Relentless! 50 years of leadership towards African Redemption
By Chairman Omali Yeshitela
It is no exaggeration to say that we are entering into this upcoming Plenary at a new, defining moment in the history of our Party and the African revolution that we have played a fundamental role in reinvigorating since the military defeat of the Black Revolution of the Sixties.
This 3rd Plenary of our 7th Congress marks the 50th anniversary year of our Party’s founding in May of 1972. It is remarkable because the history of the African revolution is concentrated within our 50-year history.
Our 3rd Seventh Congress Plenary further evinces the relentless pursuit of total African liberation by our Party by serving as the springboard to the African People’s Socialist Party’s (APSP) 8th Congress, which will also be our First International Congress. Scheduled for Occupied Azania (South Africa) on October 6-20, 2023, our First International Congress will bring hundreds of Africans from throughout Africa and the African world, into the ranks of our Party as active agents of African redemption.
If there is anything that characterizes the history of our Party for the fifty years of our existence and growth, it is “Relentless.” This is what our Party will be celebrating at our 3rd Plenary, moving toward our first Congress in Mother Africa.
Our Party has been relentless in pursuit of the redemption of Africa and African people for the entirety of our existence. Indeed, the history of the entire African liberation struggle is preserved within the fabric of our Party that has picked up the debris of defeat and resurrected our struggle against colonialism on a much stronger foundation.
Our Party has successfully defied the tradition of U.S. colonial destruction of the effective life span of revolutionary organizations within three or four years for over 50 years.
As a Party, we can clearly see the advances the African liberation struggle has achieved in our self-declared determination to complete the Black Revolution of the 1960s. Because of the APSP, our colonizers have been unable to extinguish the unbroken history of resistance through military defeat of the Black Revolution of the Sixties.
Because of our Party, the African revolution has developed along one historical continuum, constantly summing up and learning from one period to the next—instead of being trapped with the undialectical perception of beginning history anew with every twist and turn encountered.
This undialectical approach to struggle denies our movement the benefit of lessons of the past. It denies our struggle the benefit of development, as opposed to the truncated, foundering, fits and starts that characterized much of the anti-colonial African movement after its military defeat in the Sixties.
During the Party’s 50-year period of intense political activity, I also worked diligently to develop the revolutionary theory of African Internationalism that defines the African revolution and connects it to the advent of capitalism, born as a world economy at the expense of Africa, Africans and all the world’s peoples subjected to foreign and alien colonial rule up to this date.
We have provided the advanced revolutionary philosophy that is absolutely necessary for revolution rather than reformist conclusions, and that clearly shows the existing global social system of oppression came into existence through the colonial enslavement of Africa and Africans and that therein lies the source of its destruction and our liberation.
In the fifty years of our existence, the Party has answered most of the outstanding ideological and political questions, relegated by military defeat during the last era to the wayside of history. For fifty years of revolutionary activity to win African liberation we successfully bore the responsibility of answering the question: “to what end”?
We have provided the only scientific and rational answer to the question: “What about the white people”?
We have led the struggle for, and actualized the process of, attaining reparations for African people.
We have organizationally reconnected the African revolution on a global level, in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, Asia, North and South America.
With our Party’s founding we have established the African working class as the leadership of the struggle for the liberation of the forcibly dispersed African nation.
The theoretical work of the APSP has developed beyond the foundational worldview that informed the political movement initiated more than 100 years ago by the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and African Communities League led by Marcus Garvey.
Garvey’s cry of “Africa for Africans at home and abroad,” was more than a simple emotional declaration. It was a demand that carried within it the recognition that Africans globally, called by a variety of names and forcibly dispersed to a variety of places, are one people whose future and destiny are irreversibly connected. It was this understanding by Garvey that also influenced the UNIA slogan: “One God, One Aim, One Destiny,” a profound philosophical statement, the materialist significance and effectiveness of which were not obscured by its idealist reference to “god.”
With the founding of our Party, the African revolution has regained the global revolutionary impulse that an array of our enemies sought to destroy with the assault on Garvey and the UNIA by U.S. and European colonizers who were aided by incipient neocolonial forces within our forcibly dispersed colonized African nation. We have kept this all-African revolutionary impulse alive in words and deeds, in theory and practice.
We have consistently fought to resurrect the anti-colonial movement that has been undermined by the simpering, defeatist, petty bourgeoisie politics of anti-racism that is a call to improve the system of our oppression rather than destroy it.
Our Plenaries and Congresses have become the vehicles for an ongoing assessment of our work and the conditions in the world affecting our struggle for total liberation and unification of every square inch of Africa and the entire globally dispersed African nation.
Our Party has been there when others have succumbed to the blandishments of opportunist reformism or retired from the field of revolutionary anti-colonial struggle.
For fifty years, after the assassinations, political murders, jailings, mass repression of the people and comprehensive, ideological, and psychological warfare, the African People’s Socialist Party has not taken one step backward.
We have been relentless!
We are winning!