First Published: Unity and Struggle, Vol. IV, No. 13, October 1975.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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The Afrikan Liberation Support Committee held a crucial national meeting on the weekend of August 16-17th to discuss the future of ALSC, i.e., whether or not ALSC would continue as a national organization in support of Afrikan Liberation. The question of liquidating ALSC was raised by some members of the National Secretariat who put forward the position of the Revolutionary Workers League, composed of former members of YOBU, Malcolm X College, People’s College, & Harambee, and this position was that ALSC should not continue. But the majority proposal from Newark ALSC put forward the position that ALSC continue to function as a black united front against imperialism, stressing Afrika, but also general struggle against imperialism.
After giving summations of local ALSC work, the local chapters made proposals for the future of ALSC, many of the locals wanted to continue to support ALSC as a national organization, though there was opposition from RWL and chapters influenced by RWL. All the people still committed to working around the question of Afrika & providing education to the masses of Afro-Americans in the U.S. agreed to set up a continuations committee that will meet in September to decide just how best to continue a black united front in support of Afrikan Liberation, if ALSC no longer exists. Atlanta ALSC committed its resources to coordinate these interim meetings on the question of a new structure for Afrikan Liberation support work, along with Revolutionary Workers Congress (RWC) and the Congress of Afrikan People (CAP) and the next meetings on this will take place in Atlanta, Ga. on September 20-21st, 1975.
In our view the whole tendency of the forces trying to dismantle ALSC, is a tendency to ”liquidate Afrika and another aspect of bourgeois ideology and reformism, and an “integrationist” (revisionist) trend to disconnect us from the 3rd world struggles, of which ours is also a part, at the same time being an intrinsically “American” struggle! The majority report of Newark ALSC went on to take the position that, “The militancy of the 3rd World, the cutting edge of revolution and peoples’ movement toward socialism, is what is being attempted to be disconnected and we must resist this just as we resisted people telling us we’re just like everybody else here. We are and we ain’t. We’re us. Our history, heritage, culture, politics, and emotions tie us to Afrika in ways not anyone else in the USA is tied there. We have a special relationship to Afrika. And Afrika has a special relationship to Imperialism since a good part of its primitive accumulation was built on trade in Afrikan slaves, one aspect of its ideology, racism, comes as a direct result of its turning Afrikans into commodities, in fact one cultural cornerstone of capitalist western ideology is racism.” In fact, the 1928 Comintern resolution on the national question in the U.S. stated, “The Negro question in the United States must be treated in its relation to the Negro questions and struggles in other parts of the world. The Negro race everywhere is an oppressed race. Whether it is a minority (U.S.A., etc.), a majority (South Africa) or inhabits a so-called independent state (Liberia, etc.), the Negroes are oppressed by imperialism. Thus a common national liberation from imperialist domination of the Negroes in various parts of the world. A strong Negro revolutionary movement in the U.S.A. will be able to influence...the revolutionary movement in all those parts of the world where the Negroes are oppressed by imperialism.”
This tendency is linked further to the economist tendency to belittle the role of political work and revolutionary organization (and this is especially observable with some people who think going to the workplace is the totality of communist work), because it would be difficult for any of us to understand why any group would propose to liquidate a national organization that give political education around the question of Afrikan Liberation and the anti-imperialist struggles in general, and at the very same time it knows that its task as communist is to teach Marxism in the era when colonies, neo-colonies, and semi-colonies are rising up against imperialism and its lackeys. In light of the fact that Stalin stresses in The Foundations of Leninism, “the victory of the working class in the developed countries and the liberation of the oppressed peoples from the yoke of imperialism are impossible without the formation and the consolidation of a common revolutionary front” (page 77), our task as Marxist-Leninists is to form & consolidate fronts like the ALSC, especially on imperialism’s next main battleground, Afrika. This is the kind of black united front that all our people patriotic to the cause of Afrikan Liberation could involve themselves in. But especially, communists who ought to understand that work around Afrikan Liberation is not supplementary political work, but as Stalin in Foundations of Leninism pointed out to us, these wars of national liberation “cannot help but lead to the crisis of world capitalism” (Ibid.) So it is a dialectical relationship that must be understood by the vanguard and taught as a science to the masses.
For the revolutionaries who are in the united front, they understand that it is their responsibility to build the revolutionary consciousness of the masses of our people, and this task cannot be accomplished without injecting Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung Thought directly into our liberation struggle. Not to teach the fundamental laws of imperialism to the masses, shows that this political tendency has a very different view than Marx, Lenin & Mao Tse Tung on what it means to train the masses in preparation for revolution. Scientific Socialism must be brought from without by the vanguard party and taught to the masses. Otherwise, we would be bowing to sponteneity, which is not the road to our liberation. We must struggle against this bourgeois ideology and reformism and build a fighting black united front that perseveres over long periods of time & leads people in the fight in support of Afrikan Liberation and anti-imperialist struggles in general. Meanwhile on the continent, armed struggle is still raging, as the main force fighting against colonialism and imperialism especially against the two superpowers (US & USSR), and by liquidating the support of these struggles, objectively you are giving support to imperialism.