The Political Report to the Sixth Congress of the African People's Socialist Party
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The Political Report to the Sixth Congress of the African People’s Socialist Party By Omali Yeshitela, Chairman of the APSP © 2013 African People’s Socialist Party Table of Contents I. Overview: Challenging the Time Warp ............................................. 3 II. The Crisis of Imperialism ............................................................. 12 III. Political Theory of African Internationalism .................................... 33 IV. The Question of the Nation .......................................................... 73 V. History of the Party .................................................................. 111 VI. The One People! One Party! One Destiny! Campaign .................... 184 VII. African Economic Self-reliance / Self-determination ...................... 203 VIII. The State of the Organization .................................................... 214 IX. Upcoming Period—What is To Be Done ........................................ 229 2 I. Overview: Challenging the Time Warp Forty-one years ago, in May of 1972 in the city of St. Petersburg, Florida, we began the extraordinary journey that is being celebrated with the Sixth Congress of the African People’s Socialist Party. Fittingly, this journey began during the process of building for the first African Liberation Day mobilization in Washington, D.C. held on May 27 of that year. At various times during our history we have declared the significance of building the African People’s Socialist Party. At no time has the existence of our Party been more significant and urgently needed than it is today. Not only is building the Party a crucial task of our organization and our members, it is also the fundamental task of the African Revolution at this critical historical juncture. Our journey was begun by a mere handful of us at a time when U.S. imperialism was gloating about its victory over many of the forces of liberation within current U.S. borders and around the world. Our Party was founded in the wake of a crushing military defeat of the African Revolution in Africa, within the U.S. and worldwide. When our Party was formed the U.S. government was confident its years-long efforts to crush our struggle for liberation had been successful. In the latter part of the 1960s the U.S. unleashed a bloody wave of political repression that left some of our most outstanding leaders imprisoned, overthrown or murdered and our most significant organizations enfeebled or destroyed. However, even as an era of struggle was being brutally brought to a close and the dreams of freedom and happiness of millions of our people were being subordinated to the whims of imperialism, another era was being born with the founding of our Party. 3 That era is now fully upon us. We have defined this era as the Final Offensive Against Imperialism. Typically one thinks of a final offensive as the strategic culmination of a military engagement. However, when we speak here of the Final Offensive we mean this in historical terms. We mean the achievement of a point where historical conditions have resulted in the emergence of the oppressed peoples as the determinant social force, actively reversing the verdict of imperialism. Today the tables have turned and the U.S. is attempting to stave off the growing worldwide threats to imperialism as it currently exists, fighting to regain its preeminence in the tottering world imperialist system. There is an uneasy equilibrium between the past and the future and much anxiety abounds throughout the world. Every individual, every social force that perceives its future attached to the existing imperialist social system is experiencing severe distress. With the initiation of our Sixth Congress the Party stands on the heights established by our forty-one-year history of struggle. This is the metaphorical mountain top from which we can see a future of our Africa and our people, liberated and united, propelling all oppressed humanity, all the workers and toiling masses of the world into a place of peace, prosperity and eternal social justice. We know that the imperialist ideologues—philosophers, politicians and economists alike—have no answers to the pressing issues of our times. Every day there is a new lamentation by one or another thinking representative of the imperialist white ruling class that the latest proffered solution to the unending crisis has proved to be illusory. At the same time the defeat of our revolution of the 1960s has resulted in more than two generations of Africans with no revolutionary practice nor points of reference that can be relied on for direction. It is up to the Party to lead the way forward out of the morass of defeat. Many militants have been stuck in a time warp, locked in the past at that point in time when our revolution was militarily defeated and the many political 4 and ideological contradictions thrust upon us were left unresolved. That era is nearly a half century behind us. We learn from the history and examples of Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party, for example, but we do so while recognizing that we must build for the present and future off the platform they provided us from the past. Too often attempts are being made to base struggle on what the Black Panther Party and others did in the 1960s as opposed to what is needed to advance the struggle of African workers and the African nation today. In this way we are imitating imperialists who are always unsuccessful, stuck in the past because they are fighting the last war. Our Party acknowledged defeat of Black Revolution Since the defeat of the Black Revolution of the Sixties the masses of the people have been sidelined, pushed out of political life. What passes for struggle is relegated most often to single-issue activism that is an appendage to social media militants or liberal and other bourgeois schemes. The significance of our Party lies in the fact that we have never surrendered or deviated from the path of the same African Revolution that motivated the imperial white power attacks in the 20th century. We continue to lead despite the general setbacks suffered by our movement. We are the only organization that correctly summed up the fact that the Black Revolution of the 1960s was defeated. Our Party’s recognition of this defeat has informed our work and our mission to complete the Black Revolution of the Sixties instead of settling for the limitations of the present. This has been a necessary recognition that has prevented us from confusing events subsequent to the defeat of the revolution with the actual revolution that shook imperialism to its foundations. The Party’s acknowledgement of the defeat of our revolution is what also helped us to understand that much of what has transpired since then in the name 5 of the Black Revolution has often been the activities of the African petty bourgeoisie designed to hijack the consciousness of the masses. This false “revolution” or “liberation” advanced by the colonized petty bourgeoisie is what was being addressed in the September 1990 Political Report to our Third Party Congress. We made it clear that the liberation of the petty bourgeoisie can never meet the needs and aspirations of the colonized working class. These words remain relevant: “The ‘national liberation’ of the aspiring black petty bourgeoisie is a ‘liberation’ from the limitations of its development into a full- blown bourgeoisie, [limitations] which are imposed on it by domestic colonialism, the imperialist rule by foreign gangsters. Within this concept of ‘national liberation’ is the germ of the future, continuing exploitation of the African working class by a black bourgeoisie which has been liberated from the ‘national’ oppression which prevented the emergence of a free, independent black boss. Such a ‘national liberation’ is not in the interests of the colonized African working class. “The national liberation of the working class is a liberation which will sweep away all forms of oppression and exploitation. The national liberation of the domestically colonized African working class is not only interested in removing the oppression of foreign rule, it is also interested in destroying the class rule which exploits the workers and toiling masses of all countries where the capitalist system prevails. The national liberation of the working class is explicitly anti-capitalist and consciously a part of the worldwide socialist movement.” This was written 24 years ago, long after the defeat of the Black Revolution of the Sixties, but never out of our consciousness. This is a position from which we have never retreated. This is the position which informs how we lead today. This is the position by which we measure the state of the movement today. 6 All our work has been designed to solve the problems of the revolution, not to find a way to get along within the circumstances provided us by our imperialist enemies and their servile lackeys in our midst. This has not been without consequences. From the Party’s beginning in the 1970s we worked to rebuild our movement with various campaigns including attempts to give African Liberation Day a revolutionary character. From its very inception, as our Party aimed to unite the anti-colonial tendency, the primary target of the U.S. counterinsurgency of the 1960s, around a collective movement to liberate Africans imprisoned in the U.S. colonial prison system, we had to combat sundry political opponents that were incapable of venturing beyond the quagmire of defeat. In the 1980s we were attacked for correctly identifying the presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson as a diversionary move to draw the African masses back into the safe embrace of the imperialist Democratic Party instead of their own independent revolutionary organization. In this the Party stood alone as most of the so-called revolutionary organizations of the time attempted to build themselves on the Jackson presidential campaign coattails. Today more and more people are capable of recognizing the complicity of the African National Congress (ANC), if not Nelson Mandela, in the attempt to rescue imperialist interests in South Africa.