African People's Solidarity Committee Platform – African People's Solidarity Committee

Who we are and what we believe

We are an organization of predominately North American and European (white) people, formed by and working under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP).We unite with the political understandings, goals, strategy and leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party, the Party of the African working class. The APSP aims to defeat U.S. and world imperialism and liberate Africa under an all-African socialist government led by African workers and poor peasants.
We unite with the 14-point Platform of the African People’s Socialist Party.We believe that the APSP Platform represents a comprehensive revolutionary program for African national liberation. The Platform of the APSP provides the political and practical basis for the movement for one united and liberated Africa under the leadership of African workers. The APSP Platform calls for justice, democratic rights, reparations and African control of African land, resources and destiny free from foreign colonial domination.We believe that solidarity with the African People’s Socialist Party’s Platform and the struggle for African national liberation is necessary for North Americans and Europeans to take a genuinely anti-imperialist stand.
We unite with the understanding of the African People’s Socialist Party that Africans worldwide are one people subjected to colonial domination wherever they are located.We recognize that African people are located not only in their homeland of Africa, but in the U.S., the Caribbean, South America and elsewhere in the world because of the legacy of centuries of enslavement by Europe and the U.S.We recognize that African people were violently kidnapped from their homeland and transported across the ocean as human cargo to be sold by Europeans for nearly 500 years.From Brooklyn to Sierra Leone, from South Africa to Jamaica and London, African people today face poverty, oppression, police and military violence, massive imprisonment, lack of democratic rights and early death no matter where they are located.We unite with the African People’s Socialist Party’s understanding that the problem facing African people is not racism, but colonial domination by foreign powers, a situation that can only be remedied by the worldwide struggle for African national liberation.
Five hundred years ago Europe was characterized by poverty, war, disease and oppression while Africa was known for prosperity, justice and advanced civilizations. The European economy was based on feudalism under which the majority of the population were serfs tied to the lands of the aristocracy.As the APSP shows us, Europe rescued itself from scarcity and poverty through its assault on Africa and by the year 1500 had already stolen more than 80,000 enslaved African human beings and 700 tons of gold from Africa.The trade in African people, continuing for almost 500 years, turned the whole continent of Africa into Europe’s most lucrative commodity. The European onslaught on Africa was responsible for the slaughter of hundreds of millions of African people and the seizure of their land and natural resources.At the same time Europeans committed genocide against hundreds of millions of Indigenous people in the Americas in the process of stealing their lands and resources. Europeans also imposed opium on the people of China, Vietnam and Southeast Asia as a means of gaining colonial control of Asian lands and reaping massive profits.This process brought immeasurable wealth into Europe, transforming it from feudalism to an industrialized world power at the expense of the majority of humanity.We unite with the understanding of the African People’s Socialist Party that capitalism is a parasitic system, born at the expense of Africans and oppressed peoples of the world and maintained through colonial exploitation and oppression.
We unite with the understanding of the African People’s Socialist Party that the entire white population, regardless of economic or social status, sits on a pedestal of the oppression of African and other oppressed peoples. This parasitic relationship has been defined by the APSP as the material basis for the opportunism of white people in general as well as the white left and liberal movements.We recognize that in Europe, North America, southern Africa and Australia, all white people experience prosperity, opportunities, democratic rights and the highest standard of living in the world at the expense of the oppression of African and other colonized peoples.The looting of Africa, the Americas and Asia that built capitalism transformed the oppressed serfs in Europe into the bourgeois, petty bourgeois and working classes.White prosperity in North America, Europe, Africa, Israel and Australia requires the poverty and suffering of African and oppressed peoples of the world. As an oppressor nation living at the expense of Africans and others, white people everywhere have historically united with our own ruling class in attacking and exploiting African and other colonized peoples in order to gain economic, political and social benefits for ourselves.While some inequities can be found within white society, these contradictions exist on the pedestal of slavery, genocide and colonialism. Throughout the history of the U.S. white citizens of all classes have violently lynched, tortured, degraded and terrorized African people as a means of securing a place on the pedestal of white society and gaining a greater share in the stolen colonial loot.The fact that white society sits on the backs of African and other oppressed peoples is the basis for the opportunism of the self-serving white left which has historically betrayed, attacked and attempted to control the African Liberation Movement, instead of standing in solidarity with it.The white left has generally struggled for more of the stolen colonial wealth to be shared by traditionally excluded sectors of the white population as a solution to their problems. The left has never acknowledged that African, Indigenous and other oppressed peoples make up domestic colonies inside the U.S.
We recognize that the African Liberation Movement is the key revolutionary force inside the borders of the U.S. and that the liberation of Africa is key to the destruction of U.S. and Western imperialism.In the 1960s the Black Revolution, as an anti-colonial movement inside the U.S., shook this government to its foundations and sparked the Indigenous, Mexican, Puerto Rican and other U.S.-based anti-colonial movements.Inside this country African people make up the largest urban colonized population strategically located within the center of imperialism. When the U.S. Front of the African Revolution is tied organizationally to Africans around the world they are one billion strong.Stolen African labor and resources are the cornerstone of the U.S. economy and today more than 80 percent of the mineral resources needed by U.S. imperialism are found in Africa. Without the looting of Africa’s wealth and the worldwide colonial domination of African workers laboring for substandard wages – often less than a dollar a day – the U.S. would not be able to maintain its economic and military hegemony.Therefore, the liberation of Africa and African people, led by the African working class and impoverished peasants, will be the key to the final destruction of U.S. and Western imperialism.
We demand an end to neocolonialism, the imperialist strategy that creates an elite sector of African people to carry out the interests and goals of imperialist white power.We denounce the white left and liberal support for neocolonialism.Neocolonialism is an imperialist tool to carry out a colonial agenda not only throughout Africa and around the world, but inside the U.S. itself. In Africa and the U.S. neocolonial puppets live off the crumbs of imperialist profits at the expense of African workers. In the U.S. neocolonialists are used to maintain the oppression and criminalization of African people, leading them away from independent organizations and economic development that serve the interests of the African working class. Inside the U.S., in Africa and around the world neocolonialism has made the conditions faced by African workers worse than those experienced under direct white power.
We demand an end to the counterinsurgency waged by the U.S. government against the African working class.In the U.S. and throughout the world imperialism uses counterinsurgency programs to overthrow leaders, governments and organizations led by African workers for the liberation of African people.Imperialist counterinsurgency programs are responsible for the assassinations of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Fred Hampton and Malcolm X in the U.S., and for the overthrow of the government of Kwame Nkrumah.Inside the U.S. the government used COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program to assassinate the leaders of the Black Power Movement of the 60s and destroy its organizations. In the wake of the attack on the movement of the 60s the government continues to wage a counterinsurgency against the entire African working class, imposing on it a destabilizing illegal drug economy.Government-imposed illegal drugs in the African community are used to criminalize the entire working class. Imposed drugs are used to justify martial law, police containment tactics, police murders and brutality and the passage of African-specific laws such as Three Strikes, You’re Out. These laws are responsible for the massively disproportionate imprisonment of African men in the U.S., which has the highest prison population in the world.We recognize that this counterinsurgency that brings death and violence to African workers colonized inside the U.S. is used as a stimulus for white economic development through the highly profitable prison and drug industries.Counterinsurgency and police containment programs against the African community are enthusiastically voted in and supported by the white population. The white left and liberals back neocolonial politicians and officials who often play the role of carrying out counterinsurgency programs against African and oppressed peoples.
We believe that reparations are owed to African people from the imperial powers, the corporations and from white people ourselves.It is clear that the U.S. and entire capitalist economy is built on the theft of African labor, land and precious resources for the benefit of the white world.The trade in African people, sold on auction blocks by the millions in U.S. cities, worked to death on cotton, tobacco and sugar plantations and cornerstone of the so-called triangular trade, sparked every front of the U.S. economy from industry, banking, law firms, textiles, manufacturing, universities, railroads and transportation, hotels, housing and construction.After the end of chattel slavery, the genocidal system of direct colonialism was imposed on Africa to steal Africa’s precious resources such as diamonds, rubber, oil and gold for the benefit of the capitalist countries.In the U.S. other highly profitable methods of exploitation of African people were devised providing wealth for white people. These included Jim Crow, convict leasing, sharecropping, violent destruction of African economic centers such as Tulsa, OK and Rosewood, FL and today’s gentrification, prisons and illegal drug economies.In addition all white citizens owe reparations for the crimes against humanity carried out by white men, women and children in the form of lynchings, torture of African people, rape of African women and murder of African children, and through burnings, white mob violence and countless other attacks.We must acknowledge and repay this terrible debt because white people from all social strata have and continue to benefit economically from the exploitation of Africa’s resources and the exploitation of African people in the U.S. and around the world.
We believe that all the resources of Africa are the birthright of African people everywhere and that a unified, liberated and socialist Africa under the leadership of African workers is key to peace on the planet.As long as the U.S. with only five percent of the world’s population continues to consume twenty-five percent of the world’s resources at the expense of African and other oppressed peoples there will continue to be war, violence, uncertainty and suffering on Earth.Only when the parasitic system of capitalism is destroyed will the human family be able to come together to solve the world’s problems and go forward in unity.The struggle for African liberation and for national liberation all over the planet is the primary force that will bring down U.S. imperialism with its violence and colonial domination.For white people to be part of the future of justice and peace for all human beings we must separate ourselves from imperialist white power and stand in solidarity with the African Liberation Movement and the struggles of all oppressed people. African and all colonized humanity has the right to liberation, self-determination, sovereignty and control over their land, culture and resources.As Che Guevara once said about the meaning of solidarity: “It is not about well-wishing but sharing the very same fate whether in victory or in death.”