Editor’s Note: We present the “Opening and Overview” section of Chairman Omali’s Political Report to the Second Plenary of the African People’s Socialist Party’s Seventh Congress, held in February 2021, entitled “African Workers of the World, Unite and Organize!”
Our Second Plenary of the Party’s Seventh Congress opens with the urgent call for African workers of the world to unite and organize. As 2021 begins we find ourselves in a historic period that we have long predicted when imperialism is in its death throes and when crisis never lets up, rolling into every new iteration with greater severity.
Literally the hallowed halls of U.S. imperialism and parasitic capitalism have been breached. A fatal flaw of the oppressor ruling class is the assumption that its security depends on its relationship with other contending or potential rival state powers.
The fact is that the death of colonial-capitalism is being determined by the rise of anti-colonial revolution under the leadership of the African working class, galvanizing exploited, oppressed and colonized peoples inside the U.S. and around the world.
In 2020 the contradictions of the colonial-capitalist system literally exploded into the consciousness of the peoples of the U.S. and the world on many fronts but everything about the existence of our Party has prepared us for this moment.
It has been the ideological and political struggles of our Party for nearly fifty years and today that are defining this new period in which anti-colonial revolution is again becoming the main trend in the world.
Most nationalists, militants and ersatz communists are scrambling to make sense of this time and, bereft of revolutionary philosophy, are inadvertently or deliberately pushing forward with actions and explanations that at best call for a kinder, gentler system of oppression. Our Party is simply on point and on course as planned.
We are African Internationalists. This speaks to our philosophy stemming from a scientific investigation and analysis of the rise of the most oppressive and exploitative social system that has ever existed in history from the standpoint of Africa, Africans and the colonized and toiling masses of the world.
We do not proclaim our readiness for this moment based on some abstract philosophical conclusions. African Internationalism, the theory of our Party, is a theory of practice. The nearly half-century of continuous practice of our Party has tested our theory and contributed to our advancement that will prove to be the death of colonial-capitalism.
The work of the African People’s Socialist Party has been one of the factors undermining capitalist-colonialist cohesion. We have made a major contribution to the destabilization of the system through concrete socialist decolonizing projects and campaigns. We are a part of the existential crisis of this system.
Completing the Black Revolution of the 1960s has always been a declared intent of our Party. The last year of Party work and development since the 2020 Plenary of our Seventh Party Congress indicates that we are well on the way to achieving that end. The African People’s Socialist Party has helped deepen the crisis of imperialism through our success in resurrecting the African Revolution from the crushing blows of imperialist counterinsurgency.
For African people COVID-19 is just another face of colonialism
Despite the impact of COVID-19, the colonial virus, which has also deepened the crisis of many aspects of global economic and political activity, the African People’s Socialist Party continued to move forward.
We were able to do this because we understood that the sense of powerlessness being experienced by African people in the face of the brutal health and economic blows is inherent in the colonial condition. Our Party was founded with the mission to end that colonial condition and powerlessness. We were founded to achieve power, black power over our lives and future. No COVID virus was going to derail that struggle.
Our political structures and global strategic thrust were in place to win power over colonialism however it manifests itself. This allowed the Party to initiate the People’s War to fight the colonialvirus.
Last February, only weeks before the viral pandemic gained publicly-recognized traction, our Party’s 2020 Plenary had rolled out our push for full implementation of our Regional Strategy. We were preparing to build our anti-colonial structures in Africa and to fight against colonial-capitalism through our structures in every region of the globe where the forcibly-dispersed African nation lives under exploitative duress.
We were carrying out our mandates from our Party’s Seventh Congress and its political report, Vanguard: The Advanced Detachment of the African Revolution, where I wrote:
“Our struggle against colonial capitalism must be rooted in the actual colonized territories that we occupy. This is the essence of dual and contending power. The victory of our Party will come as a consequence of our success in transforming every colonized African community into a conscious, active opponent of colonialism. We will take organization and ideological development to the heart of the African working class communities where the colonial contradictions are concentrated.”
For our Party it was unnecessary to stop what we were doing to take on a new “invisible” enemy. The enemy was quite visible, the same colonial-capitalism that our Party has always fought. The tools for its defeat were elaborated in our last Plenary. In the vernacular of the military, we were locking and loading.
Through the Party’s “development and empowerment” arm we immediately initiated the successful People’s War campaign under the leadership of Comrade Aisha Fields, Director of the All African People’s Development and Empowerment Project (AAPDEP).
AAPDEP quickly mobilized and deployed African doctors and healthcare professionals to work with Party and Uhuru Movement cadres to deliver healthcare protocols and care to our people globally — in South African townships, Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere.
While colonial-capitalist governments, especially the U.S., were questioning the need for face masks, our People’s War was already searching for, distributing and sometimes producing face masks. We went door to door giving out information to our people with appropriate life-saving protocols that otherwise do not reach the African working class. Through social media, pamphlets, The Burning Spear newspaper and the radio station, Black Power 96.3 FM, our Party was there for our people.
When mass African resistance erupted our Party was ready
Then when the fierce African working class-led resistance erupted after the May 25 police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, we took the leadership in defining the mass struggle against U.S. domestic colonialism.
Our theory of African Internationalism has been especially important and served us well during this period. Advanced revolutionary theory is a prerequisite for revolution. It provides the “to what end” to otherwise directionless, spontaneous, though sometimes heroic, protests and uprisings.
The specific colonial conditions of this particular period coupled with our history of work and struggle opened the door for millions of Africans and others here and around the world to clearly see the fact that colonialism, not racism, is the main contradiction faced by African people in the U.S. and wherever we have been dispersed.
For the first time since the 1960s African workers want to fight for Black Power and our more than fifty on-the-ground institutions led by Comrade Deputy Chair Ona Zene’ Yeshiela represent the Party’s leadership in showing how this is done concretely.
And after decades of Party work and leadership to make reparations a household word, it erupted as a mass demand as never before.
Injecting science into the spontaneous actions of the people is how our Party contributes to putting mass movements of the people on the road most likely to establish a revolutionary trajectory, a trajectory toward the capture of political power.
This is our only hedge against the perennial attempt of those who would sell out the long-term interests of the people for complete liberation from colonial-capitalism for a “mess of pottage.” This is how we defeat the interests of the petty bourgeois neocolonial aspirants who arise at the expense of true freedom, the complete destruction of colonialism.
The domestic military occupation force commonly known as police murdered George Floyd on African Liberation Day. Again, we were in place.
Members of our Solidarity front were active in Minneapolis where George Floyd was killed, it is true.
But we had already organized on the streets of Ferguson-St. Louis following the murder of Mike Brown six years earlier in 2014. Out of that struggle we built the Black Power Blueprint, a lasting presence and important economic development project in North St. Louis that continues to grow in strength and relevance daily.
This is not what I mean when I say we were in place, though. We were in place because we have never relinquished the fight against the foreign and alien domination of our people, known as colonialism.
With our ongoing struggle to complete the Black Revolution of the Sixties, we continue to fight the nonsensical “anti-racism” politics that achieved dominant status in the wake of the defeat.
To overturn colonialism it is necessary to achieve Black Power. Ultimately we must achieve black state power. This is the defining, critical question of our times.