Introduction: From the Wreckage of Empire, We Build a New World

Black life in the so-called United States has always existed under siege. We were not immigrants—we were captives. We did not arrive seeking freedom—we were brought in chains to build wealth for others. And for generations, the system has required our death, exploitation, and disposability to sustain itself.

This is not a call for reform. This is not a plea for inclusion. We do not want better wages, fairer policing, or more “representation.” We want to overthrow the entire system—capitalism, settler colonialism, white supremacy, and the liberal lie that any of this can be made just.

A socialist revolution worthy of the name must destroy America as we know it and birth something entirely new. This article sketches a vision of Black life after that rupture—rooted in abolition, autonomy, and collective power. A future where we are not just surviving, but defining the world on our own terms.

I. The Land Will Be Ours: We Seize It, We Don’t Ask

Expropriation, Not Reform

After the revolution, the land is taken—by force, by occupation, by right. Plantations, corporate farms, luxury condos, private universities, federal reserves: all returned to those from whom they were stolen. This is not “reparations policy.” This is a reckoning. Black communities are restored land not through grants or government benevolence, but through revolutionary action.

We do not recognize the state’s right to legislate over stolen ground. The legitimacy of U.S. property law ends with the revolution. What was built on slavery and genocide is dismantled with equal clarity.

Collective Stewardship and Autonomy

We abolish property—not to become petty owners but to become free people. Land is held collectively. No landlords. No police evicting elders. No hedge funds owning homes. Communities make decisions through councils, assemblies, and federated unions. Black autonomy is no longer a dream. It is the basis of power.

II. Abolition Is Non-Negotiable

Prisons and Police Are Destroyed

There are no reforms to the carceral state after the revolution. It is annihilated. Prisons are closed. Police departments are dismantled and their weapons seized. ICE, the FBI, the DEA, and all other arms of domestic counterinsurgency are disbanded, their infrastructure torn down.

Every cage is emptied. Every surveillance system is destroyed. The revolution is not complete until every Black body imprisoned by the state is free.

We Keep Us Safe

Communities do not replace cops with social workers in uniform. They build collective defense, conflict resolution structures, and revolutionary security rooted in trust and mutual protection. Harm is dealt with not by punishment but by justice—transformative, rooted in accountability, and aimed at healing.

We know that the carceral state never protected us—it policed us, disappeared us, and made war against our neighborhoods. In its absence, we breathe, we fight, we grow.

III. Education Will No Longer Train Us for Obedience

Destroy the Master’s Curriculum

The school system under capitalism was never about learning. It was about discipline, assimilation, and labor preparation. After the revolution, we raze that system and rebuild it entirely. No more pledges to flags. No more standardized tests. No more whitewashed textbooks.

Black education becomes revolutionary study. Youth learn about Harriet not as a hero, but as a general. They study maroons, not monarchs. They read Fanon, Malcolm, Claudia Jones, and Toni Cade Bambara. Education becomes weapon and healing at once.

Freedom Schools, Not Factories

We transform schools into centers of political education, collective care, and survival skills. Children are taught how to grow food, defend communities, organize workers, and honor their ancestors. They do not train for jobs. They train for freedom.

There is no state-approved curriculum. Knowledge is passed down by elders, comrades, and healers. The mind is no longer colonized. It becomes a revolutionary tool.

IV. We Refuse to Work for Their System Ever Again

The Abolition of Work-as-Compulsion

Capitalism extracted our labor and broke our backs for centuries. After the revolution, we refuse labor as coercion. We dismantle the wage system. We end the division between workers and owners by ending ownership itself.

There are no bosses. No corporations. No stock markets. We build an economy based on use, need, and reciprocity—not profit. Work becomes cooperative, communal, and voluntary.

Rest, Creation, and Shared Labor

Black people, who were once worked to death, now work to live—if and when they choose. We rest, we create, we sustain. We build systems of care, mutual aid, food sovereignty, and healing. We eliminate the artificial scarcity created by capital. Abundance is shared, not hoarded.

Care work, farming, housing construction, sanitation—all are organized collectively. Automation is used to liberate time, not displace workers. The point is not more efficient production, but more freedom from it.

V. Culture Unleashed, Not Commercialized

End the Exploitation of Black Creativity

Black art, under capitalism, was stolen, sterilized, and sold back to us. After the revolution, our culture returns to its rightful place: the commons, the street corner, the kitchen, the ritual, the cipher.

We no longer make art for white markets. We do not ask for awards. We do not crave recognition. We create because we must, because we can, because we are free to do so. Our stories are no longer filtered through white institutions. We tell them ourselves, for ourselves.

A Cultural Renaissance Born of Rupture

Hip hop returns to the people. Jazz escapes the concert hall. Spirituals become call-and-response chants of the new era. Our history is preserved through oral tradition, dance, drum, and defiant memory. The Black radical imagination is unchained.

No more respectability. No more translation. Our culture is not content—it is insurgency.

VI. Black Life as the Measure of the Revolution

How do we know the revolution succeeded?

When no child wakes up hungry in a boarded-up building. When no grandmother dies in medical debt. When no Black community is targeted, pacified, or policed. When our elders walk freely, our youth dream wildly, and our communities govern themselves without permission.

Black life is not an afterthought—it is the barometer of freedom. A revolution that does not center us is no revolution at all. There is no socialism without the destruction of white supremacy. There is no liberation without the abolition of empire.

Conclusion: Revolution or Nothing

This vision is not utopian. It is necessary. Every reform, every concession, every vote cast in this decaying system is a delay of the inevitable: the end of this order and the beginning of something new.

We do not want a kinder empire. We want no empire at all.

We are not asking. We are organizing. We are arming ourselves with knowledge, with love, with rage. We are readying for the long fight. And when the cities burn and the people rise, we will not rebuild what was. We will build what must be.

Black liberation is not a dream. It is the end of this world—and the beginning of another.