WASHINGTON, DC — This is a call to the leadership and general membership of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) as well as our allies and supporters to mobilize the African working class and all freedom-loving peoples to come to Washington, DC for the 5th Congress of our Party scheduled from July 10-14, 2010.
With the selection and then election of Barack Hussein Obama as U.S. president, the mission of the African working class has never been more clearly defined. As the black working poor, our poverty rate is increasingly becoming more structured into the world capitalist economic order than ever before.
There isn’t even any make believe analysis that says our conditions of existence — characterized by prisons, homelessness, police murders, unemployment and underemployment, loss of our lives as cannon fodder for imperialist wars, extraordinary rates of maternal and infant mortality rates, HIV/AIDS, low life expectancy levels, and a host of other life/survival indicators — will get any better, and surely not solved.
Yet we are told that as a people we have “made it” because Barack Obama is U.S. president, and because we have more than 50 more black presidents in Africa.
They say look at South Africa and Nelson Mandela. But they never say, “Look, you have made it. See what great shape the African working class is in.”
Nowhere in the world can they say the African working class and poor folks and peasants are doing well. We live in poverty in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in Nairobi, Kenya, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in Harlem and Brooklyn, New York, and in Houston, Texas.
All over, we suffer at the hands of vicious police and military forces who impose capitalist colonialism as our economic lot. They function as part of a parasitic system that guarantees poverty and oppression to Africans and the other non-white masses in the world.
Black faces for white power still equal black oppression and poverty
It is the contention of the African People’s Socialist Party that world imperialism, led by the U.S. and Europe, have resorted to neocolonialism, as manifested in their anointed leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama.
This is a system where white power rules through black face; a system where white wealth grows and black poverty and oppression deepens even though black politicians seem to be running it.
It is a system where the wealth remains firmly in the hands of old white power. In Occupied Azania (South Africa), the Mandela-Zuma ANC forces have been in power for more than 15 years, yet white settlers still own and control more than 87 percent of the land there and more than 90 percent of the actual resources.
In the United States, the prison system has been placed on the Wall Street stock market, guaranteeing they stay bursting at the seams with black and Chicano/Mexicano prisoners. Every major city spends the bulk of its annual budget on police, prisons, and jails all aimed at repressing the African and other colonized communities. These budgets are met using billions of dollars that they have stolen from Africa, African people, and other colonial and subject peoples throughout the world.
Forward to the final offensive against imperialism!
It is the African People’s Socialist Party who has critiqued world imperialism, all along the line, as manifested by the Political Report to the 5th Congress of the Party. In this 46-page report, Chairman Omali Yeshitela states:
“The vicious wars of occupation in Iraq, Afghanistan and now extended to Pakistan; the genocidal terror directed at the Arab people of Occupied Palestine in defense of the illegitimate white nationalist settler state of Israel that rests uneasily on stolen land; the United Nations and direct U.S. imperial occupation of tiny, historically persecuted and plundered Haiti; the continued subversive efforts to undermine the movements toward independence and social democracy throughout South America — none of these imperialist efforts will succeed in changing the course of history that we in the African People’s Socialist Party have characterized as the era of the Final Offensive against imperialism.”
The Chairman goes on to say, “Yet, while the struggles of the world’s peoples against imperialism constitute a powerful threat to the very foundation of imperialism, they are, generally speaking, struggles without consciousness of their interconnectedness. Most often, they are struggles of peoples who are compelled by the brutal conditions of existence imposed on them by imperialism, forcing them to rise up as a matter of self-defense.”
This is the understanding that the 5th Congress of the African People’s Socialist Party will share and explain to the peoples of the U.S. and the world. It is a scientific worldview that, when organized into a material force, will change the peoples of the world’s relationship to imperialist colonialism and neocolonialism. We will have the capacity to organize and defeat the stranglehold white capitalist power has on the world.
This is the struggle for black power which, in order to be successful, must be led by a conscious black working class and its vanguard organization, the African People’s Socialist Party.
For too long, the African working class has struggled under the leadership of the black petty bourgeoisie and their concurrent organizations. As a result, only the interests of the black petty bourgeoisie have been met while our interests have been sold out for the selfish interest of a few.
They have become wealthy and we have become poorer. However, this time, our class will fight in it’s own interest. This time ‘til it’s won!
It is from this perspective that we call on our whole Party and affiliated organizations and our allies and movement to come to the 5th Congress and organize for all power to the people and black power to the African community!
Forward to DC!
Build to Win!
