In a recent article entitled, "Public Health in the African American Nation” published on the Freedom Road Socialist Organization’s (FRSO)’s online news website, FRSO member Masao Suzuki makes a feeble, contradictory attempt to disagree with what he calls “mistaken views in the left about national oppression," without any science or theory.
Because we suppose that part of this attempted polemic is perhaps directed at some of the conclusions of African Internationalism, the political theory of the African People’s Socialist Party led by Chairman Omali Yeshitela, we of the African People’s Solidarity Committee, white people organized under the Party’s leadership, will address this.
White left attempts to define national liberation struggles of African people
The Freedom Road Socialist Organization is a self-defined Marxist Leninist organization that was formed in 1985 from a merger between the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters and the Proletarian Unity League. FRSO prides itself on its "down-to-earth, practical work in the workplaces, neighborhoods and campuses" which over the past 20 years has involved campaigning for neo-colonial puppets Jesse Jackson, Chicago Mayor Harold Washington and organizing amongst the Teamsters union.
The two primary political documents stating their line include their “Unity Statement” and their “Statement on National Oppression, National Liberation and Socialist Revolution.”
In the National Oppression statement, they write that in the United States, "national oppression takes a specific form: more than simply the domination of several nations and nationalities by an oppressor nation, in the U.S. it entails the subjugation of all oppressed nations by the oppressor nation headed by the white imperialist bourgeoisie." Their proposed solution is to forge "a strategic alliance of the national movements and the working class to overthrow imperialism and establish socialism." As we will further examine, the use of the term "working class" in FRSO language actually means "white working class."
We of APSC believe that white people must become allies of African liberation, but the basis for such a strategic alliance is for white people to work under the leadership of the African Revolution. FRSO does not come to that conclusion. They write:
"The strategic alliance of the multi-national working class and the national movements is at the core of our work to build a united front against monopoly capitalism – it is not a strategy for building a communist party. In the great upsurge of the national movements of the 1960’s and 70’s, many communist organizations were created, largely based in a single nationality. As those organizations developed their understanding of Marxism-Leninism, they worked for the construction of multi-national communist party. Their collective experience demonstrated that limiting their membership to a single nationality restricted their ability to provide leadership to the movement as a whole and limited their ability to struggle against white chauvinism and opportunism.”
In spite of its rhetorical bluster about supporting working class-led national liberation struggles, FRSO's practical program has involved building support for neo-colonial Democratic Party stooges such as Jesse Jackson, who they supported openly, and Obama, who they supported tacitly. The FRSO statement on the 2012 elections did not explicitly endorse Obama, but it did say, "The defeat of Republican Mitt Romney provides a better political terrain for progressive forces to fight on. With Romney defeated, the terms of debate are less likely to be framed by the outrageously racist, anti-women, anti-worker and anti-communist Tea Party types."
APSC attended the FRSO-coordinated RNC march in Tampa which was rife with liberal, Democratic Party chants against the "Republican agenda."
Concept of an "African-American Nation" legitimizes existence of US government and capitalism
Before we address Suzuki’s befuddled and unscientific assertions, we begin by challenging the term “African American Nation,” a concept that completely legitimizes the existence of the U.S. government and capitalism itself which are built on the stolen land of the Indigenous people and the stolen labor of enslaved African people.
As the African People’s Socialist Party states, there is no such thing as an African American nation. The U.S. is a prison of nations, a colonial oppressor entity, populated by oppressed peoples including African people and the Indigenous people – those from the south of the stolen border and those forced onto concentration camps known as “reservations” who live in profound poverty.
In the book "Black Power Since the 1960s", Chairman Omali Yeshitela writes:
“It was actually the American Communist Party, under fierce pressure from the then-Communist International in 1928, because of its overtly colonialist approach to Africans in the U.S. that put forth a neo-imperialist, neo-colonialist theory of the forging of a new nation of black people from the enslaved African population of the Black Belt South…
“In its origin the theory is opportunistic in that it was part of an effort to destroy the Black Liberation Movement by the American Community party, an organization of mostly unreconstructed white nationalist white people…who fought tooth and nail against the great anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist organization of the period—the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) of Marcus Garvey…”
Africans in the US are part of a colonized African nation dispersed throughout the world by the system of slavery and colonialism. As the African revolutionary leader Malcolm X said, "That's what we are — Africans who are in America. We are African, and we happened to be in America. We're not American. We are people who formerly were Africans who were kidnapped and brought to America.”
