A Call:
Seventh Congress of the African People’s Socialist Party
The Seventh Congress of the African People’s Socialist Party is occurring in St. Louis, Missouri from October 6-13, 2018 at a critical moment in history.
Party members and our allies from throughout the African world will convene at this historic Congress to plot out a future of liberation during a time when the oppressive system of imperialist white power is convulsing with unending crises.
Young working class Africans who fought pitched street battles with the military occupational police forces in Ferguson, Missouri, a small suburb of St. Louis, can be credited with the explosion of national consciousness among Africans in the U.S. today.
It was these working class young African women and men who broke the pattern of casual police murder in the African colony after the August 9, 2014 police murder of 18-year-old Mike Brown.
Unfortunately, the African working class did not have access to its own revolutionary Party at that time and representatives of the African petty bourgeoisie–young and old, hijacked the militant, anti-colonial struggle of the people.
Of all the organizations and personalities that flooded the area following the heroic resistance by these African workers, it was only our Party that built revolutionary organization in St. Louis and successfully raised the question of “to what end?” that the ongoing protests were designed to accomplish.
Our Party, the advanced detachment of the African working class, its vanguard, has built Party organizations in St. Louis within the last three years and initiated a major anti-colonial self-determination project called Black Power Blueprint.
This is a project that has acquired several properties for an Uhuru House, café-restaurant, Uhuru Foods and Pie production, African Independence Workforce Program for ex-felons and community gardens and a marketplace to feed the African working class.
This is just one of the latest examples of the work of our Party that has earned us our status as the advanced detachment, the leadership of the African working class struggle to overthrow colonialist capitalism and to liberate and unite Our Africa and ourselves wherever we are located on the planet.
Our Party was founded in 1972 when international white power was certain it had crushed our movement with the defeat of the Black Revolution of the Sixties. This is when agents of U.S. imperialism murdered Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. U.S. CIA agents also murdered Che Guevara after he was wounded and captured in Bolivia in 1967.
The defeat of the Black Revolution of the Sixties was the defeat of the African working class and its aspirations. It is also true that the defeat of the African working class represented a victory for sectors of the colonized African petty bourgeoisie, especially government officials, administrators and others.
There are literally thousands of African elected officials throughout the U.S., for example, whose loyalty is to the white ruling class and the capitalist social system resting on the base of oppressed working people. There are also large numbers of African administrators within local colonialist-capitalist governments: police chiefs, city managers, city attorneys, etc.
The African People’s Socialist Party has been involved in solving the problems of our Revolution since we were founded. One of the most important tasks we set for ourselves as the Party of the revolutionary African working class was to complete the Black Revolution of the Sixties.
When various sectors of the African petty bourgeoisie were screaming about fighting racism, it was we of the African People’s Socialist Party who advanced the understanding that ours is a struggle against colonialism and that what is referred to as “racism” is but the ideological underpinning of capitalism.
It was we who clarified that while the fight against “racism” is only a fight to win acceptance by colonialist-capitalist oppressors at best, the struggle against colonialism is a fight for self-determination, for power over our own lives. It is a fight for Black Power, our own independent state.
Our Party solved the mystery of “white people.” Now the African working class can understand that white people are just people, and that they came into existence as a colonial power through the parasitic expropriation of resources from Africans and others that came to be the means by which “whites,” or Europeans, produced life for themselves at the expense of Africans.
This understanding influenced our practice to include building the African People’s Solidarity Committee, white people who were organized to join the struggle for African liberation under the leadership of our Party.
We have taken the issue of reparations that has been talked about for decades in the African liberation movement and turned this demand into a practical program. We organized the World Tribunal on Reparations for Black People in the U.S. in Brooklyn, New York in 1982.
With the objective to turn the reparations demand into a household issue within the African world, we created the first mass organization that had reparations as its only issue, holding annual reparations tribunals in different cities within the U.S. for approximately 12 years.
Today, the success of the Party’s reparations work can be seen in the actual, successful campaigns being waged under the leadership of our Party that retrieves reparations from thousands of North Americans or “white people,” who voluntarily give to the economic development programs of our Party and Movement. We have moved the reparations demand from a distant dream to something that is being realized by our Party in the real world.
