The following is Part II and III of an excerpted transcript of a presentation that Chairman Omali Yeshitela made to the African People’s Socialist Party 2024 Year-in-Review web event on December 29, 2024.
The African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) has been an extraordinary project. It has changed the world, and I say this without bombast or braggadocio.
We have to recognize that the APSP, formally coming into existence in 1972, has its immediate origin in the struggle of the 1960s—when the oppression and exploitation of African people were attempting to achieve self-definition. This was the moment in history when the struggle was articulated as a struggle for civil rights.
Of course, the struggle for civil rights in that period was a defensive posture that had been imposed on our movement; it was a step back. Garvey was not fighting for civil rights. You fight for civil rights if you don’t have democracy. Democracy—that’s absolutely necessary.
But Garvey wanted democracy to do what? To be able to build independently, to be able to achieve the unification and liberation of Africa and all African people on the planet Earth, not just in one place but everywhere—”Africa for Africans at home and abroad.” This is what Garvey fought for.
A combination of forces—of traitors and the efforts of the United States and all the colonial powers—ganged up on the movement that had been created by Garvey. They created a situation similar to what they did to us and jailed Garvey. They jailed Garvey for what they characterized as the crime of using the mail to defraud. This is what Garvey was accused of doing when he was winning Africans to purchase stock in the Black Star Line, to build an incredible shipping line owned by African people that would engage in trade and movement by Africans throughout the world.
And they came after us. There is evidence of them doing intentionally to us what they did to Garvey. You can find the records showing how FBI agents were saying that we can’t find anything wrong with this guy, we can’t find a reason to deport him, to get him, kick him out of the country or anything, he hasn’t broken any laws. They said, well, keep trying, come up with something.
I hate saying that because to say it presupposes the ability of a colonizer to do right by the colonized, and that’s impossible.
Colonialism and the colonizers make the laws, all the laws. All the laws governing shipping lines, possession, ownership, and what have you. But colonialism itself is illegitimate! This is something that must be deeply, profoundly understood.
The colonizer makes the laws, but colonialism is illegitimate. It is a forced imposition of authority on a people. It is a forcible theft of self-determination of people that’s imposed by forces who are otherwise foreign and alien. This is what colonialism is.
They make the laws. Are they going to make laws that make colonialism illegitimate? Are they going to make laws that make slavery illegal? Are they going to make laws that will allow free speech and freedom to be legal?
Hell no, they won’t do that! That’s the way it is, and to expect anything else is a serious error.
[This] is not to say we cannot fight for democracy. We have to fight for democracy.
You can go back to something that I wrote in 1991 for the building of what was then characterized as the National People’s Democratic Movement. We’re going to fight for democracy, but we’re also going to fight to redefine what democracy is.
We do not accept the definition of democracy that has been imposed on us by colonizers.
A major part of our work has been recognizing that this is not the 1960s. As glorious and historic and courageous as so many forces were in the 1960s, we don’t do it the same way exactly today.
We fight for democracy, but we don’t make the struggle in the same way because so much has changed now.
Someone wrote correctly in an article, in a journal called Counterpunch, that this has been a really important victory [outcome of Uhuru 3 case], but they said that as a result of this trial, this sentence, this criminalization, this sets a precedent for the criminalization of people who would dare to engage in international political relationships.
It says we can’t have a relationship with Russia, they say. It places limitations on the whole movement.
Even the three-year probation is just really problematic and very serious. This writer is right: that is a problem.
But it’s not the same problem that it used to be. And one reason why is because we’ve built an extraordinary movement now!
We have built a movement that’s not just about fighting for democracy as it has been understood up to now.
We have redefined what democracy is in relation to colonized people—anti-colonial free speech.
We have brought hundreds of different organizations and groups and people into a single process.
For the first time, perhaps ever, we have united a massive movement into the same organizational ideological process to win freedom so that this struggle for free speech, this struggle for First Amendment rights, starts by saying that the Bill of Rights and the question of free speech were not written for the colonized!
We were enslaved when this was written. It was written for the colonizers, by the colonizers.
We understand that just as there was a serious contradiction between white people at that time, where they had to have a Bill of Rights to protect their own interests, there continue to be contradictions between white people within the colonial state itself—among the colonizer society itself.
We’re not trying to join the colonizer society. What we are trying to do is hold the colonizer society to the principles that they say they hold dear. This has been our strategy all along.
So we don’t believe that the system can tolerate democracy. It cannot live with democracy if it’s applied across the board—if it’s applied to Mexicans, if it’s applied to Africans and the Indigenous population over here. They cannot live with that.
At one time, Ho Chi Minh had tried to win solidarity from North Americans based on their unity with the [U.S. Declaration of Independence] and these principles.
All the colonized people believe in free speech. All the colonized people believe in freedom of assembly, freedom of association, and also believe in the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms. These are rights that white people secured and said, in effect, these are just our rights.
