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The Anticipated Attacks against Assata Shakur's Legacy are Coming

9/29/2025

On Thursday, September 25, 2025, at 1:15pm (the time according to her daughter Kakuya Shakur) former Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army activist Assata Shakur made her physical transition in Havana, Cuba at the age of 78. For Black nationalists, Pan-Africanists, and radical activists/thinkers, Assata was a symbol of resistance to U.S. imperialism. She participated in the underground Black Liberation Army (BLA) in the early 70s. The BLA was never shy about their mission. They even arranged to have petitions filed with the World Court to substantiate that they were a military operation at war against the U.S. government. The BLA claimed that under the decisions of the Geneva Convention, the BLA and all African liberation fighters, had the right to declare all U.S. police, military, and other armed agents of the state, as enemies of the people who they had the international right to wage armed struggle against (just as the U.S. declared its rights to not only go to war with, but invade Europe, North/South Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Libya, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, as well as supporting such efforts all over Africa and the rest of the world).

Assata Shakur became that symbol of resistance after comrades calling themselves the May 19th Brigade, a collection of radicals/revolutionaries from the BLA and Weather Underground, staged a successful prison break, freeing Assata on November 2, 1979. She spent five years moving around underground before surfacing in Cuba where the Cuban socialist revolution provided her safe haven from 1984 until her transition on September 25, 2025.

Of course, Assata was in prison in the first place because of the shootout on the New Jersey turnpike with state troopers in 1973 in which former BPP and BLA comrade Zayd Shakur was killed and former BPP and BLA comrade Sundiata Acoli was captured and imprisoned for over four decades. Regarding this incident, for the defenders of the capitalist state, the many political opportunists who jump at every opportunity to dance when the system says move, and any and everyone who relies on capitalist news sources to shape their political perspectives, Assata is seen today as a cop killer and escaped convict.

Also, the story of Assata Shakur, and all African liberation fighters, can never be told without discussing the role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) infamous counter intelligence program (COINTELPRO). This program, according to the introductory document produced by then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in 1967, was dedicated to stopping the rise of a “Black Messiah” who could “electrify and ignite the Negro masses.” Hoover was never shy about expressing his racist fueled belief that “the greatest threat to American security is the unity of the negro masses.” Consequently, the FBI and COINTELPRO were committed to stopping at nothing to meet their objectives, including murder.

The mistake any activists make today is assuming that COINTELPRO discontinued the aggressive physical attacks of the 60s/70s that saw the murders of Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, the framing of Panther leaders Gerinomo Ji Jaga (Pratt) and Erika Huggins, and the fanning of artificial internal conflict which led to the murders of Panthers Alex Rackley, Lil Bobby Hutton, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, and John Huggins to name just a few as well as the imprisonment of Mumia Abu Jamal and others. That shootout on the New Jersey turnpike also falls within these categories.

Today, the FBI isn’t doing as much on the ground sabotage of the movements, although that does still occur (the installation of a violent FBI informant into the active, yet inexperienced Black Lives Matter chapter in Denver, Colorado in 2020). COINTELPRO in 2025 and beyond is much more about surveillance of activist activities, particularly on social media. There is a major influx of new and inexperienced activists and while this is a great thing, it has great challenges like so many people providing the FBI all the tea on weaknesses within our movements due to these people avoiding principled ideological struggle within the activist circles they participate in, opting instead to trash talk people online. Another much more subtle, yet overwhelmingly effective, FBI tactic today is discrediting the people and principles that surround our movements. This is where and how the attacks against the legacy of Assata Shakur are coming and why they should be absolutely no surprise to any of us who have studied the approaches of the enemies of humanity.

Just a day after it was confirmed by Assata’s daughter and the Cuban Foreign Ministry, that Assata had made her transition, the discrediting ratcheted up. There are hit pieces on Assata that are appearing in major news outlet sites that trumpet up the fact Assata was convicted of the death of New Jersey State Trooper Warren Forrester in 1973. Forrester’s family, always useful to the FBI’s efforts to discredit Assata, are trending again, calling her an escaped con and murderer. The unfortunate thing that most untrained eyes will miss is these attacks against Assata’s legacy rely on her conviction, while either ignoring and/or dismissing (just as the FBI influenced jury did during Assata’s trial) the medical examiner’s reports that the injuries Assata suffered from gunshot wounds inflicted by the state troopers were only possible from a physiological standpoint if her arms were raised (in surrender) which would have made it impossible for her to fire any weapons. In other words, the work of the FBI over the last 52 years against Assata Shakur is being raised up by them again right now. That Assata killed that cop, regardless of the fact the only real thing indicating that is the FBI repeatedly saying it.

