Rafiki Morris | All-African People’s Revolutionary Party
The All-African People’s Revolutionary Party is honored to have an opportunity to address this important meeting of anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist and anti-fascist forces from around the world. We meet at a time when the people of the world are standing up and asserting their right to sovereignty, self determination and development.
We come together because of the NATO Summit and to state our opposition. NATO is the criminal organization that led the invasion of Libya, brutally assassinated our comrade leader Muamar Gaddafi, destroyed Tripoli and unleashed mercenary militias into African States on a murderous rampage that continues to this day. This alone is reason enough to despise NATO and work for its elimination. SMASH NATO!
But it is our firm belief that it would be a serious error to assemble these anti-imperialist forces and confine our discussion to NATO. Yes NATO must be condemned and in time, removed from the political military landscape. More importantly we must examine NATO in context and discuss it in relation to the overall struggle against imperialism and its armed agents around the world.
Currently war is being fought in Europe. Western powers have employed fascists in Ukraine to encircle Russia and bring Ukraine into NATO. This war is entirely orchestrated from Washington and while many of the NATO countries are providing arms and funds to the Ukrainian fascists, the war is not technically a NATO operation. Up to now NATO has not fought in Europe, even though NATO is projected as a pact to defend Europe from foreign attacks. The facts are that since the founding of NATO in 1949, Europe has not been attacked and NATO has never had to defend it. On the contrary NATO has served as the point of the imperialist spear, used to attack governments, people’s and insurgents in the global south. While some are consumed with assessing the role NATO plays in Europe, we must assess it with our own eyes and judge it based on our experience.
For us Imperialism presents as a single hegemonic economic/political/military apparatus. The USA Military Command Structure includes the Southern Command, Pacific Command, Central Command. Asia Command, African Command and Space Command. It also includes a massive worldwide intelligence network that links the CIA, Mossad, MI5 and all capitalist internal and external national intelligence agencies. Police forces and a multitude of private mercenary militias and private armies and 800 military bases are also part of the imperialist war machine. NATO is but one aspect of these US strategic alliances with proxy states in every geopolitical Zone. This network seeks political, military, economic and social domination of our planet and its people. It is our task to use this meeting to unite so that we can coordinate our effort to defeat the entirety of Imperialism’s USA/NATO/EU political military apparatus. The imperialist are one, the anti-imperialist forces must also be as one.
Again, the context of this focus on NATO is the current effort to revive the cold war and push the world towards WW3. War with Russia, arming Taiwan, bolstering Hongkong intransigence, imperialist sanctions on progressive and revolutionary governments and the military pivot to the Asia-Pacific theater of operations, raise the specter of a world war. This pending WW3, potentially between the world’s major nuclear powers, raises global fear of nuclear annihilation. It is part of a new cold war that pits the USA and its allies against Russia and China. Since nuclear war threatens the entire planet, its possibility is incorrectly presented as the only meaningful conflict on the planet, The town crier (western Media) warns that WW3 is coming while the jesters diminish the importance of imperialist wars currently being waged around the globe.
The People of the Global South are not waiting on WW3, or the outcome of the real or imagined tension between the east and the west. Instead we are actively fighting a World War of a different type. This is the war being waged by the USA, NATO, EU against the people living in the lands of the Global South. From 2020 to present there have been 32 wars, 15 of which are ongoing. The 33 NATO nations seek to dominate and control the remaining 162 countries on the planet in service to capital. Genocide proceeding unchecked in Palestine, police attacking unarmed students in New York, sanctioning Cuba, Nicaragua, Eritrea, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Korea, Myanmar, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, and Belarus are all manifestation of war. The world is already at war.
For Africa and African people worldwide the term World War also has an entirely different meaning. Since the landing of the first Portuguese ships arriving in Africa to capture humans to enslave, our continent and her people have not known a single moment without war. The European slave raids were in fact a continental war with global implications. More than 100,000,000 Africans were captured or killed over a period of 300 years. The criminal assault on our continent continued through the colonial period and has only intensified with the rise of neo-colonialism which dominates our continent presently. Our masses, scattered and suffering worldwide, stand among the most oppressed, exploited and victimized sector of humanity.
Imperialism dominates Africa because 40% of global gold, nearly 90% of chromium and platinum and about a third of the world’s known critical minerals supply are in Africa. This coupled with vast arable land for cash crops, are the reasons millions die in the resource war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Currently war between generals in Sudan displaces 6,000,000 people and kills thousands more. Kenyan police prepare to play soldier in a USA invasion of Haiti. Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso eject the French and US military presence without a shot fired, and form an Alliance of Sahel States. Senegalese mass mobilizations elect a new president in a campaign managed from a jail cell. POLISARIO wages its struggle for the liberation of the Western Sahara from refugee camps in Algeria. Eritrea stands strong following 60 years of war, AFRICOM occupies countries throughout the continent (part of the 800 global US military bases) and Guinea Bissau wages a democratic revolution to seat the democratically elected PAI Tera Ranka (PAIGC) government. Meanwhile, Police in Europe and America continue their armed assault on the African populations with shootings, mass incarceration, community occupations by armed agents of the state, criminal militias (gangs) and the active suppression of our movements for liberation, unity and socialism. Viewing the world with our own eyes, we conclude that we have been subjected to a world war that has gone on unabated for more than 500 years.
