InPDUM's Stance
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InPDUM was organized in 1991 in Chicago, Illinois as an organization of the African People's Socialist Party. It was initially called the National People's Democratic Uhuru Movement until it began to build branches outside the U.S.
While white leftist organizations often did such things without acknowledgment, when InPDUM was first organized it was unusual for a revolutionary, cadre-based African party to openly build and lead mass, popular organizations. It was almost unheard of for any party to publicly acknowledge leadership of a mass organization.
The formation of InPDUM came at a time when the Party was faced with an extremely difficult period of struggle. The revolution of the sixties that had ignited the imagination and aspirations of Africans throughout the U.S. and the world had been defeated militarily, and the white rulers had quite adroitly substituted a safe and tame caricature of struggle for the real thing.
The military defeat of our movement was U.S. government-orchestrated counterinsurgency against the just uprising of African people and it manifested itself as brutal repression of any evidence of real revolution on the one hand, accompanied by the elevation of harmless though sometimes radical, political expressions, on the other.
The African People's Socialist Party was founded in 1972. It emerged directly out of the experiences of the Black Revolution of the Sixties. The Party was born as an organization in motion. The Party was formed during the tail end of the U. S. colonial State repression that resulted in untold numbers of African revolutionaries murdered, imprisoned and chased into exile.
With our militants defeated, dead or exiled and our organizations destroyed for the most part, it became increasingly difficult to win people to the revolutionary ideas that were being explored during the height of the Black Revolution of the Sixties.
InPDUM became the Party's vehicle for bringing a demoralized African population back into political life. It led the fight for democratic space through which the people could enhance our capacity for struggle while providing a reserve force for the revolution that would have to be waged for our freedom.
InPDUM's founding conference was held in Chicago on April 6th, the anniversary of the police murder of 17-year-old Bobby Hutton of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. Hutton was murdered just two days after the U.S. government assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968. The work to build the InPDUM founding conference succeeded in winning participants from throughout the U.S. There were attendees from 26 cities and 2 states, including the District of Columbia. It was a major breakthrough for the revolutionary sector of our movement engaged in the struggle to end U.S. colonial domination of our people within current U.S. borders.
Before InPDUM no other organization within the general anti-colonial tendency of the African liberation movement had recognized the existence of the counterinsurgency and its implications for our struggle. Of course, counterinsurgency was the organized response of the U.S. government to the Black Revolution of the Sixties. It began with the murders and arrests of our leaders, the mass imprisonment of countless numbers of Africans in sweeps throughout the U.S., the destruction of our organizations and the dispersal of their members and a profane, public slander campaign designed to discredit our revolution and its representatives.
On top of this the counterinsurgency included a neo-colonial component that consisted of raising to public acclaim and leadership representatives of the African primitive petty bourgeoisie through the electoral process and through their organizations that offered a harmless, though sometimes radical sounding, substitute for our revolutionary struggle against U.S. domestic colonialism.
To further the aim of the counterinsurgency, which was essentially to destroy the independent, organized, capacity of our people to respond to our oppression, a drug economy was imposed on the African working class. This was to destroy the morale of the African working class and to isolate it from potential allies that might be sympathetic to its conditions of existence and efforts to overturn them. Africans who were denied employment within the legal capitalist economy were provided employment within the illegal capitalist drug economy.
All of this was happening in full public view, but the class character of most of the African liberation movement made it impossible for them to recognize the existence of a full blown counterinsurgency at work. It was the Party through InPDUM that was able to initiate a campaign directed at the counterinsurgency. It was InPDUM that had as an essential premise of its founding, exposure of and defeat of the counterinsurgency.
If nothing else, it was this work to expose and defeat the counterinsurgency, to alert the African liberation movement to its existence, taking it beyond an acknowledgement of some kind of "low intensity warfare" as some would put it, that validated InPDUM and characterized the most important aspect of its past period of work.
It was a major breakthrough that our movement was now capable of opening up the struggle for democracy on the terms of the revolution, as opposed to the definitions of the white left and defeatist, assimilationist, African petty bourgeoisie or middle class.