The other element of the current FBI effort, which was also largely anticipated by those who study their methods, was the attempts they are making to criminalize the Cuban Revolution and the fact Assata spent the last 41 years of her life in that socialist country instead of doing so in a U.S. prison. To attempt to accomplish this, these current efforts at discrediting Assata rely on the same old tired and consistently disproven Cold war allegations against the Cuban Revolution about it being undemocratic and violating the human rights of the Cuban people.

One such article produced over the weekend after Assata’s passing, made the argument that Cuba was a dictatorship using the example of the so-called “Ladies in White” a group of family members to people jailed in Cuba for confirmed anti-government activities in 2006. The article mentioned, doesn’t even make an effort to inform those reading it that this group was discredited when they came out in 2006 after it was confirmed that they received training and funding from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

With Assata’s passing, what needs to be said over and over is that we as independent thinking people will determine who we love, support, and are inspired by and the U.S. government, which has been an enemy to Africa and African people since its colonized inception, will have no say in any of that. We have to yell from the highest mountains, especially where our youth can hear, that Assata was our freedom fighter. She is and should be beloved by African people and all peace and justice loving people everywhere. She stood up to the capitalist system and won (and this is really the reason they don’t want us to be inspired by her example). Any African who stands up against this system should be loved by us and we have to resist the pressure to submit to the anti-African narrative that we need to mourn our enemies. Objectively, police of any kind, anywhere, regardless of who they are – your family, etc. – are enemies to African people and all of humanity. The police all over this country participated in an illegal assault against African revolutionaries and we have dozens of bodies that verify that, thousands of families and people who have been devastated by this and they expect us to stop the presses because of the death of that state trooper. We have to resist that and any and all efforts to discredit the Cuban Revolution. For anyone serious about African liberation, you would be very hard pressed to find any entity on earth who has supported our quest for freedom harder than the Cuban Revolution. From Che Guevara physically fighting with African combatants from Cuba and the Congo in the Congo in 1964 against neo-colonial efforts, to Fidel Castro directing 500,000 Cuban troops to fight against racist apartheid in Southern Africa in the late 80s and early 90s, to Cuba being a safe haven for African freedom fighters from the U.S. from Robert Williams in 1962 to Huey P. Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Assata Shakur, and many others, anyone still saying we are all alone in our struggle is just someone who clearly flunked any real history of the world.

In truth, all of this can be summed up by looking at the statement released by chief U.S. police terrorist Kash Patel (current FBI Director). He issued a statement calling on people not to commemorate Assata Shakur in the wake of everyone from the Chicago Teacher’s Union to Democratic Socialists of America, acknowledging Assata Shakur’s contributions and life. He called Assata a terrorist. For anyone who has even the slightest understanding of the terrorism the FBI (formally the Justice Department) has historically carried out against African liberators for the last 100 years, this should be laughable. It’s the equivalent of a cat calling for everyone to condemn the mouse for standing up for their right to live.

Absolutely not. Celebrate the life of Assata Shakur and be inspired by it. If you don’t have much information about her, start by reading the two books that are most connected to her existence – her autobiography “Assata” and “Inadmissible Evidence” a book written by her auntie Evelyn Williams, who was Assata’s attorney who worked on her case in the 1970s. Continue to raise up Assata’s name as well as all freedom fighters who refused or refuse to bow down. And, make a commitment to get engaged in the very same struggle Assata represented because we all know the absolute best and only way to truly honor someone is to continue their work. Assata’s physical body is no more, but her impact on all of us will continue and there is nothing at all our enemies can do about that unless we let them.

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Kwame Nkrumah's Class Drives Race Analysis was Correct!

9/23/2025

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In the month of September Pan-Africanists all over the world generally commemorate the born month of Osageyfo Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah was the first president of Ghana, which was the first country in Africa to achieve the first stages of political independence from Europe. Nkrumah was the founder/co-founder of the first African Union between countries in 1960. He was the convenor for the All African People’s Conference in 1958 which set a more militant tone for independence struggles. He was the co-founder of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) which today is known as the African Union or the organization of all governments in Africa. He was the co-founder of the All African People’s Revolutionary Party which continues work today to carry out his revolutionary Pan-African vision.

