By a Witness to Struggle and Class War

“The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself.”

— Karl Marx

“We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

— The enslaved and the exploited, across centuries

I. FREEDOM IS THE DREAM—BUT WHAT IS FREEDOM?

Freedom, in the mouths of the capitalist class, is a lie dressed up in patriotism and sold on every screen. It is the freedom to consume while being consumed. The freedom to work yourself into the grave while billionaires orbit the earth. It is the freedom of wage slavery. Of mass incarceration. Of empire cloaked in democracy. In both the Black radical tradition and Marxist thought, freedom cannot and will not exist under capitalism.

From the docks of Liverpool to the cotton fields of Mississippi, from the Congo mines to the sweatshops of Bangladesh, capitalism has always depended on racialized labor. The stolen bodies of Africans, the slaughter of Indigenous peoples, the exploited masses in the global South—this is the foundation of the capitalist world. To dream of freedom, then, is to dream of a world without capitalism.

In the Black radical tradition, freedom has always been collective. In Marxism, the proletariat is not one race, but class is always racialized under capitalism. When Marx wrote about the “primitive accumulation” of capital, Black radicals like Cedric Robinson reminded us: that accumulation began in chains, in genocide, in the plantation economy that birthed the modern world.

We dream of freedom because we have been denied it at every level—economic, political, social, spiritual.

And we know this:

No Black freedom without socialism. No socialism without Black liberation.

II. CAPITALISM IS THE ENEMY OF FREEDOM

Capitalism didn’t invent oppression, but it industrialized it. It systematized exploitation, racialized the world, and sold back our own lives to us as debt. Under capitalism:

You are free to starve. You are free to be over-policed and underpaid. You are free to sell your labor or die. You are free to rot in prison while corporations profit from your confinement.

The plantation became the factory. The whip became the wage. Jim Crow became the school-to-prison pipeline. Slavery became mass incarceration. Colonialism became global debt. The form changes; the function does not.

Freedom cannot coexist with a system built on the exploitation of labor. In a capitalist society, the working class is not free—especially not the Black working class, who are super-exploited, surveilled, displaced, and discarded.

Marx showed us that history is the history of class struggle. But in America, class is never separable from race. This is what Robinson called racial capitalism: capitalism as a system that requires racial hierarchy to function.

III. THE STATE WILL NOT SAVE US

The capitalist state is not neutral. It is an instrument of class power. It exists to protect private property, to defend capital, to discipline labor. It makes laws that criminalize the poor and legalize the rich. It funds police, not schools. Prisons, not homes. Bombs, not food.

The state will not liberate us. It cannot. Every Black radical who has lived long enough learns this truth. And so too does every Marxist who sees the machine for what it is. The state serves capital, and capital needs us caged, divided, and exploited.

This is why the Black radical tradition and Marxism both demand revolution—not reform. Not more diverse CEOs or Black faces in high places. We do not want to integrate into oppression. We want to abolish it.

Revolution is not just violence. It is the total transformation of the social order. It is the reorganization of production, of life, of values. It is the end of profit as motive, and the beginning of a world built for human need—not capitalist greed.

IV. ABOLITION IS MARXISM MADE REAL

Abolition is not just about police and prisons. It is about everything that upholds this violent order. Abolition means the end of work as domination. It means land redistribution. It means collective ownership. It means internationalism. It means the dismantling of white supremacy and the class system it feeds.

In other words, abolition is communism in motion. And in the Black radical tradition, it has always looked like:

Fannie Lou Hamer organizing poor farmers into cooperative land projects. The Black Panther Party feeding children while arming against state violence. Claudia Jones demanding that any Marxism that forgets race and gender is no Marxism at all. Workers in Alabama fighting both the boss and the Klan.

Abolition is building dual power. It’s creating systems of care where the state gives us cages. It’s rejecting liberal crumbs for revolutionary feasts.

We will not vote our way to freedom. We will not shop our way to liberation. We will build it together—or not at all.

V. FREEDOM IS COLLECTIVE, GLOBAL, AND COMING

Freedom is not an individual condition. It is collective. And it is global. The freedom of the Black worker in Detroit is bound to the freedom of the garment worker in Haiti, the miner in Congo, the peasant in Palestine, the migrant in Europe. That is the essence of both Marxist and Black internationalism.

Our oppressors are global—and so is our solidarity.

We fight not only for ourselves but for all oppressed peoples. We stand with Indigenous sovereignty, with anti-colonial revolution, with every struggle that seeks to smash capitalism and the racial order it maintains.

Freedom is the dream—but it must be armed with theory, history, organization, and mass power. We must study, we must struggle, we must build.

And above all, we must believe—that a world beyond this one is not only possible, it is necessary.

VI. WE ARE THE FUTURE THEY FEAR

They fear us because we are the merging of two great revolutionary rivers—Black resistance and Marxist critique. We bring the fire of rebellion and the science of revolution. They fear that we will no longer just protest, but organize. No longer just react, but plan. No longer just survive—but win.

We are the ones who understand that the fight for Black life is also the fight for worker power. That capitalism cannot be reformed. That this system will never give us justice because it was built on injustice.

We carry Harriet’s urgency, Du Bois’s intellect, Claudia’s clarity, Fred Hampton’s unity, and Marx’s vision of a world without classes.

Freedom is the dream.

Capitalism is the nightmare.

Socialism is the path.

Revolution is the way.

And we—we are the dreamers, the builders, the fighters.

We will win.

Because we must.