It is the basic premise of the theory of African Internationalism developed and espoused by the African People’s Socialist Party that capitalism and the United States itself were built on the foundation of the genocide and stolen land of Indigenous people, the kidnapping, commodification and stolen labor of African people and colonialism.
Euro-Americans (white people) constitute an oppressor nation living at the expense of the African nation and other oppressed nations of the world.
The oppressor nation is made up of all classes of white people, seated on the pedestal of the oppression of African and colonized peoples. This pedestal is the basis for the fact that historically we white people have always struggled for our rights at the expense of African and Indigenous people. Even the white workers and impoverished among us have acted in full complicity with US colonial policy by participating in and initiating unspeakable terror against African and Indigenous peoples. The white left and white workers have sold out African and Indigenous peoples’ own demands and movements over and over again throughout our history.
The African and Indigenous national liberation struggles
The African People’s Socialist Party makes it clear that the land of North (and South) America–including what Suzuki calls the “Black Belt south” is the land of the Indigenous people. The Indigenous people are the only ones who have a legitimate claim to the land whose colonial name is “America.” The struggle of Indigenous people is a struggle for national liberation, a struggle that the African People’s Socialist Party has unconditional solidarity with.
The white left-derived concept of the "African-American Nation" liquidates the rights of the Indigenous people to reclaim their land and positions the FRSO in objective unity with US imperialism's genocidal theft of the Indigenous land. The concept of the African American Nation presupposes that colonial U.S. state as it now stands will continue to exist with the only difference being the possible secession of the “Black Belt South,” as opposed to unity with the goals of the movements for national liberation to overturn the imperialist state, destroy the parasitic economic system with the colonized working people assuming power and carrying out self-determination.
Moreover, Susuzki's position paper denies the rights of African people to reclaim their national homeland, as well. The national land base of the African liberation movement is the continent of Africa. Black people are African people whether they are in Africa, the U.S. Brazil, the Caribbean or any place else in the world. As defined by African revolutionaries such as Kwame Nkrumah and Chairman Omali Yeshitela, the African national liberation struggle is a struggle to reclaim Africa under the leadership of an all-African socialist state, led by African workers.
Their struggle is for African national liberation, not a “struggle for equality” in the colonial, imperialist U.S. system, a struggle determined by Suzuki to include the “right to self-determination, up to and including secession, for the African American nation.”
Brought as captive commodities to the US to labor for free, African people have never enjoyed the status of American citizens. They have been colonial subjects throughout history up until today.
Africans were not Americans during the centuries of enslavement when they were 3/5ths of a human being; nor during the period of Jim Crow and Convict Leasing when African men, women and children were denied all rights and rounded up into camps to be worked to death. Nor are Africans citizens now as the colonial state shoots down an African person every 28 hours and has rounded millions into the colonial prison system.
The 2013 verdict acquitting George Zimmerman in the murder of 17-year-old African Trayvon Martin makes that clear that just as the 1857 Dred Scott decision stated, Africans “have no rights that the white man [or US government] is bound to respect.”
All white people sit on the pedestal of parasitic capitalism
As Omali Yeshitela has written, the construction of capitalism on the backs of Africans, Indigenous and other colonized peoples created the pedestal upon which all white people sit, regardless of class or status. This is the white nation, the reactionary sense of sameness enjoyed by the majority of white people that supercedes income and class status. This pedestal is the material basis of the “American dream” for white people—a better life for us at the expense of the majority of humanity.
The reality that there is colonialism in this country is apparent in every facet of life: how the state relates to white people vs its colonial subjects in the indicators of income, health, education, etc.
The colonial reality is shown in the U.S. prison gulag holding the largest prison population on earth at 2.5 million people with three quarters of its population being African and Mexican/Indigenous. It is a colonial prison system that pumps billions of dollars into the US economy. One out of every 8 prisoners on the planet is an African in the U.S.
Fact: African communities are under martial law, are under the thumb of SWAT teams and hostile militarized colonial police forces. This is a counterinsurgency war similar to the U.S. strategy against colonized peoples around the world, with the tactics used by the that the Los Angles Police Department being used to train U.S. military forces assigned to the Middle East in counterinsurgent methods.