One critical area which rarely comes up today in discussions about Nkrumah’s legacy is his emphasis on class consciousness and struggle. Throughout the 1960s, Nkrumah’s literary works like “Neo-Colonialism (1965)”, The Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare (1968)”, and “Class Struggle in Africa (1970)” each had a strong focus on class struggle, but his writings, much like those of his political comrades/contemporaries like Sekou Ture “Strategy and Tactics of the African Revolution” (1958/1978), and Amilcar Cabral “Unity and Struggle”(1979), are most often ignored by many so-called Pan-Africanists today.

One reason for this is many Africans claiming the Pan-African mantle today lack any semblance of class analysis. For this element of people, the racial analysis reigns supreme. In fact, many so-called Pan-Africanists reject class as a determining factor in evaluating our struggle for liberation on any level. Our history is rapt with so-called Pan-Africanists from Aime Senghor and Felix Humphrey Boygny in Senegal in the 1950s to Umar Johnson in the U.S. today who claim to be Pan-Africanists, or least support African unity, while clinging to capitalism as the economic approach that they believe will provide for our people.

Nkrumah never accepted or advanced a non-class based analysis of our struggle for liberation. He understood that our struggle as African people is rooted in the exploitation of Africa’s human and material resources. Consequently, he recognized that our primary struggle is the liberation of our land base – Africa – and so when he, and we, call ourselves African nationalists, we are doing so with a focus on our connection to the land (Africa), not our skin color. Nkrumah also understood clearly that the capitalist system has been developed into the dominant economic system on earth through its exploitation of Africa and other lands/peoples. As a result, he was under no illusion that capitalism could play any role in the self determination of our people or any people on earth.

Nkrumah also realized that a primary strategy of the ruling capitalist classes is to divide workers/people and that doing so along racial lines has proven to be the most effective and sustainable way to ensure mass unity is difficult to achieve. And, this division of course cannot just be limited to European (white) control over African minds and bodies. With the advancement of the African independent movements and civil rights and Black power movements around the world, the ruling classes recognized the need to proliferate classes of petti-bourgeoisie and even bourgeoisie Africans who would protect the capitalist system.

To understand the last statement its necessary to look at the contradictions that those movements forced. Here are some examples to illustrate this point. In 1960 when the Congo became independent, in a country of 25 million people, there were exactly 15 Congolese people who had technical and civil service training and experience. The newly elected government of Patrice Lumumba never had a chance to realistically build an independent government under those conditions which forced the Congo to continue to be manipulated by Belgium and the U.S. in efforts to manage the country. Another example is the response of the U.S. government to over 300 urban rebellions throughout U.S. cities in the late 1960s. In response, the government formed a committee made up of the president of the U.S. – Richard Nixon, McGeorge Bundy, the CEO of Ford Foundation, David Rockerfeller who was the patriarch for all the Rockerfeller ruling class interests that include controlling stock in Chevron, all NBC television affiliates, and Chase Bank, and others. The task of this committee was to study the results of the 1968 Kerner Commission report which argued that the U.S. was two societies, one Black, one White, and unless the disparities created by centuries of institutional racism were addressed the country would continue to rupture. Of course this committee never had any honest intentions of addressing any of the social contradictions articulated in the Kerner report. Instead, its approach was to broaden the existence of the African petti-bourgeoisie class by promoting the institution of Affirmative Action programs that would open doors that were previously closed to qualified African people to have access to assistance to help them achieve college education, minority business contracts, etc. The results of this were and are an expanded African petti-bourgeoisie class within the U.S., or a large class of African people who see their primary interest as that of protecting the capitalist system in order to serve their own political and economic interests as the gatekeepers for this system.

These examples are the things Nkrumah warned us about in “Class Struggle.” Now today, in 2025, there are multiple African billionaires throughout Africa like Akite Bangote from Nigeria, and numerous other African billionaires around the world including several within the U.S. As Nkrumah told us, the role of these people is to pose as leaders of the African masses while using their visibility to steer our people towards loyalty to the capitalist system. The concerted effort has been to replace revolutionary ideology and action with entrepreneurship and business focuses among our people. To promote the belief that hard work and vision will permit us to gain access to the benefits of the capitalist system. Pyramid scam economic approaches like bitcoin have engulfed the imagination of so many of our people today when the reality is all of the business and entrepreneurship in the world has not and cannot liberate our people. It cannot because the number one principle within the capitalist system is in order to have a ruling class, there must be an underclass. For this emerging African petti bourgeoisie, they have made clear choices. They will place all of their eggs into that capitalist basket with the hopes of advancing their ability to rise within the capitalist system. And, since capitalism is again the product of exploiting Africa, a central component of sustaining capitalism is to keep the masses of Africans divided and disorganized. A core element of this strategy is dehumanizing and demoralizing the African masses. Making us believe that the struggles we face are only the result of our own failings and have nothing to do with this system that continues to exploit us.

