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African People's Socialist Party 5th Congress - Political Report - African People’s Solidarity Committee another vehicle against U.S. imperialism

Political Report to the Fifth Congress of the African People’s Socialist Party

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African People’s Solidarity Committee another vehicle against U.S. imperialism

InPDUM is not the only vehicle through which the Party is advancing a winning struggle against U.S. imperialism within current U.S. borders. One major component of the Party’s arsenal is the African People’s Solidarity Committee (APSC), the Party organization comprised essentially of North Americans or white people.

In many ways APSC has been ghettoized within the Uhuru Movement and its significance is not fully understood either by itself or the Party at large. This is essentially because of the race nationalism and race analysis that have contaminated the body politics of the African Liberation Movement.

Race nationalism has been most influential within the diverse movement for self-determination or independence from the U.S. It has been essentially a nationalism based on skin color or racial identity, in most instances liquidating the critical issues of class and the revolutionary capture of state power, and ignoring the question of what kind of social system will be established after independence has been won.

In many instances this race nationalism has prevented its advocates from establishing alliances and unity with any non-African cause, regardless of its political and strategical implications for the struggle against world imperialism and the liberation of our people. It has occasionally also allowed the race nationalists to unite with enemies of our people and tools of imperialism, simply because they were African.

However, the race nationalists are not the only forces who are wedded to a racial analysis of our struggle. Assimilationists of every complexion and political persuasion — black liberal capitalist-aspirants, frothing-at-the-mouth infantile black and white pseudo Marxists along with their liberal variant — are also adherents of racial analysis.

Even the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP), a formerly significant student-based middle class Pan-Africanist organization, described ours as a struggle against “racism” and imperialism, an example of an idealist form of philosophical dualism.

Of course, we of the African People’s Socialist Party have always recognized that racism is simply the ideological underpinning of imperialism. Racism is the ideas in the heads of people that unite them with the interests of imperialism, often against their own best interests. It is a consciousness that owes its existence to an economic base stemming from parasitism or “primitive accumulation.”

We have always recognized that the struggle of African people is for the conquest of independent political power. It is a struggle against colonialism which, when victorious, makes insignificant the ideas in the heads of our national oppressors and class enemies.

To minimize the intervention of “race” consciousness in our Party and the world in which the Party has influence, we have always attempted to speak of “white” people in general as Europeans and those who are citizens of a particular state, by the generally used name of the state.

This is why we prefer to refer to “whites” in the U.S. as North Americans, because of their identity with the North American State. This helps to clarify our relationship as oppressor and oppressed in the same way it is clear for Vietnamese and others who have had to struggle against white power. This clarity allowed the Vietnamese to develop a strategy during their struggle to evict the U.S. colonial occupiers that could distinguish between U.S. North Americans and what they defined as the “internal colony” of African people.

On the other hand, just as “whites” are Europeans and North Americans, we are Africans, not “blacks,” an identity that liquidates the struggle for national liberation and the consolidation of the African nation-state. This gives a different kind of political definition of our relationship and correctly informs our struggle for African liberation, unification and socialism.

Race nationalism limits the ability of our movement to define the basis for unity with anyone who is not “black,” while African Internationalism is capable of defining our unity with anyone on terms determined by our anti-imperialist mission to unite, liberate and unify Africa and the dispersed African nation under the leadership of the African working class.

Race nationalism is based on philosophical idealism. It represents the worldview of the imperialist bourgeoisie that invented the concept of race to facilitate the domination of capitalism, which was born as a world system and as white power. It is interesting to note that many of the race nationalists and the Assimilationists have found unity in their support for the campaign and presidency of Barack Hussein Obama, imperialism’s most desperate example of white power in black face.

While the African People’s Socialist Party can be proud of our track record of fighting for science in our struggle and for destroying the ideological basis for most of the backward notions concerning the struggle for socialism and liberation, we have not been absolutely immune to the ideological and political influences of the world.

Moreover, the imperial attitude that too often accompanies whites, sometimes even members of APSC in opposition to its line and formal policies, has fed the subjectivism of some Party members. This has in turn, also occasionally subdued or compromised the Party line among Africans regarding race and the African People’s Solidarity Committee.

Nonetheless, it must be clearly stated that the African People’s Solidarity Committee has proved to be an invaluable Party organization. It has provided us a division of labor that has allowed the Party to extend the struggle for African liberation and socialism into the living rooms and communities of the oppressor nation white population. Only the politically blind will refuse to see the value of this.

African People’s Solidarity Committee comrades are a strategic asset that has also provided our Party with some of our most heroic and dedicated cadres. The African People’s Solidarity Committee is comprised of cadres who have been beaten and arrested by police, kidnapped and traumatized in “deprogramming” attempts, become the “nigger lovers” to the white left and at times have had to endure a form of excommunication from other sectors of white society.

Some of our movement’s longstanding veterans, custodians of much of our history of struggle, tactics and strategy, some of whom were trained by our Chairman up to thirty years ago, are members of the African People’s Solidarity Committee.

Their willingness to adopt African Internationalism as their own and to endure the hardships and struggles consistent with this acceptance of the Party’s worldview have resulted in the development of a well organized, tightly-knit group with a membership that has learned to work well together and that has a passion for African Internationalism and the Party.

Within the ranks of APSC are comrades who have maintained their station in our movement for much longer than much of the Party’s membership. They are comrades who have often been willing to withstand and engage in severe criticism and self-criticism as an aspect of their Party life. They have endured disruptions of personal relationships and, based on the direction of the Party, they have willingly accepted assignments that moved them to different cities and states to carry out political work.

These are comrades whose political history as African Internationalists has prepared them for the crucial task ahead.

The selection and election of Obama as U.S. president is a weapon in the hands of the oppressor to sow even more confusion on the question of “race” in the U.S. The fact that he was elected with a substantial vote from the white oppressor nation citizens is being used to absolve them and the U.S. government of any responsibility for the conditions of existence with which Africans are confronted. The race analysis supports this erroneous, opportunist, self-serving conclusion.

However, the existence and work of the Party through APSC will allow the Party to contend with this bourgeois explanation of the current reality. The existence and work of APSC allows the Party to contend with the imperialist treachery of Obama as white power in a black face with the APSC as our own black power in white face.

APSC represents a living, concrete challenge to bourgeois disingenuousness, providing an example of a principled relationship with the struggling peoples of the world. APSC shows the line of march that can result in a resolution of the contradictions separating white people from the rest of the human family and arm them to fight for black power in their own selfish interest.

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Political Report to the Fifth Congress of the African People’s Socialist Party

African People’s Solidarity Committee another vehicle against U.S. imperialism

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