[The following is an excerpt from the Political Report to the 2017 Plenary of the African People’s Socialist Party “Putting Revolution Back On The Agenda!”]
What will liberated Africa look like?
Since that time, after many setbacks, serious class-based battles within the African community and the establishment of neocolonialism as a generalized condition for African people, we are forced to look beyond national liberation to the question of the kind of society we are fighting for and to identify the social forces necessary to achieve it.
Africans, a once free people existing within our own independent economies in Africa, have been transformed into commodities (first-capital) and producers of capital (first-workers) within a social system defined by the relationship between capitalist production and producers resting on a foundation of slavery and the colonial domination of peoples and territories.
National liberation serves the purpose of freeing Africans from the direct foreign domination. However, direct foreign domination is not necessary for vicious, life-draining economic exploitation, either by foreign or domestic capital. National liberation under the leadership of the African petty bourgeoise leaves in place a system of exploitation.
African toilers [and] producers, continue to be exploited under the aegis of a domestic flag, maybe, as in Libya, a Red, Black and Green flag.
To be victorious, our revolution must take place under the leadership ofd the African working class.
This is the role of the African People’s Socialist Party [APSP], the Advanced Detachment, general staff of the African working class.
Only the African working class, aligned with other toilers, especially the poor peasants, has a stake in destroying the entire system of exploitation and all of its attendant structures, including the artificial borders that exploit Africa but function as the incubators for the reproduction of the neocolonial petty bouregeois class as a social force.
Only the African working class is compelled to fight for the destruction of class society and the exploitation that produced it.
Under the independent revolutionary leadership of the African working class, organized under African Internationalist principles, victory will mean the defeat of the foreign imperialists and their domestic minions.
It will mean that the toilers—the workers and poor peasants in particular—will become the new, temporary ruling class; the custodians of the means of production now owned and controlled by capitalists, mostly foreign.
Liberation under the leadership of African Internationalist-informed workers, organized in the African People’s Socialist Party will mean the end of economic exploitation and once the imperialists and the petty bourgeois neocolonialist have been crushed, the end of all exploitation.
This means that African women, who will play a fundamental role in the liberation of our Africa, will rise to full stature with all rights and authority this infers.
This means a major assault will be made against all restrictions on the rights of women that hide under the flimsy and most cases, false mask of “tradition.”
Nor will African liberation under the leadership of the African working class tolerate social, economic and political oppression of sectors of the African Nation and working class because of spurious, bourgeois morality,
We condemn the morality and relations that permit Europeans (white people), imperialist corporations, countries and neocolonial thugs to exploit our people’s life and resources in Africa and to flaunt laws protecting sovereignty, the environment and customs with impunity while attacking African people and the working class based on sexual orientation or relations between same gender loving individuals.
The liberated African worker’s State will only oppress the imperialists and the neocolonialists who have surrendered Africa’s future to them. We will call on the entire African working class based on the false contradictions of sexual identity, ethnic identity and regional and religious differences.
Control of the means of production
The African Revolution that liberates and unites Africa and African people under African Internationalism, the organized, conscious and victorious leadership of the African working class will be the death knell of imperialist white power and capitalism as a world economy. It will finally allow for the African workers to take social possession of the means of production.
Our victory will mean the entire process of production—mining, building, manufacturing, shipping, distribution, etc.—will occur through workers councils throughout the production process. This will guarantee safety and creativity throughout.
Workers will not approve going into mines that are unsafe and improvement in the productive process will not be motivated by profit, that has no regard for safety and proficiency otherwise, but by the needs and aspirations of workers as producers and consumers.
Additionally, because the State of the African economy smothered by the whims and requirements of imperialist white power has minimal industrial development, much of the lackluster economic life is center in the countryside.
The African Internationalism Revolution will be the first major step in the world in resolving the contradiction between the city and countryside; the full, rapid development of Africa will require it.
We will have to reorganize the African economy—destroying all borders—into a full-fledged anti-colonial economy.
Today’s economic activity in Africa is tied to the interests of foreign, imperialist exploiters; every bit of food grown or not grown, every factory, every decision to develop a diamond, gold, iron or bauxite mine instead of production that satisfies our needs, is imperialist-driven.
It has been the imperialist-driven economy that has driven so many African men, women and children from the artificially-created cruel conditions of the countryside into unsanitary and overcrowded cultural-crushing cities.
“It takes a village…”
The African working class, as the transitory ruling class, will organize production based on the real needs of the people rather than the contrived, profit-driven and profit-motivated needs of the capitalists.
Collective housing, neighborhood councils with the power to solve domestic problems, efficient public transportation, African educational systems, literacy eradication campaigns, centers for music, cultural development and socializing, birthing programs and socialist care for our elderly, time and centers for reflection, revolutionary rehabilitation programs, efficient public transportation, barefoot doctors deployed into the community as in China and, as in Cuba, places where lovers can go for privacy will become ordinary features of life, overturning the horrible day-to-day grind that characterizes our reality today.
Even the form of the family will be reorganized under the dictatorship of the African worker’s State.
It will allow adults to enter into agreements of relationship that are free from economic compulsion. Women will be assured economic independence so financial duress will not be a factor that determines their commitment to a relationship nor enslaves their emotions.
The immediate role of the African worker’s State will be to function as a protector of society against incestuous, exploitative and oppressive relationships and their consequences.
African men and women can determine whatever arrangements they contract among themselves with the State functioning as arbiter only until the time when the rule of habit and tradition overturn the rule of the State that becomes unnecessary in human affairs.
Our Party also has a deep commitment to the well being of our African children, recognizing that under the system of parasitic capitalism our children live with daily trauma. They are demeaned, locked up and gunned down by the colonial police and tormented in the white school system.
The APSP follows in the footsteps of the African Revolution of Haiti whose in victory in 1804 produced a progressive constitution that for the first time in history abolished all [of the] notion of an illegitimate child and pledged a commitment to the nurturing and protection of every child.
The African adage declaring the role of the village in raising a child will be given new life.
Women will be freed from the burden as isolated, individual primary childcare givers. The family now becomes the society in a relationship that has the force of law and collective resources of the people that have been liberated from their role as “surplus” under private ownership within the capitalist system.
This means the institution of State-funded and administered nurseries and childcare collectives that benefit parents and children in a manner that could never happen under colonial capitalist society developed though the commodification of African parents and children.
Parents of the community at large will be able to engage in a stress-free, non-competitive relationship with our children.
The African Internationalist liberation and unification of Africa and Africans worldwide will be the major blow to destroy the entire capitalist system that was an outgrowth of colonialism.
It will be the fundamental instrument in the emergence of world socialism, providing the defining direction for the world economy.
The achievement of African Internationalist socialism will be the essential force in the achievement of permanent world peace, easily understood when it is recognized that most wars are fought by States contending with each other and with peoples for profit-generating markets and resources.
We will replace capitalist competition with socialist cooperation, something not possible before now.
