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

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Table of Contents

1. Imperialists cannot stem tide of national liberation
2. The Party is the anti-colonial force in this time
3. African People’s Socialist Party is heir to Marcus Garvey
4. Pan-Africanism was the petty bourgeoisie; Garvey led the African working class
5. African Internationalism advances Garvey Movement, defines imperialism in crisis
6. African Internationalism shows the way forward
7. African Internationalism led on the issue of reparations
8. African workers must lead the struggle against parasitic capitalism
9. ASI is the basis for a genuine Communist International
10. White nation-state built on pedestal of slavery, colonialism
11. White communists must be committed to overthrowing white power
12. The African Socialist International is growing in Africa
13. ASI resolution adopted at Party’s First Congress
14. InPDUM leads mass resistance
15. Revolutionary National Democratic Program: the political basis for black power
16. Black is Back Coalition helps to advance RNDP
17. African People’s Solidarity Committee another vehicle against U.S. imperialism
18. White people must side with African workers not parasitic capitalism
19. AAPDEP a tool against parasitic capitalist development
20. AISO wins students to African Revolution
21. African Redemption Church: the Party’s response to religious idealism
22. Influencing and organizing African labor
23. Party must address issue of African mass incarceration
24. Formalizing the leadership of African women
25. Solve the problem of recruitment
26. Accountability and democratic centralism
27. Party’s Department of Agit Prop has made great leaps
28. Cadre development and leadership is key
29. Office of Economic Development builds culture of self-reliance

White people must side with African workers not parasitic capitalism

In the current period the contradictions of imperialism are being generalized. The cascading, successive, struggles of the oppressed peoples of the world are successfully changing the political and economic contours of the world. This is the source of the crisis of imperialism and the reason the imperialists have geared up for a permanent state of war, currently characterized as a fight against terrorism.

Nevertheless, despite all the imperialist duplicity and claims about fighting terrorism, imperialist war is being increasingly discredited as a viable solution. The economic crisis and bourgeois colonialist state response to it are exposing greater numbers of North American oppressor nation citizens to economic anxiety and political outrage.

The self-interested concerns of the North American oppressor nation citizens are real. The problem historically is that the North American population has usually united with solutions to their perceived problems at the expense of Africans and others. This is an example of the power of the ideological foundation of imperialism.

Historically the ruling class initiators and ultimate beneficiaries of this ideology have used it to promote and validate the obscene ability of whites to unite with their own white ruling class and opportunistically separate their own narrow, self-serving interests from those of the majority of the peoples of the world.

This traditional North American opportunism — the tendency to accept short-term benefits for themselves at the expense of the long-term interests of the masses of the world’s peoples — serves to protect imperialism by splitting the North American people and self-serving, self-defined progressives from the struggling peoples of the world.

However, during this period where so many of the inherent contradictions of imperialism are in a state of simultaneous convergence, we have the greatest opportunity, perhaps in history, to win a significant sector of the North American oppressor nation citizens to unity with a revolutionary solution.

In the earlier-quoted 1920 presentation at the Second Congress of the Third Communist International, Lenin addressed the question of white opportunism and its material basis with these words:

“Why is this opportunism stronger in Western Europe than in our own country [Russia]? It is because the culture of the advanced countries has been, and still is, the result of being able to live at the expense of a thousand million oppressed people. It is because the capitalists of these countries obtain a great deal more in this way than they could obtain as profits by plundering the workers of their own countries.

“It is these thousands of millions in superprofits that form the economic basis of opportunism in the [white] working class movement.”

Today, with North Americans feeling pain and often needing to respond to it, we must look for occasions to use their own pain as the starting point in the discussion, helping them in the process to recognize that although they are not accustomed to it, theirs is not a special pain.

They must be made to understand that theirs is a pain born of the very nature of a social system built and sustained by the pain of slavery, colonialism and genocide committed against the majority population of the world. The theory of African Internationalism must be taken to North Americans and Europeans.

The African People’s Solidarity Committee is the potent weapon that we will employ in this critical task. In order to be effective it is not enough to only educate the North American population to the aggressions of imperialism against Africans and others. We must develop our capacity to explain to the North American population the connection between its current crisis and the very nature of the system born of slavery, colonialism and genocide.

The African People’s Solidarity Committee must become reverse missionaries, taking real “civilization” to the white world, civilization that will help them to throw off the superstition of racial separation and superiority through recognition that their fate and their possibility of a real future will depend on their willingness to join us in destroying the failed god of a parasitic based white supremacy.

