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Guinea-Bissau; Coup d'Etats in Africa & Continued Imperialist Tricks

12/4/2025

Members of Guinea-Bissau's Electoral Commission reporting that most established records of the election results from the November 23, 2025 election were destroyed as a result of the military coup d'etat

On November 23, 2025, the West African country of Guinea-Bissau held a national election, but on November 26th, 2025, a military coup d’etat, led by Brigadier General Dinis Incanha was carried out. The military coup has disrupted any potential for civilian governance in the country for the foreseeable future.

The international capitalist/imperialist media is reporting this incident within the context of it being the ninth coup d’etat in Guinea-Bissau since the independence war was won by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau (PAIGC) in 1974. The often repeated and easily defeated refrain by these media sources is that coup d’etats in Guinea-Bissau, and all of Africa, are automatic byproducts of African people when we make any attempt to govern our own lives. The fact these sources consistently make note of the claim that Guinea-Bissau is a hub for illegal narcotics trafficked from the Western world to Europe simply reinforces this racist and simplistic perspective around African politics.

In order to gain a proper understanding of what’s taking place in Guinea-Bissau its essential to understand that country (and Africa’s) history. Viciously colonized by Portugal for decades, Amilcar Cabral founded the PAIGC in 1956. From that day forward, the PAIGC, staged its revolutionary anti-colonial war against Portuguese occupation, staging its operations from neighboring Guinea where they received logical and practical support and assistance from the Democratic Party of Guinea and its president – Sekou Ture.

As a result of the resilience of the people of Guinea-Bissau along with this clear example of revolutionary Pan-Africanist cooperation, the PAIGC was victorious in 1974. Although Amilcar Cabral, Titina Silas, and other leaders within the PAIGC were assassinated by agents for Portugal in 1973, the PAIGC governed the country until 1980 when Luis Cabral, the brother of Amilcar, was overthrown as president in a coup d’etat.

Those historical occurrences provide some backdrop for the events of 2025. In 2023, the country had a national election where results and the fairness of that election were confirmed by international observers such as representatives from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Those results showed that the PAIGC, and the Terra Ranka (PAI Terra Ranka) Coalition won an overwhelming majority of seats for the National Assembly (the national legislature in Guinea-Bissau), and Domingos Pereira, the President of the PAIGC, won the election for president by almost 100,000 votes (a significant victory in a country of only slightly more than two million people).

At the time, Umaro Embalo held the position of president. He was and is the universally selected candidate by imperialism being their neo-colonial choice to continue to make the country available for international and illegal interests while doing nothing to improve the conditions for the people of Guinea-Bissau. Consequently, Embalo invalidated the 2023 election results, refusing to permit the majority Terra Ranka Coalition Assembly seat victors to take their seats. He also refused to recognize the results of the presidential election, calling it invalid. He demanded that a re-election take place and this time, he won that second race by about 80,000 votes. Universal condemnation of voter repression and corruption during that second election in 2023 set the stage for the November 2025 election.

Fast forward to 2025 where Embalo, recognizing the national popularity of the PAIGC and Brother Pereira, outlawed the PAIGC from participating in the November 23rd, 2025 election. As a result, the PAIGC threw its support behind Ferdinand Dias who ran against Embalo. Before the results, which initially pointed to a victory by Dias, could be confirmed, the coup d’etat took place, invalidating the election, resulting in the arrest of Brother Periera, and causing Dias to flee Guinea-Bisau for neighboring Senegal.

Embalo also left Guinea-Bissau for Brazzaville, but there is substantial evidence that suggests that the military coup leaders could be in league with Embalo in a play to prevent Dias and the Terra Ranka National Assembly victors, from ever being seated. Before leaving the country, Embalo was permitted to address the people of Guinea-Bissau through national media sources which would represent the first time in known history that military coup d’etat leaders allowed a displaced politician to have such a privilege. In comparison, when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) led the overthrew of Kwame Nkrumah’s government in Ghana in 1966, everyone even suspected of being supportive of Nkrumah was forced to leave Ghana immediately at the threat of losing their lives. Nkrumah himself was out of the country when the coup happened and although he lived for six more years, he was never able to set foot in Ghana again.

The model in Africa since the independence movements in the 50s and 60s has been to infect these anti-colonial efforts with neo-colonialism. Since the very structure of colonialism was always to establish exploitative mechanisms in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, that would serve the interests of the capitalist countries, that strategy of course relied on keeping the colonial subjects dependent upon the colonizers. As a result, the only education made available in Africa was that which promoted loyalty to the colonizing country. This reality explains why coup d’etats have been so common in Africa since the 1960s because the chief responsibility of a neo-colonialist leader is to demonstrate their ability and commitment to ensuring the country they govern is always readily available to foreign exploitation as its priority. In the case of Embalo, the alleged disposed president in Guinea-Bissau, his refusals to seat the PAIGC/Terra Ranka Assembly members (with zero proof that they did not legally and fairly win their elections), his subsequent banning of the PAIGC from the elections, the ill timing of the military coup d’etat to happen just before the results of the most recent election were most likely going to declare Dias victorious, the relatively soft treatment towards him from the military and his non-dramatic exit from the country into Brazzerville, all reek of a planned and scripted coup d’etat in which Embalo isn’t the victim of a coup, but rather the person(s) who orchestrated it.

