The Campaign for African Community Self-Defense (CACSD) is an international campaign of the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM), which functions according to the
Revolutionary National Democratic Program (RNDP) of InPDUM.
The RNDP responds to the colonial conditions experienced by African people inside the U.S. and throughout North America, and recognizes that African people in North America and throughout the world are part of a dispersed African nation that must reunite with Africans on the continent in order to liberate Africa.
Although the RNDP speaks to a very wide array of contradictions faced by African people in North America and worldwide, the CACSD is designed to specifically defend the African community from all forms of colonial violence that African people suffer on a local, national and worldwide level.
The CACSD is a response to the intensifying colonial violence that African people throughout the world are experiencing at the hands of white power, both in the form of the imperialist State apparatus and the general white population itself.
Colonial violence comes in various forms, from such incidents as the assassination of Trayvon Martin by white nationalist vigilante George Zimmerman, to the neocolonial proxy wars being waged in such regions of Africa as Ivory Coast and Congo, where over seven million African people have died.
From the police murder of Oscar Grant in Oakland to the economic quarantine of the African community in Philadelphia – for poverty itself is a form of colonial violence which is enforced by the police who stand between African people and our resources.
Colonial violence is waged against African people through the existing U.S. court system, which serves to justify the colonial violence carried out against African people by sectors of the general white population as well as by the U.S. colonial police force and its repression of the African communities throughout the country. Colonial violence is not only the murder of Sean Bell, but it is the court system’s justification of such murder.
InPDUM recognizes that the ultimate solution to colonial violence is the seizure of revolutionary national democratic state power in the hands of the African community itself – aka Black Power. Such state power will result in the ability for Africans to conduct our own trials and hearings in the quest for justice within our colonized communities and achieve justice in issues between Africans and the U.S. colonial state and citizens.
Such state power will result in the “immediate withdrawal of the U.S. police from our oppressed and exploited communities and their replacement 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.” As stated in point #8 of the
working platform of the African People’s Socialist Party.
The overall work of the Campaign for African Community Self-Defense (CACSD) will be informed by the following specific points of the Revolutionary National Democratic Program (RNDP):
• We demand all rights consistent with being a free people, rights which include self-determination and self-government as the highest expression of genuine democracy. We demand independence in our lifetime. (RNDP pt #1)
• We call on the world community to support and recognize the legitimacy of the World Tribunal on Reparations for Africa and African People (established by African people) that puts imperial white power on trial for the offenses committed against African people. (RNDP pt #4)
• We demand reparations for the centuries of slavery, colonial oppression, exploitation, terror, and deprivation that continue to be experienced by African people to this day (RNDP pt #7)
• We demand an end to the public policy of police containment of African people within the U.S. and its replacement with a public policy of economic development through massive capital infusion that would be used to uplift the entire community by supporting existing African businesses, establishing new African businesses, including cooperatives and by contributing to the general self-reliance of the African community. (RNDP pt #16)
• We claim the national right to self-defense and recognize that in our struggle for self-determination and national liberation any act of resistance is self-defense (ie Lovelle Mixon), whether initiated or responsive. (RNDP pt #27)
• We recognize that the U.S. justice system functions as a tool of colonial domination of African people and demand immediate transformation that includes:
o An immediate, transparent, community controlled investigation of the court processes that have resulted in the highly disproportionate number of incarcerated African people, especially young African men;
o The immediate abrogation of designer laws, such as three strikes, stop and frisk, two-tiered drug charges, mandatory minimums, and so-called anti-gang initiatives that target African people. We demand that reparations be paid to those imprisoned by these and other such discriminatory colonial laws;
o Recognition of prisons in the U.S. as concentration camps for our colonized population, and that such colonial domination of our people makes all Africans imprisoned in the U.S. political prisoners, regardless of the charges against them;
o The immediate release of all conscious African political prisoners, including those who were arrested because of political actions or statements, or who were first arrested for violations of colonial laws, and subsequently became politically active in the cause of our liberation (RNDP summary of pt #31)
The highest expression of these demands will be the achievement of the seizure of revolutionary national democratic state power in the hands of the African community itself.
Although we do not yet have the capacity to seize and wield such power, the Campaign for African Community Self-Defense can and must begin with basic work in the community to win the masses of the people to the idea of independence and seizure of state power.
This work must serve to enhance the fighting capacity of the African community, specifically the African working class.
The work of the Campaign for African Community Self-Defense (CACSD) should include but not be limited to:
a. Recruit into and build the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement, the mass organization of the African Socialist International.
b. Consolidation of actual organizational division of labor of local CACSD (ie chair, secretary, outreach coordinator, fundraiser/treasurer, directors of various programs of the campaign).
c. To win support and participation with the Oakland Freedom Summer Project of 2012.
d. To win support and participation for African Liberation Day 2012 in Washington, DC and Paris, France.
e. To win support and participation for the International Convention of the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement scheduled for September 2012.
f. To initiate routine activity under the aforementioned committee to undermine the colonial occupation and violence against the African community. Such activity should include but not be limited to:
1. Conduct regular political education classes on the principles of African Internationalism.
2. Implementation of cop watch programs that monitor the ongoing activity of police and gentrifying forces in the African community through documentation on video cameras and camera phones.
3. The development of a propaganda campaign to put up “wanted” posters with pictures of cops who have brutalized Africans.
4. To honor and defend the modern day resistance of the African working class as a template for the type of resistance, which under the leadership of InPDUM, will serve as a force to prevent future acts of colonial violence against the African community. Such examples should include:
i. The Philly Youth Uprisings (aka flash mobs) of 2010 and 2011.
ii. The shooting of U.S. police forces by Lovelle Mixon (Oakland 2009), Hydra Lacy and Nicholas Lindsey (St Petersburg, FL 2011).
iii. The Black August Rebellions of London, UK in 2011.
5. Organize tribunals (courts) to put the State on trial for the ongoing colonial oppression of the African community. The tribunals should always result in the People’s Sentence which would come in the form of the Revolutionary Democratic Program and be enforced by the work of InPDUM and the CACSD.
6. Initiate martial arts classes to teach African women, men and children how to defend themselves against aggressors.
7. Form rifle/gun clubs which function according to the parameters of the colonial local, state and federal law.
8. Carry out Formal Investigation Script Testimony (Black FIST) work, which is a complaint form for victims of police brutality.
9. Organize Uhuru Law Schools through which the people can be educated around their legal and democratic rights and how to fight for them.
10. Wage campaigns for justice for African victims of police murder and brutality. The fundamental principles of such campaigns should be informed by the revolutionary national democratic principles of the INPDUM and CACSD.
