Connecting the African and British struggles against imperialism
A message to all our comrades on Africa Liberation Day, sent to a meeting held by the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP) to mark the event.
We wish you success for the meeting and please pass on our warm fraternal greetings and firm proletarian solidarity to all those present from the CPGB-ML on this 55th anniversary of African Liberation Day.
Obama’s formation of an Africa Corps, and the renewed determination of the Nato imperialist powers to dominate the continent of Africa, remind us how important it is to mark this occasion, and to renew our struggle to rid the world of the scourge of imperialism – the enemy of all working and oppressed people.
At this moment, millions of African workers, like all the oppressed masses of humanity, are struggling against aggressive imperialist plunder – whether it takes the form of economic domination, IMF ‘restructuring’ and slow starvation, or of political destabilisation and direct military intervention in those countries where the path of independence has been boldly taken.
Nato’s genocidal campaign against Libya, and recent imperialist interventions in Cote D’Ivoire, Mali, and Sierra Leone, as well as the ongoing imperialist intrigue and manipulation in other states – Uganda, Rwanda, Egypt, Tunisia, etc – remind us of this harsh reality.
As imperialism’s economic, diplomatic and military might falls on the brave and independent people of Syria, where in the media do we read of the USA’s ongoing genocidal proxy war for the plunder of coltan (without which Silicon Valley, and the entire computer and mobile phone industries, would grind to a halt) from the long-suffering Congolese people?
The 5 million Congolese victims of this war apparently warrant no moral outrage; they are the everyday sacrifice made on the high altar of capitalist profit, and highlighting their plight does not serve the imperial strategic agenda.
Imperialism seeks domination, not democracy! Let us never forget it.
Lenin said that the struggle against imperialism would be a sham and a fraud unless it was inseparably bound up with the struggles for national liberation of the toiling millions of ‘colonial slaves’.
In our allegedly ‘post-colonial’ era, following the fall of the Soviet Union and the renewed aggression and arrogance of Anglo-American imperialism in particular, the pressure of imperialism on its former colonies is greater than ever.
Let us then remember the words of Amilcar Cabral, founder of the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde):
“I should just like to make one last point about solidarity between the international working class movement and our national-liberation struggle. There are two alternatives: either we admit that there really is a struggle against imperialism which interests everybody, or we deny it.
“If, as would seem from all the evidence, imperialism exists and is trying simultaneously to dominate the working class in all the advanced countries and smother the national-liberation movements in all the underdeveloped countries, then there is only one enemy against whom we are fighting. If we are fighting together, then I think the main aspect of our solidarity is extremely simple: it is to fight.” (‘Brief analysis of the social structure in Guinea’, Seminar given in Milan, 1-3 May 1964)
Let us resolve to build unity in our struggle against capitalist imperialism, against neo-colonialism, and admit that if a better world is possible, it is our duty to forge the means for bringing it into being.
Workers of all countries, unite! We have nothing to lose but our chains! We have a world to win!
