At the same time as slavery came to an end in the British Empire, still harsher restrictions on working people were promulgated. That was not a coincidence. Image by William Gibson.

We Can’t Understand Capitalism Without Understanding Slavery

Pete Dolack

December 28, 2025

Ever since Eric Williams published his book Capitalism and Slavery, which demonstrated to those more inclined to weigh evidence rather than ideology that slavery was a crucial prop to the Industrial Revolution, there has been a continual pushback. There is no surprise in that. The fiction that capitalism is a “natural” manifestation of “human nature” […]

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Pete Dolack has been an activist with several groups, most recently Trade Justice New York Metro. He writes the Systemic Disorder blog and is the author of the books What Do We Need Bosses For?: Toward Economic Democracy and It’s Not Over: Learning From the Socialist Experiment.

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Image by Hédi Benyounes.

How Florida Uses Unpaid Prison Labor to Run Its Military Asset Pipeline

Emmett Tatter August 30, 2026

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