ST. PETERSBURG, FL—The International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) is calling on all of its members, supporters and all African patriots, whether man or woman, worker or student, elderly or young—to attend the upcoming 2013 International InPDUM Convention, scheduled for March 23 – 24 in St. Petersburg, Florida, the "City of African Resistance."
The theme of this upcoming convention is "One Africa! One Nation! Build Revolutionary Organization to Protect and Defend Our Own!"
This convention is occurring at a point in time when imperialism, the system responsible for the world's poverty, oppression and exploitation is experiencing a deep and profound crisis.
While ruling class and so-called "progressive" economists explain the crisis imperialism is suffering on ineffective policies or money going into wars of aggression, InPDUM understands that the true basis of the crisis is the resistance of oppressed peoples worldwide who are determined to permanently overturn our relationship with this foul, exploitative social system.
Thus the crisis cannot be traced only to the board rooms of Wall Street financial gangsters, which they are and have always been gangsters, but also primarily to the streets of Cairo, Egypt; Caracas, Venezuela; North London in Britain and North Philadelphia in the U.S., where resistance against U.S. imperialism in one form or another has become the main trend.
This trend was not the case when the "sun neverseton white power imperialism."
Such resistance can be found in the Middle East, where most recently the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, despite U.S. and Israeli military threats, reinforced to the world Iran's defiance and opposition to western imperialism, as put forward in his address to the General Assembly to the United Nations on September 26 of this year.
Such resistance reared its head in the recently held Venezuelan elections where the masses of the people, also faced with U.S. threats of aggression, once again made the statement of resistance by voting in President Hugo Chavez and his opposition to imperialist domination.
We see the resistance occurring on the continent of Africa, and we mean all of Africa, including Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, etc., from which white power steals the vast majority of the country's resources to enrich itself at the expense of African people.
Such resistance can also be found in Occupied Azania, otherwise known as South Africa, where we are engaged in a serious struggle against parasitic capitalist exploitation of African workers in the platinum and gold mines.
Although initiated by a strike that was held by workers who were demanding better pay and conditions in the Lonmin platinum mine of the Marikana province of South Africa, such resistance has spread to other sectors of South Africa’s white settler, neocolonialist economy, including the gold mines and trucking industry, which is on strike throughout the country.
This is not an economic struggle.
It is a struggle for power.
Women and other sectors of the African working class and poor peasantry are building the resistance.
It is this resistance that is the basis for the economic and political crisis of imperialism and neocolonialism in virtually every corner of the world.
South Africa is not unique.
The strikes and resistance of South Africa were caused by the same exploitation, oppression and imperialist-imposed poverty that Africans face throughout the continent—from the coltan mines of Congo to the flower plantations of Kenya to the diamond mines of Sierra Leone, where InPDUM is currently located and active.
That same poverty, exploitation and oppression can be found in the domestically colonized African communities in imperialist centers like France, Canada, Britain and the U.S.
While Africans on the continent are forced at gunpoint to dig up our mineral wealth for white power, Africans throughout the world are held at gun point as a means of keeping us separated from those same resources, and forced to work like slaves for what little of ourresources we have access to.
Colonialism requires relentless colonial violence, terror and parasitism
InPDUM is building this convention in the midst of an intensifying war being waged against Africa and African people worldwide.
This war is being waged against us by U.S. and European imperialism as a means of attempting to resolve its crisis.
White power and the capitalist-colonialist State in particular, were forged as a means of protecting a parasitic relationship between the oppressor white nation and the African nation, and other non-white oppressed peoples of the planet.
This parasitic relationship has resulted in the ongoing theft of African resources and labor for over 400 years.
The wealth generated from this parasitism doesn’t only wind up in the bank accounts of the ruling class and the treasury of the U.S. government.
This exploitation accounts for the magnificent infrastructure of the West, such as the electrical grids, clean water, etc.
This standard of living is virtually non-existent in the colonial world.
This colonial loot is also distributed throughout the general white world, making their standard of living, including health care, the highest in the world.
This is the material basis for the war on African people.
