Party fights like hell in the 1980s

As the 1980s opened up, the U.S. government was deepening its counterinsurgency against the African working class as a whole and against the revolutionary movements around the world. The U.S. unleashed the full extent of its viciousness against the African working class, sparing nothing.

(Above) Chairman Omali Yeshitela at event in Oakland California.

It began a massive slander campaign which campaign which criminalized the whole African population, flooded the communities with a new kind of chemical warfare called "crack", and implemented an all-out campaign to lock up nearly every African male into the concentration camps called prison. As the white population was enjoying an enormous economic boom derived from the drug economy and the massive prison building, African workers were trapped in an impoverished war zone dependent on the crumbs of the illegal drug economy with fewer and fewer social services and no democratic rights.

While the U.S. intensified its brutal counterinsurgency, serious internal struggles rocked the Party and the African Peoples' Solidarity Committee, struggles which attempted to challenge the Party's whole identity grounded in the African working class. Chairman Omali rose up to overcome one of the most serious threats to the Party by fighting fiercely for the agenda of the class and rebuilding the Party.

In 1981 the Chairman moved the national office of the Party to Oakland, California where the Party had been doing work for the past few years and where the majority of the African People's Solidarity Committee was located. Almost immediately the Chairman opened the first Uhuru House on MacArthur Boulevard in East Oakland, the heart of the African community. In the city where only 12 years before African workers had proudly exercised their power as the Black Panther Party, Africans now seemed brutally down pressed. The Chairman often remarked that he wondered if the water had been poisoned with mind-deadening drugs as part of the COINTELPRO attack on our movement.

In addition, in place of the voice of the African working class which had been so powerful just a few years prior, now a vicious, self-serving and parasitic white left had set itself up to dominate the political agenda of the Oakland area and to participate in the attack on African workers. White leftists of all stripes were building lucrative careers as "progressives" at the expense of African workers.

(Above) Chairman Omali with Huey Newton.

From the first day the doors of the Uhuru House opened on MacArthur Boulevard, in the summer of 1981, the Chairman led an intense whirlwind of political activity that continued without a breather for more than five years. It was one of the most important periods of the Party and represented a profound transformation both in the organization itself and in the Chairman's theory.

During this period sleep was nearly forgotten and Party-led forces were out on the streets every single day, organizing and demonstrating against the brutal conditions facing African workers. The political consequences were profound, forcing the needs of the African working class back on the political agenda for the first time since the 60s. The city of Oakland is still reeling from the work of this period, and the campaigns had national and even international significance.

The Chairman kept the Party forces in constant motion. The First Party Congress was held in Oakland, the African National Reparations Organization was built and the first Tribunal on Reparations for African people in the U.S. was held in New York in 1982. Tent City for the Homeless was organized in Oakland in 1983 followed in 1984 by the Oakland Summer Project, the Community Control of Housing Initiative (Measure O and Measure H), the Bobby Hutton Freedom Clinic, as well as the monthly publication of The Burning Spear. Party work was going on in other parts of the U.S. as well, and the Chairman was often traveling to revolutionary Nicaragua or for speaking tours around the U.S., and making two tours to Europe.

In 1987 the popular Uhuru Bakery Cafe opened in Oakland. There was the Party-owned Spear Graphics in Oakland, and Uhuru Houses were opening in Philadelphia, Baltimore and St. Petersburg.

The theory of Yeshitelism is developed

During this period of incredible activity Chairman Omali also produced his most important body of theoretical work which went through profound tranformation at this time. Through the struggles in the world and in the organization and through the real conditions of colonialism, the Chairman developed his theory in the heat of battle.

It was at this time that the Chairman first defined the question of parasitic capitalism-that capitalism was born of slavery, genocide and theft of resources of the African people and all oppressed peoples, and that it remains parasitic today.

It was in this period that the Chairman brought the theory of Marx and Lenin to a higher level, showing that African and colonized peoples create the foundation upon which the whole white world sits. The Chairman's theory brought African workers and other colonized peoples to the center stage of history.

As the Chairman wrote in A New Beginning: the Road to Black Freedom and Socialism published by the Party in 1982:

"Living in a country built and sustained off slavery, colonialism, and neo-colonialism, the impact of victorious revolutionary struggles reach down into the gas tanks, shopping centers, and tax brackets of the North American population. There is an objective relationship between world slavery and U.S. affluence, and up until now the North American population, opportunistically and demagogically led by their stomachs, pocketbooks, and corrupt leadership, have chosen the continued enslavement of the world..."

As the Chairman explained about his theory versus the classic "Marxism-Leninism":

"There was a huge error in Marx's observation and that error was based on his relationship to the same reality that African and other people experience. This error was the ability to diminish and sometimes obscure the significance of Africans and other colonial people in the development of the world capitalist economy and its ongoing existence.

"They made Europeans the subjects of history...and their experience was very narrow. Because of that they saw white people and what happened in Europe as the central force and the engine of world history. But even as they did that they were still able to sum up that slavery, this thing they call primitive accumulation which was a great aggression against most of the other peoples in the world, but it was only seen as significant as it related to Europe. This was a profound weakness and error in their observations that tainted everything, even the labor theory of value, etc."

Today the Chairman's theory of African Internationalism or Yeshitelism is the only analysis that can give African people around the world and all of our allies a vision for a future free of white power and oppression and with political power in our own hands.