The African neocolonial petty bourgeoisie in Africa, the Caribbean and other areas of the world are proving to be loyal servants of one or another sector of international colonialist-capitalism, bleeding the people more and more to satisfy the requirements of profit for their foreign masters and privilege for themselves and their families.
What is generally called “independence” throughout the African world has been simply a change of imperialist management from white or European to African. That is what is meant by neocolonialism, where by virtue of continuing white ownership of the resources, they rule indirectly as white power in black face.
They are also currently capable of misdirecting the anger of the masses of our people into senseless ethnic or “tribal” based violence that leaves the African primitive petty bourgeoisie firmly entrenched in power as custodians of foreign colonialist interests at the expense of our people, especially workers and poor peasants.
The African People’s Socialist Party, the advanced detachment of the African working class, its vanguard, is an international organization that is spreading the theory and organization for our revolution throughout the African world.
We are a part of the African Socialist International, a single revolutionary African organization with the mission to “…organize a capacity for collective action by African workers of different countries, including those imperialist-created, artificial post-colonial countries of Africa and those countries to which Africans have been forcibly dispersed…” (Preamble of ASI Constitution)
Our Party is the advanced detachment because we have determined that African workers and poor peasants, African people throughout the world, will never have to fight alone again.
After the defeat of the Black Revolution of the Sixties, it was our Party that organized the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement as a major component of the campaign to defeat the counterinsurgency that had slaughtered African militants and massively imprisoned millions more throughout the world.
With more than 40 years of leadership of Our Revolution for the liberation and unification of Africa and African people, the African People’s Socialist Party’s 7th Congress represents just the latest example of our Party as the Advanced detachment, the vanguard of the African liberation movement—in Africa and abroad.
We will elect the leaders of our worldwide struggle for the liberation and unification of Africa and African people and adopt the political report that spells out our vision for the future of our people and the imperialist white power system that holds Africans and the toiling masses of the world in a deathly stranglehold.
Party members who collectively make up the organized advanced detachment of the African working class upon whose shoulders rest the responsibility for liberating our whole people will assume leadership of the Party for the duration of our Congress and freely debate and adopt resolutions that advance our interests as an African nation.
Party members and your delegates will elect the leadership of our Party and adopt the Political Report that establishes Party policy and our Main Resolution that will guide our work for the next five years.
Leaders of our Party are building committees in every region of the world to participate in the 7th Party Congress. In Africa, this includes Occupied Azania or South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya and Sierra Leone.
In Europe, Congress Regional Committees are being developed in Sweden, France, Belgium and the United Kingdom and Comrades in the Bahamas are building for Caribbean participation in our 7th Congress.
Because our Congress is being held in the U.S., we expect most of the Congress participants to come from the U.S. Regional Committees are already busy building for the Congress in the Northeast, Midwest, South and the West Coast.
Comrades, Brothers and Sisters, the more than forty years of continuous struggle to solve the problems of our revolution has prepared the African People’s Socialist Party more than any other party in the world to lay claim to custody of the aspirations of our people for happiness and the return of the 600 years of material value robbed from us through colonial-slavery.
We are the advanced detachment of the African revolution, its vanguard!
In our Party can be seen the continuum of African struggle from the European attack on Africa that resulted in colonial slavery, the partition of Africa, the development of the capitalist system and the rise of global white power.
This is the meaning of the African Socialist International and the theory of African Internationalism, which is 21st century Garveyism that unites our efforts everywhere to African liberation and to the unification of Africa and our people under the leadership of the African working class.
All of our work and our constituent organizations represent the most comprehensive and cohesive concrete approach to African liberation. We are building the organizational capacity to govern and we are doing so in a way that concretely demonstrates the efficacy of African Internationalism as the advanced revolutionary theory necessary for victory.
Moving forward, the stance of our Party will be as custodians of the African revolution, of all the hopes and aspirations of our enslaved and exploited nation.
We will continue to work with all legitimate forces in a nonsectarian manner, we will cooperate with all non opportunistic groups and personalities, but we shall never abdicate our responsibility as the advanced detachment of the African working class and, hence, the African nation, to lead our struggle to victory over colonialist capitalism.
Africa belongs to us. We must take it!
The future belongs to us. We must take it!
Forward to the 7th Congress of the African People’s Socialist Party!
Forward to victory!
We are winning!