As was stated by the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations, of which InPDUM is a member:
“At the time when the U.S. is declaring an end to its wars against the peoples in Iraq and Afghanistan, our people are enduring oppressive conditions that can only be likened to a state of warfare in every community where we are located within the U.S.
"We are being violently attacked by state-imposed poverty and joblessness intensified by the mass incarceration of our young people that takes away potential breadwinners through imprisonment and the subsequent denial of work because of past convictions.
"We suffer an economic embargo as intensive as those imposed on declared enemies of the U.S. government that leads to economic sanctions that deny bank loans and trade opportunities—such as we have seen imposed on Zimbabwe, Cuba, Iran and Syria.
"Our children are forced to endure brutally mind-numbing indoctrination that is euphemistically referred to as education. They are stuffed into institutions that crush their spirits and punish their curiosity with the support of police agencies that normally push the students into the cavernous jaws of a U.S. prison system that is the largest in the world, half of whose inhabitants are black.
"This is the same prison system that has swallowed up some of our best men and women who have voluntarily put their lives on the line to struggle for the freedom of our people during some of our darkest days of oppression. These are political prisoners, the existence of which is denied by a U.S. government that postures on the world stage as a messenger of freedom and democracy, sometimes as justification for attacking and occupying other countries and peoples.
"We must break the silence surrounding the fallacious idea of a “post-racial” America that is used to muffle the cries of the dispossessed from Hurricane Katrina, of the mothers and loved onesof black men shot down every 36 hours by the police, of thousands of our young people brutalized in children’s prisons, of the millions unjustly stopped and frisked and the thousands sentenced to life without parole while criminal bankers walk free.
"We must protest the dispossession from the foreclosures caused by the subprime mortgage fraud created by prestigious financial institutions and supported by the U.S. government with the explicit intent of looting the meager resources of already impoverished black and Latino communities.”
Resistance must be organized for revolution!
This is why InPDUM must be built—to organize revolutionary resistance to defeat the war on the African community.
It is not enough to simply resist. The resistance must be organized under revolutionary leadership and informed by advanced revolutionary theory.
Even if the demands of the striking workers in South Africa were to be met—demands that are essentially limited to better pay and conditions on the plantation—the fundamental contradiction would remain.
That fundamental contradiction is colonialism, which manifests itself in a thousand different ways besides the poverty and poor conditions that the mine workers face.
Colonialism and neocolonialism in South Africa, just as it is everywhere throughout the African world, is a consequence of African people having been stripped, through violence and coercion, of our ability to be a self-determined and self-governing people.
The fact that the same ANC neocolonial government of South Africa, which has always united with white power against the masses of the people, is still in power is a result of colonial domination over our African lives.
If all we demand in South Africa is better pay and conditions, then we would be allowing for the power to remain in the hands of neocolonialism and white power.
The overall horrific conditions we suffer would remain.
Under such a situation, 80 percent of the useable land would remain in the possession of white exploiters and 50 percent of the adult population would still be unemployed.
The same police and state that murdered more than 30 African miners in the Lonmin strike and then charged the miners with murder, would continue to attack the masses.
In fact, should we not engage in a struggle for Black Power, white power would be able to strip away any gains we may have won during the strikes, returning the workers to the same, if not worse, conditions they endured prior to the strikes.
InPDUM has always led the resistance
Since the founding of InPDUM by the African People’s Socialist Party in 1991 in Chicago, InPDUM has remained committed to our responsibility to organize the masses into revolutionary political life.
For without the masses of the people, there will be no revolution.
Therefore, InPDUM has defended the rights of hundreds of African families who have been victimized by this war against our people.
We have not struggled simply for justice for one person but to win reparations, economic and political power for the entire African community.
In Philadelphia, we have fought for justice for the victims of police violence for the past 20 years.
In London, we fought for justice for Ricky Bishop and Mark Duggan, the African man whose murder by the London police sparked the heroic Black August Rebellions of 2011.
In Oakland, we stood courageously in defense of Oscar Grant, Andrew Moppin, Lesley Xavier Allen, Casper Banjo, Jose Luis Buenrostro-Gonzalez, Mac "Jody" WoodfoxandAnita Gay, all murdered by police violence.
