Module 1 - Glossary

African Liberation Day emerged as an annual demonstration of solidarity with anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements across Africa. Rooted in the struggles of revolutionaries like Amílcar Cabral and influenced by thinkers like Walter Rodney, the movement connected African liberation struggles with the radicalization of Black youth in the U.S., many coming out of SNCC and the broader Civil Rights Movement. The first African Liberation Day in 1972 mobilized 50,000 people in Washington, D.C., growing to 100,000 in 1973. These mass mobilizations linked the fight against U.S. imperialism to the struggles of African nations, highlighting the necessity of a global anti-imperialist front.

A British multinational bank founded by the Barclays family, who were deeply involved in the slave trade. The bank financed plantations, insured slave ships, and provided capital for the expansion of slavery in the Caribbean. Today, it remains one of the largest financial institutions in the world, built on the blood and labor of enslaved people.

One of Wall Street’s oldest investment banks, which built its early fortunes by financing the cotton trade, a system that depended entirely on enslaved African labor. The bank helped connect Southern plantation owners with Northern financiers, ensuring that capitalism profited from the forced labor economy.

Carter G. Woodson (1875–1950) was a historian, journalist, and founder of Negro History Week, which later became Black History Month. Often called the 'Father of Black History,' Woodson sought to challenge the racist erasure of Black people from history and promote a historical understanding that supported the struggle for Black liberation. His book The Mis-Education of the Negro critiques the ways capitalist education systems condition Black people to accept subjugation rather than fight for their liberation. His work remains foundational for radical historians and educators today.

Capitalism is a system of “socialized production,” a way humans come together to produce all of the goods and services in existence. Under capitalism some people survive by making others work for them. Most, however, survive by working for others. The first group, Capitalists, control the physical means by-which goods and services are produced and distributed. The second group, Workers, sell their ability to work to produce and distribute goods and services to the Capitalist for a wage. The wage is always less than what the goods or services can be exchanged for, creating extra, or surplus, value that Capitalists use to enrich themselves and make the investments that ensure production and distribution of goods and services can continue. In short: Capitalism is a system by which humanity perpetuates itself through the exploitation of a large majority by a small minority.

Originally known as the National City Bank of New York, it was founded with profits from slavery. Bankers like Moses Taylor, a key figure in the firm, directly invested in plantations, trafficked enslaved Africans, and ensured that the wealth from slavery was funneled into the expansion of U.S. capitalism.

Passed in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was the first U.S. law to ban immigration based on race. It came at a time when Jim Crow laws were being reinforced, making clear to Black communities that racial oppression against any group would ultimately harm all oppressed people. Many Black leaders spoke out against the act, recognizing it as part of a broader strategy of white supremacy and labor control. The act was a cornerstone of U.S. racial capitalism, reinforcing the exploitation of Chinese and Black workers.

A British company founded in the 17th century to monopolize the transatlantic slave trade. The company, backed by the British monarchy, trafficked hundreds of thousands of Africans, branding them with the company’s initials. Historians have estimated that the RAC shipped more African slaves to the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade than any other company.

A historian and former Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, whose book Capitalism and Slavery demonstrated that the transatlantic slave trade was not an accidental injustice but a necessary foundation for the capitalist system. He argued that racism was not the cause of slavery but rather its justification, created to uphold an economic system based on maximizing profit.

Exploitation and oppression are two sides of subjugation in class society. Exploitation is economic in its essence, and oppression is political. Exploitation is when one section of society owns the means of production, deploys labor in production, and appropriates the surplus product. Exploitation can be measured, as Marx explained. The rate of surplus value expresses the exploitation of labor by capital.

Freedom was a radical newspaper founded by Paul Robeson in 1950 as a voice for Black liberation and anti-imperialist struggle. The paper connected the struggles of African Americans with decolonization movements worldwide. It was shut down under McCarthyism, as the U.S. state sought to silence anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist voices.

Gabriel Prosser was an enslaved Blacksmith who planned a massive slave rebellion in Virginia in 1800. Inspired by the Haitian Revolution, Prosser organized hundreds of enslaved people to rise against their oppressors. However, the rebellion was thwarted by informants, and Prosser and his co-conspirators were executed. His planned insurrection remains a powerful example of enslaved people's resistance and their aspirations for self-liberation.

Harry Haywood was a communist theorist and organizer who played a crucial role in applying Leninist theory to the Black struggle in the United States. As a member of the Communist Party USA and the Communist International, Haywood argued that Black people in the U.S., particularly in the Black Belt South, constituted an oppressed nation with the right to self-determination. He developed this analysis within the framework of anti-imperialism, situating the struggle of Black people not as a fight for mere civil rights within U.S. democracy, but as part of a broader revolutionary movement against capitalism and national oppression. His work, particularly Negro Liberation and Black Bolshevik, laid the theoretical groundwork for later Black revolutionary movements, including the Black Panther Party and other radical organizations that took up the demand for self-determination.

