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By Omali Yeshitela, Chairman of the African People's Socialist Party
Published Oct 6, 2008
defend the national democratic rights won by our people
struggle to extend the question of democracy beyond the definition of the liberal African Petty bourgeoisie.
that within the oppressed and colonized African community there are Africans whose class interests give them greater solidarity with our national oppressors than with African workers and the masses of our people
against these sell-out forces as well, sometimes more vigorously than with our capitalist-colonialist oppressors
defeat of the Black Revolution of the Sixties was a victory for white bourgeois liberalism and the liberal sector of the African petty bourgeoisie, whose interests were restricted to democratic rights under colonial white power
African presidential candidate an attempt to rescue imperialist white power
Today a sector of liberal imperialism is fighting for the "right" to rescue "Western" imperialism from an ever-increasing crisis that threatens its hegemonic place in the world.
conditions of existence of African people have worsened in the most recent period.
Barack Obama .... is testimony to the depth of the crisis of imperialism in general, but especially of U.S. imperialism. It was in the U.S. that the imperialist ideological underpinning of white racial supremacy or racism was most developed and viciously imposed.
....a kinder face of imperialism....
....African as head of the U.S. State is the result of the ever-growing struggle of non-white victims of imperialist slavery and colonial oppression for control of our lives, lands and resources.
....Barack Obama represents balm to the North American oppressor nation population, which has grown extremely anxious by the obvious manifestations of crisis that have begun to impact its economic and physical security.
....provides relief that colonized African people, historically the most revolutionary volatile sector of the population, have chosen to seek salvation in a manner that validates the parasitic social system. Obama's Democratic Party candidacy absolves whites of any responsibility to rectify their relationship with the oppressed and exploited peoples of the U.S. and the world.
....African population itself, bereft of revolutionary leadership, has jumped on the bandwagon of the ruling class-sponsored African presidential candidate
....Obama ....absolutely refuses to address the pressing, life- and liberty-threatening imperialist-imposed conditions confronting Africans in the U.S. and the world.
....Obama is seen by the North American oppressor-nation population and far-seeing sectors of its ruling class as an invaluable asset during these times of extreme turbulence for the imperialist world order.
imperial arrogance carried out in blatant racial terms has now become an impediment for imperialist success
increasingly necessary for imperial white power to disguise itself on a global level as it had so successfully done for a while within the former colonies
[US]....fighting to rescue Western imperialism, it is also struggling to maintain its preeminent imperialist position as the sole remaining super power.
Obama's claim of "post-racial America"
....comments Obama has made concerning African people, as a people have been denunciatory.
....according to him, 90 percent of the "racial" problems of the U.S. have been solved.
mortgage crisis is but one example of the ongoing exploitation of African people that is directly tied to our oppression as a domestically colonized sector of the dispersed African nation.
the black-white health gap costs the lives of more than 83,000 Africans annually in the U.S.
one in every eight African men in his 20s is now in prison or jail on any given day
5,000 African men in prison per every 100,000, compared with 736 per 100,000 for white men.
only 33 percent of convicted white defendants going to prison compared with 51 percent of Africans.
[BHO]....assures whites of the oppressor nation that they do not have to fear independent African resistance that will challenge the status quo and their lifestyle.
....captures the millions of African people whose growing emiseration might normally drive them to independent, alternative, revolutionary politics and woos them back into the safe embrace of the capitalist-colonialist system.
....a similar impact on the international stage, especially, but not exclusively among the world's dispersed African population.
....his ability to seduce the European bourgeoisie and people who have become so resentful of U.S. anti-European foreign policy and hegemonic intent under the current U.S. regime that it threatens the post "Cold War" "Atlantic Alliance."
....Mr. Obama was favoured by a four-to-one margin across the 22,500 people polled in 22 countries....
Opportunist movements in U.S. provide no allies for anti-colonial struggles
....because of the weakness of a revolutionary movement inside of the U.S., struggling countries around the world cannot realistically rely on meaningful solidarity from revolutionary organizations here.
....revolutionary movements within the U.S....ingratiating themselves to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party with the hopes of being awarded political crumbs from the imperialist table.
....abandons and covers over the revolutionary aspirations of Africans and other colonially oppressed peoples as represented by genuine revolutionary organizations and parties. It is a stance that assumes the permanence of U.S. imperialism.
