T.O. 127: Labor Party & Black Working-Class Party in US; Shut Down AFRICOM!; Support Haitian Sovereignty!

Posted on January 4, 2024

In This Part 2 of the OCRFI CONFERENCE REPORT-BACK

• The Fight for an Independent Black Working-Class Party Linked to the Fight for a Labor Party Rooted in the Unions and Communities of the Oppressed – by S.O. and UPP

• Individual Contributions to the November 3-5, 2023 OCRFI International Conference – (1) Shut Down AFRICOM, by Erica Caines (UPP), and (2) Support Haitian Sovereignty, by Berthony Dupont and Marie Dupont Thénot

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Resolution on Labor Party and Black Working-Class Party Linked to the Fight for a Labor Party

Resolution submitted jointly by Socialist Organizer (United States) and the Ujima People’s Progress Party (United States), adopted unanimously by the international conference.

We – militant revolutionary socialists and supporters of Black liberation and self-determination who are present at the November 3-5, 2023, international conference “For the Reconstitution of the Fourth International, For the World Party of Socialist Revolution” – submit the following text for discussion and consideration by the participants in the conference.

Our intent is for this statement to be adopted by the conference as a whole. We realize that this text does not take up other aspects of the Black question, such as the relations between dependent Black working class parties and the nations and liberation struggles in Africa and the African Diaspora, or, in great detail, the relationship between the Black working-class parties and other oppressed communities. We need to open this specific discussion among ourselves, soliciting the active participation and leadership of the African comrades in this discussion.

A distinctive feature

The U.S. working class has a distinct feature, which is that the Black working class is both a component of the working class, having been a core component at the heart of the formation of the American nation as chattel slaves whose labor and status as property developed the productive forces of society, while at the very same time Black people were (and remain for the most part) excluded from the formation of the new nation.

While Black working people are predominantly proletarian, Black African descendants in the U.S. are more than just another more heavily exploited section of the working class. The Black movement is more than just a part of the general working-class movement. Their position in society is special; their consciousness is influenced by racial and national as well as class factors. This is also true for indigenous Americans.

That exclusion took place centuries ago and persists to this day. This continued exclusion places the fight against racism and for Black self-determination as a top priority of the revolutionary struggle in the United States.

The struggle for the emancipation of the enslaved Black people was at the heart of both the first and the second American Revolutions – the second more commonly known as the Civil War. But the failure, or rather, the limitations of the post-war Radical Reconstruction period, enabled the struggle for Black freedom to retreat into the abyss of Jim Crow and segregation – an abyss that still lives on. This situation underscores the need to promote the self-organization and self-determination of Black working people. Black workers are the only ones who can decide what expressions of self-organization (independent Black working-class parties, etc.) are required to advance the struggle for Black freedom and on what basis the juncture with the white working class can take place, so that Blacks are seated at the table of working-class unity as equals, not in a subordinate capacity.

A distinct duality: independent working-class parties

Working-class unity is our ultimate goal as builders of the revolutionary party, but such unity presupposes support for Black self-determination, which can include up to the right to separate – to divide – from the American body politic, if they so choose.

This duality is expressed in particular in the fight to build an independent party of the entire working class, which includes the Black working-class party – that is, an independent Black working-class electoral party linked to the struggle to build a Labor Party rooted in the unions and communities of the oppressed.

There is no contradiction between calling for a Labor Party rooted in the trade unions and oppressed communities and supporting a Black working-class electoral party, or parties. There is no contradiction between these two struggles. The labor and Black movements march along their own paths, but they march to a common destination, and the freedom of the Blacks from oppression and of the workers from exploitation can be achieved only through the victory of their common struggle against capitalism. Blacks cannot win their goal of equality without an alliance with the working class.

The tempo of development of the two movements, however, are uneven. Blacks may first want to unite in their own party in order that they can be able to bring about an alliance of equals, where Blacks can be reasonably sure that their demands and needs cannot be neglected or betrayed by their allies. A Black working-class electoral party and a Labor Party would find much in common from the very beginning, would work together for common ends, and would tend in the course of common activity to establish close organizational ties or even merge into a single or federated party.

If a Black working-class electoral party were to be formed first, it would be a major spur for the development of a Labor Party. The creation of a Black working-class electoral party running its own candidates would rock the whole political structure to its foundation. Advocates of a labor break with the twin parties of capitalism would get a bigger and better hearing from the ranks. Thus, the creation of a Black working-class party would not only benefit Black workers, but it would also benefit their present and potential allies.

Overcoming the obstacles placed in our path by the labor bureaucracy and Black political misleaders

It is not just the labor bureaucracy in the United States which is tied at the hip to the Democratic Party. The same is true of the Black petty-bourgeois misleaders, who, serving as a comprador class, have made it a career riding on the coattails of the Democrats. This represents a central roadblock to the struggle for independent working-class action and Black Liberation.

