On April 21, 2021, Derek Chauvin, the white cop who murdered George Floyd, was found guilty in the colonial court for three counts of various iterations of murder and manslaughter.
A tremendous amount of exuberance was demonstrated by the masses of our people, because for Africans, the conviction we experienced as a validation of our collective power to actually do something in defense of our lives against the vicious colonial state. We saw this conviction as an expression of our power.
And that’s not untrue. That verdict never would have occurred without the mobilization and the relentless demonstrations that African people were initiating there in Minneapolis and various other places around the world.
An assortment of liberals, opportunists and hustlers joined in the celebrations, declaring that the conviction of Chauvin for his grotesque and public lynching of George Floyd somehow represents a turning point in the culture of policing African people in the United States.
Before the actual verdict came out, people like Ben Crump and Al Sharpton were talking about how this trial represented a “referendum” on justice for African people in the United States.
For these hustlers, the verdict was a form of marketing for a growing lucrative industry of income generation for vulturistic beneficiaries who actually need police murder victims for personal profit, prestige and political leverage.
All of the opportunists, liberals and hustlers have one thing in common: They need to portray the guilty verdict against Chauvin as a vindication of the colonial-capitalist system.
What they’ve done with this trial is to say that the contradiction was not the system. It’s not the colonial capitalist State apparatus itself. It was this one guy Chauvin. So they willingly threw Chauvin under the bus.
This explanation does not explain why even during Chauvin’s trial, police in Brooklyn Center, which is a Minneapolis suburb less than 10 miles from where Chauvin was on trial, murdered a 20-year-old African named Daunte Wright.
It does not explain why police would gun down 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant in Columbus, Ohio shortly before the verdict was rendered. We saw also the murder of this young Adam Toledo in Chicago, who was only 13 years old.
Neocolonial hustlers manipulate African families of victims of police murder
Our community experiences a natural sense of empathy for the families of Africans victimized by police terror.
We’ve seen lawyers and hustlers who have raised up families of victims of police murder, and somehow conferred upon them an understanding of revolutionary self-determination or politics in general.
They will tell you: the family doesn’t want you to rebel. The family wants you to stay peaceful. I’m talking about hustlers like Sharpton and Crump. They elevate these families who before then were almost non-existent except as our neighbors and people in our own communities who we cared for and loved.
They use their control and their influence with these family members to get them to show up for the purpose of containing the struggle of African people within the limits that the government would have it contained and within the limits that this verdict was designed to create.
When we say it’s the system, we’re not talking about just the so-called police system or the so-called justice system. We’re talking about the social system itself.
If you look at the origin of the system, then you understand what is happening to African people in Minneapolis, in Brooklyn Center, in North St. Louis and throughout this country in the world.
It’s bigger than Chauvin: the system must go
How does this system work? What brought this system into existence?
There’s a reason why we live and die in distress, poverty and violence heaped upon violence, with ignorance imposed on our community. It’s not something that God gave us or because of lack of civilization or any other lie given to us by the rulers.
The way we live is a consequence of the rise of a social system. The social system has its roots in colonial slavery, in the attack by Europe on Africa and the theft of resources, human and material, the theft of resources that go into computers, etc. That includes the stolen African resources that go into electronics and other forms of “green energy” that liberals love to talk about.
This is a system that came into being through capturing Africa, a continent of 12 million square miles of nothing but richness and value. This is a system that captures this continent and then turns it into a place for the breeding of human beings who would be sold as capital, to create capital itself. That’s what capitalism is.
This system has to be examined and understood. This alone explains why most of the value in the world will be located in the white world, why 11 percent of the people on the planet Earth control 80% or more of the resources of the peoples of the world.
What happened was that Europe, faced with disease where at least half of the white people on Earth died in four short years from plague, rescued itself through stretching out and enslaving human beings, capturing and bringing us into colonial slavery.
This is where you begin to see the definition given to this thing that we call the State under capitalism. The State is simply that organized monopoly of violence. The State is the army, court, jails, and even internationally, things like the United Nations and NATO.
They constitute the State apparatus that has been designed to control the world and to be able to suck the resources out of our lives and our community and drive us deeper and deeper into starvation.
Colonialism doesn’t work without inflicting extreme consistent violence all the time on the people because the people won’t take it.
The people won’t tolerate going to the mines and bringing out diamonds and resources and seeing them loaded up on trucks and trains to be taken to Europe and to be displayed eventually in the mall in some white community in the United States.
These are conditions the people will not tolerate without fighting back. The people will rise up. That’s the normal thing that people would do. We don’t want to see our children gunned down in the streets whether in the U.S. or in the townships of South Africa.
This system has to go. There is no future for this system.
African resistance deepens crisis of U.S. imperialism
The system is in a state of trying to defend itself in a very serious way. They are not just dealing with us Africans in the United States. China and Russia are intruding into economic and political spaces that the white man, Europe and the United States have considered their own province.
Economically and politically throughout the world, Africans are catching hell. Let’s not allow them to convince us that we’re looking at a Derek Chauvin problem or a problem of African people in the United States.
We got a problem, Africans: it’s the whole system that brought George Floyd to this country in the first place, using extreme violence to wrench his people from Africa so that he would be subdued here in the U.S. in conditions leading to what happened in public view on May 25, 2020.
It could not work without neocolonialism, without those Africans who are telling us that we just hang on a little longer and that everything’s gonna be alright. These are Africans who work hand-in-glove with the system, saying “Bring in more police, bring in the National Guard.”
We have to create our own justice
There is no so-called justice for George Floyd, Adam Toledo or Daunte Wright inside the system. We have to make our own justice. We have to govern. That means we have to push out of our lives all of those forces that prohibit the ability of us to come to power to govern ourselves.
This guilty verdict is an attempt by the colonial capitalist system to rescue itself, to disguise the viciousness of its own rule.
In 1979 the African People’s Socialist Party put forth a 14-point working platform. It would be reaffirmed in 1981 at the First Congress of our Party that was held in Oakland, California.
Point #8 of our Party platform states:
“We want the immediate withdrawal of the U.S. police from our oppressed and exploited communities.
“We believe that the various U.S. police agencies which occupy our communities are arms of the U.S. colonialist state which is responsible for keeping our people enslaved and terrorized. We believe that the U.S. police agencies do not serve us, but instead represent the first line of U.S. defense against the just struggle of our people for peace, dignity, and socialist democracy. Therefore, we believe the U.S. police is an illegitimate standing army, a colonial army in the African community and must withdraw immediately from our community, to be replaced by our liberation forces whose struggles in defense of our community and against our oppression demonstrate their loyalty to our community and their willingness to serve in its interest.”
The demand for the immediate withdrawal of police from our communities is different from just going around yelling “black lives matter.” We say, “black community control of police!” We want you out of the community. What does “black lives matter” say to the masses of the people? Nothing! “Black lives matter” is a whine that you’re making to the oppressor. It doesn’t inform our people to do anything!
We are building the African People’s Socialist Party around the world because we are determined to be free. We know that there is no way that we will ever have peace without having first captured power in our own lives. We will never have peace without having first created an organization of steeled cadre who can have the long view.
Join the African People’s Socialist Party and become a part of the struggle that we are waging around the world. We are virtually everywhere. We are in Africa. We are in the Caribbean. We are in Europe and throughout the United States.
Ours is a global revolution. Go to the apspuhuru.org and join the African People’s Socialist Party!
Vanguard Up!