The alienated sectors of the North American people must be brought to a scientific understanding of the contradictions they themselves are facing. In other words, we must become experts in winning North Americans to solidarity based on the recognition that solidarity is the only route to creating a new system that will free them from the imperialist-designed segregation from the rest of the world and from the exploitation and other contradictions with which they attempt to contend in their imaginary isolation from the rest of us. The white population must become anti-colonialists as a matter of self-defense.

Not all the North Americans who support and voted for Obama were motivated by conscious opportunism, which is not to say this makes the opportunism less significant. Some North Americans actually saw their support and vote for Obama as taking a stance in the interests of ”racial” justice and reconciliation. Although, because it is motivated by conviction, “honest” opportunism is the most dangerous kind, in this instance it is also an opportunism that may be susceptible to education towards the correct path to “racial” justice.

During this period there is a lot of political motion among grassroots North Americans or whites. One example of this is the so-called Tea Party participants, so named for the Boston Tea Party in 1773 that popularized the struggle between the emerging U.S. capitalist class, tied directly or indirectly to the trade in African people, and the British Empire for control of the resources stolen from the Indigenous people of what is now known as the U.S.

The current Tea Party movement is spurred on by some of the most reactionary sectors of the white population, mostly tied to various arms of the ruling class and, in some instances, one of the ruling parties. While this grassroots activity often criticizes such things as the big bank bailouts and Wall Street profiteers, it has been characterized by vocal outpourings of racial hatred, anticommunism and attacks on so-called immigrants.

Many of these whites are reportedly people who have never engaged in political life in the past. They are ordinary whites that luxuriated in the benefits looted from the oppressed around the world and deposited in the malls and gas tanks of the U.S.

However, the crisis born of the inherent tendency of an economy based on such parasitism to decay and putrefy, has forced them to seek explanations for the social, political and economic turmoil they are experiencing and witnessing.

APSC is the vanguard of the Party’s work to explain to the alienated sectors of the North American population the basis of the chaos that causes them so much anxiety.

The North Americans, like most Europeans, assume they have some idea of the basis of the contradictions because of the fantasies passed on to them historically about the source of their comparative wealth and “good fortune.” It is upon this false ideological foundation that the North American demagogues have mobilized large sectors of the white population.

Nevertheless, those are resources stolen from others that have become increasingly difficult for them to afford in their malls and supermarkets. It is somebody else’s oil, wrenched from the earth with bloody consequences, for which they now have to pay more.

The bauxite, coltan, gold and diamonds along with the cocoa beans, cotton and cheaply produced clothing have cost the rest of us dearly and our combined struggles to seize control of our lives and resources are affecting the ability of North Americans and other Europeans to enjoy a parasitic economy that requires global misery for an oasis of white happiness.

This work by APSC is not easy and it does not provide immediate evidence of general success. However, it is the only way forward if whites are to end their isolation from the rest of us and survive to participate in a new world free from oppression and exploitation.

It is work that requires an ongoing process of intervention into the mass issues that are mobilizing whites with a scientific explanation for their conditions of existence, both as beneficiaries of stolen wealth and victims of parasitic crisis. Our ultimate success is guaranteed by the fact that we have the only answers that speak to the reality of the issues immediately affecting whites and the world. Sooner or later whites, like everyone else, will be forced to accept objective truth over self-gratifying racial nonsense.

The March 29, 2010 edition of Newsweek magazine, a journal of the U.S. white ruling class, quotes former U.S. president William Jefferson Clinton as he describes the pervasive anxiety of North Americans facing the Obama administration:

“There are objective reasons that huge numbers of Americans are confused, angry, frustrated and afraid,” Clinton stated. Elaborating on Clinton’s advice to Obama, the magazine article goes on to say:

“[T]ell us how what you are explaining will lead us to a better place and describe that place. Assume nothing; repeat yourself until you are numb. Only then will the message begin to sink in…”

This is also good advice for revolutionaries in general, but it is especially true for the work of APSC. This is the contest that it faces in competition with all the forces of reaction and the instincts of the white population that will reflexively unite it with imperialism.

APSC is the Party’s primary weapon in this struggle at this critical time when all these contradictions are impacting on so many of the alienated sectors of the U.S. population at the same time. This is not an easy task, but it certainly cannot be any more difficult than the tasks these comrades have taken on in the past. It simply means that we will have to develop new tactics, strategies and approaches to this work. But it is necessary and it will be done and we will win.

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