The electoral process in the U.S. and other bourgeois countries is simply a nonviolent contest for control of the State by contending sectors of the white ruling class.
The struggle for African liberation will never be determined by the outcome of a bourgeois election.
Elections by and large are held for the purpose of protecting the system, not for the purpose of overturning it.
This is not to say that there are never advantages for the revolutionary Party of the people to engage in the electoral process. Our Party has done so in the past and will likely do so in the future.
It is, however, fundamentally wrong to rely on bourgeois elections as vehicles for our liberation.
The current electoral battle occurring within the U.S. between members of the Republican and Democratic parties for the right to represent their respective parties in the 2016 contest for U.S. president is an example of the intensity of the intra-class struggle roiling the white ruling class.
The first of the debates among 17 Republican candidates for the presidential nomination—so many they had to be broken up as first and second tier performers—took place in Cleveland, Ohio on August 6.
The large number of contenders for the Republican nomination combined with all those vying to be the Democratic candidate is a reflection of the ruling class division.
The various sectors of the bourgeoisie are fighting over how to deal with the imperialist crisis threatening the interests and future of the ruling class as a whole along with the capitalist system itself.
The general lack of interest in the electoral process, as a means of solving the self-recognized issues of the people within the U.S., is not the least of their concerns.
More and more of the U.S. population has clearly concluded that the system cannot solve its problems and has become cynical about the veracity of politicians attempting to win their favor.
Extreme examples of the people turning away from the electoral process to solve their problems are found throughout the U.S within a diverse swath of the population.
The rise of the Tea Party and Occupy movements a few years ago are examples of this.
The growing movement of African people today who are taking to the streets in opposition to police violence and murder, as well as the genocidal use of mass prison incarceration of our young men—and increasingly our young women—are also examples.
From time to time, when the crisis deepens and the people are likely to turn to other political means to satisfy their aspirations, the bourgeoisie will discover some method to spice up an election to keep the people tied to the safe embrace of the electoral process.
Barack Hussein Obama is one such ploy to keep the masses tied to the Democratic Party.
His candidacy excited the very people most likely to join the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) and discover revolutionary alternatives to the system of bourgeois colonial democracy.
Jesse Jackson’s candidacy in 1984 served the same purpose. Like Obama, Jackson succeeded in winning the support and participation of black nationalists, communists and the entire array of liberals and democrats of every persuasion.
White ruling class media outlets work overtime to drum up excitement for elections—the sham transferences of power from one sector of the ruling class to another.
They excitedly query, “Who is going to win the election?”
They bray, “Will the ‘African’ American vote be split between Obama and Hillary?”
They do anything to keep the people locked into the electoral process as the only game in town.
There is really no mystery here: every debate and every election will be won by a representative of capitalist-colonialism. Mass fidelity to the electoral process as the primary means of advancing their aims guarantees that white power will always win.
The main attraction going into the Republican debate was the presence of billionaire Donald Trump whose attack on Mexican migration across the U.S.-imposed border has tapped into white nationalist sentiments in the U.S. and catapulted him into a big lead in the polls.
We use “debate” loosely because these “debates” never include a discussion of the rampant police murder Africans, mass incarceration, group starvation and the host of other cruelties imposed on Africans and others colonized within the U.S.
There is also no “debate” about the international mass murder the U.S. calls “wars on terror” nor any other excuse used, at the moment, to win support or engender mass passivity in the face of the newest U.S. genocide.
Trump, to the dismay of many Republican leaders, has also criticized senator John McCain, the war-mongering darling of the “respectable” bourgeois political class.
In fact, many Republicans and notable reactionary personalities and institutions like Fox News, are being made frantic by Trump’s disregard for the niceties of the electoral process and are obviously doing all possible to bring him down.
All 17 Republican candidates in the televised August 6 debate owed their presence on the platform to the moneyed class.
A fundamental difference between Trump and the other candidates is the fact that he has the money to run his own campaign. He does not need support from the elements of the white ruling class that have purchased the other candidates from both parties, bar none.
Trump does not apparently utilize the behind-the-scenes campaign machinery available to the others, paid for by their patrons, to shape his statements and make them palatable to the respectable rulers and their pundits.
