Liberation in our lifetime: Towards an African socialist movement manifesto

The haunting spectre of communism doesn’t hold the world at ransom any longer. The unholy capitalist alliance has all but gone global. We now stand at the conjuncture between a failing imperialist core and a slowly awakening revolutionary periphery. This is the looming presence that haunts the earth – the presence of the Global South. 

From international NGOs, western military bases to interfaith groups a unity have been forged to end this impending presence. The fear of Babylon is evident as it points to an end; the slow fading out of its dominance and hegemony. Showing finally the power of the old sufferers forcing the ark of history towards a classless world.  

What is to be done then is known; struggling to be free and dignified in our lands. How is to be done remains the fundamental task of these beautiful children of Africa. Towards these ends, a presentation of the facts of historical science and dropping, along the way, the weight of history.

A recognition of the productive forces —the workers, toilers and peasants— in their class conscious state as the engines of a just and righteous history. Whiles the usurpers of production as the destroyers of that historical trajectory in its transition to its logical conclusion of a fully developed productive base and force that have and hold beyond monopoly and profit. 

For this to be a possibility, this onward advance of the people to sovereign wealth, it must be known who stunts this growth, who benefits from this stunting and who sleeps in a king-size bed whiles the surplus is stored far from the toiling masses. A class analysis reveals layers upon layers of betrayal of the toilers by their own and by the others — the old masters of our misery.

We know from scientific analysis that the middlemen who stands between international capital and the neocolonial state are both interlocutor and beneficiary in this scheme to control the productive base of Africa so as to pick crumbs on the masters table after the pen is put to the signature line which seals and shackles us in one swift motion. It is a constant in the ever-changing dynamic and mechanics of our oppression that there is a fabricated class of politicians, managers, intellectuals, religious leaders who make it their duty to rob and steal from our people. The advantage we have over them today is that they’re constantly warring amongst themselves. They have no loyalties towards each other, only to capital and big finance.  In their greed they remain an ever small and fragmented set of entities with no grounding in a cohesive totality. 

To destroy this parasitic class, we must become skilled at exposing the indoctrination with which they hold us captive to. All over the continent today we are told our biggest failure is the lack of good governance. We go along echoing these sentiments in an almost fatalistic style. We don’t dare question this thought-hegemony lest we are called enablers of dictators and tyrannical systems. But we failed to notice or to understand that every society, scientifically, is a dictatorship. But who’s dictatorship? Who’s the one who controls the medium of ideas and ideologies? Who controls the national wealth? Which class in our society runs the show? An example: today in most of our villages we have a primitive feudal lordship over land. We are told and convinced by the feudal class that since their great grandfathers founded the village, they have been given the divine right to rule and administer the land and all that’s in it. With this, many families have been dispossessed of their lands, but instead of raising up their voices and muscles in protest and collective ownership, they submit dutifully because this is the way it has been ordained. They fall victim to the dictatorship of ideas and hegemonies of the feudal lordship.

United Africa. Source: Youtube

The control of ideas and the class rule of the elite and colonised intellectuals is a battlefront that must be won with a vigorous political education to expose their dictatorship and institute a new and vibrant dictatorship of the masses as a whole which is the only true democracy. The adventurism of this class of oppressors must also be exposed. How they use our people in protests and uprisings only so they can take over state power and continue to rob us. We have seen the hijacking of this sort all over Africa and the Third World, from Egypt to South Africa. The struggle must go back to the material needs of our people. Land, bread and water must occupy the front seat of this struggle and abstract bourgeois ideas about civility, morality and nonexistent rights thrown to the bin of history. These new progressive ideas must be derived and rooted in the material, social, cultural, intellectual conditions that we find ourselves in today. It must also be an active combat against superstitions, magic and all such ideas that have impeded our growth in the era of scientific and technological advancement of the world. Without falling into Eurocentric false universals, this movement must honour and extend those traditional and historical practices that our people developed before the landing of the coloniser and domination of a technocratic western civilisation.

We must build schools and study circles that counter the indoctrination coming from the ruling class through their numerous institutions

We know we can only win this war with organisation. With mass organising of our people under the banner of a revolutionary democracy that is disciplined and urgent. Our organising must be built upon consistent truth-telling and fact collection which is turned into a coherent system of theories to guide us. We cannot act like the comprador class that only mobilises for temporary gains. We must organise, show and prove the correctness of our line by building in real-life what society we want to see through discipline and distribution of collective resources in a cooperative model. We must constantly educate ourselves and apply that education in mass work. We must build schools and study circles that counter the indoctrination coming from the ruling class through their numerous institutions. 

We must also always be on the frontlines in winning immediate material benefits with the people, in the form of asking the neocolonial state to offer services that are needed everyday in the form of mass demonstrations, sit ins and other such ways the people use to make gains. But we must be careful not to be adventurist or lead our people into bloodbaths in the forms of riots or protests without a clear analysis and social investigation of the context and structure. Remember create no heroes or cults, organise eternally.

We affirm before the world that our friends are those who show solidarity with our struggle without trying to superimpose their ideas and theories upon us. That we don’t consider it solidarity if you’re more interested in telling us how to struggle and what ideas are more correct. That we consider that to be disrespect for our history and our final becoming. We recognise in all of this the impotence of the Western Left in the great onslaught of imperialism in our lands. That they cannot orchestrate a revolution without the defeat of the neocolonial state and imperialism down in the global south. The White Western left, instead of asking what must be done with the comrades who are in the Third World, are more interested in little petty squabbles over  theory without the practice it should be rooted in, so they remain a sidekick of capitalism-imperialism — in their distraction and uselessness for the coming struggle. In sight of this, our solidarity doesn’t lie with them but with the colonised masses caught in the core of western capital. The so-called ‘minorities’ who are the only portent revolutionary class there today.

We honour those who came before us. Those who took the correct line in the struggle for the liberation of our people. We promise to finish that project by doing a careful study of the works they left behind and to pick what fits our time through an objective understanding and analysis in the context of our time. 

We pledge allegiance to no-one but the working masses of our people, of the Global south and of the marginalised minorities caught in the core of the imperial metropolis. 

Our freedom and final walk to liberation will come in our unity and constant struggle for correct creative ideas and our ever-righteous fight to defeat our enemies both home and abroad. Since we only win when we fight holding a torch of knowing and understanding before us and lose when we bring a stone to a knife fight. A reminder then: correct theory combined with protracted practice!

To in the promise and fullness of time usher in the total unification of the African continent under scientific socialism giving birth to the African Nation that must be.

Follow This Is Africa on Twitter and Facebook to join the conversation.