Spear staff

The violence that erupted in opposition to this The Group of Twenty (G20) forum which took place on Friday, July 7th and Saturday July 8th 7 in Hamburg, Germany made headlines in most national news broadcasted around the world. 

"Cars and barricades ablaze, shops plundered, water cannons in constant operation, injuries, devastated city quarters, heavily-armed special police units: The images of the violence in Hamburg have circled the globe. And they stood in stark contrast to those of the 20 heads of state and government who, at the same time, were listening to Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" in Hamburg's chic new Elbphilharmonie concert hall. Classical music inside, clashes outside." (Spiegel.de) July 8, 2017. 

The Black Community Control of Police (BCCP) working group of the Black is Back Coalition (BIBC) organized a march and rally for Black Community Control of the Police in Philadelphia, PA on Saturday, June 24th.

The mobilization was entitled “Pigs in Our Hood Aint No Good—March on Ridge Ave!”

The rally was held at the community lot on 24th St and Cecil B Moore Ave deep within the oppressed and exploited North Philadelphia section of the city.

This lot was recently liberated by the Coalition, as we took initiative to clean up the trash from the grounds and decorate the wall with the red, black and green flag.

Several other organizations and collectives joined the BIBC, including the Philadelphia REAL Justice, RBG Fridays, Philly Socialists and others, some of whom made solidarity statements during the rally and other points of the mobilization.

On Monday, July 10th the voice of the black working class shattered the stifling “decorum” set by the St. Petersburg, FL League of Women Voters and the Downtown Neighborhood Association.

The African People’s Socialist Party – Occupied Azania is happy to announce that the very first African Liberation Day (ALD) in Occupied Azania (South Africa) and possibly the entire African continent was successfully held!

We held our historic ALD celebration on the 27th of May, 2017. The events leading up to it saw us struggling within our Movement to get organizers to assist in work like agitation and propaganda and logistics as well as meeting new forces that held the fort even though they had just learned about the Uhuru Movement. Although these were contradictions (both negative and positive), we succeeded in our objective.

We held the celebration at Kagiso in Gauteng Province on Saturday from 8 AM to 3:30 PM. African people came from Johannesburg and Kagiso itself, Fochville and the Vaal. The African People’s Socialist Party had been preparing this event for three months and was able to put up posters, social media as well as spread the word tactically wherever its members were.

This past June and July, cities around the world held ‘Pride’ parades; celebrations of resistance to the restrictive sexual norms of European culture. To their supporters, the parades were living monuments to a righteous struggle for inclusion in a predominantly heterosexual society.

For colonized workers, however, including same-gender-loving (SGL) and gender non-conforming (GNC) colonized people, this brand of inclusion into the status quo is an assault on their lives and their communities.

The primary day-in day-out struggle for colonized workers, is not for ‘inclusion’ in parasitic capitalism. For them, true liberation and self-determination means seizing State power and overturning the very system of capitalism built and sustained entirely by their oppression.

A fire broke out in the Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey building located in West London on the early morning of Tuesday June 14, 2017 at about 1am.

The fire spread extremely quickly, engulfing the entire building in a matter of 15 minutes and condemning its inhabitants to a certain death.

The infamous building, demonized by both the government and the media, was mainly inhabited by poor and working class people from colonized places in Africa, Syria, the Caribbean, South Asia and elsewhere, along with poor white workers.

We united with all the demands from victims of this colonial mayhem, such as to be rehoused in the same borough.

We united to charge the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management organization KCMO, a subcontractor company that managed the Grenfell Tower on behalf of the Kensington and Chelsea local council–for murders!

This month, Colombia celebrates its 207th year of ‘independence’ from Spanish rule on July 20.

However, two months ago (on May 10 and 16, respectively), the colonial crisis in so-called Colombia deepened further when African and Indigenous people in the looted states of Choco and Buenaventura along the Pacific coast went on strike against the State.

They are protesting the colonial conditions forcibly imposed on them for hundreds of years.

This strike has spread to other parts of the country, including Medellín, Cali and Bogotá, where hundreds of thousands of workers and teachers have started strikes of their own in the same vein.

The Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations (BIB) is holding our Annual Conference at Chicago State University on August 12 and 13, 2017. The theme of the conference is “The Ballot and the Bullet: Elections, War and peace in the era of Donald Trump.”

The theme of our Conference contains within it the critical matters of this period that must be addressed to move our struggle for black liberation forward.

The SEIU’s People’s Budget Review held a local forum on Thursday June 15th at The Sunshine Center so that the nine district 6 candidates could have an opportunity to hear out the concerns of the community. The description of the event read: “You’ll be able to engage in dialogue with candidates for the District 6 race and hear them respond to how they will be supporting the People’s agenda.”

The open forum quickly became a battle royale. Most candidates were obviously fighting in the interest of prime real estate, while others were engaged in a vested struggle against police violence and gentrification.