We know for certain that some of the funds going to the candidates are coming from reactionary billionaires whose opinions about Mexicans or the rest of us are comparable to or worse than Trump’s.
The other candidates are hired by the white ruling class precisely because they are groomed to sell the policies of the ruling class to an electorate needed to endorse them for the appearance of a popular mandate for bourgeois policies.
Some African activists are paying special attention to Trump, characterizing him as a “proto-fascist.”
This is reminiscent of now-deceased Amiri Baraka, when he expressed concern in 2008 that African and/or “left” refusal to support Obama’s election would open the door to fascism in a way similar to the rise of Hitler in Germany during the 1930s.
Trump may very well be a proto-fascist, whatever the hell that means to an African population that has suffered slavery, convict leasing, Jim Crow, popular lynchings, public police murders, mass incarceration numbering in the millions, economic quarantine in the domestic colonies that starve us into the illegal capitalist drug economy, etc.
The tendency to compare our situation with fascism in Nazi Germany and elsewhere is erroneous and outrageous when considering the murder, terror, torture and exploitation that Africans have endured at the hands of our white, “democratic,” colonizers for the past 600 years.
A stand that fears Trump fails to recognize that when Africans in the U.S. were subjected to public, mass lynchings, that terror was carried out by non-fascist “democratic” states and ordinary white citizens.
When “proto-fascist” repression did appear in the 1950s with a reign of terror backed by popular support from the general white population, chasing the Communist Party underground and almost into extinction, it was the colonized African population whose struggles for democracy kept the society open.
Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks and an army of Africans living near starvation and suffering every imaginable deprivation, were the forces that not only defeated U.S. fascism but forged new definitions of democracy onto the agenda of the U.S.
Africans would still be on plantations, buck dancing for a slimy, non-fascist democratic white nationalist social system and every white person who so demanded had those Africans aforementioned trembled from the fear of fascism, had their actions been determined by fear of new terrors from U.S. colonialism.
It is worth noting that with all the terror and brutality Africans have faced since our introduction to European democracy, it took the emergence of Mussolini and Hitler and the attack on the rights of white people for a special designation called fascism to suddenly become necessary.
The designer character of the term is even more obvious when we search for a definition of fascism. While there are many definitions of fascism, including some identified as “scientific” or Marxist, it is clear that there is not a satisfactory a priori definition.
Fascism has become a pejorative, something that defines some traits of the phenomenon once it appears, but fascism is incapable of being defined scientifically in a way that would help us to know it before it arrives.
It is notable that the ubiquitous murder, imprisonment and police containment of the African population is never defined as fascist. These conditions are seen by the white population as normal.
It is only when the features of the normal existence of the colonized begin to intrude into the existence of whites or “the larger society” the term “fascism” comes into play.
At that point the colonized are called on to choose between fascist colonialism and non-fascist democratic colonialism.
Amilcar Cabral, a leader of the revolutionary movement to defeat Portuguese colonialism in Guinea Bissau, West Africa stated, in response to a Portuguese leftist position that defeat of fascism inside Portugal—something the Portuguese left saw as primary to their interests—would come with the defeat of colonialism, led by African liberation movements in Portuguese colonies that:
“We must reaffirm clearly that while being opposed to all fascism, our people are not fighting Portuguese fascism: we are fighting Portuguese colonialism.
“The destruction of fascism in Portugal must be the work of the Portuguese people themselves: the destruction of Portuguese colonialism will be the work of our people.
“While the fall of fascism in Portugal might not lead to the end of Portuguese colonialism—and this hypothesis has been put forward by some Portuguese opposition leaders—we are certain that the elimination of Portuguese colonialism will bring about the destruction of Portuguese fascism.
“Through our liberation struggle we are making an effective contribution towards the defeat of Portuguese fascism and giving the Portuguese people the best possible proof of our solidarity. This factor is a cause of pride to our people, who hope for the same solidarity from the Portuguese people…”
Like Africans in what was then Portuguese Africa, Africans in the U.S. and around the world are also fighting against colonialism.
This is something that Baraka and the anti-fascist alarmists have not understood.
The concern expressed about fascism is one that would keep the struggle for our liberation locked into a “fight against fascism” by supporting one or another of the “non-fascist” ruling class parties or personalities.
The “fight against fascism” is a fight to maintain the capitalist-imperialist status quo.