There are plenty of these African petti bourgeoise who are content to play the role of keeping our people down by any means necessary to uplift their individual stock within the capitalist system. All one has to do is scroll social media and you will find no small number of African people who are proudly parroting long ago discredited racist tropes against our people. Its naïve to believe that their desire to do this is fueled entirely by ignorance. The neo-colonial leaders throughout the 54 countries in Africa and the 16 in the Caribbean along with people like Barack Obama are not all confused. They are the people Nkrumah warned us about. They look like us, but they ain’t like us.

Nkrumah was also very clear about articulating the importance of a class perspective to guide our understanding of how race is utilized as a tool of oppression within the capitalist system. When Kwame Ture, formally Stokely Carmichael, died in 1998, he was an avowed revolutionary Pan-Africanist and scientific socialist with a clear class consciousness, but that was not always the case. In 1968, when Stokely Carmichael first started visiting Nkrumah in Guinea-Conakry (before moving there in 1969 to become Nkrumah’s political secretary), he possessed a dominant race first analysis. This was illustrated by his 1968 speech at Huey P. Newton’s birthday party commemoration in Oakland, California, U.S. (as a result of Newton – the co-founder of the Black Panther Party – being imprisoned for the death of a European police officer). In that speech, during a contentious time where Carmichael was engaged in ideological struggle with Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, he indirectly criticized the Panthers in general, and Cleaver in particular, by attacking communism as being “ill-relevant to Black people!” The young Stokely Carmichael’s ideological growth into Kwame Ture has to be largely credited to Kwame Nkrumah who had endless discussions with the young Stokely at Vila Syly in Conakry about the danger of a race dominant analysis that is devoid of class analysis in properly evaluating our problems as African people.

If he were with us in his physical form today, Kwame Nkrumah would most likely see the boot licking of so many Africans in Africa towards neo-colonialism and disgraceful respect so many Africans are showing towards an anti-African fascist who was shot and killed in the U.S. as clear manifestations of class struggle within the African communities. Long before it because fashionable to say so, Nkrumah understood clearly that “all skin folks ain’t kin folks.” Regardless, we are still a long way from developing the type of collective class consciousness that will overshadow race consciousness among African people. We are still in the realm of “I’m rooting for everyone Black!” Nkrumah’s experiences with the betrayal of Lumumba by Mobutu and other Africans in the Congo and the betrayal of Africans within his government in Ghana reinforced for him that the struggle for revolutionary Pan-Africanism is a class struggle. A struggle that will certainly require African unity, but will also see the African struggle in solidarity with non-Africans who are engaging in anti-imperialist struggles while we fight relentlessly against many people who look like us who will not hesitate to work on behalf of the enemies of the masses of Africans and all of humanity.

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Do the FBI/CIA Have a Role in Africa/African Diaspora Wars?

9/9/2025

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Any surface review of social media platforms will find a plethora of videos of African people from the U.S., Caribbean, and of course Africa, arguing that Africans are defined strictly by the colonial borders where we were born and raised and that beyond that, we have no historical and cultural connections to one another. Accompanying this narrative with equal consistency are voices from Africans within the U.S. claiming that those of us born within the U.S. have zero historical and biological ties to Africa.

