Revolutionary National Democratic Program
The Revolutionary National Democratic Program (RNDP) is the practical program of the African Socialist International (ASI) North American Region.
The RNDP responds to the colonial conditions experienced by African people inside the U.S. and throughout North America, and recognizes that African people in North America and throughout the world are part of a dispersed African nation that must reunite with Africans on the continent to liberate Africa.
This Revolutionary National Democratic Program recognizes that the U.S., Canada and Mexico constitute what is currently known as North America. We know that the U.S. is the reigning, though declining world imperialist power and that Canada is its imperial junior partner in North America while Mexico continues to exist as a semi-colony of the U.S. that forcibly annexed nearly half its territory in 1848. Recognizing that the three North American countries have distinctly different features, we call on African people in each country to recognize ourselves as part of the same struggle for the liberation and unification of Africa and African people worldwide.
The Revolutionary National Democratic Program understands that African people are colonized inside the borders of the U.S., and that this colonial status is the result of the historical attack on Africa. It was this attack that balkanized our African homeland and forcibly separated African people from each other and from our resources in Africa and abroad.
Reflecting the ever-escalating colonial attacks against African people in North America, the RNDP is in a continual state of development. The content of the Revolutionary National Democratic Program has been developed through struggles, meetings and collective discussions during conventions led by InPDUM, the mass organization through which the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) forwards the revolutionary national democratic struggles in North America and elsewhere.
The program has been deepened through mass input during African Liberation Day conferences organized by the African People’s Socialist Party in May of 2008 and 2009. The African Liberation Day conferences provided the opportunity for hundreds of Africans previously unaffiliated with the African People’s Socialist Party and/or the Uhuru Movement to participate in forging this program for the liberation of African people under the leadership of the revolutionary national democratic forces of the North American front of the African national liberation struggle.
The content of this Revolutionary National Democratic Program has also been influenced by the regional conferences to build the African Socialist International, a global organization of African revolutionaries. African Socialist International conferences have been held in Sierra Leone in West Africa and Kenya in East Africa.
The Revolutionary National Democratic Program is a program that distinguishes the interests of the vast majority of African People in North America from the interests of the U.S. North American ruling class and state, and from the interests of reactionaries and opportunists within the African nation itself.
The RNDP recognizes that the primary, most dynamic contradiction in the world today is the contradiction between oppressed and oppressor nations. It understands that the United States of North America and its citizens constitute an oppressor nation state that holds a substantial sector of the African population as part of a colonially oppressed nation. As a colonized people inside the U.S. since the time of enslavement, African people long for total liberation and the ability to join humanity as a free nation, equal among other free peoples of the world.
This Revolutionary National Democratic Program responds to the reality that all African people, those in Africa and those abroad in locations such as North America, constitute one people, one nation. None of us can achieve genuine freedom without the total liberation and unification of Africa and African people worldwide.
The program recognizes that neocolonialism, the indirect control of African people by white power in black face, by an opportunist, usually petty bourgeois traitor sector of the African nation, carries out the exploitation of Africa, African people and our resources today.
The Revolutionary National Democratic Program also shows that capitalism, born of the enslavement, colonization and division of Africa and African people, must be defeated and replaced with a just social system in which social production of the means of existence is accompanied by social ownership of the means of production.
In other words, this program understands that capitalism must be replaced by socialism. The laboring producers must collectively own and control the means of production, controlling the power necessary to guarantee social progress and protect and advance the interests of the workers and toiling masses.
We understand that the only social force capable of leading the struggle for the unification and liberation of Africa and African people to its conclusion; the only social force capable of leading the struggle for the total defeat of capitalism and its replacement by socialist democracy, is the African working class aligned with the poor peasantry.
This Revolutionary National Democratic Program speaks to the selfish interests of the oppressed African majority throughout North America and the world. It recognizes that all Africans in North America, like Africans worldwide, suffer direct or indirect national oppression, a reality that establishes the objective basis for cross-class, anti-colonial unity under the leadership of the revolutionary African working class that addresses this national oppression.
This is the program that speaks to the interests of that majority. The Revolutionary National Democratic Program calls out to the workers and other toiling masses as well as African students and revolutionary intellectuals. This is the program of the African national cultural workers and pro-independence democratic nationalists as well as African small business owners suffocating under the weight of disadvantageous colonial laws and monopoly capital.
This Revolutionary National Democratic Program speaks to the millions of Africans tied to the prison concentration camps of North America and to their families, friends, neighbors and organizations founded for their defense.
This program calls on all enlisted Africans and junior officers who are connected to any arm of the imperialist military organizations of the U.S. and North America – including the police departments – to unite with the legitimate interests of their oppressed people for national liberation, unification and socialism.
The program is a call to the exploited African farmers, struggling to regain their land, and to African schoolteachers who have been prevented by colonial law and tradition from bringing liberating education to African students.
The RNDP represents African people struggling throughout the U.S. against gentrification and the destruction of our communities and in the interest of the countless African people facing job cuts, foreclosures and chronic underemployment.
The Revolutionary National Democratic Program calls for an end to colonially-imposed divisions between African people inside the U.S. and North America and calls for all Africans to recognize that we are one colonized people, regardless of whether we speak Spanish, French Portuguese, have recently arrived from the Continent of Africa or are transplanted from the Caribbean islands.
This Revolutionary National Democratic Program is opposed to the programs of the Democratic and Republican parties and other organizations that represent the interests of other, hostile classes and oppressor-nation groups. It is opposed to all programs that would attempt to reconcile the interests of the revolutionary national democratic African masses with those of imperialism, no matter how liberal or radical.
With this program we shall wage furious struggle to thrust the genuine interests of African people into the political arena of North America. We call on all revolutionary national democratic African forces to embrace this program as their own. With this program we call on all allies of our struggle to unite. This is the program to win the dictatorship of the revolutionary national democratic power of the African people.
This is our program. We must win and implement it.