Indentured servants were laborers bound to work for a fixed period, often under brutal conditions. While some European immigrants entered indentured servitude willingly, many were coerced, and the system was a precursor to chattel slavery. Indentured labor was also imposed on colonized people across the world, from India to the Caribbean, as a means of securing cheap labor for capitalist expansion. Though distinct from chattel slavery, indentured servitude reinforced the capitalist exploitation of the working class.

Internationalism arises from an understanding that the system of Capitalism is global, with the imperialist US at its head, and therefore, the international working class is united under one strategy against one enemy.

The legal, political, and social system of white supremacy governing the United States, from the late nineteenth century reaction against Reconstruction, to the late 1960s.

A white supremacist, fascist terror organization in the US that has seen three waves, from 1865–1872, 1915–1944, 1946 to the present. The Klan is one of the premier white nationalist organizations to have emerged out of US society.

Labor power is labor ability – the ability to work, the sum total of the mental, physical, and spiritual forces of the human, from which material wealth is produced.

One of the world’s largest insurance markets, originally established as a coffee house where merchants and slave traders gathered to insure slave ships and their human “cargo.” Lloyd’s profited heavily from the transatlantic slave trade, ensuring that capitalists could continue trafficking and enslaving Africans with minimal financial risk.

Local 22 was a militant, interracial union of nearly 10,000 tobacco workers—mostly Black women—in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In the 1940s, they organized against exploitative conditions in tobacco stemming factories and played a crucial role in fighting Jim Crow laws. The union was affiliated with the CIO and faced intense repression during the McCarthyist era due to its leftist leadership and commitment to racial and economic justice. Their strikes and voter registration efforts contributed to breaking segregationist control in the South.

Lui Ling-Mo was a Chinese activist sent to the U.S. by the Chinese United Front government during World War II to build international solidarity against Japanese imperialism. Recognizing the shared struggles of oppressed peoples, Lui worked to unite African Americans, Indian Americans, and Chinese communities in the fight against the poll tax, for Black voting rights, and for the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Means of production are one of the indispensable components of productive forces an embrace the nonhuman resources required for production, including land, raw materials, tools, machinery, energy source, and technology in production. (Marxist Glossary - Expanded Edition: 3.0 by Darryl "Waistline" Mitchell)

Mode of production is the predominant way society reproduces the things needed for its existence, growth, and development. The mode of production of any historical period is determined by that period's productive forces and social relations of labor. For example, the capitalist mode of production is characterized by private ownership of the means of production and socialized production by the vast majority of the population.

Miranda Smith was the education director of Local 22 and the first Black woman to hold an international officer position in a major union. Under her leadership, Local 22 challenged Jim Crow segregation, registered Black voters, and helped elect the first Black city council member in Winston-Salem since Reconstruction. The union’s radical politics made it a target of McCarthyist repression. Overworked and under constant attack, Smith died of a brain hemorrhage in 1949.

Nat Turner, who was a religious enslaved preacher, led a rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia. The revolt resulted in the killing of almost 60 white slave-owners. Although it was brutally suppressed, the rebellion terrified slaveholders and led to harsher laws against enslaved and free Black people, while inspiring future rebellions and abolitionists to intensify their efforts to overthrow the system of slavery.

Paul Robeson was a Black communist, artist, and militant internationalist who used his immense cultural influence to fight against racism, imperialism, and capitalist exploitation. A world-renowned singer, actor, and writer, Robeson saw culture as a weapon in the struggle against oppression, using his voice and performances to champion anti-colonial and workers’ movements across the globe. He was an outspoken supporter of the Soviet Union and saw socialism as a path toward the full liberation of Black and colonized peoples. His work directly challenged U.S. imperialism, from his solidarity with anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia to his defiance of McCarthyism, which led to his blacklisting and persecution by the U.S. government.

Reconstruction was the period following the U.S. Civil War when efforts were made to rebuild the South and integrate formerly enslaved people into society. Radical Reconstruction aimed to grant political rights and economic power to Black people, leading to transformative achievements like the establishment of schools and Black political leadership. However, these gains were violently reversed by white supremacist terror and the rise of Jim Crow.

In 1931, nine Black teenagers hopping a freight train in Alabama were charged with raping two white women. In the ensuing rigged trials, all but one of them were found guilty, and sentenced to death. The CPUSA supported the defendants as they appealed their sentences, leading to a major international campaign against the Jim Crow system.

Settler colonialism is a form of colonialism where settlers permanently occupy and claim land, displacing Indigenous peoples through a process of ethnic cleansing, or eliminating them entirely through the process of genocide. Unlike other forms of  colonialism focused on extraction, settler colonialism seeks to erase Indigenous sovereignty, replacing it with settler dominance.

The Sleepy Lagoon case (1942) was a racist legal attack on the Chicano community in Los Angeles, where 22 Mexican-American youth were unjustly convicted of murder without evidence. The case was a precursor to the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, in which white servicemen, encouraged by police and the media, violently attacked Chicano youth in an attempt to enforce racial labor control.

A term that conceptualizes Black resistance as a continuous and evolving force, not a series of isolated uprisings but a long-standing revolutionary struggle against white supremacy and capitalism.