Even a cursory glance at the analysis projected within all of these talking points reveals the massive holes in these arguments to any and everyone who has spent even a little time studying the history of our people. For the anti-Africa voices, their entire framework is built upon the fragile belief that we should reject Africa because of random perspectives and voices from Africans born in Africa who know as little about our collective history as the Africans expressing this from the diaspora (outside of Africa). For the Africa against the diaspora (primarily against Africans in the U.S.) voices, their flimsy position is rooted largely in long ago disproven white supremacy tropes that Africans in the U.S. are lazy and criminally inclined. And unfortunately, these weak perspectives are not as alarming in comparison to the strange claims that we have no connection to Africa. These claims take anecdotal evidence like people’s physical appearances, and a complete lack of understanding of history i.e. “where are the slave ships?” to create this fantasy identity while completely ignoring clear linguistic, cultural, and even physiological connections between Africans in the U.S. and Africa. For example, ill refutable evidence of our linguistic connection like the fact the word mama, obviously widely used by Africans in the U.S., is actually the word for mother in Swahili. Or, the many ceremonies, and mannerisms we share such as African women in Venezuela beating sticks into water at varying degrees to create music which is a practice originated from the Baka Forest people in Central Africa through a ceremony called Liquindi. Then, there is sickle cell anemia which a large percentage of Africans in the U.S. house the trait if not the actual disease. This illness unquestionably results from the out of control mutation of blood cells that only impacts African people because of the historical relationship of those mutated blood cells serving as the body’s natural defense against malaria, a disease common throughout Africa and nonexistent in the U.S.

Most of us have heard and participated in conversations about these unfortunate perspectives, but very little of this discourse is centered around discussing where the origins of all this disunity come from. The suggestion here is that we consider that much of this dysfunction is most likely being injected into our communities from organized forces who have direct interest in keeping African people divided and disorganized.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have spent much of their 126 and 76 respective years history engaged in work designed to sabotage efforts at African unity and liberation. Starting with the Department of Justice (its name prior to being renamed the FBI) and J. Edgar Hoover’s work to sabotage the cross continental relationship between Liberia’s President King and Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the 1920s. Then to the CIA’ s sabotage of Congolese independence and coordinated murder of Patrice Lumumba, and its illegal overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah’s government in Ghana, and both intelligence agencies role in breaking up the relationship between Malcolm X’s work with Nkrumah, Sekou Ture, socialist Cuba, etc., the claims of U.S. imperialist intelligence actively eliminating African liberation efforts is ill refutable.

Just as Hoover’s and Justice Department’s work against the Garvey movement clearly illustrated 100 years ago, U.S. intelligence has always understood, even if we didn’t, the importance of sabotaging any serious efforts to link up African people across the Atlantic ocean. Why? Because that unity is the most potent weapon aimed at thwarting the capitalist world’s dependence on cheap African material and human resources. Resources that fueled and sustain capitalist dominance over the world’s political and economic interests. No matter where you are while reading this, whether it’s the architectural designs, the vehicles, the electronics, or the food you eat, Africa’s exploitation is everywhere around you.

And, since we haven’t been able to verify for sure where the origins and financing for most of these very well polished anti-African unity videos/takes are coming from, our history has taught us that we have to put everything on the table, especially the interests of the forces who benefit the most from our disorganization. Fortunately, there is much we can do to circumvent this sabotage against us.

First, we have to acknowledge that like any and all of the efforts capitalist intelligence has made against our unity, their efforts are always only going to be as effective as our willingness to compromise and sell out our people for their interests. Hoover’s work against Garvey was only successful because of Liberian President King’s willingness to cave to pressure as well as the self serving persons within the UNIA who were used against Garvey in a mail fraud scheme. The disruption of Lumumba’s government in the Congo required Joseph Mobutu (Mobutu Sese Seto), originally a close friend to Lumumba and member of Lumumba’s National Congolese Movement, to become the CIA’s main man, first in the Congo, and eventually throughout all of Africa.

So, these sellouts making these anti-unity videos are guilty and this shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of us because the class struggle is real. There is no such thing as racial unity without a class analysis. There have always been Africans who would not hesitate to sell the masses out to the colonizers in Africa and the slave masters at home in Africa and across the Atlantic to the plantations here in the Western world. And, those sellouts continue to reproduce creating the current variety who disingenuously claim colonial borders as our identity while making Africans born outside of the U.S. our primary enemies when as my mother always said “none of us have a pot to piss in!”

This is also true for the Africans from and on the continent who, embracing the class struggle of exclusion of the masses of Africans, see aligning themselves with the enemies of Africa and the African masses as their meal ticket just as their diaspora sellout kin share the same backward perspective on how to potentially build wealth by exploiting our situation instead of eliminating our collective oppression.

