Liberation Audio

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Socialist news and analysis from the front lines of struggle. Project of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

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Episodes

Overproduction: The absurdity of suffering amidst surpluses

A popular coal-miner’s riddle from the 1930s summarizes one of capitalism’s most visible and absurd contradictions. After a daughter asks her father why their home is so cold, he tells her they don’t have any money to purchase coal. He explains they don’t have money because he lost his job at the coal mine. When the daughter asks why he lost his job, the father answers: “Because we produced too much coal”. For a contemporary example, how many of us have, through a religious institution, school, ...

Jan 11, 2025•17 min

Thomas Sankara: Assessing the 3rd year of a revolutionary process

The eighth installment in Liberation School’s series of previously untranslated works by Thomas Sankara is published on the day Sankara was born in 1949. We would like to thank Bruno Jaffré and the editorial team of ThomasSankara.net for letting us translate and publish these works and the following interview dated September 20, 1985. The text is from an interview with Thomas Sankara conducted by a graduate student, which results in, as Jaffré notes in his introduction, a unique style of dialogu...

Sep 03, 2024•52 min

The class struggle in every commodity: Use value and exchange value

Every year, Pew Research publishes a study on the U.S. population’s political priorities. Their 2024 report shows that, like the previous years, “no single issue stands out after the economy,” with almost 75 percent of respondents rating it the main goal for the next administration, a rate “considerably larger” than any other policy. Yet when we see pundits discuss “the economy” on the news, they speak an obscuring language. The economy is an abstraction, in that there is no such “thing” as the ...

Jul 31, 2024•15 min

Capitalist contradictions and revolutionary struggle: An 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 oppressed people can easily understand them for the simple reason that we all live with and negotiate any number of contradictions every day. The contradictions we deal with that are the most confining, that most constrain our capacities and that kee...

Apr 12, 2024•20 min

Capitalist urbanization, climate change, and the need for sponge cities

According to the United Nations Population Fund’s 2009 report, 2008 was the first time in history that over 50 percent of the world’s population resided in cities instead of rural areas. Because of the different ways countries define cities, others date the qualitative shift to as recently as 2021. Regardless, across the spectrum it’s undisputed we now live in an “urban age” and, as such, transforming the relationship between cities and the natural world is essential for climate change adaptatio...

Dec 19, 2023•20 min

Extradition of Alex Saab: U.S. takes effort to starve Venezuelans to new lows

Note: Following the original publication of this article, Alex Saab was extradited to Miami on October 16th 2021, and remains in prison awaiting an appeal. On March 18, The Cape Verde Supreme Court approved the extradition of Venezuelan government envoy Alex Saab to the United States. Saab was en route to Iran to secure food and medicine deals for Venezuelan public programs last year when he was arrested in Cape Verde, at the request of the U.S. government under Donald Trump. He has been impriso...

Oct 18, 2023•9 min

From allies to comrades

Despite its association with sovereign nations involved in wartime alliances, the term “ally” has become influential in activist circles on the US left. Attention to debates over what it means to be an ally reveal the limits of the politics of allyship. They also provide an opportunity to reflect on the difference between allies and comrades. Allyship is anchored in liberal politics. People committed to revolutionary politics need to be comrades. Over the last decade, there have been intense dis...

Sep 16, 2023•27 min

Liu Liangmo: China’s anti-imperialist, anti-racist, Christian revolutionary (pt. 2)

Liu Liangmo’s story is as remarkable as it is unknown. An anti-imperialist, pro-Communist Christian, with a significant relationship to the Black Liberation Movement and the Indian Freedom Struggle, Liu lived in the U.S. as a diplomat after participating in the ongoing Chinese revolution. He wrote a column for the prominent Black newspaper. The Pittsburgh Courier, before returning to his home country and attaining a fairly high-ranking position there. His story offers notable insight into the hi...

Aug 26, 2023•25 min

Liu Liangmo: China’s anti-imperialist, anti-racist, Christian revolutionary (pt. 1)

Liu Liangmo (1909-1988) was a prominent Chinese anti-imperialist, religious leader and, from 1942-1945, columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier—at that time the nation’s widest circulating Black newspaper. Liu’s columns (and actions as an organizer) were a significant part of efforts by progressive Chinese people, on the mainland and in the diaspora, to build alliances with the Black Liberation movement as part of a broader effort to shape the post-war world. His words linked the causes of ending c...

Aug 22, 2023•30 min

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