For the past hundred years, but especially since World War Two, Black misleaders have been successful in derailing mass movements into the Democratic Party with the slogan “Today We March, Tomorrow We Vote!” – where the marches and rallies are all aimed at promoting votes for the so-called Democratic Party “progressives.” Breaking with these ties of subordination to the Democratic Party is a key task to promote a revolutionary strategy, and revolutionary action, particularly in relation to the struggle for Black Liberation.

The international framework

The political situation facing working people in the United States cannot be divorced from the convulsions of a capitalist system in its death agony. The system based on the private ownership of the means of production is worldwide. Its dependency not only on the heightened extorsion of surplus-value, but also on land theft, wars and the war economy, on the one hand, and unbridled speculation on the other, has enabled it to weather the storms, but at the cost of a massive development of the destructive forces of humanity.

New technologies, which could potentially liberate working people from the hardships and drudgery of capitalism in crisis, are instead, given the pursuit of profit, vehicles to destroy millions of jobs. At the same time that it is destroying human labor, the drive to maximize capitalist profit is fueling climate change and the very survival of humanity.

Creating an international framework of discussion and common campaigns is one of the tasks emanating from the November 3-5 international conference. It is a key task. An international political rudder is needed to navigate these troubled waters.

How to build mass movements to fight the growing number of wars around the world, for example, requires political co-ordination, as lessons are learned from other forces involved in the fight to build the World Party of Socialist Revolution on the basis of an internationalist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist and anti-capitalist basis. The fight for Black Liberation in the United States itself requires an international framework. Fine-tuning a political orientation to help the working masses overcome the obstacles in their path is greatly needed.

Combined character of coming American revolution

The coming American revolution will have a combined character. It will be a socialist revolution by the working class and its allies against the bourgeoisie. At the same time, it will be a revolution of national liberation by Blacks, helping the liberation of indigenous and other oppressed communities.

Only through the establishment of workers’ power in this country will this combined struggle be brought to a successful conclusion. Only a government based on the working class and all the oppressed will guarantee the democratic rights of all oppressed peoples. There can be no solution to the national democratic demands of the oppressed nationalities apart from the solution to capitalist exploitation by the workers – that is, without the struggle against private ownership of the means of production.

The revolution, if it is to be victorious, must combine the uncompleted tasks of the democratic revolution – including the right to self-determination of all oppressed nationalities and peoples – with the socialist revolution.

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Individual Contributions to the Discussion at the November 3-5, 2023 International Conference

[Note: The following two documents on Africom and Haiti were submitted as individual contributions. The texts were submitted for the record of the conference proceedings and will be published by the OCRFI in the coming weeks.]

Africans in the U.S. Call to Shut Down AFRICOM

(submitted by Erica Caines, UPP – Baltimore, MD)

As Africans in the U.S., we understand ourselves as an internal (domestic) colony. This colonial relationship is characterized by institutional racism. This colonial status operates in three areas politically, economically, and socially.

We are politically stunted with our political decisions made for us due to a lack of power. We are economically disenfranchised and dependent on larger society and this is maintained by a social order that designates police in our communities as occupying forces. This is how we understand our broader connection, as workers, to Africans globally, but more specifically on the continent of Africa.

Oct 2023 marked the 16th year since the establishment of the US African Command also known as AFRICOM. Established in the months before Obama assumed office as the first Black President and highest level of counterinsurgency in 2008, AFRICOM expanded under Obama’s presidency with the support of the Congressional Black Caucus resulting in 46 various forms of US bases as well as military-to-military relations between 53 out of 54 African countries and the United States. AFRICOM was founded to promote strategic interests in Africa that include fostering the prevention, mitigation, and containment of conflict, fostering sustained stability, and mitigating the effects of significant humanitarian crises and natural disasters.

AFRICOM’s main aim in this regard is to intensify and coordinate activities dealing with the “war on terror” in Africa by coordinating and managing initiatives and furthering the security-development discourse by incorporating counterterrorism into the various military partnerships and training programs it oversees. This has been achieved through the US claims that AFRICOM is “fighting terrorism” on the continent. Here we see that AFRICOM is the flip side of the domestic war being waged by the same repressive state structure against Black and poor people in the US. —- ie the 1033 program or even the construction of multiple “cop cities” in the U.S. This, of course, is the counterpart of global imperialism.

The U.S. has carved up the world into 11 military commands. Prior to AFRICOM’s formation, the US dealt with African states through three different regional commands: the US Central Command, which was tasked with exercising responsibility over Egypt, the horn of Africa and Kenya amongst others; the Indo-Pacific Command, whose responsibilities included the various Indian Ocean nations such as Madagascar and the Comoros; and the European Command under which most African states fell.

