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

Influencing and organizing African labor

Hopefully this period will also see the Party achieve a greater influence within organized labor, especially within trade unions with significant African membership.

While we recognize that within a capitalist world economy all workers are exploited at the point of production, this has different implications for workers of countries whose peoples and resources constituted the “primitive accumulation,” or start up of the capitalist system itself.

This “primitive accumulation,” made up of whole countries and continents and all that is produced therein; that stems from the enslavement and dispersal of Africans in Africa and globally and continues to operate through colonialism and neocolonialism, is obscured by capitalist production at the point of production.

Neither the workers nor the imperialist economists are able to recognize the relationship between the brutal extraction of coltan from war-torn Congo and the ability to have jobs in Silicon Valley in California and efficiently operating cheap computers throughout the U.S. and around the world.

They do not recognize the relationship of the African extraction of bauxite from mines in Guyana and Guinea-Conakry and the concomitant loss of sovereignty and freedom, to the jobs created in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere in the European world and their ability to shop at any local supermarket for aluminum goods cheaply produced at the points of production there.

Similarly, African, Mexican and other workers in the U.S., as well as internally colonized workers in other parts of the European world, while exploited at the point of production as workers, suffer the brutality of colonial domination that cannot be resolved by simply struggling to recover the loss of value stolen at the point of production. Ours is a struggle for our liberation as a people and a dispersed, captive nation, whose national homeland provides fodder for the capitalist production that feeds the capitalists and all the beneficiaries of capitalist development.

Our task is to win African workers to a consciousness of themselves as workers who never receive the value of their labor and often not even the value necessary for reproducing real life and the ability to labor.

In addition to educating the workers to this theft of value that goes to make the bourgeoisie rich at the expense of the workers, as Africans the workers must be brought to the understanding that it is our colonial oppression as a people that makes this exploitation possible; that it is our experience at the point of the bayonet that created the conditions for exploitation of workers of the oppressor nation at the point of production.

Hence, the African workers must be brought to consciousness of their task to lead the struggle against our national oppression as a strategic necessity for the emancipation of African labor and the elevation of the African working class to the position of the ruling class of a liberated, united Africa and African people worldwide.

Through the African Socialist International, the Party committed to build an international African labor union that would take on the struggle to win concessions from the bosses where laborers are employed, both in the informal and formal sectors of the economies where they work.

However, the greater task of our labor work would be to take revolutionary science to the struggles of the workers and help them to move toward defeating the existing bourgeois ruling class and overturning the capitalist state in the process of themselves, as workers, becoming the new ruling class in a socialist society.

This would be our main task working with labor here in the U.S. And, while we have a history going back many years of working intermittently with organized African labor in the U.S., it has never had strategic significance for our Party. That must change and hopefully we are on course to contribute to that change.

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