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

AISO wins students to African Revolution

The Party has also moved to build a student wing of our organization. The African Internationalist Student Organization (AISO) is our work to win African students to a permanent place in the Revolution.

Students are not a class. However, through the imperialist vetting process of accepted imperialist-influenced definitions of success, especially among the colonized and subject masses, it is not unusual for African students to be burdened with deep-seated petty bourgeois aspirations.

AISO must be the weapon in the hands of the African working class to challenge African students to become revolutionary intellectuals. They must be influenced by AISO to reject the attempts of institutionalized seduction, the ongoing efforts to build a wall of contempt between the students and the African working class, in most instances their neighbors, friends and families.

African students must realize that their presence in the academic institutions is a result of concessions to the bloody battles of the working class for access to what was assumed to be an avenue for the advancement of our whole people, not the self-aggrandizement of a chosen few.

There are African student organizations on campuses throughout the U.S., many of which have existed as a consequence of the struggles of the 1960s. For the most part these students are involved in inconsequential and sometimes even decadent activities. These groups also function as “company unions” or arms of the institutional administration.

At best they involve themselves in minor reforms, often directed at improving their lot as students. Many times these students are drawn to African cultural — sometimes mystical — formations or expressions that lead nowhere. Or, they express their militancy or self-defined “blackness” by sponsoring performers, some of who are political speakers, at their university. In almost every instance, when these students graduate or leave their campuses for other reasons their departure marks the end of their political activism.

AISO is the Party’s method of winning the students to our Revolution. It is our way of seizing as our base the universities, colleges and even the high schools, where thousands of African students are looking for answers to the issues confronting African people and the world. AISO is the Party’s way of contesting bourgeois ideology in the very centers of production and reproduction of bourgeois colonialist ideas and their thinking representatives.

The educational system of the U.S. is one of the major weapons used to undermine the revolutionary consciousness of our people. It is a system that assumes for itself the sometimes not too subtle task of “civilizing” African students.

It is a system that is based on the assumption that African students are simply empty vessels, bringing no worthy history or culture of their own to the educational process, waiting to be filled with white colonially informed “knowledge.” This results in an instinctive resistance by most of the African students (especially in the middle and high schools), the criminalization of many and a process of vetting those timid and malleable souls most likely to perform future neocolonial functions against the interests of Africans and other oppressed and laboring people.

The vetting process continues during “higher” education, where students are faced with intensive ideological assaults and the results of the reversal of policies won by our movement during a higher point of resistance that opened the doors of the colleges and universities to more African and colonized students. The key attack on the students, however, is the ever-increasing cost of tuition that serves to eliminate an even larger proportion of the African students. This leaves the possibility of even a colonial education being primarily open to a narrow elite element of the African population.

Obviously AISO organizers will not suffer from a dearth of issues around which to hone their fighting capacity and organize students and their parents into members and supporters of AISO and the Revolution. AISO can turn the campuses into ideological and political battlegrounds that will have significance beyond the campuses. Such struggles during this period of the students’ lives can serve to shape and develop a militant African Internationalist consciousness for many of them forever.

The campuses will provide our Party with a ready base of Africans whose primary endeavors are intellectually based. These are Africans who are open to new ideas and are fast developing the capacity to process and develop ideas.

By building AISO we assure the Revolution a continuous flow of revolutionary recruits that are won to the ideas of the Revolution and have a greater capability of improving on and transmitting those revolutionary ideas. We immediately raise the level of political discussion within our Party and the movement at large.

However, our work to consolidate AISO has left a lot to be desired and we must consider this one of the outstanding issues to be resolved. Our Party’s Fifth Congress must contribute greatly to our ability to effectively take on this work.

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