....This is the opportunism that was prevalent during the second imperialist world war, when in the name of a so-called united front against fascism, the international Soviet-dominated communist movement impeded and denounced any struggles by subject peoples against its imperialist allies holding us in colonial bondage.
....opportunists....take Obama's pronouncements at face value, believing that his words and promises (even those unspoken to African people) are to be accepted as honest representations of his personal views.
....the ideas being bandied about during these elections [2008] are the ideas of different sectors of the ruling class struggling for a popular mandate to utilize the power of the capitalist-colonialist state to advance their interests.
....Obama has received more money from Wall Street than any other candidate throughout the primary election process.
....Many of the arguments we hear for having to support Obama today were advanced by much of the same anti-imperialist movement in supporting Clinton's candidacy then.
....will we contribute to the disarmament of the masses by leaving them to the mercy of the same predator adorned with a different complexion and style?
....The proclaimed fear of fascism as a basis for supporting Obama demands a convenient historical amnesia. It demands that we forget the lessons of the U.S. during the heyday of what has been defined as an incipient fascist movement in the U.S. during the mid 1950s. The only thing at that time that kept U.S. society open, that prevented the successful rise of the most reactionary sector of the white ruling class was the struggle of African people for democracy. This was the turning point in U.S. society that defined that period as one for democracy and civil rights.
....A serious, successful struggle for the national democratic rights of African people, this time under the leadership of the African working class will be even more effective today in opening U.S. society than it was in the 1950s. It is surely better to rely on the power of the people than the good will of a liberal representative of imperialism, even if it is an African.
....the so-called revolutionaries in the U.S. are not engaged in theoretically informed strategically based work their truths are generally useless. This is notwithstanding the fact that they are sometimes wrapped in weighty revolutionary language too obtuse for the ordinary person to easily grasp.
This is a kind of opportunism that is informed by philosophical idealism, a form of pure abstraction where one can draw any conclusion one so desires without fear of the conclusion having to be tested in the real world. It is an instance of continuing to see philosophy as something that simply explains the world, without any responsible to change the world.
[1991 InPDUM founding doc]: "The liberal sector of the white ruling class had funded the Civil Rights Movement. They needed the limited revolution for their own economic interests following the second imperialist war. The defeat of the Black Revolution of the Sixties was a victory for the liberal white ruling class and its junior partner the liberal African primitive petty bourgeoisie, whose limited revolution for democracy, prestige and material wealth for itself was to be at the expense of democracy, prestige and material wealth for the broad masses of our wretched and brutalized people.
"In the final analysis it has been this relationship between the white ruling class and the African petty bourgeoisie that has proved the most devastating component of the U.S. counterinsurgency. For it is the African petty bourgeoisie that function as the social base for the U.S. neocolonial strategy, currently the linchpin of the U.S. counterinsurgency. The U.S. neocolonial strategy is simply a strategy of formal transfer of political power to the African petty bourgeoisie, generally trough the electoral process, while economic control and hence de facto power remains in the hands of the white ruling class.
"The U.S. neo-colonial strategy has provided an excellent cover for U.S. domestic colonialism and up till now, along with historical white opportunism, has contributed magnificently to the maintenance of class peace within the U.S. and the isolation of the suffering African working class within the U.S. and internationally."
"[W]e must build an organization which will also attack the neocolonial component of the U.S. counterinsurgency. And since the electoral process is the primary method for implementing neocolonialism within the U.S., our movement must deny the African petty bourgeoisie the free hand to utilize it with impunity to carry out a ruling class or corrupt self-serving petty bourgeois agenda. In order to do this we must fight them on the arena of the electoral process by running our own candidates and where appropriate, by registering our movement as a mass party.
"However, two things must be kept in mind. Number one, we are not talking about symbolic campaigns. We are talking about campaigns to win elections and/or to affect policies governments are capable of implementing. Number two, we are talking about winning campaigns on principle, on the basis of actually massifying our demands for self-determination among the people.
"This means that we must learn certain skills necessary for struggle in this arena, skills that most people in most mass movements may not have, but many of which the Uhuru Movement has acquired over the years although not in sufficient enough quantity nor quality. Serious, principled struggle in this arena – in defense of the national democratic rights of our people and as part of the process to expose the U.S. counterinsurgency leading to the abrogation of many of those democratic rights, will shatter the democratic façade of the colonialist white ruling class state."
....We have been assumed to be elitist, thinking of ourselves as knowing better than the people. Some have declared that we are making the error of isolating ourselves by getting too far ahead of the people by criticizing Obama. Others have claimed that our criticism represents support for the white candidate of the ruling Republican Party.
one indicator of the significance of the betrayal of the people by those who would wear the mantle of leadership that the sentiments of the masses are wedded to the interests of a sector of our oppressor nation and class.
....the Democratic Party ....is for all practical purposes the party of the masses of our people precisely because those who claim revolutionary credentials have ensconced themselves in the very same bourgeoisie party, albeit under the leadership of its liberal wing, and have denied them revolutionary leadership.
....real crime is being committed by those who would tail the masses as opposed to lead them; by those who would assume our task to be simply waiting for the people to indicate the direction they want to go and to then get in front of the uninformed crowd.
....view of many of our opportunist opponents one can only pursue the interests of the people through the patronage of one sector of the white ruling class or another. For them opposition to one wing of the ruling class must necessarily mean support for another.
. We recognize the depth of the crisis of imperialism and the fact that the two imperialist parties represent, at this point, two different approaches to how to resolve the crisis and rescue imperialism.
....when Malcolm X was a representative of the aspirations of the suffering African masses or when the Black Panther Party and other revolutionary organizations were viewed as real alternatives to imperialism, we were never confronted with the question of, "If not the Democrat, then what?'"
can walk the earth without fear of real revolutionary opposition ....the people are stuck with a bourgeois choice in the absence of a real revolutionary alternative....
...., Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. has had to face the increasingly sophisticated resistance of the people that although not tied to revolutionary program is nevertheless representative of a new historical era that is attacking the very basis of Euro-American capitalism resting upon a parasitic pedestal of colonial oppression.
"Imperial stability," Brzezinski continues, "has historically depended on skilled domination, superior military organization, and – ultimately most important – political passisivity on the part of dominated peoples against their less numerous but more assertive dominators… "
....earth-shaking change is already happening....
Obama....call to manage, control, misdirect and undermine the change that is being forced upon the imperialist world by the struggling masses of the world.
the U.S. has been advancing its military capacity to the doorstep of Russia
....We have long said in the African People's Socialist Party that our struggle had entered into an era of the final offensive against imperialism in historical terms. We have long ago proclaimed that imperialism was a spent shell, without a viable future, living off past glories and desperately fighting to hold onto what it has stolen.
Western imperialism that is on the defensive, within the U.S. and throughout the world. Imperialism is on the defensive immediately and in a historical sense. Imperialism has been mortally wounded by the ongoing struggles of oppressed peoples of the world to take back their lives and resources, which constitute the pedestal upon which imperialism resides and that it needs as a condition for its continuing existence.
....profound crisis of imperialism is the result of the birth pangs of a whole new social system being born from the womb of the parasitic past.
stress being experienced by the imperialist world economy and the growing resistance of the world's peoples, along with our work to build the African Socialist International, we see the historical conditions for the birth of socialism as the new world economy.
In the victories being won by the world's peoples to take back our resources, our sovereignty and our identity we see a world pregnant with the possibility for the emergence of a liberated and unified Africa and African people worldwide.
Our enemies see this possibility as well. This is the significance of Brzezinski's quoted ruminations. Their response is to attempt to abort this process, to prevent the rise of the people to real power and our rightful place as leaders of society.
Even sectors of the African petty bourgeoisie understand this possibility. They too would abort the emergence of this new social force in the world. As Obama has suggested to us on Father's Day this year, they hate the birth of the new world because of the fact that the expectant parents of the child are of the African working class.
....while the African working class is not strong enough to conquer power in its own name and selfish interests, it is the only social force that is capable of leading a revolutionary national democratic struggle. That is a struggle that embraces the interests of the most progressive sectors of the oppressed African nation, whose national interests oppose the colonial domination of our people and, when fought for under the leadership of the African working class, can achieve a democratic revolutionary character.
Because the African working class is not only interested in its ascendancy to power as a class, but in the emancipation of the whole colonized nation, which is a condition for the rise of the working class, it is the only social force capable of leading the struggle for the achievement of revolutionary national democratic power.
Use every front
to the masses of our people and win this program as the program of the people. This is our way forward regardless of which imperialist candidate achieves the right to be captain of this imperialist Titanic.
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