Chris Smalls’ “Unforgivable Sin”: Connecting the Warehouse to the Empire

Writes Prince Kapone of Weaponized Information . . .

Jacobin really thought it was doing labor strategy. What it actually did was publish a character assassination of a Black worker who committed the unforgivable sin of connecting the warehouse to the empire.

Chris Smalls helped crack open Amazon – one of the most powerful corporate machines on earth – and then refused to stay in the lane the respectable Left assigned him. He stood with Palestine. He stood with Cuba. He confronted ICE. He confronted [Amazon CEO] Jeff Bezos. He treated labor politics as something larger than contracts, elections, press hits, and polite speeches from politicians who want workers as backdrops.

And that is when the language changed. Suddenly it was not Amazon’s union-busting. Not the rotten labor-law regime. Not the Democratic Party’s graveyard of movements. Not the weakness of the official labor movement. Not the empire behind the boss. No. The problem was Chris Smalls’s “ego.” How convenient.

This is the old trick: when Black radical politics becomes internationalist, the respectable crowd turns the politics into a personality problem. Too loud. Too flashy. Too angry. Too undisciplined. Too much style. Too much confidence. Too much refusal. Too much worker acting like he has the right to speak on Palestine, Cuba, ICE, Bezos, police, politicians, and empire. They wanted him as a poster. They did not want him as a line.

. . . Smalls is not above criticism. No organizer is. Celebrity politics is not enough. Charisma is not organization. A movement cannot live on one face.

But bureaucratic respectability is not enough either. Electoral containment is not enough. A union with no fire becomes an office. A socialist politics afraid of anti-imperialism becomes management of decline.

The working class does not need mascots or managers. It needs organized anti-imperialist labor power. That means labor politics that does not stop at the warehouse gate. It means workers understanding that Amazon is not just a workplace, Bezos is not just a billionaire, Palestine is not just “foreign policy,” Cuba is not just “complicated,” ICE is not just immigration enforcement, and the Met Gala is not just culture.

It is all one system. They called it ego because they could not call it what it was: Black anti-imperialist labor politics.

– Prince Kapone
Excerpted from “They Called It Ego: Jacobin, Chris Smalls,
and the Policing of Black Anti-Imperialist Labor”
Weaponized Information
June 5, 2026

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Kshama Sawant on the Real Reason for Jacobin Magazine’s “Hatchet Job” on Chris Smalls
• Steven Donziger’s Shout-Out to Chris Smalls
• Chris Smalls: We Need to Escape the “Two-Party Plantation”
• Quote of the Day – August 5, 2025
• U.S. Labor Leader Chris Smalls Joins the Crew of the Handala