{"id":44487,"date":"2026-06-19T14:26:39","date_gmt":"2026-06-19T19:26:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/?p=44487"},"modified":"2026-06-19T17:04:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T22:04:07","slug":"this-juneteenth-the-revolution-continues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/2026\/06\/this-juneteenth-the-revolution-continues\/","title":{"rendered":"This Juneteenth, the revolution continues!"},"content":{"rendered":"
Sofia D. & the Oppressed Nationalities and Ethnicities Commission of the Partido Laborista Estadounidense<\/a>\u2014<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
People incarcerated at Attica Correctional Facility raise their fists on Sept. 10, 1971, as they voice their demands during a failed negotiating session with New York\u2019s commissioner of corrections, Russell Oswald. (Associated Press)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

June 19, the day of freedom, marks the end of the old, barbaric, crisis-ridden system of racial slavery in the U.S. It marks the defeat of the endless cruelty and backwardness of the plantation system, and the emancipation of four million Black working people between 1863 and 1865.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Juneteenth \u2013 as Manuel Salazar, General Secretary of the Communist Workers Party of the Dominican Republic, says of the October Revolution in Russia \u2013 was \u201cthe culmination of a revolutionary process\u201d1<\/sup>. It is only thanks to the combined efforts of the Abolitionist circles in the North, the Union Army, and certainly, the heroic and honored military operations, rebellions, and coordination of the enslaved themselves that wrested power from the plantation owners2<\/sup> and relegated them to the dustbin of history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, we have to account for the role of the Northern industrial capitalists. It is poor history to anachronistically ascribe all the great achievements of the Civil War solo<\/em> to the working masses. Slavery, although slotted into an external capitalist framework, internally<\/em> was the same-old system of reaction and brutality that destroyed the Roman Empire and countless other societies from antiquity through the colonial era3<\/sup>. Therefore, the Northern industrial capitalist class, at the time, in context, was momentarily a revolucionario<\/em> force, begrudgingly leading the popular masses, though only so long as it could extend its own system of subjugation: wage labor4<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These forces combined \u2013 the popular masses, the enslaved, and the Union Army, led by the Northern capitalists — underwent a revolutionary process5<\/sup> and put a definite and irreversible end to chattel slavery in the U.S. First, the forward-thinking Northern capitalists, workers, and enslaved set the political and ideological stage for the abolition of slavery, circulating the demands of the enslaved for freedom, defending their cause, and organizing parts of the Underground Railroad. Next, the slave system entered crisis: the good Southern soil which had made this dated system of production profitable was drying up, and the crude and violent system of organizing the plantations was being supplanted more and more by capitalist agriculture. Old planting states like Virginia, Louisiana, and Georgia began to turn away from the industry of planting<\/em>, and to the industry of slave breeding<\/em>6<\/sup>. These conditions of economic crisis gave rise to a fierce competition with the Northern capitalists for Western territory,\u00a0finally grinding the bourgeois-slaver political alliance to a halt, to a political crisis within the ruling class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ideological revolutionary readiness, economic crisis, and political crisis within the ruling class \u2013 these are the conditions of revolution7<\/sup>. The Civil War was a revolution, but it was led by the Northern industrialists, a class whose concept of liberation extended only to the freedom to sell yourself, rather than being sold by someone else8<\/sup>. Following the Civil War, a brutal reaction set in in the form of Jim Crow to clip the wings of the nascent democratic and popular movement of Reconstruction. This reaction was not opposed by the Northern industrial capitalists, for whom this oppression turned a very nice profit \u2013 the capitalists only cared that ellos<\/em> could not reap the benefits of slavery, and did not care one inch about the freedom or liberation of the enslaved and Black workers themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, the American capitalist class is everywhere the most savage and brutal oppressor, at home and abroad. It has perpetuated the most vile genocides, especially of American Indigenous, Arab, and African peoples, and is everyday committing more violent military aggressions in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. It has adapted the system of racism developed for upholding slavery, and advanced it into a now-muted, now-open policy of oppression and dispossession, suited to the task of managing capitalism\u2019s growing and tumultuous crises9<\/sup>. It has reinforced the policies of racist oppression from the reaction of the 70s and 80s through election redistricting and termination of \u201cDEI\u201d programs. These are done with the aim of continuing to disenfranchise Black, Indigenous, and immigrant communities, most likely hoping to dull their political participation, to trap these communities in menial labor and prison-slavery, and to socially engineer new problems to create moral panics and incite racist pogroms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Forced labor has, of course, continued into the modern capitalist era, but not in the form of direct slavery. The most infamous example of this is the policy of mass incarceration10<\/sup>: a policy of social engineering (and reaction to the Civil Rights democratic movement) whereby Black workers were first denied an education and other democratic rights, and thus were first up for the chopping block when technological innovation began to create an army of \u201cunskilled,\u201d \u201cunemployable\u201d labor11<\/sup>. This \u201carmy of the unemployed\u201d then became the \u201carmy of the incarcerated\u201d in the 70s, who were made to do menial work to sustain and maintain themselves when the crisis-laden capitalist system could not provide employment. Naturally, this quickly evolved into an attached prison-industrial complex, where prisoners are made to work for outrageous wages in the worst conditions \u2013 a modern, \u201cimpersonal” slavery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the MAGA clique of technological capital has begun implementing its program, this fascist power has replaced the traditional subjugation of migrant workers by semi-legality with another direct system of forced labor and prison slavery with ICE. These are the \u201creturn\u201d of the worst aspects of the slave system, but under a new, generalized framework. This is the \u201cslavery\u201d brought out by capitalist-imperialist crisis, and which can be defeated, not by liberal-bourgeois revolution, but only by proletarian, working-class revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since 2008, we have been in a worldwide economic crisis, and more and more, the old capitalist system is grinding to a halt. The objective conditions for revolution are growing quickly. It is up to us, the multiracial and multinational working class, to meet the moment and defend the cause of the working class, to build our own \u201cUnderground Railroads\u201d to protect our fellow workers and comrades, and to advocate revolution against the rotten, backwards, and reactionary capitalist system. This Juneteenth, it cannot be the capitalists who lead the way to liberation, but the multiracial, multinational working class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

