NEW IN ENGLISH & SPALabor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity: The L

Monday, August 22, 2011

Omali Yeshitela: my notes on two reports

*
 
 
I have been watching Omali Yeshitela's videos on US politics, dialectical materialism, and African liberation for several years.  It is only in the last few weeks that I have had the time to read a few of his reports made in his capacity as chairman of the APSI.  The excerpts below, and a few notes I made on them, are not the basis of a polemic or ideological rejection of Omali Yeshitela's views.  On the contrary, while there are some areas in which I disagree with the APSI's line on the white proletariat, I find Omali Yeshitela's Marxism exciting and thought-provoking. 
 
*
 
 

....these contradictions [mobilizing whites with a scientific explanation for their conditions of existence, both as beneficiaries of stolen wealth and victims of parasitic crisis] are impacting on so many of the alienated sectors of the U.S. population at the same time. This is not an easy task, but it certainly cannot be any more difficult than the tasks these comrades have taken on in the past. It simply means that we will have to develop new tactics, strategies and approaches to this work. But it is necessary and it will be done and we will win.

so many of the inherent contradictions of imperialism are in a state of simultaneous convergence

....intervention into the mass issues that are mobilizing whites with a scientific explanation for their conditions of existence, both as beneficiaries of stolen wealth and victims of parasitic crisis. Our ultimate success is guaranteed by the fact that we have the only answers that speak to the reality of the issues immediately affecting whites and the world. Sooner or later whites, like everyone else, will be forced to accept objective truth over self-gratifying racial nonsense.

presentation at the Second Congress of the Third Communist International, Lenin addressed the question of white opportunism and its material basis with these words:   "Why is this opportunism stronger in Western Europe than in our own country [Russia]? It is because the culture of the advanced countries has been, and still is, the result of being able to live at the expense of a thousand million oppressed people. It is because the capitalists of these countries obtain a great deal more in this way than they could obtain as profits by plundering the workers of their own countries.   "It is these thousands of millions in superprofits that form the economic basis of opportunism in the [white] working class movement."

....are resources stolen from others that have become increasingly difficult for them to afford in their malls and supermarkets. It is somebody else's oil, wrenched from the earth with bloody consequences, for which they now have to pay more.
The bauxite, coltan, gold and diamonds along with the cocoa beans, cotton and cheaply produced clothing have cost the rest of us dearly and our combined struggles to seize control of our lives and resources are affecting the ability of North Americans and other Europeans to enjoy a parasitic economy that requires global misery for an oasis of white happiness.

[the pain whites feel is ] not a special pain.

theirs [white North Americans] is a pain born of the very nature of a social system built and sustained by the pain of slavery, colonialism and genocide committed against the majority population of the world. The theory of African Internationalism must be taken to North Americans and Europeans.

African People's Solidarity Committee must become reverse missionaries, taking real "civilization" to the white world, civilization that will help them to throw off the superstition of racial separation and superiority through recognition that their fate and their possibility of a real future will depend on their willingness to join us in destroying the failed god of a parasitic based white supremacy.

solidarity is the only route to creating a new system that will free them from the imperialist-designed segregation from the rest of the world and from the exploitation and other contradictions with which they attempt to contend in their imaginary isolation from the rest of us. The white population must become anti-colonialists as a matter of self-defense.

. Some North Americans actually saw their support and vote for Obama as taking a stance in the interests of "racial" justice and reconciliation. Although, because it is motivated by conviction, "honest" opportunism is the most dangerous kind, in this instance it is also an opportunism that may be susceptible to education towards the correct path to "racial" justice.

this period there is a lot of political motion among grassroots North Americans or whites. One example of this is the so-called Tea Party

Boston Tea Party in 1773 that popularized the struggle between the emerging U.S. capitalist class, tied directly or indirectly to the trade in African people, and the British Empire for control of the resources stolen from the Indigenous people of what is now known as the U.S.

current Tea Party movement is spurred on by some of the most reactionary sectors of the white population, mostly tied to various arms of the ruling class and, in some instances, one of the ruling parties. While this grassroots activity often criticizes such things as the big bank bailouts and Wall Street profiteers, it has been characterized by vocal outpourings of racial hatred, anticommunism and attacks on so-called immigrants.
[Tea Party rank and file today] They are ordinary whites that luxuriated in the benefits looted from the oppressed around the world and deposited in the malls and gas tanks of the U.S.

the inherent tendency of an economy based on such parasitism to decay and putrefy
....forced them to seek explanations for the social, political and economic turmoil they are experiencing and witnessing.   APSC is the vanguard of the Party's work to explain to the alienated sectors of the North American population the basis of the chaos that causes them so much anxiety.