We are building a movement of colonized peoples throughout this country and alerting the peoples of the world to a connection to this. We are building a movement of colonized peoples demanding what is characterized as the Bill of Rights and free speech as a part of the ongoing struggle.
It is not saying that we won the struggle for free speech at this trial or with this sentencing. It’s not over. It’s not over because we’re still engaged consciously in the struggle to overturn this colonial relationship we have and to bring the masses of people of the world into it. And also to bring white people, colonizers who can be won, into this project as well.
The APSP did this.
This was an attack on the African Revolution, and part of the strategy of the African Revolution again was to win as much support and solidarity from around the world and help the rest of the world to recognize that they have an objective interest in this struggle.
When white people in the solidarity movement come into this movement, they’re not coming as favors to us. I don’t want those kinds of favors.
They are coming because they recognize that in the solidarity movement, there is an objective interest here.
They recognize that the struggle against colonialism is a struggle to destroy the capitalism that they hate.
They recognize that it is a struggle to destroy the oppression of women that they hate; it is a struggle to destroy the oppression of homosexuals that they hate; it is a struggle to destroy this offense that they are constantly and consistently making against democracy all across the board as they have defined it.
We’re redefining it now because now the colonized are playing an active role in saying what it looks like.
We have come into a whole new era where the African movement, the movement of colonized people, is setting the terms for what freedom and struggle should look like going forward.
This is not the 1960s: When I came into the movement, where I had to fight tooth and nail every day with ideological imperialists, [where] white Left colonizers who would impose their own definition of what it is we’re about.
They would try to simply make us some kind of appendage to a struggle that white people are involved in.
They even challenged the concept of primitive accumulation that Marx came up with as the starting point of the development of capitalism. Marx famously characterized turning Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins–interring the Indigenous people in this country into the mines, bringing up silver and gold, and the brutal attack that was being made on what they call East India. That’s colonialism that he just described!
But Marx wasn’t able to describe it as colonialism, because to characterize it as colonialism was to characterize it as something that has its historical significance to those of us who are being interred into the mines, who are the Africans being turned into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins.
But as it is, Marx’s definition of primitive accumulation is a story that’s being told about the development of white people, white America, capitalism that came at the expense of African and colonized peoples. We are the ones who see Marx through the eyes of the enslaved and oppressed African working class.
I think it’s really important for us to say that this is what the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) has done. This is the thing that makes the difference between us and others that some people have not quite grasped yet.
Comrade Efia Nwangaza and some of these heroic people who were members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who helped to work on the the Atlanta Project, who wrote the Vine City paper, the document from the Atlanta Project that was the precursor to the black power position that SNCC came up with – they are part of the historical continuum that leads to the APSP today.
History doesn’t just start one day and end. It’s part of a single continuum. That’s what dialecticians understand; that we’re all connected in the same process of coming into being, going out of existence–in connection with all other phenomena around the world.
Comrades of SNCC came together with the Atlanta Project because they began to see there was something seriously problematic about groups such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). This incredible group of young people who made up SNCC were often referred to as the saints, and even some of the liberal bourgeoisie recognized that SNCC was different.
Unlike the SCLC, the NAACP and other forces, SNCC members would go into places in the heat of struggle that other groups found too dangerous. When the SCLC did go into these places, they often only went there to make speeches, raise money and then get the hell out of town. But SNCC lived with the people.
SNCC’s position on nonviolence changed not because of the lack of efficacy of the concept, not because they discovered who Gandhi really was. SNCC moved away from the principle of nonviolence because they lived with the people and none of the people they lived with were nonviolent. African workers who SNCC members lived with had shotguns in the house to protect their lives, to protect their families from white violence.
Even though the Civil Rights Movement had a process of training people how to be nonviolent, how to get kicked, how to get spat upon–as if we needed practice on that–the masses of the people needed to defend themselves.
SNCC lived with the people and came to different conclusions. SNCC was that bridge between the anti-racist Civil Rights Movement and the anti-colonial Black Power Movement. And when you talk about power, you’re talking about a struggle against colonialism. That’s what SNCC was.
That’s why I appreciate comrades like Efia. A lot of people come into the movement, sometimes not knowing why we come into it.
We find it exciting; great stuff is happening and we get hooked into it. A lot of people joined the Black Panther Party in this way. They were there because there was this great upsurge of struggle against colonialism around the world.
You didn’t have to know much, you just knew that your neighbor, your brother, your sister, your cousin, people who look like you all over the world, were fighting against what was happening to you.
Even some critical leaders of the Black Panther Party did not understand the historical material basis for what it was that put them in motion.
But we explained it. The APSP explained it and we were able to discover the material basis for everything. We understood the material basis for the nonviolent struggle that we went through and why it moved from that nonviolent posture. SNCC moved from nonviolence precisely because they lived and moved with the people.