Meanwhile, at the time of the preparation of this article, PAIGC President and President of the Guinea-Bissau National Assembly – Domingos Periera remains locked up in military custody, the PAIGC remains banned, and Dias has been forced to exit the country.

Understanding the shaky ground that international imperialism and neo-colonialism occupy in today’s world, a scripted coup d’etat in Guinea-Bissau makes sense. The popular support of the PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau is undeniable. And, the PAIGC’s history and developing Pan-African consciousness connects Guinea-Bissau’s destiny with that of all of Africa and with all African people everywhere on earth. This is the exact thing that has imperialism shaking in its boots. And, for good reason because even if many of us on the right side of history remain confused, the imperialists understand clearly that their tricks in Guinea-Bissau, Somalia, the Sahel region, the Congo, Sudan, Western Sahara, etc., will work temporarily, but the writing is on the wall for them. The people of Guinea-Bissau are in the streets, refusing to be fooled by these neo-colonial tactics. This type of rising consciousness is all over Africa and the African world today and its continued development does not bode well for the enemies of humanity.
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Centuries of Continued Attacks against African Identity

11/19/2025

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Since the first European invasion into Africa centuries ago, and the institutionalization of colonialism and slavery in the process, the logic of African people understanding and identifying with Africa has always been under attack. As Europe normalized stealing and selling Africans into slavery while also controlling African territories to exploit the human and material resources there, a vicious assault against the ability of African people to connect with our true history and culture has been relentlessly perpetuated.

Many Africans in French colonial territories like Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Benin, Burkina Faso, Niger, etc., identified as French. Their highest aspirations becoming visiting and/or living in France and advancing through the highest stages of French life available to them. For Africans in the British, Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, etc., colonial territories, the same reality exists whether in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, or wherever.

The U.S. is somewhat of a unique situation because unlike Africa and the Caribbean nations, Africans within the U.S. have always been a numerical minority to the Europeans. Consequently, the efforts by Europeans to disconnect Africans in the U.S. from everything Africa was a much more effective process then similar efforts elsewhere in colonies in Africa, or throughout Central, South America, and the Caribbean.

As a result, Africans everywhere on earth are systemically encouraged through political, educational, faith, and social institutions to relinquish any connection to Africa and this is even more true within the U.S. Despite the ill refutable truth that the first organizations Africans established within the U.S. proudly expressed African identity i.e. the Free Africa Society (one of the first documented social justice organizations for African people in the U.S. which formed immediately following the so-called American Independence war in the 1700s) and the African Methodist Episcopalian Church (AME), which was the first organized and documented church organization established by African people in the U.S. in 1816, today in 2025, there are a number of African people in this country who flat deny any connection to Africa whatsoever.

Presently, one of those trends are Africans who claim to be Native to the Americas. This argument takes bits and pieces from African historical documentation of Africans who traveled to the Western Hemisphere before colonialism and slavery to formulate a position that a significant portion of Africans here today are direct descendants of people who have been in the Americas always or at least are distant descendants of people who immigrated from Africa thousands of years ago to the Americas.

Besides the historical efforts to sabotage our connection to Africa, there are other reasons why people advance these types of notions. In the case of the claim of being Indigenous to the Americas, there is a hope by some that the possibility of legal recognition as Indigenous people will bring qualifications of tribal monies from the federal government. For the people hoping for this to happen, the concept of monetary reparations for Africans being enslaved is still just a conversation while monies for so-called recognized Indigenous ethnic groupings is already a current reality.

A larger reason for this is simply shame at being African. The capitalist/imperialist/colonial system has done such a masterful job painting Africa as a hapless, ineffective, useless, burden on the European world. And, Africans have, at least up to this point, demonstrated little desire to engage in the type of collective study necessary to deconstruct those mythical narratives. Consequently, there are many Africans today who see value in creating fictitious identities rather than acknowledging their real one.

The latter statement is easily verified because the overwhelming majority of Africans within the U.S. have direct ties (literally no more than one or two generations removed) to Southern slave states within the U.S. With family from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, etc., all slave states, and surnames that are French, British, German, etc., there isn’t a logical argument that refutes a connection to slavery ala to Africa. Plus, DNA testing is popular within the U.S., including among Africans. Scores of people are getting, or have received, results confirming their physiological connection to Africa. Even the “we’re Native American” crowd hasn’t produced rebuttals to challenge any of this strong evidence.

For those genuinely interested in the forward progress of African people everywhere, this problem must be understood within context. Anyone reducing a connection to Africa to purely a psychological desire demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of why colonialism and slavery happened in the first place. Similar to how the zionist movement uses faith as a cover to justify the theft of Palestinian land, the subjugation of Africa, and the chattel slave system that it produced, serves to justify the continued exploitation of Africa’s human and material resources. This is the reason why reactionaries keep talking about the “benefits” of slavery and colonialism. Its also the reason such consistent efforts have been systemically applied within every institution within these capitalist countries, to drive Africans to look in all directions except at their mother. That is an essential element of their strategy because Africans being conscious about who we are threatens to create a vision for us about where we want to go. That type of vision greatly challenges the capitalist system because instead of demeaning and fighting each other, many Africans will start to ask why we come from the richest land base in the world, yet we are some of the poorest people in the world? This is the question imperialism cannot risk African people connecting the dots around. That’s why a simple scroll through Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, produces so many anti-African identity videos, aimed exclusively at Africans in the U.S. There are 50 million Africans living within the most powerful capitalist country in the world. We are well positioned to engage in active sabotage against this system once we have the consciousness to see doing so as our role and responsibility (as opposed to integrating into the capitalist system).