....fantasies passed on to them historically about the source of their comparative wealth and "good fortune." It is upon this false ideological foundation that the North American demagogues have mobilized large sectors of the white population.

--

Notes on Resolution on White People 2000

The liberation of Africa and her people does not hinge on the ideas in the heads of white people. It is based in the destruction of the state power, which enforces the blood-sucking relationship.   
.... only principled relationship of white people to the struggle for a new and just world system is in genuine solidarity with African workers and peasants and the oppressed peoples of the world as they destroy the pedestal of capitalist power.  under the revolutionary leadership of African workers. They must recognize that the same white power system is responsible for the contradictions facing white people, including workers' exploitation and women's oppression. The solution for them is not in making a better life on capitalism's pedestal, but in joining the peoples of the world in destroying that pedestal.


The white power capitalist system was born from and is maintained through this enslavement, genocide and colonization of Africa and the majority of the world's peoples. It was this process of pillage, rape and plunder that destroyed the long-standing commerce and economic prosperity that flourished in the just societies of Africa for thousands of years.

African Socialist International ...to overturn the 500-year legacy of enslavement, colonization, oppression and exploitation by European imperialism. This organized struggle on the part of African people worldwide also exposes the relationship that white people have to African people and to imperialism itself.

....white people are economic and political benefactors of the theft of the land, labor, resources, gold, science, art and civilization of the peoples of Africa, the Americas and Asia. All white people make up an oppressor nation, which carries out the rape of Africa and African people.

.... pedestal, built on our backs, upon which all white people comfortably sit - rulers and workers alike.

....served the colonial policies of the Western imperialist governments, brought jobs, resources and land to every stratum of white society.
....white people control at least 80 percent of our wealth, while African people suffer the consequent poverty, disease, political repression and military terror.

....challenge the assumption that white people are "progressive" if they struggle to overturn their bosses or to reform contradictions within white society. This stand has been the basis for the historic opportunism of white communists and leftists who have consistently held the same position regarding African and other colonial peoples as the imperialist governments and the general white population.   

African Socialist International defines the struggle of African and other colonial peoples as a struggle of oppressed nations against oppressor nations. Clearly, there is no proletariat to be found in the European oppressor nation. Every European laborer has always had economic options beyond selling his labor power to capitalist bosses. European workers have historically been able to participate in our enslavement and colonization and therein find a means of entering the ranks of the middle class or even the bourgeoisie at our expense.   

[n.b.  This sweeping and ahistorical generalization about the mobility of white workers was only true for some white workers after the victory of US imperialism in the second world war.  But it was no longer true after about 1974-1975, when the first world-spanning capitalist recession occurred since the end of that war.  White proletarians have virtually never made it into the middle class in any other period since the beginnings of capitalism in North America.  "Proletariat" as a class is defined for Marxists not by whether or not they might receive some economic, political, or ideological benefit from the national oppression of Africans, but from the fact that their labor generates the surplus value the fuels the capitalist system;  surplus labor generated by the natural workings of the capitalist system, not the choices of individual capitalists or workers; and regardless of the color of the laborer.  JR]

....white workers and leftists have never united under the leadership of colonized workers to overturn the capitalist pedestal. Rather, the struggles of white workers have been struggles for white rights.   

[n.b.  Before the degeneration of the Comintern after 1924, when it became an international amen chorus for the privileged bureaucratic caste in Moscow and assisted in Moscow's maneuverings to curry favor with this or that national bourgeoisie after 1934, communist parties in all the imperialist countries were multi-racial in membership and program, and put a premium on the liberation of Black workers as the vanguard of the labor movement itself.  Indeed, in the United States the entire question or Black or African labor's liberation was put on the agenda and embraced by the vanguard of white communists at the insistence of the Comintern in Lenin's time. In this period, and for years afterward, the work of vanguard communists of all races in the US was never for white workers only.  JR]

"Racism" is the ideology of parasitic capitalism, used to justify the system of slavery and genocide.

White people can end their self-imposed isolation as the policemen, slave masters and exploiters of humanity and join the world community.

....when Africa is once again free and when the indigenous peoples of Africa, Asia and the Americas once again control their lives, civilizations, land, wealth and destinies....[w]hite people can end their self-imposed isolation as the policemen, slave masters and exploiters of humanity and join the world community

 
 
 
 
 
*

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments