A revolutionary working class must be able to acknowledge its enemy and eschew not only capitalism but also colonialism and imperialism. - Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

I am one of the 5 to 10 percent of the adult U.S. population of the 1960s who, by the end of that decade, had come to consider herself a lifelong revolutionary, part of a global revolution against greed, war, patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, and racism. Many of us were guided by a wide spectrum of anti- capitalist, anti-imperialist theorists, among them Amilcar Cabral, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Herbert Marcuse, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, Frantz Fanon, Antonio Gramsci, Marx and Engels, Bakunin, Lenin, Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, Rosa Luxemburg, Lucy Parsons, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. (Prologue)

The opening of the twenty-first century saw a new, even more brazen form of US militarism and imperialism explode on the world scene when the election of George W. Bush turned over control of US foreign policy to a long-gestating neoconservative and warmongering faction of the Pentagon and its civilian hawks. Their subsequent eight years of political control included two major military invasions and hundreds of small wars employing US Special Forces around the globe, establishing a template that continued after their political power waned.

"A nation of immigrants" was a mid-twentieth-century revisionist origin story.