Nonetheless, the statement is true by an African revolutionary in the 1960s when asked about the assassination of Malcolm X and whether the Nation of Islam committed the act when he said “they may have fired the guns, but they didn’t buy the bullets!” Deep in the interior, down underneath the surface, somewhere that we may not discover for another several years, the forces of intel for the capitalist system have their hands in this. As they always have from their efforts to advance the narrative of the Black Belt South (carving out territories in the Southern U.S. for Africans), originally created by the Communist International to sway Africans away from the Garvey movement and its focus on Africa, U.S.,intelligence built upon that narrative to continue to separate us from Africa, to their confirmed work to sabotage Pan-Africanist connections for decades afterward. Those intelligence agencies understand clearly that true African unity, across artificial colonial borders, is the key to disrupting their stranglehold on African self determination and the total liberation of Africa under scientific socialism. It would be naïve for us to ignore that and not consider their role in all this confusion. Kwame Ture told us – “any analysis of our people without including the work of our enemies is an incomplete analysis!”

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Three Widely Believed Myths about Socialism in the U.S.

9/4/2025

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Its 2025 so if you haven’t noticed yet, international capital and its exploitative dominance over the entire world’s human and material resources is facing its most serious challenge. Just 35 years ago, even the then powerful Warsaw Pact, or Eastern European countries led by the former Union of Socialist Soviet Republics (USSR or Soviet Union) were not able to mount the type of challenge to the capitalist/imperialist system that its seeing today.

And this is borne out by Kwame Ture’s prophetic statement during the 1990s that the cracks in capitalism’s armor were exposed by the fact “the same white racists who attacked us in the 60s for protesting because they saw this as communist activities, are now protesting against the very same government they brutalized us in favor of!” Ture went on to state that attacks from the right and left make the capitalist system that much more vulnerable.

None of this is to say that the capitalist system isn’t still extremely resilient. It certainly has life to continue fighting back, but one of its most important tools in doing so is its ability to maintain its dominant anti-communist propaganda over a large segment of the world’s population.

This is evidenced by the fact that much of Europe today, at the very demand of the populations in countries like France, Italy, Germany, etc., uphold socialist influenced national programs like free healthcare, education, etc. While doing this, these countries, including Canada, laugh off U.S. critiques of their systems as costing too much by responding that they, unlike the U.S., don’t spend 50% of their national tax revenues on maintaining war mechanisms and militaries, around the world. And, the majority of the people in these countries happily agree with this approach while many of them would still resist any comparison between their countries and socialist development.

Of course, the U.S. is still the unquestioned leader of international capitalist/imperialist dominance and as a result, the most effective and consistent anti-communist propaganda exists within the U.S. This can easily be demonstrated by simple experimentation. If you go to any U.S. state, urban or rural setting, and stand on any intersection, offering passersby $100.00 USD if they can demonstrate any comprehensive book on socialist development they have read, outside of an assigned reading from school, etc., you would find no more than 1%, and that’s being optimistic, who would be qualified to cash in on your proposal.

This reality exists due to this non-stop anti-communist propaganda that exists like the sun comes up in the U.S.. And, the three myths about socialism are just some of many that can be easily dissected, yet they continue to represent what is without question the most dominant thinking about socialism in the U.S. today.

Myth # 1 – There is no freedom of thought in socialist societies.

This one is most likely the most widely propagated and the easiest to disprove of the many unfortunate lies about socialist development. The core of this mistruth rests in the mistaken assumption within capitalist U.S. that freedom and democracy is defined solely by being able to do what you think you want to do with no context and/or analysis. The truth is you can do what you want in capitalist societies as long as what you want does nothing to challenge the status quo of capitalist domination. In capitalism you can be racist, patriarchal, homophobic, and can even brag about being completely ignorant about any and everything, and all of this is not only acceptable, its encouraged within many quarters. This is of course an extremely primitive and underdeveloped perspective on freedom. Any healthy freedom has to require people within society to recognize not just their responsibility to themselves and their loved ones, but their responsibility to everyone. This is what socialist development promotes. So, in this collective mindset, a conscious socialist operating within a society committed to socialist development would have no issue in recognizing that the amount of money they can make should be limited for a time. Not to say that they cannot make money, but to say that their ability to make money cannot result from exploitative activities that maintain class inequities crucial for the continuance of capitalist development. For example, this conscious socialist would prefer that schools be prioritized with infrastructure. They would demand that the elderly and sick be taken care of without the burden of worrying about the finance to do so properly. And this socialist would always see these responsibilities as theirs as a human living in a collective society as a opposed to seeing the necessity to utilize tax revenues to fund schools as a personal financial burden that limits their personal profitability as is promoted within backward capitalist societies.