The good news for conscious Africans in the U.S. and everywhere is that this latest confusion about being Native to the Americas, although completely disrespectful to the real Indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere, and our African ancestors, is nothing more than the latest stage of these attacks against our culture and identity. In the 1920s and 30s, after economic collapse in this country, the militancy and African focus of the Garvey movement was largely replaced by the escapist evangelism of the Daddy Grace and Father Devine periods. In the 1980s and 90s, the 5% Nation of Islam did a great job influencing hip/hop culture/music thus launching constant claims that Africans were not Africans, but were instead Asiatic Black people. Ten years ago there was the proliferation of the Foundational Black American (FBA) and American Descendants of Slaves (ADOs) xenophobic identities.

Like the Asiatic Black identity, ADOs, FBA, etc., the Native to America identity will play for a while, but it won’t last. It won’t because like the others, its not based in reality for the masses of our people i.e. there are certainly a handful of us who can trace back thousands of years in this Hemisphere, but without question, the overwhelming majority of us are descendants from Africa and all the evidence clearly points to that.

The capitalist generated identity that has lasted in various forms through all of these periods, and will continue to be the most important threat aimed at convincing our people that we are Americans above all else. This one is much trickier because it has a much stronger basis than the others. Its rooted in the concept that we have been here for centuries (true). And, we have done a lot to contribute to this society (also true). And, since the U.S. is still the strongest country on earth, there is always going to be that emotional desire from oppressed people to relate to the winner. So, because of these factors, unlike the others, this American question will not just play for a while and begin to fade. This one will require a much more dedicated, sustained, and consistent propaganda effort to demonstrate to our people that where Africa goes we go. That, not only should we not see ourselves as consistent with U.S. identity, but we shouldn’t even want to go where this country goes because each and every time, this country is on the wrong side of history where it will stay because of its foundation of theft and repression. The class struggle over American identity overwhelms all of other false identities combined. The struggle for African identity must continue and it must be refined and clarified to mean a connection to the land base, whether we live there or not, whether we like the name Africa or not. The land and what happens to her is our salvation.

Its no coincidence that over the centuries since Africans have been in the U.S. the two identities we have struggled around the longest has always been some variation of – “are we Africans or are we Americans?” Although class drives everything, this identify contradiction is the strident one i.e. who’s interests do we identify with, Africa’s or the U.S.? The American versus African is a simple question. Are you for the masses of our people everywhere or are you only for empire? And, unlike the other cursory/false identities, this one every African everywhere is already being forced to choose a side.

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Kwame Ture and the Battle for Collective Consciousness

11/10/2025

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Kwame Ture at Democratic Party of Guinea HQ in 1997 in Guinea-Conakry with other A-APRP cadre who also belong to other Pan-African formations in Africa like the PAIGC, the Pan African Union of Sierra Leone, Convention People's Party of Ghana, etc.

November 15, 2025, commemorates 27 years since the physical disappearance of Kwame Ture (formally known as Stokely Carmichael). If one is to seriously use Kwame’s life to reflect on what lessons we should learn from his example, one of the most critical ones is his often stated quote – “power only comes from the organization of the masses of the people!” Although its going on 30 years since Kwame himself was able to utter that phrase, the comment is often repeated and shared in articles and throughout social media platforms. Still, there isn’t a logical argument to be made that people today have any greater understanding of what Kwame meant by that statement than they had during the 1990s when he made it.

The capitalist system drills individualism into our heads 24/7/365. By individualism we mean the core belief that our interests, perspectives, philosophies and actions only need to be guided by what we perceive to be our personal vison of the world, not the interests of the masses of humanity. As a result, individualism requires that we don’t see ourselves as a part of a collective. Instead, we see our accomplishments as solely the result of individual initiative. We define advancement as individual representation within the capitalist system. This dysfunction explains why celebrity culture is so dominant within the capitalist system because celebrities portray the myth of individualism better than anything else. In other words, the capitalist system relies on individualism because as long as people continue to see the world through that backwards vision, they will never see collective victory as realistic. And, despite the fact that the capitalist system understands clearly that collective struggle is the sole approach that can effectively dismantle capitalism and build something better, they also know that they have so effectively convinced so many of us to worship individualism that provided they can continue to promote this lie, they need not worry about a serious threat to their dominance.

We believe one of Kwame’s most significant contributions was to advance the notion that individualism is a trap of the capitalist system and that collective consciousness and action is truly what we must strive to achieve. Kwame knew this lesson firsthand. As a young man in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) he was unfortunately able to consistently witness and experience the brutality of the capitalist system against the masses of Africans in the Southern U.S. who were simply fighting for basic human rights. From that critical work, he learned that the masses were truly the key to any meaningful work towards achieving power. Any study of his life and work during his Stokely Carmichael years in the 1960s will illustrate this. Kwame knew that no one in the civil rights movement, not even Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was more important than the masses of people. In fact, Kwame understood that without the masses, Dr. King would have been nothing more than another African Baptist preacher in the South. Kwame articulated this understanding when he recounted the story of when the Montgomery Improvement Association was founded in 1955. At its inaugural meeting, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) used the meeting to announce its plans to lead a one day bus boycott of Montgomery buses. Ms. Rosa Parks, an NAACP member, had fulfilled an NAACP strategy (that actually was tested with other women who refused to give up their “whites only” seats on buses before Ms. Parks) by refusing to relinquish her seat in the “whites only” section of the bus. After the one day boycott, and its perceived success, a second meeting was called and E.D. Nixon issued a nomination of Dr. King to become president of the association. Kwame Ture’s consistent point about this is the inspiration for the expanded bus boycott came from the collective actions of the people of Montgomery and Dr. King being thrust into leadership was a manifestation of that, not the reason for it. Quoting Ture – “if Dr. King wasn’t there, the people were ready. They would have chosen Dr. Smith, or Jones, etc., to lead the organization!”

This perspective provided by Kwame Ture flies in the face of the capitalist interpretation of history that people like Dr. King are exceptional and no one else could play the role that he played. Certainly, he demonstrated great skill, courage, and intellect in his leadership capacity, but it would be ahistorical and undialectical to suggest that the movement only moved because he was in it. That type of individualistic interpretation of history has always been brought to us by this capitalist system which wants you to believe that if you are not King, Malcolm, Nkrumah, Sekou Ture, Franz Fanon, Assata Shakur, Cabral, Carmen Peirera, Imbalia Camara, Huey P. Newton, etc., then you cannot make the level of contribution that they made so why even try?

The truth of Kwame’s analysis is that each of our contributions may not be exactly the same as those historical African giants, but each of us has a contribution to make and once we make it, we find that it has value and is very necessary. It was this level of consciousness that led Kwame Ture to embark on the work which, although much less known than his work in the U.S. civil rights and Black power movements, was in our view much more consequential and important.

Kwame spent from 1961 through 1968 in SNCC, seven years. He spent approximately one year in 1968 in the Black Panther Party. In 1969, he moved permanently to Guinea-Conakry, West Africa, where he worked and lived until his physical transition in 1998. He spent that last 29/30 yeas of his life organizing within the Democratic Party of Guinea (PDG), the party of Sekou Ture. He served as a political secretary to Kwame Nkrumah who was living in Guinea-Conakry as co-president (until his physical transition in 1972) after being illegally overthrown as president of Ghana by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1966. As a citizen militant of the PDG, Kwame Ture shed the name Stokely Carmichael in 1977, choosing to honor his political mentors Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Ture. He accepted the assignment asked of him by Nkrumah to carry out the mission of Nkrumah’s “Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare (1968) to unite revolutionary Pan-African formations on the ground in Africa under the All African Committee for Political Coordination and All African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-ACPC/A-APRP – pages 56 to 60 in the Handbook). Kwame Ture took the assignment seriously, working feverishly within the PDG, eventually becoming a lead coordinator for the youth of Guinea and then a member of the PDG Central Committee. All the while, being a Central Committee member of the A-APRP as well. Kwame used his political contacts and relationships to help move A-APRP cadre into neighboring Guinea-Bissau to join the Amilcar Cabral founded African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau (PAIGC), following the work example Kwame illustrated in Guinea in Guinea-Bissau and several other countries in Africa.

The other aspect of Kwame’s assignment from Nkrumah was to help build the A-APRP in the Western Hemisphere. This was the reason he returned to the U.S. annually to conduct speaking engagements. Many people, unfamiliar with revolutionary organizing work mistakenly assessed that Kwame’s speaking engagements didn’t produce the type of mass mobilizations that happened in the 1960s so, in their eyes, his mission was unsuccessful. What they missed is his work was designed to recruit and create revolutionary Pan-African cadre within the A-APRP who would be committed, disciplined, and dedicated to continuing to carry out Nkrumah’s vision after Kwame Ture was no longer walking the earth.

We see that his work in Africa after the 60s was his most important because as great as SNCC and the Black Panthers were, they are no longer operational in 2025. Kwame has been away from this earth for the last 27 years, but the A-APRP cadre that he helped establish the foundation for continue to organize today in every corner of the African world. This is the highest expression of collective work. It was this level of political activity that ushered in Kwame’s political maturity beyond his 1960s activism, where some SNCC comrades referred to him as “Stokely Starmichael” based upon their criticism that he didn’t work collectively with staff. Within the A-APRP and PDG, Kwame helped institutionalize criticism/self-criticism, the antithesis of the criticisms against him in SNCC. And most impressively, his work those last 29/30 years demonstrated without a doubt his commitment to mass empowerment over individual advancement.

After the 1960s, virtually every major civil rights and Black power movement figure who was not murdered or imprisoned leveraged their position within the movement for individual positions of visibility. Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, Bobby Rush, Marion Barry, the list goes on, but unlike all of them, Kwame never ascended to U.S. politics. He never wanted to be mayor of New York or some other major city. He didn’t want to be chancellor of some large university. Certainly, since his notoriety was as large, if not larger, than all the others around 1970, he could have pursued those interests had he desired to do so. We would argue (without disparaging any of those aforementioned civil rights workers turned politicians) that although their names were more popular than Kwame who abandoned U.S. capitalism at the height of his personal popularity , none of their works will have the long lasting and critical impact of Kwame Ture’s work to build revolutionary cadre operational on the ground, all over the world. Cadre who do the work everyday to build the type of collective consciousness and organization that we are convinced will led us to the victory that our most sincere warriors gave their lives for. This is Ture’s biggest gift to his people and to humanity. And, even if the cadre he spawned are somehow unsuccessful in our mission, he has helped demonstrate that the collective organizing approach is the correct model. It’s a living testament to Ture’s statement that he only ever wanted “the power of the organized masses!”

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The Anticipated Attacks against Assata Shakur's Legacy are Coming

9/29/2025

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On Thursday, September 25, 2025, at 1:15pm (the time according to her daughter Kakuya Shakur) former Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army activist Assata Shakur made her physical transition in Havana, Cuba at the age of 78. For Black nationalists, Pan-Africanists, and radical activists/thinkers, Assata was a symbol of resistance to U.S. imperialism. She participated in the underground Black Liberation Army (BLA) in the early 70s. The BLA was never shy about their mission. They even arranged to have petitions filed with the World Court to substantiate that they were a military operation at war against the U.S. government. The BLA claimed that under the decisions of the Geneva Convention, the BLA and all African liberation fighters, had the right to declare all U.S. police, military, and other armed agents of the state, as enemies of the people who they had the international right to wage armed struggle against (just as the U.S. declared its rights to not only go to war with, but invade Europe, North/South Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Libya, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, as well as supporting such efforts all over Africa and the rest of the world).

Assata Shakur became that symbol of resistance after comrades calling themselves the May 19th Brigade, a collection of radicals/revolutionaries from the BLA and Weather Underground, staged a successful prison break, freeing Assata on November 2, 1979. She spent five years moving around underground before surfacing in Cuba where the Cuban socialist revolution provided her safe haven from 1984 until her transition on September 25, 2025.

Of course, Assata was in prison in the first place because of the shootout on the New Jersey turnpike with state troopers in 1973 in which former BPP and BLA comrade Zayd Shakur was killed and former BPP and BLA comrade Sundiata Acoli was captured and imprisoned for over four decades. Regarding this incident, for the defenders of the capitalist state, the many political opportunists who jump at every opportunity to dance when the system says move, and any and everyone who relies on capitalist news sources to shape their political perspectives, Assata is seen today as a cop killer and escaped convict.

Also, the story of Assata Shakur, and all African liberation fighters, can never be told without discussing the role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) infamous counter intelligence program (COINTELPRO). This program, according to the introductory document produced by then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in 1967, was dedicated to stopping the rise of a “Black Messiah” who could “electrify and ignite the Negro masses.” Hoover was never shy about expressing his racist fueled belief that “the greatest threat to American security is the unity of the negro masses.” Consequently, the FBI and COINTELPRO were committed to stopping at nothing to meet their objectives, including murder.

The mistake any activists make today is assuming that COINTELPRO discontinued the aggressive physical attacks of the 60s/70s that saw the murders of Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, the framing of Panther leaders Gerinomo Ji Jaga (Pratt) and Erika Huggins, and the fanning of artificial internal conflict which led to the murders of Panthers Alex Rackley, Lil Bobby Hutton, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, and John Huggins to name just a few as well as the imprisonment of Mumia Abu Jamal and others. That shootout on the New Jersey turnpike also falls within these categories.

Today, the FBI isn’t doing as much on the ground sabotage of the movements, although that does still occur (the installation of a violent FBI informant into the active, yet inexperienced Black Lives Matter chapter in Denver, Colorado in 2020). COINTELPRO in 2025 and beyond is much more about surveillance of activist activities, particularly on social media. There is a major influx of new and inexperienced activists and while this is a great thing, it has great challenges like so many people providing the FBI all the tea on weaknesses within our movements due to these people avoiding principled ideological struggle within the activist circles they participate in, opting instead to trash talk people online. Another much more subtle, yet overwhelmingly effective, FBI tactic today is discrediting the people and principles that surround our movements. This is where and how the attacks against the legacy of Assata Shakur are coming and why they should be absolutely no surprise to any of us who have studied the approaches of the enemies of humanity.

Just a day after it was confirmed by Assata’s daughter and the Cuban Foreign Ministry, that Assata had made her transition, the discrediting ratcheted up. There are hit pieces on Assata that are appearing in major news outlet sites that trumpet up the fact Assata was convicted of the death of New Jersey State Trooper Warren Forrester in 1973. Forrester’s family, always useful to the FBI’s efforts to discredit Assata, are trending again, calling her an escaped con and murderer. The unfortunate thing that most untrained eyes will miss is these attacks against Assata’s legacy rely on her conviction, while either ignoring and/or dismissing (just as the FBI influenced jury did during Assata’s trial) the medical examiner’s reports that the injuries Assata suffered from gunshot wounds inflicted by the state troopers were only possible from a physiological standpoint if her arms were raised (in surrender) which would have made it impossible for her to fire any weapons. In other words, the work of the FBI over the last 52 years against Assata Shakur is being raised up by them again right now. That Assata killed that cop, regardless of the fact the only real thing indicating that is the FBI repeatedly saying it.

The other element of the current FBI effort, which was also largely anticipated by those who study their methods, was the attempts they are making to criminalize the Cuban Revolution and the fact Assata spent the last 41 years of her life in that socialist country instead of doing so in a U.S. prison. To attempt to accomplish this, these current efforts at discrediting Assata rely on the same old tired and consistently disproven Cold war allegations against the Cuban Revolution about it being undemocratic and violating the human rights of the Cuban people.

One such article produced over the weekend after Assata’s passing, made the argument that Cuba was a dictatorship using the example of the so-called “Ladies in White” a group of family members to people jailed in Cuba for confirmed anti-government activities in 2006. The article mentioned, doesn’t even make an effort to inform those reading it that this group was discredited when they came out in 2006 after it was confirmed that they received training and funding from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

With Assata’s passing, what needs to be said over and over is that we as independent thinking people will determine who we love, support, and are inspired by and the U.S. government, which has been an enemy to Africa and African people since its colonized inception, will have no say in any of that. We have to yell from the highest mountains, especially where our youth can hear, that Assata was our freedom fighter. She is and should be beloved by African people and all peace and justice loving people everywhere. She stood up to the capitalist system and won (and this is really the reason they don’t want us to be inspired by her example). Any African who stands up against this system should be loved by us and we have to resist the pressure to submit to the anti-African narrative that we need to mourn our enemies. Objectively, police of any kind, anywhere, regardless of who they are – your family, etc. – are enemies to African people and all of humanity. The police all over this country participated in an illegal assault against African revolutionaries and we have dozens of bodies that verify that, thousands of families and people who have been devastated by this and they expect us to stop the presses because of the death of that state trooper. We have to resist that and any and all efforts to discredit the Cuban Revolution. For anyone serious about African liberation, you would be very hard pressed to find any entity on earth who has supported our quest for freedom harder than the Cuban Revolution. From Che Guevara physically fighting with African combatants from Cuba and the Congo in the Congo in 1964 against neo-colonial efforts, to Fidel Castro directing 500,000 Cuban troops to fight against racist apartheid in Southern Africa in the late 80s and early 90s, to Cuba being a safe haven for African freedom fighters from the U.S. from Robert Williams in 1962 to Huey P. Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Assata Shakur, and many others, anyone still saying we are all alone in our struggle is just someone who clearly flunked any real history of the world.

In truth, all of this can be summed up by looking at the statement released by chief U.S. police terrorist Kash Patel (current FBI Director). He issued a statement calling on people not to commemorate Assata Shakur in the wake of everyone from the Chicago Teacher’s Union to Democratic Socialists of America, acknowledging Assata Shakur’s contributions and life. He called Assata a terrorist. For anyone who has even the slightest understanding of the terrorism the FBI (formally the Justice Department) has historically carried out against African liberators for the last 100 years, this should be laughable. It’s the equivalent of a cat calling for everyone to condemn the mouse for standing up for their right to live.

Absolutely not. Celebrate the life of Assata Shakur and be inspired by it. If you don’t have much information about her, start by reading the two books that are most connected to her existence – her autobiography “Assata” and “Inadmissible Evidence” a book written by her auntie Evelyn Williams, who was Assata’s attorney who worked on her case in the 1970s. Continue to raise up Assata’s name as well as all freedom fighters who refused or refuse to bow down. And, make a commitment to get engaged in the very same struggle Assata represented because we all know the absolute best and only way to truly honor someone is to continue their work. Assata’s physical body is no more, but her impact on all of us will continue and there is nothing at all our enemies can do about that unless we let them.

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Kwame Nkrumah's Class Drives Race Analysis was Correct!

9/23/2025

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In the month of September Pan-Africanists all over the world generally commemorate the born month of Osageyfo Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah was the first president of Ghana, which was the first country in Africa to achieve the first stages of political independence from Europe. Nkrumah was the founder/co-founder of the first African Union between countries in 1960. He was the convenor for the All African People’s Conference in 1958 which set a more militant tone for independence struggles. He was the co-founder of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) which today is known as the African Union or the organization of all governments in Africa. He was the co-founder of the All African People’s Revolutionary Party which continues work today to carry out his revolutionary Pan-African vision.

One critical area which rarely comes up today in discussions about Nkrumah’s legacy is his emphasis on class consciousness and struggle. Throughout the 1960s, Nkrumah’s literary works like “Neo-Colonialism (1965)”, The Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare (1968)”, and “Class Struggle in Africa (1970)” each had a strong focus on class struggle, but his writings, much like those of his political comrades/contemporaries like Sekou Ture “Strategy and Tactics of the African Revolution” (1958/1978), and Amilcar Cabral “Unity and Struggle”(1979), are most often ignored by many so-called Pan-Africanists today.

One reason for this is many Africans claiming the Pan-African mantle today lack any semblance of class analysis. For this element of people, the racial analysis reigns supreme. In fact, many so-called Pan-Africanists reject class as a determining factor in evaluating our struggle for liberation on any level. Our history is rapt with so-called Pan-Africanists from Aime Senghor and Felix Humphrey Boygny in Senegal in the 1950s to Umar Johnson in the U.S. today who claim to be Pan-Africanists, or least support African unity, while clinging to capitalism as the economic approach that they believe will provide for our people.

Nkrumah never accepted or advanced a non-class based analysis of our struggle for liberation. He understood that our struggle as African people is rooted in the exploitation of Africa’s human and material resources. Consequently, he recognized that our primary struggle is the liberation of our land base – Africa – and so when he, and we, call ourselves African nationalists, we are doing so with a focus on our connection to the land (Africa), not our skin color. Nkrumah also understood clearly that the capitalist system has been developed into the dominant economic system on earth through its exploitation of Africa and other lands/peoples. As a result, he was under no illusion that capitalism could play any role in the self determination of our people or any people on earth.

Nkrumah also realized that a primary strategy of the ruling capitalist classes is to divide workers/people and that doing so along racial lines has proven to be the most effective and sustainable way to ensure mass unity is difficult to achieve. And, this division of course cannot just be limited to European (white) control over African minds and bodies. With the advancement of the African independent movements and civil rights and Black power movements around the world, the ruling classes recognized the need to proliferate classes of petti-bourgeoisie and even bourgeoisie Africans who would protect the capitalist system.

To understand the last statement its necessary to look at the contradictions that those movements forced. Here are some examples to illustrate this point. In 1960 when the Congo became independent, in a country of 25 million people, there were exactly 15 Congolese people who had technical and civil service training and experience. The newly elected government of Patrice Lumumba never had a chance to realistically build an independent government under those conditions which forced the Congo to continue to be manipulated by Belgium and the U.S. in efforts to manage the country. Another example is the response of the U.S. government to over 300 urban rebellions throughout U.S. cities in the late 1960s. In response, the government formed a committee made up of the president of the U.S. – Richard Nixon, McGeorge Bundy, the CEO of Ford Foundation, David Rockerfeller who was the patriarch for all the Rockerfeller ruling class interests that include controlling stock in Chevron, all NBC television affiliates, and Chase Bank, and others. The task of this committee was to study the results of the 1968 Kerner Commission report which argued that the U.S. was two societies, one Black, one White, and unless the disparities created by centuries of institutional racism were addressed the country would continue to rupture. Of course this committee never had any honest intentions of addressing any of the social contradictions articulated in the Kerner report. Instead, its approach was to broaden the existence of the African petti-bourgeoisie class by promoting the institution of Affirmative Action programs that would open doors that were previously closed to qualified African people to have access to assistance to help them achieve college education, minority business contracts, etc. The results of this were and are an expanded African petti-bourgeoisie class within the U.S., or a large class of African people who see their primary interest as that of protecting the capitalist system in order to serve their own political and economic interests as the gatekeepers for this system.

These examples are the things Nkrumah warned us about in “Class Struggle.” Now today, in 2025, there are multiple African billionaires throughout Africa like Akite Bangote from Nigeria, and numerous other African billionaires around the world including several within the U.S. As Nkrumah told us, the role of these people is to pose as leaders of the African masses while using their visibility to steer our people towards loyalty to the capitalist system. The concerted effort has been to replace revolutionary ideology and action with entrepreneurship and business focuses among our people. To promote the belief that hard work and vision will permit us to gain access to the benefits of the capitalist system. Pyramid scam economic approaches like bitcoin have engulfed the imagination of so many of our people today when the reality is all of the business and entrepreneurship in the world has not and cannot liberate our people. It cannot because the number one principle within the capitalist system is in order to have a ruling class, there must be an underclass. For this emerging African petti bourgeoisie, they have made clear choices. They will place all of their eggs into that capitalist basket with the hopes of advancing their ability to rise within the capitalist system. And, since capitalism is again the product of exploiting Africa, a central component of sustaining capitalism is to keep the masses of Africans divided and disorganized. A core element of this strategy is dehumanizing and demoralizing the African masses. Making us believe that the struggles we face are only the result of our own failings and have nothing to do with this system that continues to exploit us.

There are plenty of these African petti bourgeoise who are content to play the role of keeping our people down by any means necessary to uplift their individual stock within the capitalist system. All one has to do is scroll social media and you will find no small number of African people who are proudly parroting long ago discredited racist tropes against our people. Its naïve to believe that their desire to do this is fueled entirely by ignorance. The neo-colonial leaders throughout the 54 countries in Africa and the 16 in the Caribbean along with people like Barack Obama are not all confused. They are the people Nkrumah warned us about. They look like us, but they ain’t like us.

Nkrumah was also very clear about articulating the importance of a class perspective to guide our understanding of how race is utilized as a tool of oppression within the capitalist system. When Kwame Ture, formally Stokely Carmichael, died in 1998, he was an avowed revolutionary Pan-Africanist and scientific socialist with a clear class consciousness, but that was not always the case. In 1968, when Stokely Carmichael first started visiting Nkrumah in Guinea-Conakry (before moving there in 1969 to become Nkrumah’s political secretary), he possessed a dominant race first analysis. This was illustrated by his 1968 speech at Huey P. Newton’s birthday party commemoration in Oakland, California, U.S. (as a result of Newton – the co-founder of the Black Panther Party – being imprisoned for the death of a European police officer). In that speech, during a contentious time where Carmichael was engaged in ideological struggle with Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, he indirectly criticized the Panthers in general, and Cleaver in particular, by attacking communism as being “ill-relevant to Black people!” The young Stokely Carmichael’s ideological growth into Kwame Ture has to be largely credited to Kwame Nkrumah who had endless discussions with the young Stokely at Vila Syly in Conakry about the danger of a race dominant analysis that is devoid of class analysis in properly evaluating our problems as African people.