We were the lone voice of the organized defense of Lovelle Mixon, a 26-year-old African man who killed four Oakland police officers before being assassinated by the police death squad.
We support the struggle for justice for Oury Jalloh, a young African man who was burned to death while in police custody in Germany.
We supported the movement to free Fred Hampton Jr. framed up in Chicago in the 1990s.
In 1996, InPDUM represented organizational leadership for the African working class when young Africans from the south side of St. Pete rose up in resistance against the point-blank police murder of 18-year-old TyRon Lewis during a traffic stop in the community’s main thoroughfare.
Three weeks later, following the Grand Jury’s exoneration of the police, the community again rose up to defend the Uhuru House from a military attack by 300 highly armed police forces during a regularly scheduled InPDUM meeting.
Because of our stance of defending our people, the cops attacked our headquarters in an attempt to crush our movement.
They failed—we prevailed! The community rose up to defeat the police in what has come to be known as the Battle of St. Petersburg.
We have a fighting history. We have a track record.
The Battle of St. Pete proved to be so significant that then U.S. president Bill Clinton sent a member of his cabinet to investigate the matter.
For the last 21 years, InPDUM has fought tirelessly to defend the democratic rights of Africans victimized by the colonial prison, public housing, and foster care systems.
Just recently in Bronson, Florida, InPDUM led a powerful struggle to free Eric Oliver, an 18-year-old African who was arrested and charged with assault for defending himself and his family by beating down a white lynch mob who came to lynch his younger brother.
InPDUM is currently engaged in the intense struggle to free Bakari Olatunji, a veteran of the Uhuru Movement who was recently arrested for leading a contingent of forces from InPDUM’s Oakland branch to serve the People’s Subpoena to the chief of police.
The Subpoena demanded that the chief appear at the Court for Black Justice and face trial for colonial genocide against the African community.
We know that Bakari is under attack because of his 30-year-long, uncompromising stance in defense of the African community, a stance which was exemplified when he led the march in honor of the warrior Lovelle Mixon just a week after he was assassinated by the police.
Convention to advance revolutionary strategy of the African Socialist International
The International Convention of InPDUM is the highest expression of InPDUM’s organizational and democratic process, through which an overall strategy to liberate the African nation from imperialism will be deepened and implemented and its leadership elected.
At the convention we will meet as a movement and as a community.
We are inviting key forces whom we have met in the past period of struggle—forces from the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice Peace and Reparations as well as the Patrice Lumumba Coalition and the Oury Jalloh Movement in Europe.
We are calling on every activist, organization and member of the African community with whom we have come into contact as an organization to come to the Convention and participate in the building of a mass revolutionary organization to protect and defend our own!
Through the leadership and spirit of the African People’s Socialist Party’s One People, One Party, One Destiny (OPOPOD) Campaign, the International Executive Committee of InPDUM has determined to hold a different kind of convention, one that will be a turning point in the organization's history.
The OPOPOD Campaign has mandated that all organizations under the Party’s leadership place scientific methods of recruitment at the forefront of our agendas and create the iron-clad infrastructure to bring in thousands of new members into a highly functioning organization.
The International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement has been entrusted by the Party with the task of being the mass front of the African Revolution.
Today, under the OPOPOD campaign, InPDUM is shifting from a campaign-based organization to a power base of the African Revolution.
We are following the mandate of Chairman Omali Yeshitela to transform from a defensive stance into an offensive position based on the participation of thousands of members around the world.
InPDUM is taking up our mandate to make sure that no African “falls through the cracks.”
We are building a “Protect and Defend our Own” Campaign that reaches out to every sub-group of the African population to come home under the banner of the African Revolution—from African women to the African gay, lesbian and transgender community, to students, teachers, veterans, seniors, workers, mothers of police murder victims, etc.
All must assume their true African identity and find their place and safe haven in the African Revolution.
Forward to St Petersburg, FL on March 23-24!
Forward to the InPDUM Convention!
One Africa! One Nation! Build Revolutionary Organization to Protect and Defend Our Own!