How would we fight against fascism?
Amiri Baraka believed the answer was to unite around the presidency of Obama, one of the most effective shills for white power capitalism that could have been offered up.
Certainly Obama was much more effective in waging war and terror against African and other oppressed peoples than any white “proto-fascist” (in this case, McCain) could have ever been.
What must be understood and accepted by Africans who claim revolutionary credentials is the role of the colonized African population in determining our own fate, independent of any reliance on the white ruling class, it’s State and other institutions, all of which owe their existence to the enslavement and colonization of Africans and others.
Our liberation—and that’s what we must win—will only come about by an all-out struggle to overturn the colonial relationship we have with white power.
We must become a free and independent people in control of our liberated and united Africa and all its resources and the lives of our forcibly scattered nation everywhere on the planet.
Moreover, the Portuguese leftists addressed by Cabral were not unusual.
It is traditional for the colonizer population to set the agenda for the colonized in a manner to establish the needs of the colonizer as common to all, including the colonized.
The 1907 meeting in Stuttgart, Germany of more than 800 delegates to the Congress of the 2nd Communist International is an outstanding example of this.
The debate on the colonial question resulted in many European communists refusing to condemn colonialism, and recognizing the benefits of colonialism to Europe. These Marxists actually argued for a “socialist colonialism”!
Another, more recent example is the discovery by whites that they are the “99 percent,” as stated by the white-led Occupy Movement.
White people, who sit on the pedestal of the oppression of African and Indigenous peoples, have suddenly become part of the 99 percent because the crisis of parasitic capitalism has the U.S. losing absolute control of its resources stolen through colonialism thus causing discomfort among the general white population.
Loss of student loans and retirement funds do not equate with the loss of lives, land and freedom by the oppressed of the world—including the Indigenous of the Americas, many of them stuck in concentration camps called “Indian Reservations,” as an example.
Should we organize the 80 percent of the world’s population trying to subsist on less than 10 U.S. dollars a day to fight for the student loans of the “suffering” white kids?
What about the 50 percent of the world who are struggling to survive on less than $2.50 a day and our people on the continent of Africa who are lucky if they can get $1.00 per day?
One big problem we are constantly confronting is our ideological weakness that enslaves us to the worldview of the “good” colonizers, the “whites who love us.”
The definition of our struggle as one against racism is related to this.
Such a definition inherently requires us to be in a constant state of “improving” our lot by “improving” the U.S. One such improvement is the struggle against fascism.
Our struggle against colonialism is not about making the U.S. better; it is about defeating it’s colonial authority over our lives.
It is about the revolutionary overthrow of U.S. capitalist-colonialism—this includes U.S. capitalist-colonialist democracy or fascism or whatever form the colonial State assumes in imposing its illegitimate rule over our oppressed people.
In terms of Trump’s candidacy it is interesting that it is the other sectors of the bourgeoisie that appear threatened by Trump.
They have their interests and they have their preferred unisex political strumpets hired to pursue and defend these interests within the electoral process.
Trump, up to now, has been disdainful of them all and calls into question the entire electoral process as he openly attacks other candidates by blasting their fidelity to the moneyed class, including himself.
His appearance in the presidential electoral process is simply another example of the crisis of imperialism. Is this portentous of fascism? Is it really a proto-fascist moment?
Are ordinary white people in trouble likely to experience some semblance of the repression everyone else in the world has had to live with since the advent of colonialism and the rise of capitalist white power?
Could be. “Fascism” has only appeared in European history when capitalism was in crisis.
Regardless, the way forward for us all is to struggle to defeat U.S. and European colonialism—everywhere in the world: in Africa, the Caribbean, Afghanistan, Palestine, the Middle East, Asia and South America, and within the U.S. itself.
The best way for white people to guarantee themselves a future is to join with the rest of us in fighting against the parasitic relationship enjoyed by all Europeans at our expense. The entire capitalist system rests on this colonial parasitism.
Defeat colonialism, and fascism will surely fall, along with every other vile political manifestation of capitalism.
As for our Party, we are organizing ourselves and our subject, colonized people everywhere on Earth to take power.
We are preparing to govern ourselves and we are preparing to govern at the expense of the U.S. government, its illegitimate State power and colonizer population – fascist or otherwise.
