On May 24, Burning Spear Publications released Chairman Omali Yeshitela’s new book, An Uneasy Equilibrium: The African Revolution versus Parasitic Capitalism. This book, featuring the historic Political Report to the Sixth Congress of the African People’s Socialist Party as well as resolutions and statements of solidarity, explains this critical moment in history of imperialism’s decline and what must be done by the African Revolution to tip the scales and overturn the parasitic relationship the European nation has imposed on the world for more than 400 years.
The book is a must have for those trying to understand the world and even more important for those revolutionaries, activists and supporters who are engaged in changing it.
Order the book today at burningspearpublications.com.
The Vietnamese revolutionaries called it thoi co, translated roughly as the “opportune or critical moment.” The Black Revolution of the 1960s mobilized around the same principle with its cry to “Seize the Time!”
There is a precise and fleeting moment in the history of every struggle when the balance of power has shifted, a moment ripe for revolutionary action and victory, when the dying-but-not-yet dead imperialism has no more legitimacy in the eyes of the oppressed, and no capacity to rule in the same old way.
All around us, in every headline and news report, we see the death crisis of imperialism playing out before our eyes, day by day. Global resistance of oppressed peoples, generalized social volatility and rising anti-U.S.-European-imperialist sentiment abound.
These conditions are responsible for imperialism’s economic crisis, which the imperialists are powerless to turn around. For the first time ever North Americans and Europeans look to the future with fear and despair while the traditional victims of their countries’ policies are marching ahead with increasing confidence.
The urgency of understanding that we are facing a thoi co moment right now permeates the pages of An Uneasy Equilibrium: The African Revolution versus Parasitic Capitalism written by Omali Yeshitela, who characterizes the present era as the “Final Offensive against Imperialism.”
As Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party and leader of the African Socialist International, Omali Yeshitela presides over the fastest growing African revolutionary movement in the world today. With Party organizations or influence throughout Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, Canada and the U.S., the Chairman’s message of “One Africa! One Nation!” resonates across the African world.
This is the Party of workers who have never been paid for centuries of forced, stolen labor, workers who produced the cotton, sugar, coltan, gold, oil, diamonds, tin and bauxite for others’ enjoyment. This is the Party of workers forced to live on 50 cents a day, many of whom have never seen a dentist or an electric stove; of young men stuffed into the prison camps. This is the Party of women who walk miles to get water unfit for human consumption or bury their loved ones who are shot down by police, security guards or vigilantes every 28 hours.
In An Uneasy Equilibrium, the Political Report to the Sixth Congress of the African People’s Socialist Party held in St. Petersburg, FL in December 2013, Chairman Omali takes us on an incredible journey from the viewpoint and experience of the African working class.
This journey is informed by the certainty of the fall of this parasitic capitalist social system now resting tenuously on the backs of African and Indigenous peoples whose centuries of blood and sweat, enslavement and genocide fertilized the ground on which capitalism was born and grew. It is we who are now rocking imperialism’s pedestal with resistance and struggle in every corner of the planet.
With an arrogance that flows from confidence in the people’s victory, Chairman Omali shows us that while this crisis offers dismal prospects for all who have hooked their destinies to imperialism, for those of us fighting to free ourselves from imperialism’s long and bloody grip, this is a time pregnant with unlimited possibility for our collective future.
With his forward vision, Chairman Omali cautions against being “stuck in a time warp, locked in the past at that point in time when our revolution was militarily defeated and the many political and ideological contradictions thrust upon us were left unresolved.”
Systematically and with great ease, Chairman Omali destroys every theoretical, political and practical barrier standing in the path of our people’s centuries-long struggle for the total liberation and unification of Africa and African people everywhere.
Each unresolved question lingering from the ‘60s, or otherwise, is studied under the microscope of the theory of African Internationalism where it is scientifically dissected and resolved.
To anyone mired in nostalgia about the past era, the Chairman points out that the decade of the 1960s is a half-century behind us. The responsibility of the revolutionary is to lead us into the future. As the only African working class-based revolutionary organization that successfully bridged the gap between that period and this one, the African People’s Socialist Party has indeed led during all its four decades of existence, boldly and with revolutionary swagger.
The Chairman takes us through the current crisis of imperialism and shows us its profound significance. As far back as 1981, Chairman Omali analyzed this crisis in the Political Report to the Party’s First Congress, noting that “imperialism is not accommodating us by committing suicide.”
Built and sustained from the land, labor and resources stolen from the oppressed peoples of the world, the current parasitic social system, the Chairman wrote, “is being shaken by the continuous struggles of the people to reverse the verdict of imperialism, to take back what is ours and to use it for our own benefit.”
