League of Revolutionaries for a New America
The Juneteenth holiday marks one of the greatest victories in U.S. history – the end of chattel slavery, a system in which people were treated as private property with no legal rights. On June 19, 1865, enslaved African Americans in Texas learned that the Emancipation Proclamation had freed everyone held in Confederate states – a full two and a half years earlier.
Juneteenth celebrates freedom won through long, deep struggle – by the resistance and work of the enslaved themselves, abolitionists of all colors, radical legislators and eventually through a bloody Civil War where approximately 750,000 U.S. soldiers died, including 40,000 Black union soldiers.
Emancipation abolished roughly $4 billion in human private property – at the time, the largest concentration of private wealth in the U.S. economy. But it did not end exploitation. Private property survived, and the ruling class reorganized around new ways to exploit labor and divide workers along racial lines.
The formerly enslaved received neither 40 acres nor reparations and were forced into sharecropping that trapped them in debt, alongside impoverished white workers. Meanwhile, the wealth generated by enslaved labor and stolen Indigenous land became the foundation of American capitalism and U.S. global power.
Juneteenth challenges us to examine today's remaining barriers to freedom. Society has unprecedented wealth, yet millions lack access to basic needs, while a tiny ruling class turns to fascist methods to keep its dominance.
As artificial intelligence and automation transform the economy, growing numbers of workers – across every race, gender, and industry – are being displaced, with no stake left in this system. The struggle for human dignity now requires the complete abolition of capitalist private property.
Across the country, the victims of this system are in motion – defending neighbors from ICE, demanding healthcare and housing, protesting police violence and fighting for the right to vote. Many are angry, but don't yet see that a different system is possible today – one where the wealth we all create is shared to benefit all people and the planet, instead of hoarded by a few. Helping people envision that system and fight for it is the work of revolutionaries.
Juneteenth carries a spirit of hope and transformation. It teaches that oppressive systems once thought permanent can be abolished. As we celebrate emancipation, we take up that work – building toward a society where the wealth we all create is owned in common and distributed according to need. That is the unfinished work of freedom.