and mass incarceration
The following is adapted from Puryear’s book “Shackled and Chained: Mass Incarceration in Capitalist America” (Liberation Books, 2013) In August 1971, a lawyer for big tobacco in Richmond, Va., sent a memorandum to an acquaintance at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce with...
Tactics and fighting slogans for the anti-police brutality movement
An updated study by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement revealed that every 28 hours, on average, law enforcement officers in the United States killed a Black person in 2012. The pandemic of police violence is largely concentrated against Black communities, but the...
What is behind the expansion of U.S. prisons?
Racism and social unrest The police killings of New York 23-year-old Sean Bell in a hail of 50 shots on Nov. 25 and of Atlanta 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston on Nov. 21 were jarring reminders of the reality of racist police terror, especially in Black and oppressed...
The first modern socialists: their means were utopian, but not their goal
Since the advent of class antagonisms in human society, oppressed people and others angered by injustice have dreamed of a better world. In the face of poverty, disease, humiliation and exploitation, people have counterposed their hopes and aspirations for a life free...