Since the violent defeat of the Black Liberation Movement of the Sixties by white power counterinsurgency, where leaders of the movement were murdered or imprisoned and then replaced with neocolonialist puppets, African people throughout the world have been told that voting will set us free.
We’ve heard sentiments like “black people died for us to have the right to vote,” that attempt to strong-arm Africans into voting out of duty or obligation.
In 2016, however, the Black Revolution rejects the notion that voting anywhere on the planet Earth will set us free.
The crisis of imperialism—characterized by the oppressed colonized peoples responsible for its existence fighting back and taking back our resources—has certainly deepened.
No sphere of imperialist society and life is spared from this crisis, as despair and decline stares imperialist leaders and the colonizer population in their faces.
We continue to see the U.S.—the world’s leading imperialist country—descend slowly but surely into insignificance, its world power being downsized by the growing resistance of the oppressed peoples of the world.
Neocolonial and imperialist elections
This year, at least 10 countries in Asia and 20 countries in Europe held elections.
At least sixteen African States and eight countries in North America, Latin America and the Caribbean held elections to decide who would best uphold parasitic capitalism.
Perhaps the most talked-about election worldwide is the one taking place in the U.S. between representatives of opposing sectors of the white ruling class—Donald Trump of the Republican party and Hillary Clinton of the Democratic party.
We see with these elections colonized African people worldwide being corralled by white imperialists and their neocolonial puppets to spend hours waiting in lines for an opportunity to vote for one or another representative of white power.
On the Continent, in neocolonial States like Chad and Uganda, we saw neocolonial rulers Idriss Déby and Yoweri Kaguta Museveni respectively––who have been in power for over two decades each––secured, through military intimidation and corruption, another term of neocolonial rule.
Both long-time rulers have sunk the masses further into poverty and helped to facilitate exploitation of our African resources by white power for their own personal financial gain and pathological egos.
Jamaica and the Dominican Republic both saw violence leading up to and following their elections, respectively. The elections-related violence left many Africans dead, but left Andrew Holness and Danilo Medina unscathed and able to secure and continue their neocolonial rule at the expense of the African working class.
And in the U.S. the crisis of the oppressive imperialist system is blatant, as both Trump and Clinton attempt to secure the vote of the African community in order to forward their imperialist aims without a single plank in either’s platform addressing any of the critical questions confronting black folks.
Trump asks us Africans, “what do you have to lose?” as he attempts to use daily police murders of Africans as a reason why we should give him our votes. While Clinton outright ignores and denies the damage that she has done to our African nation thus far and plays on Trumps racist rhetoric to frighten Africans into voting for her.
Our brothers and sisters on the Continent, in the Caribbean and here in the U.S. are consistently fed a barrage of propaganda promoting the U.S. as a democratic entity that all human society must strive to emulate.
Africans abroad often look to the U.S. as a democracy, using this imperialist beast as an example for their countries to aspire to.
The idea of the U.S. as a people’s democracy is a myth. It is a democracy for the ruling class.
Breaking the myth of U.S. democracy
The U.S. is an illegitimate colonial State built on the genocide of Indigenous people and the enslavement of Africans.
The U.S. is a prison of nations––of Africans, Indigenous people and other colonized peoples––which disqualifies it from being a democracy.
The existence of the U.S. is a violation of the highest democratic principle that exists on this planet, which is the self-determination of nations. It is the U.S. that attacks any country that wants to be sovereign or asserts its determination to be free in this world.
The U.S. has committed genocide in Viet Nam and Iraq, and it is committing genocide in Congo through its proxy wars. The U.S. has assassinated elected leaders throughout the world.
What exists in the U.S. is a colonial democracy where opposing sectors of the white ruling class engage in a non-violent contest every four years to further imperialism. What we see every four years is a demonstration of democracy.
Real democracy is not a four-year alternative between the bourgeoisie. Nor is it an acceptance by the imperialists which declares that the elections were fair.
Democracy is the recapture of African self-determination. Democracy is when the colonized African working class, under the leadership of our own Party, redefines the struggle for democratic process.
In order to achieve real democracy, we must break the neocolonial State. Neocolonialism (white power in black face) is a tool to maintain colonialism which must be replaced with the State of the workers. Unless that is done, there is no democracy.
Democracy requires the overthrow of the world split between oppressor and oppressed nations; this is only possible with the ending of the ability of U.S.-led white power military imperialist intervention anywhere.
Voting wont free us; join the revolution!
African people are only presented with neocolonial stooges who are in place to forward their own petty bourgeois interests, which are rooted in the interests of the colonizer.
The biggest stooge of them all is Barack Obama, who has put African people––who jubilantly voted him into power as a solution to our oppression––in an even worse position than we were prior to his regime.
But before Obama, it was voting into power Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress in Occupied Azania (South Africa). Today working class Africans have the vote in Azania while the white people and a few petty bourgeois Africans have the resources.
These worldwide elections has underscored the need for revolutionary struggle. We must recognize that revolution, not the polls, is the only solution to our worldwide oppression.
Voting for neocolonial puppets on the Continent and in the Caribbean has only put us further into the embrace of colonialism.
Africans running to the polls in the U.S. to vote for the next imperialist representative only puts us tighter into white power’s deadly colonial embrace.
We cannot fall for the tricks of imperialism.
The struggle for black State power born at the expense of neocolonial State power is necessary to secure the power of the African working class. Self-determination is doing for self; it is the control of African land and economy.
A unified African economy under the African working class is the material content of a democratic rule based on the needs and aspirations of the people. Democracy means the end of imperialist control of our African economy.
We must unite and organize towards revolution by joining a revolutionary organization set on dismantling parasitic capitalism.
We must build the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP), the Party of the worldwide African working class. We must struggle for black power in our own black hands!
Elections without black power is meaningless.
#Vote4BlackPower
The Revolution Must Be Worldwide!
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