“Never,” remarks Chairman Omali, “has the decline of imperialism exposed itself in such absolute terms. Never has the future been so bleak for imperialism… and so bright for the struggling and oppressed peoples of the world.”
Delving into his theory of African Internationalism, the Chairman gets to the essence of the most critical questions of our times, providing an understanding of the “material forces at work in the movement of history.”
We learn that capitalism was born parasitic through the European assault on Africa and the world. “Rapes, massacres, occupations, genocides, colonialism and every despicable act humans are capable of inflicting” make up the DNA of capitalism, writes the Chairman.
The same process that results in “progress” for white people, elevating them out of poverty, disease and oppression, has pushed Africans and the rest of us backwards into the most base and repressive subsistence, ending our progress and forward motion as nations and peoples.
These opposing realities are two poles of the same capitalist process. Without this parasitic relationship, Yeshitela asserts, there could be no capitalism, no America, no imperialism as we know it today.
As a historical materialist and African Internationalist, Yeshitela is not a Marxist, but uses his critique of the works of Karl Marx as a building block for the theory of African Internationalism. Chairman Omali quotes Marx to show that, limited by his own European viewpoint on the pedestal of colonialism and slavery, Marx was not capable of understanding the significance of his own words.
Marx summed up the ruthless and bloody enslavement of African people, genocide of the Indigenous people, the conquest and looting of India with the term “primitive accumulation” of capital.
If Marx had comprehended his own words, he would have “been forced to declare that the road to socialism is painted black,” the Chairman argues.
One of the most outstanding sections of the book is the chapter on the African nation.
The Chairman thoroughly establishes that African people wherever we are located around the world, in Africa, the U.S. or elsewhere, are one people, one African nation oppressed by imperialism and colonialism.
“We are not a race,” the Chairman asserts, “but a nation of people forcibly dispersed across the globe.” He makes it clear: Africans are a colonized people struggling against imperialist state power for the liberation of our national homeland, Africa. We are fighting for political power in our own hands, not against racism and the perverted, narcissistic and self-adulatory ideas in white people’s heads, an effort that the Chairman calls a “self-defeating waste of time.”
The Chairman crushes the petty bourgeois philosophy of Pan-Africanism and defines the qualities and national sense of sameness shared by African people everywhere.
The struggle for the African nation represented in this book cuts through every obstacle used by the imperialists and the African petty bourgeoisie. Africa’s borders are colonial creations, which only facilitate exploitation by the imperialists and all those who serve them.
The building of one, united, liberated African nation under the leadership of the African working class forever resolves the plague of tribalism, which is used to entrap and fragment Africa, maintaining the violent control of imperialism and the neocolonial class.
Chairman Yeshitela’s visionary leadership lays out the foundation of a liberated political and economic revolutionary project that ties every single African located in every part of the world to the struggle to free Africa and African people everywhere.
The amazing history of the African People’s Socialist Party and its political and practical impact on the world and on the consciousness of African and oppressed peoples everywhere is also chronicled in this book.
Founded in 1972, in the wake of the U.S. government’s COINTELPRO and other assaults on the African Revolution and on anticolonial movements around the world, the Party was the only force that correctly summed up that an imperialist counterinsurgency was waged to defeat the U.S. Front of the African Revolution.
The Party’s early years were characterized by non-stop political motion and mass struggle aimed to advance the African Revolution, accompanied by bursts of rapid theoretical development on the part of the Chairman.
Throughout its history the Party has been on the front lines of every political question. It has built campaigns and espoused positions far ahead of its time that have defined for generations of Africans and the world at large how to understand events and issues through a revolutionary perspective.
From the victorious campaign to free Dessie Woods in the 1970s, to the First Tribunal on Reparations to African People making reparations a household word in 1982; from the relentless exposure of neocolonialism, to the formation of the African People’s Solidarity Committee; from the building of the African Socialist International, to the continuous publication of The Burning Spear newspaper since 1968; from the creation of numerous economic institutions and the building of Black Star Industries as dual and contending African power, its fighting history has poised the Party— more than any other organization on the planet—to lead the revolutionary period before us.
It is a testimony to the fact that a few dedicated cadres informed by the correct theory and tireless practice, under the leadership of the bold and brilliant Chairman Omali Yeshitela, can and have forever changed the world.
Now with the presence of an organized African working class, armed with our own programs, strategy and political theory, with African Internationalist members in key locations around the world, based in imperialist centers and oppressed territories alike, the African Socialist International represents a new paradigm from which imperialism cannot escape.
An Uneasy Equilibrium shows us that the vision of Marcus Garvey and his worldwide African movement a century ago based on “Africa for the Africans, those at home and those abroad” is in the process of becoming a reality.
Our time is now. We must seize it.
African independence in our lifetime!