The white left and African assimilationists saw the issue of democratic rights as a struggle for civil rights or rights conferred on people by an existing state power. While InPDUM was determined to fight to defend those rights characterized as civil rights under the existing laws and traditions of the U.S., InPDUM saw the real, essential, struggle for democratic rights under revolutionary leadership as being a struggle for the right to African self determination.
The Assimilationists and other middle class African leadership understand democracy according to the definition of the white owning class of the U.S. To them democracy is some esoteric harmony of interests that can be found in U.S. society when it lives up to its constitution and the ideals espoused by its "founding fathers."
African Internationalists and real revolutionaries understand that democracy is a form of the State and that the State, by its very nature is oppressive. Therefore, when we speak of democracy or democratic rights we mean the struggle to place limitations on the power of the colonial State to intervene in the affairs of our domestically colonized African people.
When InPDUM declared that the highest form of democracy is self-determination it was speaking to the fact that the bourgeois democratic State of a hostile, foreign and alien power, the U.S. of North America, holds African people in colonial bondage. For us the significance of the U.S. constitution and its other democratic utterances and institutions is the fact that they offer us opportunities to expose the colonial contradictions, to expose the dictatorship of the colonial ruling class.
It helps us to understand that our task ultimately is not to win relief through the achievement of democracy within U.S. society but to struggle against and overthrow this colonial, bourgeois democracy that holds us in bondage.
The Main Resolution presented to the founding conference to build InPDUM in 1991 attempted to make this fact clear. One of the examples of this position can be found in this quote:
"The National People's Democratic Uhuru Movement, like components of the liberal African petty bourgeois-led Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties, will be a direct action movement that will engage in acts of civil disobedience and other tactics employed by democratic mass movements worldwide. However, even as we struggle to defend the national democratic rights won by our people in the past, rights which are constantly being abrogated by the U.S. government in the name of fighting a war against drugs, the National People's Democratic Uhuru Movement will fight to extend the question of democracy beyond the definition of the liberal African petty bourgeoisie.
"The highest expression of democracy is self-determination. A major aspect of NPDUM mass work should revolve around our efforts to initiate an internationally supervised plebiscite, which, as stated in Point Number 10 of the 10-Point program of the Black Panther Party, will be 'held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.' "
Notwithstanding the significance of InPDUM's founding and the incredible history of struggle that it has initiated and in which it has participated, the organization was hobbled at its inception by all the contradictions of the period as well as by the inexperience, ineptitude and struggles within the Party. This is because revolutionary parties also exist in society and experience on some level the same contradictions that are being experienced in the world.
For one thing there was the uneven ideological development within the Party. This is something that can be expected in any party, but it was especially undermining for a party that had set for itself such tasks as leading the struggle for democratic space to advance our revolution.
The first leader of InPDUM was a Party member who had previously been out of political life for a long time, since the murder of Illinois Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in 1969. Other Party leaders either understood the struggle for democracy on the terms of the liberal African petty bourgeoisie or incorrectly attempted to hold the membership of InPDUM, a mass organization of the Party, to the same terms and conditions as members of the Party.
Inexperience and unfamiliarity with Party standards and way of life represented a serious problem with the Party leader whose membership in the Party was a reintroduction into revolutionary political life after the repression of 1969. However, our greatest problem may have been how other Party leaders understood the question of democracy and how the Party would provide leadership for a mass organization comprised of members who were not formally inducted into the ranks and discipline of the Party.
It is obvious now that some Party members accepted the general bourgeois definition of democracy when setting out to build InPDUM. They did not understand democracy as a form of the State. In many instances they did not understand the question of the State itself as an instrument of repression in the service of the ruling class. In his pamphlet, The State and Revolution, V. I. Lenin, the leader of the Russian revolution of 1917, correctly defined the State as, "a special organization of force; it is an organization of violence for the suppression of some class."
Acceptance of the bourgeois definition of democracy is to rob democracy of its class character and its relationship to the State. The primary relationship Africans have to the U.S. is colonialism, the imposition of a foreign and alien State power over the lives of our people—the forcible expropriation of our capacity for self-determination. Therefore, understanding the State and its relationship to democracy is fundamental to understanding the essence of our struggle against colonialism. Indeed, the struggle against colonialism is the struggle for self-determination.