Notwithstanding the devastation generally caused by both French and U.S. military operations in Africa, a crime that has left Africa reeling, and from which it has not yet recovered, was the depraved, barbaric assassination of Moammar Gadhafi and the destruction of Libya in 2011. AFRICOM forces joined with NATO and other reactionary forces in Libya to carry out a protracted process of genocide and mass destruction that culminated in the murder of Gadhafi by rectal disembowelment. Unlike many imperialist operations of this kind where we are left to connect the dots, we have damning evidence of the motive.

And since 2011’s fall of Libya, jihadist terrorists have moved westward into the sahel torturing, kidnapping maming, raping and murdering countless people in West Africa. Here we see AFRICOM is both the cause of, and alleged savior from, “Islamic terrorism”.

What should be understood is that AFRICOM’s operations in Africa since Libya’s fall has included hundreds of drone strikes (Niger still remains the 2nd largest drone base for the U.S.), billions of dollars in “aid” and “development” projects, and countless massive military exercises. This has, of course, correlated with a 500% spike in incidents of violence attributed to Islamist terrorist organizations.

While Part of AFRICOM’s stated mission is to “promote regional security, stability, and prosperity,” its very nature precludes the development of any of these conditions and actually brings about destabilization and the furthering of U.S. interests on the continent.

Despite its rhetoric, the purpose of AFRICOM is to use U.S. military power to impose U.S. control on African land, resources and labor to service the needs of U.S. multinational corporations and the wealthy in the United States. It also serves as a major boon to “defense” contractors like Raytheon or Lockheed Martin. AFRICOM continues to militarily occupy Africa, with thousands of U.S. troops now stationed in some 30 African countries with dozens of U.S. bases across the continent, not to mention the continued bombings in places like Somalia. The U.S. Special Forces roam all throughout the Sahel, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic. Furthermore, where the U.S. cannot use overt military force they use soft power. There are currently Sanctions on Zimbabwe, Eritrea, and Ethiopia which we know function as an economic form of U.S. war on African people.

This is a critical moment for Africa right now. A majority youth continent, this is a generation of millions who have lived under and suffered the material conditions of a comprador class of African politicians beholden to the west, continuously opening its doors for the west to extract resources from the third world while doing the bidding of the west. The youth of Africa are making conscious and (what’s oftentimes dismissed) organized decisions about their future and we are seeing that manifest throughout the Sahel, and West Africa more broadly.

In the spirit of the Black Radical Tradition,

Erica Caines, UPP

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Statement in Support of Haiti’s Sovereignty Adopted by the November 3-5, 2023 OCRFI Conference

[The following statement was submitted for discussion at the International Conference for the Reconstitution of the Fourth International, For the World Party of Socialist Revolution, by Berthony Dupont (Haiti Liberté) and Marie Dupont Thénot.]

On Monday, October 2, 2023, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2699 authorizing a Multinational Security Support (MSS) force for Haiti. The resolution, adopted under UN Charter’s Chapter VII, was drafted by the United States and Ecuador. This Resolution represents the successful implementation of phase one the American “10-Year Strategy for Haiti.” A U.S.-led invasion and 10-year occupation of Haiti is now imminent.

The consequences of Washington’s 10-Year Strategic Plan for Haiti are comparable to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Haiti in 1915. If Washington gets its way, Haiti will turn from its current status as a U.S. neo-colony back into a virtual colony as it was from 1915 to 1934.

Passed with full bipartisan support under President Trump in 2019, the Global Fragility Act (GFA) was initially framed by proponents as an “an opportunity to drive the necessary change ”to prevent “adversaries such as China and Russia to expand their influence.”

The U.S. government selected Haiti to be the first “partner ”under the GFA. Also on the list are Libya, Mozambique, and Papua New Guinea, along with West Africa’s Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, and Togo.

In a major policy speech in Seoul in 2022, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen explained that the U.S. “cannot allow countries like China to use their market position in key raw materials, technologies, or products to disrupt our economy and exercise unwanted geopolitical leverage.”

Haiti has mineral resources, primarily gold, valued at an estimated at US$20 billion.

Speaking on Friday, September 22, 2023, at the start of a UN meeting in New York, Antony Blinken said the United States would supply “robust financial and logistical assistance” to the MSS, promising US$200 million.

Kenya is slated to lead the MSS, despite widespread popular and political resistance both in Kenya and Haiti, as well as internationally.

The international Conference for the Reconstitution of the Fourth International, for the World Party of Socialist Revolution strongly opposes the GFA and MSS and calls upon workers and oppressed people to support the campaign to stop the implementation of GFA and MSS.

We must fight the capitalist system that has survived and prospered exploiting the working class, the poor and the peasants as they did during the period of slavery.