African people are weighed down by the legacy of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonial plunder. For Africans, WW3 is happening. It is both multi form and global, it is a war that we must fight by every available means. If you look closely you will see us politically educating, striking, rallying, occupying, demonstrating, voting, mobilizing, organizing, and when we must fight, we fight.
The A-APRP is a Pan-Africanist Party. Our objective is the total liberation and unification of Africa under a scientific socialist government. We do not define this war as military conflict alone. Our view is that every act taken to achieve our objective, as well as every act by imperialism to continue its hegemonic control of our continent are acts of war. Like our enemies, we fight on every plane: ideological, social, political, economic and military. We are divided, besieged, poor and disorganized. But what is most important is that we are resisting.
To a certain extent our Pan-African victory is dependent on:
• Africa’s ability to coordinate the political/military actions of her revolutionary forces and
• The solidarity and support of the global anti-imperialist movement.
Because we are in a permanent state of war, we must have a proper assessment of ourselves, the forces we align with and the forces we oppose. In our assessment, what concerns us most in all of this is the low level of ideological development and/or lack of ideological understanding among Pan-Africanist, Communist, anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist forces. This is our greatest weakness. We do not collectively know the material and immaterial conditions we seek to transform. Conditions in each zone of operation have a specific history and culture which must be the material basis from which to pursue the objectives, strategies and tactics employed in the struggle. Revolutions can not be duplicated or exported. There is no cookie cutter model for revolutionary transformation.
What is required is a general line of thought, which we agree upon and can apply to the material and immaterial conditions we face. Our general line of thought then gives meaningful guidance to the struggle to be waged by each People in each location with differing circumstances. The general line of thought also defines the nature of the relationships between the revolutionary forces who are engaged in this fight against imperialism. Solidarity can then be built on a foundation of knowledge, understanding and coordinated interaction. How can one be in solidarity with something they know nothing about?
Among socialist, communist, Pan Africanist and anti-imperialist forces there is a continuing tendency to view Marxism as the only viable ideology of revolution. The archaic tendency to take the ideas of Europe and universalize them without critique or alteration must be exposed. That these ideas persist is evidence of the failure to understand the nature and extent of the revolutionary process outside of Europe. Clearly the ideological framework of the twenty-first century struggle against imperialism cannot be confined to the thoughts and teaching of the supreme 19th revolutionary philosopher, Karl Marx. Revolutionary thought finds its weapons (material and immaterial) in the living culture of the people it serves. This is not to deny the universal aspects of Marxism or the contribution of others. It is the application of the scientific principle of dialectical materialism (A Marxian contribution) to the material and immaterial conditions that prevail in each Zone of struggle. Revolution is an act of culture and as such must be fully wedded to the culture of the people who seek to transform any given society. This is why we have Juche in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Maoism in China, Leninism in Russia and Nkrumahism/Toureism/Cabalism in Africa.
Communists who really understand the nature and material manifestation of this conflict must support this fight by bringing human and material resources to the struggle we wage. For us the struggle for peace, freedom and dignity is the primary responsibility of those organized sectors committed to the communist ideal.
The World Anti-imperialist Platform (WAP) has asked us to detail the needs of this movement in the country we operate in. This question assumes that the field of struggle is with nation states as currently constituted. But this construct does not consider the fact that the struggle being waged by African people is both continental and global by its very nature. The existing nation/states of Africa are precisely the divide and conquer tool employed by imperialism to gain control of our land, resources and labor. There is no need to recount the Berlin Conference. Of necessity we must engage in this struggle on a continental level. This means that we must bring to this table general observations drawn from the compiled reports of the specific countries we work in and the conditions we face on a global basis, both inside and outside of Africa. Our field of struggle is the entire continent of Africa and we seek to organize the masses of African people existing in some 115 countries. The specific territories are but front lines on a global battle field. In all places we seek a concrete understanding of the material and immaterial conditions we seek to transform. In all places the weapons employed are directly related to the culture which is the basis upon which each zone draws its political perspective.
We strengthen the communist movements in each country by coordinating the political, military and social activities of our fighting forces both at home in Africa, and abroad. We must find ways and means to politically educate and organize and train revolutionary cadre as well as the broad masses of our people. We must stand in uncompromising solidarity with our comrades in Palestine and link this struggle to the struggle of indigenous people and oppressed nations world wide. We must stand in uncompromising solidarity with the communist, socialist and revolutionary states of the world. Finally, we must coordinate our work as builders of a communist world, understanding that the growth and establishment of socialist states and communism are totally dependent on our collective ability to defeat capitalism, imperialism, zionism and to SMASH THE US/NATO/EU Axis of domination.
We thank you for this opportunity to express our humble perspective at this historic gathering.
As Always we stand,
READY FOR REVOLUTION!