A weakness in the understanding of this question of the State and democracy challenged the ability of InPDUM to keep the struggle for self-determination in the center of its national democratic struggles. As a consequence, although InPDUM led many critical struggles for democracy on local levels – against police terror, oppression of our children in the school system, ideological assaults by the bourgeois media, etc. – these struggles did not necessarily win Africans to the struggle for self-determination.
Our efforts were too often devoid of an anti-colonial content, because too often they did not extend the definition of democracy beyond that of the colonial ruling class and its liberal spokespersons. For this reason InPDUM was sometimes seen as a militant version of the NAACP or some other liberal organization.
Not only did this prevent InPDUM from expanding the camp of the anti-colonial struggle, it also prevented InPDUM from building its own membership. In the final analysis, if one is going to join the NAACP one will join the real thing, not some militant, Johnny-come-lately version.
While the people complain about the NAACP when they come to us because of the inability of the NAACP to unite with the struggles of the African working class, they maintain their loyalty to the NAACP because it stands alone, unchallenged ideologically by our movement and solidly supported by the white ruling class.
The fact is the reason we speak of national democratic rights is because we want to emphasize that these are rights that are denied Africans as a national entity, not as some kind of misunderstood or deprived citizens of the U.S. The Main Resolution, the defining document of InPDUM's founding conference, attempted to distinguish InPDUM from organizations of the liberal African petty bourgeoisie. It clearly characterized the democratic mission of InPDUM as a function of the African revolution. Here are some of the words of that document:
"The revolutionary character of [I]NPDUM will be determined by the fact that it is led by our Revolutionary Party and that every action and campaign it initiates or participates in, in fact, even its very existence, meets the strategic needs of our Revolution...
"We reject the suggestion that our people suffer brutality and deprivation because we are not integrated with white people. Such a suggestion is a slanderous insult to the national dignity of our people. Nor do we believe that our conditions of existence are due to racism, the reactionary white nationalist notions in the heads of white people that function as the ideological foundation of parasitic world capitalism.
"...Our membership must be won to understand that the struggle of our people is not against the 'racist' ideas in the heads of white people but for Black Power over our own black lives: in short, for self-determination, for the right to combine with Africa and Africans worldwide in possession of our own self-governed democratic rights.
"The fact that NPDUM is under the leadership of our revolutionary Party is a mark of political maturity for the oppressed domestically colonized workers of the U.S. For one thing this means that our movement will never be trapped, like the Civil Rights Movement of the fifties and sixties, in limiting our struggle for democracy or democratic rights to those things approved of by the white ruling class and African petty bourgeoisie, or to acceptance by this system founded on our enslavement and brutalization.
"The leadership of NPDUM by our Party also removes us from the practice of pretending that mass organizations within our oppressed community are not informed by ideology, that they are empty of class or ideological content. We are clear: while the National People's Democratic Uhuru Movement will fight to defend the national democratic rights of all African people, it is under the leadership of the African working class in the form of its advanced detachment, the African People's Socialist Party.
"Ideologically we are African Internationalists. We recognize ourselves to be a part of one African people, whose conditions of existence worldwide are due to our enslavement, the rape of Africa and the pillage of the entire world by Europe, a process which established the conditions for, and existence of, a parasitic capitalist world order that achieves wealth and democracy for Europe, North America and Japan at the expense of the wealth and democracy for Africans and the world's peoples.
"It is this ideological clarity within the Uhuru Movement that allows us to understand the meaning of U.S. aggression against the world's peoples internationally – in Viet Nam, Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, Cuba, and even more recently against Iraq and the masses of Arab people. For in truth, despite its jingoist, white nationalist ravings of supremacy, the U.S. white ruling class and parasitic capitalist system, like white power in general, is absolutely dependent on our human and material resources for its very existence. Hence, U.S. white power must deny real democracy to the world's peoples as a condition for maintaining U.S. ruling class democracy. To defeat U.S. parasitic white capitalism we must struggle for real democracy.
"However, the leadership of the National People's Democratic Uhuru Movement by the African People's Socialist Party will not allow us to forget that even democracy is determined by the question of class. While the ancient Greeks are held up by white liberal historians as the precursors of Euro-American democracy, the reality is that only 20 percent of the ancient Greeks were free. Eighty percent of the Greeks were enslaved. The democracy of the ancient Greeks was a democracy of slave masters.
"The so-called democracy of the U.S. originated during the period of legal enslavement of captured and kidnapped Africans and even as the Native People were being actively and viciously wiped out. The Civil Rights Movement of the fifties and sixties, although waged in the name of all the African people, only provided democracy for the African primitive petty bourgeoisie who now run for president, lead genocidal U.S. colonial armies, act as nominal heads of local governments, drive Mercedes Benzes, etc. – at the expense of the majority of our people who now catch more hell from the U.S. government than we did 20 years ago."
What has been recently missing in InPDUM is the understanding of the fact that its mission and its connection to the Party requires a definition of democracy that is different from that of the U.S. ruling class, white liberals and African assimilationists. The reality is that InPDUM requires a revolutionary national democratic program. It means that InPDUM's leaders in the Party are required to understand fully that the Party as the advanced detachment of the African working class that is a social component of a colonized nation, has for itself not only the task of leading the struggle to liberate the African working class, but the task also of liberating the whole colonial nation, comprised of various, sometimes competing classes.
The revolutionary national democratic program of InPDUM must be a program that recognizes the legitimate interests of the whole colonized nation without sacrificing the leadership and interests of the African working class, the only social force that can lead the struggle for liberation to its legitimate conclusion.
The revolutionary national democratic program of InPDUM is a program that responds to the fact that the African working class does not yet have the ability to seize political power in its own name and must, therefore, mobilize other democratic elements of our colonized nation against colonialism or for self-determination. However, the leadership of InPDUM by the Party recognizes that the struggle around the revolutionary national democratic program must be led by the African working class.
This means that although InPDUM is a mass organization it does not mean that it is a liberal assimilationist organization. It means that although InPDUM fights for democratic rights we are talking about the national democratic rights of an oppressed, colonized people who suffer from the weight of the bourgeois democracy of a hostile colonial power.
When we take up the democratic issues as defined by the U.S. white ruling class, its institutions and constitution we are engaging U.S. domestic colonialism in a form of ideological and political jujitsu, using the weight and motion of its ideological utterances and political institutions against it in pursuit of our own interests.
This is the only way we can take on the critical democratic issues facing the masses of our people and, at the same time, win them to the struggle for self-determination. Any other stance prevents the masses from being able to make a choice between bourgeois democracy and revolutionary democracy.
Any other stance would have InPDUM functioning to perfect the capacity of the colonial state to hide its dictatorship from the masses; it would help to ive bourgeois democracy a cloak of legitimacy among the masses of our people and others.
Our Party leaders of InPDUM have suffered a lack of clarity on this issue of building a popular movement based on a revolutionary national democratic program, of building a movement that can distinguish itself from the democratic organizations of the African petty bourgeoisie or middle class.
Also, there has been the question of how the Party leads a mass movement that is comprised primarily of Africans who are not formally members of the Party and subject to the same standards and discipline of the Party.
For one thing Party leaders, so accustomed to functioning within small organizations with only a constitutionally required number of members, have had a problem dealing with the concept of mass organization. Too many of our leaders have been unable to envision an organization comprised of thousands of members, which is exactly what a mass organization must be in order to be truly considered a mass organization.
These leaders have made two crucial errors in building InPDUM. One, they have not recognized that by its nature a mass organization will have rapid turnover. Many of the persons who come to InPDUM get involved because of a timely issue: police killing, unjust jailings, student expulsions, etc. The moment these particular issues are resolved or the passion dies away they will no longer be available as active members of the organization. This is notwithstanding the fact that we will be able to win and keep many members through helping them to connect their current struggles to the issue of self-determination.
Therefore, there must always be a consistent membership drive to bring in new recruits to replace those who, especially when we fail to deepen their understanding of the root cause of the problems with which they are confronted, will drop out of political life.
Secondly, many leaders have stymied the ability of new members to join or remain in InPDUM because they have attempted to use InPDUM as a substitute for the Party. They have required that InPDUM members live up to the standards of the Party.
In so doing they have violated the constitution of InPDUM, which only requires for membership that unites with the purpose of the organization and pay an annual membership fee. But more than that they have defied the very basis for the existence of InPDUM, that is the winning Africans who otherwise would not be involved, into political life. For many, then, InPDUM provides a point of entry into political life.
From the perspective of the Party this helps us to build a reserve force for the revolution. It helps us to be able to work with Africans who are coming into political life in a mass organization, giving us each an opportunity to learn about the other. This helps us to avoid choking the Party with unreliable forces and with forces with no experience in organized political life.
We are approaching the InPDUM Convention in Huntsville with the best understanding of InPDUM's role and capacity since its founding in 1991. We have a new set of young Party leaders who will start afresh with the task of building InPDUM. They are leaders who have not succumbed to the tradition of simply tolling the bell, of doing things a particular way just because it has always been done in that fashion. They are leaders, who, although appreciative and open to the advice and experience of veterans of the Party, are confident of their ability to make a contribution and put their own imprint on InPDUM.
In addition, we have the benefit of the Party, through its work in the African Socialist International (ASI), gaining experience in working with other revolutionary national democratic programs. The Africanist Movement, based in West Africa, has been especially active in Guinea-Conakry and Sierra Leone with struggles designed to win the mass of Africans to revolutionary national democratic programs under very intense political conditions, sometimes approximating armed struggle. This means that within our movement the idea of a revolutionary national democratic program is something that is being pursued on different fronts. This helps us to understand our situation on the U.S. front of the African revolution more concretely. We have the ability to consider InPDUM's program alongside other concrete programs struggling to achieve the same basic aims within our movement.
First among the new leaders working to build InPDUM is Ivory Muhammad, chosen by APSP Chairman Omali Yeshitela in accordance with InPDUM's Constitution, to replace the current InPDUM president, Chimurenga Waller. Comrade Muhammad has the advantage of being young but also of an powerful political pedigree stemming from her parents and her own involvement in organizations committed to ending the colonial domination of our people by the U.S. government on this front of our international revolution (See page ? for an autographical biography of Ivory Muhammad).
President Muhammad is joined by a number of other young and enthusiastic cadres who have assumed critical leadership roles in building InPDUM and have traveled the length and breadth of the U.S. to win participation in the convention. Moreover, Comrade Muhammad is requiring each of these key elements to present a plan of action for building in their various areas of responsibility. This guarantees that each component of the organization is working with a program consistent with the strategical direction of InPDUM and can, therefore, be easily held accountable. Also, for the very first time, InPDUM is working on development of an actual annual fundraising plan and budget. This will also be presented at the convention.
The primary task of InPDUM coming out of this convention will be to build the organization. Work is being prepared for the convention to develop and strengthen existing structures and to fill positions necessary for the effective functioning of the organization. However, the most significant part of this work to build the organization will be the recruitment of thousand of members into the organization. This time, while taking on some specific political campaigns, the leaders of InPDUM have concluded that the next year of work will be primarily about winning new members, not new political campaigns. It has been already determined that the organization cannot even do effective campaigns, nor raise money or too many other things unless it has a membership pool that is deep enough to support the work. This means that the essential work of InPDUM for the next year will be ideological work. This is because InPDUM organizers have to present the organization to masses of African people -- especially to the workers, democrats and intellectuals -- in a way that justifies membership based on revolutionary democratic principles. This is going to be the test of the organizers and the key to building the anti-colonial camp and winning members to InPDUM on a much higher level that will eventually contribute to liberation.
The crisis of imperialism is deepening daily. Increasingly the political crisis that has been visible for some time now is being noticeably complemented by its underlying economic crisis. The tendency of imperialism is always to do what some leftists call shift the imperialist crisis onto the backs of the oppressed. In the U.S. this would include the backs of the domestically colonized African population.
However, this tendency to "shift" the crisis is simply an expression of the reality that the crisis of imperialism is almost always a response to the struggling peoples of the world against the stranglehold of parasitic capitalism. It is the struggles against colonialism in any of its forms; the struggles to break free of the imposed economic structures of imperialism, and for independence and genuine self-determination.
This is the meaning of U.S. intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, its reaction to Venezuela's attempt to rescue its oil resources from imperialism's control and its new, aggressive threat to Africa and other places of the world where imperialist hegemony is being challenged.
This is also why we can anticipate an escalation of the attack on the national democratic rights of African colonized within current U.S. borders and why the development of InPDUM at this time is so critical.