Also, since socialist societies prioritize collective input and participation, it’s insane to suggest that capitalist societies offer more free speech than socialist societies. Sure, from a surface perspective, capitalists can argue this point while leaving out that socialist societies haven’t been able to consolidate the values of socialism and moral incentives like capitalist societies have with financial incentives. So, to make that comparison is like expecting an undisciplined child to understand collectivism at the same qualitative level in a selfish capitalist society as someone who has practiced and is committed to collective development.

Deeper inspection confirms that that you truly can only say what you want within capitalist societies provided what you are saying is not opposed to capitalism and that a reasonable number of people are not listening to you. A simple inquiry into the capitalist system’s elimination of people like Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, Thomas Sankara, Fred Hampton, Salvador Allende, Samora Machel, Eduardo Mondalane, Ernesto Guevara, etc., etc., illustrates that capitalism will end you quickly if you speak out against it in ways that undermine its stability and ability to continue to dominant.
Meanwhile, socialist construction relies on tools like democratic centralism, which properly instituted ensures that everyone’s voice is heard and all debate is fully exhausted before a decision is made. Then, after the debate is exhausted, everyone has that collective responsibility to make a decision. With this socialist method, if anything, the danger is bourgeoisie democracy where people who don’t do the work are still able to express their opinions without any accountability to the work, but to call this style of work restrictive and undemocratic is laughable. This is especially true when free speech in capitalism doesn’t exist without dollars because dollars buys you the access. There are no historical accounts of capitalist development written and widely consumed by poor people.

Myth # 2 – You cannot make money in socialist societies.

The basis of this lie is that everything and everyone is equal under socialism and work is not incented so no matter how hard you try, everyone gets paid the same. This is also laughable. Doctors and lawyers within socialist societies make much more than street sweepers and garbage collectors. The fundamental and important difference is that within socialist development the value of that garbage collector and street sweeper is encouraged with the understanding that their role, although different, is as important as the doctor and lawyer. In socialism, the type of class hierarchy that dominates in capitalist societies is openly discouraged with education having a focus on eliminating this all together.

Another importance difference is since education, healthcare, childcare, etc., are free in socialist development, any and everyone is encouraged to pursue whichever type of career they wish because all work contributes to the revolutionary process. So, if the street sweeper decides not to go to law school, they aren’t socially penalized for this. That stigma doesn’t exist like it does in capitalist societies because the ability to have education isn’t decided by your elite class status, but by what contribution you wish to make to the collective society. Once all work is respected, you will always have some who wish to be doctors and some who decide to be street sweepers.

Myth # 3 – Production of products in socialism is inferior to capitalist production.

Although widely believed, another laughable concept. If you take s cellular phone for example. One developed in socialist societies is done under an environment of providing a necessary service to the user/buyer. The company is state owned so this is its motivation, not profitability. As a result, they have every incentive to build a superior product because their success is measured based on their ability to provide the people what they need, not how much money they make. This model has been proven time and time again, but a clear example is the work of Ghana’s tire manufacturing plant in Takaradi, Ghana from 1960 to 1966 under Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People’s Party’s socialist development. Ghana’s socialist tire factory out produced Firestone Tire and Rubber in Liberia during that period producing hundreds of thousands of tires that performed better and lasted longer. And, the recipe was no mystery. Under the socialist tire factory, workers were respected as contributors to the revolution by making those tires. They were paid respectively, provided benefits and treated as valuable members of the society. Even within capitalist societies we know that when workers are respected, they perform better, call in sick less, and produce at higher levels. In fact, the number one reason for worker dissatisfaction in capitalist countries is that lack of respect, not wages.

Meanwhile, capitalist tire production repped the same tired approach that is common in capitalist societies. Poor pay. Bad work conditions. Less workers to increase profitability with higher penalties for not meeting production goals. The fact that the neo-colonial U.S. backed thugs who illegally overthrew Nkrumah’s government in 1966 had the vision to close that tire factory immediately and sell it off to Firestone to be immediately closed, forever (it was never reopened) tells the full story. Capitalism will do anything to prevent the people from finding out what it really is because once people find out that capitalism is nothing except a brutal oppressive system, they will learn that scientific socialism is the exact opposite of that. As capitalism gets weaker and weaker, its ability to maintain that mirage of superiority is really the only trick up its sleeve that it has left.

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