From July 5 to August 1 the African People’s Socialist Party will hold an elite Cadre Intensive training process at the Party’s international headquarters in St. Petersburg, Florida.
During the four-week intensive, Africans and some of our allies will come together from around the world for a packed agenda of theoretical and historical study, organizational training, community organizing and physical education.
The intensive is only for the best sons and daughters of Africa. It is for those who pass the application process and who have a burning desire to carry out whatever is necessary to be a Party leader capable of forwarding the goal to liberate and unify Africa and African people everywhere, regardless of the personal price.
In 1972, as the U.S. government was pounding the Black Revolution of the 1960s with a counterinsurgent assault as brutal as any it was waging against national liberation movements elsewhere in the world, Chairman Omali Yeshitela and two other Florida movement leaders joined forces to found the African People’s Socialist Party.
As Chairman Omali explains in the Political Report to the Party’s Sixth Congress (soon to be published as An Uneasy Equilibrium: the African Revolution versus Parasitic Capitalism), the founding of the Party as the advanced force of the African Liberation Movement was necessary to move beyond mere protest and the spontaneity of the mass movement.
In the Political Report the Chairman states that the responsibility of the Party has always been to lead. “So we must lead today, at this moment,” he writes.
“Our Party as the advanced detachment of the African working class continues to uphold the responsibility to show the way forward, especially when the way forward is murkiest…We do not bury or liquidate the Party among the masses; we lead always.”
In order to be a vanguard organization, capable of leading always, the Party must be made up of experienced, steeled cadres who carry the full responsibility for the African Revolution on their shoulders, just as cadres of national liberation movements have done in earlier times.
Chairman Omali has noted that two generations of African people have grown up during the past 40 years since the U.S. government’s military defeat of the Black Revolution. These are African workers and potential revolutionaries who were not alive when revolution was the main trend across the planet and African and oppressed peoples inside the U.S. and throughout the world were in motion fighting for national liberation.
The goal of this intensive is to re-create a fighting cadre force capable of organizing anywhere across the globe for our freedom and independence.
As the Chinese revolutionary leader Chairman Mao Zedong wrote in 1937, cadres must be “politically far-sighted, competent in work, full of the spirit of self-sacrifice, capable of tackling problems on their own, steadfast in the midst of difficulties and loyal and devoted in serving the nation, the class and the Party.”
In 1962, following the 1959 victory of the Cuban Revolution, Che Guevara wrote that a cadre “is an individual of ideological and administrative discipline, who knows and practices democratic centralism and who knows how to evaluate the existing contradictions in this method and to utilize fully its many facets; who knows how to practice the principle of collective discussion and to make decisions on his own and take responsibility in production; whose loyalty is tested, and whose physical and moral courage has developed along with his ideological development in such a way that he is always willing to confront any conflict and to give his life for the good of the revolution.”
In the Political Report Chairman Omali stresses that Party cadres must have a deep loyalty and love of the Party. He wrote,
“This deep and profound respect and love for the Party is an absolute necessity for our cadres in this period. The Party cadres must be capable of recognizing the programs, commitments, strategy and struggles of the Party as their own. They must see the contradictions as well as victories of the Party as their own.
“This means that subjectivism and opportunism, tendencies that place the interests of individuals at the forefront, have no place in Party cadres. The same is true of adventurism and other forms of individualism that substitute personal significance over the significance of the Party and our collective mission.”
As the crisis of imperialism deepens daily and conditions become ever more ripe for the seizure of power into the hands of the African working class, the African People’s Socialist Party is creating a dedicated and fighting force capable of recruiting thousands and thousands of others throughout Africa and the world to make African Independence in our Lifetime a reality!
Uhuru!