Editor’s Note: We present this fourth section of Chairman Omali’s Political Report to the Second Plenary of the African People’s Socialist Party’s Seventh Congress, held in February 2021, entitled “African Workers of the World, Unite and Organize!”
In any event, we are not the only ones to recognize imperialist crisis. The crisis of imperialism and the decline of white power has taken center stage in the discourse of leading thinking representatives of the ruling class.
The July/August 2020 edition of the bourgeois journal, Foreign Affairs, is dedicated to this discussion.
One joint submission by Alexander Cooley and Daniel H. Nexon has the revealing title, “How Hegemony Ends: The Unraveling of American Power.”
The article acknowledges that there have been many other predictions of the end of the system.
But this one is different, the article states, as it goes on to describe the symptoms of imperialist decline as it is concentrated in U.S. white power.
Say Cooley and Nexon, “But this time really is different. The very forces that made U.S. hegemony so durable before are today driving its dissolution.
“Three developments enabled the post-Cold War U.S.-led order. First, with the defeat of communism, the United States faced no major global ideological project that could rival its own.
“Second, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and its accompanying infrastructure of institutions and partnerships, weaker states lacked significant alternatives to the United States and its Western allies when it came to securing military, economic, and political support.
“And third, transnational activists and movements were spreading liberal values and norms that bolstered the liberal order.
“Today, those same dynamics have turned against the United States: a vicious cycle that erodes U.S. power has replaced the virtuous cycles that once reinforced it.
“With the rise of great powers such as China and Russia, autocratic and illiberal projects rival the U.S.-led liberal international system.
“Developing countries—and even many developed ones—can seek alternative patrons rather than remain dependent on Western largess and support.
“And illiberal, often right-wing transnational networks are pressing against the norms and pieties of the liberal international order that once seemed so implacable.
“In short, U.S. global leadership is not simply in retreat; it is unraveling. And the decline is not cyclical but permanent.”
There, the white man said it.
The authors of this Foreign Affairs submission, however, could not possibly envision the end of the colonial-capitalist system altogether or that the lowly, despised colonized would bring about its end.
They would also be contemptuous of the idea that African Internationalism is the “major global ideological project” actively contending with the whole system, including the neocolonial “weaker states” which are themselves remnants of the past order the authors recognize as representative of U.S. decline.
African Internationalism predicted this
Globally many have witnessed the drama associated with the 2020 U.S. presidential election with bemusement.
However, Party members, armed with the science of African Internationalism and an organization constantly using principles of historical materialist investigation and analysis, have not been confused at all.
The contradictions of a failed global system are concentrated in the U.S., the disabled hegemon. U.S. disabilities are representative of a terminally afflicted colonial-capitalist world social system.
For years now, actually since the Party’s First Congress and continuing on through each subsequent congress, we have been defining and quantifying the crisis of the existing world system that was founded and is reliant on a violent parasitic stranglehold on Africa, our people and the colonized and subject peoples of the world.
The shocking election of Donald J. Trump as U.S. president in 2016 was evidence of political crisis grown so severe that it could no longer be obscured. The political fissures within U.S. colonialist-based society were bared.
To the dismay of the white colonial rulers, the 2016 presidential campaign process and election allowed white people, ordinary colonizers, to discover their common disunity with the colonial-capitalist political establishment.
They learned that the colonial-capitalist media and other institutions were lying when they claimed their ruling class narrative mirrored white people’s understanding of the world and their view of themselves.
This discovery is what has given such weight to Trump’s characterization of the bourgeois media as “fake news” that has become part of the general lexicon, used often by bourgeois media themselves.