1<\/sup> Salazar, Manuel. Octubre 17: Algunas ense\u00f1anzas de la revoluci\u00f3n de octubre para la revoluci\u00f3n dominicana<\/em>, Santo Domingo, Partido Comunista del Trabajo (PCT), Mediabyte, 2017<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2<\/sup> B., Maurice, \u201cOliver Law: A Forgotten Pioneer in the Black Radical Tradition,\u201d The Red Phoenix, 2025.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3 De Ste. Croix, G. E. M. The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World from the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests<\/em>. Cornell University Press, 1989.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4<\/sup> Bland, William. \u201cThe Formation of the United States & Marx and Engels on Slavery,\u201d Alliance Marxist-Leninist, 1996<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5<\/sup> Salazar, Manuel. Octubre 17<\/em>, 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

6<\/sup> Bland, William. \u201cThe Formation of the United States,\u201d 1996.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

7<\/sup> Lenin, Vladimir. \u201cLeft-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder,\u201d<\/em> USSR, Progress Publishers, 1964. \u201cIt is not enough for revolution that the exploited and oppressed masses should understand the impossibility of living in the old way and demand changes; it is essential for revolution that the exploiters should not be able to live and rule in the old way.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

8<\/sup> But, see Dubois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction<\/em> in America<\/em>, 1935, on the ways the new capitalist alliance brought the more radical, democratic elements of the Civil War to a screeching halt in the aftermath. Compare with the experience of the February revolution (Lenin, Vladimir. \u201cThe Task of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution,\u201d 1917), or more recently, the Arab Spring (Boyle, Peter. \u201cTunisia’s \u2018unfinished revolution\u2019 \u2013 interview with Workers\u2019 Party militant, Green Left Weekly, 2012.<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

9<\/sup> Anonymous. \u201cOs Negros em os Estados Unidos,\u201d A Luta, 2, Partido Comunista Revolucionaria (Brasil), 1967.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

10<\/sup> Wilson Gilmore, Ruth. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California<\/em>, University of California Press, 2007.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

11<\/sup> Marx, Karl. \u201cChapter 10: The Working Day\u201d in Capital: Volume 1<\/em>, Progress Publishers, 1887.
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June 19, the day of freedom, marks the end of the old, barbaric, crisis-ridden system of racial slavery in the U.S. It marks the defeat of the endless cruelty and backwardness of the plantation system, and the emancipation of four million Black working people between 1863 and 1865.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":44489,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[149,185,97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-discrimination","category-prisons","category-us-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/06-2026_attica.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44487"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44495,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44487\/revisions\/44495"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}