Introduction 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...
Thomas Sankara to comrade Mongo Beti: “Fatherland or death, we will win!”
Liberation School introduction This is the first English translation of a 1985 interview with Thomas Sankara conducted by Mongo Beti, which remained unpublished until Beti's spouse, Odile Tobner, gave the handwritten notes to Bruno Jaffré, who first published it in...
The Marxist theory of the state: An introduction
Editor's note: A Spanish translation of this article is available here. Introduction Our understanding of the state lies at the heart of our struggle to create a new society and fundamentally eliminate the oppression, exploitation, war, and environmental destruction...
Whose lessons? Which direction?
Introduction As obituaries for neoliberalism pile up on our nightstands and Antonio Gramsci’s adage that the old is dying and the new cannot be born appears newly profound, we turn to the past for direction. What successes should guide us? What can we learn from our...
The history of class struggle from the Russian Revolution to the Cold War: An interview with Jacques Pauwels
Editor’s note: The latest installment in our Liberation School interview series provides a general overview of class struggle from the Russian Revolution to WWII & the Cold War. PSL member Gabriel Rockhill and historian Jacques Pauwels discuss the desire on the...
The history of class struggle from 1789-1917: An interview with Jacques Pauwels
Editor’s note: The latest installment in our Liberation School interview series provides a general overview of class struggle from the French Revolution of 1789 to the Russian Revolution. PSL member Gabriel Rockhill and historian Jacques Pauwels discuss the class...
Toward a third Reconstruction: Lessons from the past for a socialist future
“The price...of slavery and civil war was the necessity of quickly assimilating into American democracy a mass of laborers...in whose hands alone for the moment lay the power of preserving the ideals of popular government...and establishing upon it an industry...
Surplus value is the class struggle: An introduction
Editor's note: A Spanish translation of this article is available here. Introduction The notion that the rich are rich because they’re frugal, smart, entrepreneurial, and hardworking, and that the poor are poor because they’re wasteful, lazy, stupid, and irresponsible...
Marx’s “Capital:” Class 5 (The working day and relative surplus-value)
Class description: In this class we continue our investigation into exploitation (i.e., the production of surplus-value), beginning with the struggle over the commodity of labor-power and the contradiction between its...