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

Party’s Department of Agit Prop has made great leaps

One of the most important developments of the Party has been the work in the Department of Agitation and Propaganda. This is a department of the Party that suffers immeasurably from too few cadres and various other organizational contradictions.

Despite these shortcomings, which include the infrequent publication of our printed political journal, The Burning Spear, Agitprop has made incredible leaps in other areas. This includes our Internet news publication, Uhurunews.com, which also serves as an online edition of The Burning Spear.

A related success of Agitprop is the establishment of Uhururadio.com, an online radio station. Together these propaganda institutions reach thousands of people worldwide each month. In 2009 our Internet media — Uhurunews.com and Uhururadio.com — reached almost 90,000 people worldwide and our capacity is growing daily.

Through Uhurunews.com and Uhururadio.com the Party’s views are seen and heard throughout the U.S., England or the UK, South Africa, Canada, France, Spain, India, Switzerland, Nigeria, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and virtually all of Africa. The Party is read and heard in Greece, Austria, Portugal, Yemen, Hungary, Trinidad and Tobago and throughout the Caribbean, as well as in Romania, Slovenia, Pakistan, China and Myanmar, for example.

Through this work by Agitprop the Party is successfully struggling to end the isolation of our struggle for liberation, unification and socialism and demonstrating its relationship to the struggles of the oppressed and struggling peoples of the world.

This important work of Agitprop also helps us to develop practical unity between the struggles of African people in different parts of the world. This also helps us to contend with the popular notion, thanks to the bourgeoisie and its media, that there is no coherent explanation for and struggle against the conditions of African existence other than the self-serving explanations offered by our oppressors.

Although there is always room for improvement and we are currently working to develop our programming, Uhururadio.com is currently broadcasting from within the U.S., Canada and England. (Our South Africa broadcasting has been temporarily terminated because of opportunism and ideological differences with the Pan-Africanist host.) We have one French-language show and are in the process of creating programming in other languages, especially, but not limited to, languages indigenous to Africa.

The crisis of imperialism is leading the white ruling class to go to greater lengths to control the production and distribution of information. In this way the imperialists assume they can keep the people in a permanent state of misinformed complacency. However, one consequence of the blatant manufacturing of information and opinion by the bourgeois media is that more and more people are turning to other sources for their information, some of which allow for the people to participate in the actual production of information and the distribution of ideas independent of the bourgeoisie.

This is contributing to the decline of the bourgeois media. Bourgeois newspapers are folding and other media are in constant states of decline. Although bourgeois pundits speak of this phenomenon as something new, this is not the first time something like this has happened. During the height of the Black Revolution of the 1960s, in the U.S. the Nation of Islam had a weekly distribution rate of one million newspapers and the Black Panther Party more than one quarter million newspapers. Our own newspaper also published several thousand newspapers monthly.

“Alternative,” mostly radical newspapers grew like wildfire throughout the U.S., as more and more people were alienated from the warmongering, anti-democratic bourgeoisie and its worldview and distrusted its information and opinions. This had a tremendous impact on the bourgeois media, forcing them to publish information that approximated an explanation of the reality that the people were discovering on their own. The bourgeois publications even went to great lengths to duplicate the look of the independent radical media in its efforts to regain influence.

Eventually it took the defeat of the African Revolution of the 1960s and the resultant capitulation of most of the North American left for the bourgeoisie to temporarily recapture some of its lost ground. However, this has proved to be a hollow victory for the white ruling class since there is currently a great distrust of the ability and willingness of the bourgeoisie to explain the reality being experienced by the people in this era of great imperialist crisis.

The growth of technology has only facilitated the ability of the people to seek other means of securing, producing and distributing information and ideas.

Moreover, the bourgeois media have long ago determined not to allow the African Revolution or the various struggles of peoples to free themselves from the grip of imperialism to express themselves through their media. For us in the African People’s Socialist Party this move by the imperialists to shut us out of public view has further demonstrated the reality that imperialism has within it the germ of its destruction.

Rather than fold up our tent and skulk into obscurity because of the unwillingness of the bourgeois media to cooperate with us, we have embarked on a process of building our own contending media that allow us to communicate directly to our class, our people and the world.

Additionally, although our media are small in comparison to that of the white ruling class, theirs, like imperialism itself, is in a state of decline as our media continue to grow in capacity and influence.

Our primary work with Agitprop is to develop the office itself. It is chronically understaffed and we are not necessarily using the available forces in the most efficient manner. We also have to improve the tremendously underdeveloped resource-creating capacity of Agitprop. And, most importantly, we have to reestablish the regular publication of our flagship print journal, The Burning Spear.

The Burning Spear is an invaluable ideological and political organizing tool. It allows the masses to read about themselves in struggle and to learn how others in similar situations contend with contradictions. It contributes to our organizational efficiency and its propaganda value includes the confidence it gives to our oppressed people to see our class fighters always politically engaged throughout our communities with The Burning Spear, Voice of the International African Revolution.

However, nothing is as important as the role of The Burning Spear in defining the day-to-day work of all our rank and file cadres.

Every rank and file member of the Party and our mass organizations should be constantly engaged in distribution of The Burning Spear. This is the most important, consistent contact between the Party and the masses and demands a relationship between the Party and the people. There is never a time when there is not something for a cadre to do as long as The Burning Spear is available for distribution.

Distribution of The Burning Spear helps us with recruitment. Forces recruited into the movement through The Spear come prepared to do the political work of Spear distribution. In other words The Burning Spear contributes to our ability to recruit activists, individuals who, through example, expect to do political work.

Importantly Agitprop has acquired an editor for The Burning Spear. This task has been assumed by a veteran of our Party who held the position of editor in the 1980s and has now come back to that post with great enthusiasm.

This provides the Party and Agitprop with leadership specific to the task of producing The Spear, constantly fighting for its high quality and demanding Party cadres maintain a high level of participation with the journal — as writers, readers and distributors. In addition to the editor, The Burning Spear has begun to fill out its production structure, growing ever more efficient moving toward consolidation of frequent, more reliable publication.

Another example of the great significance of Agitprop and the growth of the Party’s work is the fact that during the planned launch of the African People’s Socialist Party-Sierra Leone in November of 2009, Uhuru Radio Sierra Leone, an FM station, was also scheduled to begin broadcasting under the auspices of Agitprop.

The radio station was not launched in 2009 because of a delay by the authorities in assigning a frequency, but we certainly intend for the station to be up and operating by the time of this Congress although our comrades in Sierra Leone have been under intense pressure by the ruling neocolonial government since the announcement by the Party of its presence there.

We are convening our Fifth Congress at a time when imperialism in general and U.S. imperialism, the current leader of the imperialist world, in particular, is experiencing great difficulties. This profound crisis is the result of the unrelenting determination of the world’s oppressed peoples to win our freedom, sovereignty and total control of our labor and resources for our own use and benefit.

This Fifth Congress of our Party is a statement of our unflinching commitment to the liberation and unification of Africa and the dispersed African nation and to carrying out our responsibility in the worldwide movement of peoples and countries for liberation, peace and socialism.

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