Fact: Even in times of economic crisis, white people on average have 22 times the assets of African people. Yes, there are poor white people and some wealthy African people. But white communities are scenes of “social” wealth where student loans, fixed rate mortgages and jobs are doled out discrepantly versus the social poverty of the African community which are targeted for sub-prime mortgages, discriminatory prison arrests and sentencing, and where the “pre-school to prison pipeline” is a burning issue.
Fact: All white people sit on the pedestal of the oppression of African and oppressed peoples does not mean that we do not experience poverty or various forms of oppression ourselves.
The history of the struggle of the white left in Europe and the U.S. has been one to gain greater equality among white people on this pedestal among larger sectors of the white population- a fight for a greater share in the stolen colonial loot.
It also means that white people have always attempted to solve our problems at the expense of Africans and other oppressed peoples, not in solidarity with them. For example, white suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others were clear that they did not support the vote or rights for African men. Their feminism was a white feminism entrenched on the pedestal of the oppressed.
A call for white solidarity with Black Power
As Chairman Omali Yeshitela wrote in his book, A New Beginning: The Road to Black Freedom and Socialism :
“Living in a country built and sustained off slavery, colonialism and neocolonialism, the impact of victorious revolutionary struggles reaches down into the gas tanks, shopping centers and tax brackets of the North American population. There is an objective relationship between world slavery and US affluence and up until now the North American population, opportunistically and demogogically led by their stomachs, pocketbooks and corrupt leadership have chosen the continued enslavement of the world.”
It was these theoretical understandings that led to the formation by the APSP of the African People's Solidarity Committee, an organization of white people who work direclty under the leadership of the African working class. As defined by the Party, the work of APSC is to go back into the white community and win other white people to stand in solidarity with African liberation. Our primary responsibility is to win reparations from the white oppressor nation.
This responsibility is based on the fact that 80% of the world’s resources are amassed inside of the white world, and upon our history of terror, lynching and colonial unity in regard to African people.
We do not see responsibility as an act of "charity", but as material solidarity with African self-determination. We recognize that in the final analysis, there is no future for white people outside of solidarity with African Revolution.
We do believe there must be principled unity from white people with African workers struggling for power and freedom. The white left incorrectly characterizes the struggles of white workers as parallell to the African workers’ struggle, as if both are part and parcel of a "multinational workers struggle." The fact remains that the enslavement of African people that lifted white serfs out of feudal servitude, enriched all of Europe and gave birth to the entire capitalist class system – including the white working class.
Luwezi Kinshasa, Secretary General of the African Socialist International, wrote: "The only way for white workers to be part of an international community of workers, is for them to be under the leadership of the African Revolution."
The basis for principled white unity with African workers is reparations. Solidarity with African liberation and reparations is in our long-term interest. Every contradiction experienced by white people is a contradiction created by the system of white power. It is white power that degrades white women, exploits white workers, persecutes white homosexuals, etc.
In order to overturn the system of white power and parasitic capitalism, we must unite in principled solidarity with African anti-colonial struggle through working under the leadership of African people and building a worldwide movement of white reparations to African people.
In 1990, Chairman Omali Yeshitela writing in the, Political Report to the Third Congress, stated:
“The fact is that capitalism was born as parasitic white power and it must be defeated as parasitic white power. Genuine communists of all nationalities must be consciously committed to the overthrow of white power, and white communists must be committed to the struggle for the victory of black power over white power.
“The beginning of the process for white communists in the U.S. and the world to abandon the interests of imperialism and to integrate their own interests with the interests of the toiling masses of the world is to subordinate their interests to the struggles of the oppressed peoples of the world to overthrow parasitic white power.
“In the U.S. this can only be done through joining the anti-colonial struggle for black power. Concretely this means joining the African People’s Solidarity Committee, an organization of and subordinate to the African People’s Socialist Party, the advanced detachment of the revolutionary African working class and poor peasantry.”
The African People's Solidarity Committee calls on all white people—white communists, progressives, workers, students, men, women, LGBT, etc.—to join in principled solidarity with the struggle for Black Power and African Revolution.
Join the APSC and build "Days in Solidarity with African People" worldwide!