A system that linked Europe, Africa, and the Americas in a cycle of human trafficking and exploitation. European merchants sold weapons and goods to African elites in exchange for enslaved people, who were then forced across the Atlantic to work on plantations in the Americas. The raw materials they produced (cotton, sugar, tobacco) were sent back to Europe to fuel industrial capitalism.

The Union League was the main grassroots organization mobilizing support for the Republican Party during Reconstruction. In the South, it became a powerful, almost entirely Black organization that fought for voting rights, land redistribution, and protection from racist violence. White supremacist forces, including the Ku Klux Klan, violently suppressed the Union League, demonstrating the lengths to which capitalists and white elites would go to maintain racial and economic oppression.

Wages are the money-price form of value paid to the workers by capitalists to purchase their labor power. The price paid for labor ability is always below the value created by the workers’ labor. The value created by the workers, but never returned to them, is the source of surplus value, the basis of capitalist profits. Wages therefore are only a special name for the price of labor-power, and are usually called the price of labor; it is the special name for the price of this peculiar commodity, which has no other repository than human flesh and blood.

Walter Rodney was a Guyanese Marxist historian, revolutionary, and Pan-Africanist whose work exposed the violent underdevelopment of Africa under European colonialism. His most famous book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, provided a materialist analysis of how capitalism and imperialism deliberately plundered Africa, stifling its economic and political autonomy to maintain the wealth of the colonial powers. Rodney rejected liberal narratives that blamed Africa’s poverty on internal failings, instead demonstrating how colonialism and neocolonialism structurally subordinated African economies to Western interests. Beyond academia, Rodney was an active organizer, engaging in mass political education and radical struggle, particularly in Guyana, where he sought to unify workers and the Black and Indian populations against ruling elites. His assassination in 1980 by the Guyanese state was part of the long history of imperialist-backed repression against revolutionary intellectuals in the Global South.

W.E.B. Du Bois was a Marxist intellectual, revolutionary historian, and Pan-Africanist whose work deeply analyzed capitalism as a system built on the exploitation of Black people globally. His seminal work, Black Reconstruction in America, refuted racist distortions of U.S. history, demonstrating that the Civil War and Reconstruction were not just fights over slavery but revolutionary struggles in which freed Black people played a decisive role. Du Bois introduced the concept of the global color line, linking the oppression of Black people in the U.S. to colonialism and imperialism worldwide. Over the course of his life, he increasingly moved towards socialism, joining the Communist Party in his later years and advocating for anti-colonial struggles across Africa and Asia. His political evolution—from the NAACP to revolutionary internationalism—reflected his deepening understanding that racism could not be eradicated within the capitalist system.

Ratified in 1868, the 14th Amendment was a critical measure in the post-Civil War Reconstruction era intended to protect the rights of formerly enslaved people, establishing birthright citizenship and granting equal protection under the law. The 14th Amendment provided the first legal avenue for Chinese immigrants in California to assert their rights, and more widely became a tool for oppressed groups to challenge racial discrimination. However, as Reconstruction was dismantled, the ruling class used measures like the Chinese Exclusion Act to continue white supremacist rule.

An organized rebellion by enslaved Africans in New York City. At the time, the city was a hub of the transatlantic slave trade, and enslaved people endured extreme exploitation, working in construction, domestic labor, and shipping. At least 21 people were executed. Women were among those charged and executed, but history often erased their participation.

The 1733 St. John Slave Revolt was one of the earliest and most successful revolts against European colonial rule in the Caribbean. The revolt was led by enslaved Akwamu people,  many of whom had been warriors before their capture, in what was then the Danish West Indies. They seized control of the island and established their own rule for several months, directly challenging the colonial economy that relied on their forced labor. Although the revolt was eventually suppressed with the help of French colonial forces, the memory of the uprising remained an inspiration for future struggles against slavery, imperial domination and capitalism in the Caribbean.

John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry was an attempt to spark a mass uprising that would overthrow the U.S. slave system through armed struggle. Brown, a radical abolitionist, saw slavery as a foundational structure of capitalist exploitation that could only be abolished through armed struggle. His raid, while militarily unsuccessful, was politically significant—it intensified the contradictions between the North and South, accelerating the collapse of the slave economy and pushing the U.S. closer to civil war. Brown was captured, tried, and executed by the state, but he became a martyr for the abolitionist cause.

The 1898 Wilmington Massacre was a white supremacist coup d'état, one of the only successful coups in U.S. history. In the aftermath of Reconstruction, Black communities in Wilmington, North Carolina, had built significant political and economic power, electing Black officials and establishing independent businesses. This posed a direct threat to the white ruling class, whose power depended on the subjugation of Black labor under the emerging Jim Crow order. In response, a coalition of white supremacists, backed by local elites, staged a violent insurrection, overthrowing the multiracial government, massacring Black residents, and driving many more out of the city. The Wilmington Massacre was part of a broader counterrevolution that crushed Reconstruction-era gains and reasserted capitalist dominance and white supremacy.