If he were with us in his physical form today, Kwame Nkrumah would most likely see the boot licking of so many Africans in Africa towards neo-colonialism and disgraceful respect so many Africans are showing towards an anti-African fascist who was shot and killed in the U.S. as clear manifestations of class struggle within the African communities. Long before it because fashionable to say so, Nkrumah understood clearly that “all skin folks ain’t kin folks.” Regardless, we are still a long way from developing the type of collective class consciousness that will overshadow race consciousness among African people. We are still in the realm of “I’m rooting for everyone Black!” Nkrumah’s experiences with the betrayal of Lumumba by Mobutu and other Africans in the Congo and the betrayal of Africans within his government in Ghana reinforced for him that the struggle for revolutionary Pan-Africanism is a class struggle. A struggle that will certainly require African unity, but will also see the African struggle in solidarity with non-Africans who are engaging in anti-imperialist struggles while we fight relentlessly against many people who look like us who will not hesitate to work on behalf of the enemies of the masses of Africans and all of humanity.

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Do the FBI/CIA Have a Role in Africa/African Diaspora Wars?

9/9/2025

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Any surface review of social media platforms will find a plethora of videos of African people from the U.S., Caribbean, and of course Africa, arguing that Africans are defined strictly by the colonial borders where we were born and raised and that beyond that, we have no historical and cultural connections to one another. Accompanying this narrative with equal consistency are voices from Africans within the U.S. claiming that those of us born within the U.S. have zero historical and biological ties to Africa.

Even a cursory glance at the analysis projected within all of these talking points reveals the massive holes in these arguments to any and everyone who has spent even a little time studying the history of our people. For the anti-Africa voices, their entire framework is built upon the fragile belief that we should reject Africa because of random perspectives and voices from Africans born in Africa who know as little about our collective history as the Africans expressing this from the diaspora (outside of Africa). For the Africa against the diaspora (primarily against Africans in the U.S.) voices, their flimsy position is rooted largely in long ago disproven white supremacy tropes that Africans in the U.S. are lazy and criminally inclined. And unfortunately, these weak perspectives are not as alarming in comparison to the strange claims that we have no connection to Africa. These claims take anecdotal evidence like people’s physical appearances, and a complete lack of understanding of history i.e. “where are the slave ships?” to create this fantasy identity while completely ignoring clear linguistic, cultural, and even physiological connections between Africans in the U.S. and Africa. For example, ill refutable evidence of our linguistic connection like the fact the word mama, obviously widely used by Africans in the U.S., is actually the word for mother in Swahili. Or, the many ceremonies, and mannerisms we share such as African women in Venezuela beating sticks into water at varying degrees to create music which is a practice originated from the Baka Forest people in Central Africa through a ceremony called Liquindi. Then, there is sickle cell anemia which a large percentage of Africans in the U.S. house the trait if not the actual disease. This illness unquestionably results from the out of control mutation of blood cells that only impacts African people because of the historical relationship of those mutated blood cells serving as the body’s natural defense against malaria, a disease common throughout Africa and nonexistent in the U.S.

Most of us have heard and participated in conversations about these unfortunate perspectives, but very little of this discourse is centered around discussing where the origins of all this disunity come from. The suggestion here is that we consider that much of this dysfunction is most likely being injected into our communities from organized forces who have direct interest in keeping African people divided and disorganized.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have spent much of their 126 and 76 respective years history engaged in work designed to sabotage efforts at African unity and liberation. Starting with the Department of Justice (its name prior to being renamed the FBI) and J. Edgar Hoover’s work to sabotage the cross continental relationship between Liberia’s President King and Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the 1920s. Then to the CIA’ s sabotage of Congolese independence and coordinated murder of Patrice Lumumba, and its illegal overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah’s government in Ghana, and both intelligence agencies role in breaking up the relationship between Malcolm X’s work with Nkrumah, Sekou Ture, socialist Cuba, etc., the claims of U.S. imperialist intelligence actively eliminating African liberation efforts is ill refutable.

Just as Hoover’s and Justice Department’s work against the Garvey movement clearly illustrated 100 years ago, U.S. intelligence has always understood, even if we didn’t, the importance of sabotaging any serious efforts to link up African people across the Atlantic ocean. Why? Because that unity is the most potent weapon aimed at thwarting the capitalist world’s dependence on cheap African material and human resources. Resources that fueled and sustain capitalist dominance over the world’s political and economic interests. No matter where you are while reading this, whether it’s the architectural designs, the vehicles, the electronics, or the food you eat, Africa’s exploitation is everywhere around you.

And, since we haven’t been able to verify for sure where the origins and financing for most of these very well polished anti-African unity videos/takes are coming from, our history has taught us that we have to put everything on the table, especially the interests of the forces who benefit the most from our disorganization. Fortunately, there is much we can do to circumvent this sabotage against us.

First, we have to acknowledge that like any and all of the efforts capitalist intelligence has made against our unity, their efforts are always only going to be as effective as our willingness to compromise and sell out our people for their interests. Hoover’s work against Garvey was only successful because of Liberian President King’s willingness to cave to pressure as well as the self serving persons within the UNIA who were used against Garvey in a mail fraud scheme. The disruption of Lumumba’s government in the Congo required Joseph Mobutu (Mobutu Sese Seto), originally a close friend to Lumumba and member of Lumumba’s National Congolese Movement, to become the CIA’s main man, first in the Congo, and eventually throughout all of Africa.

So, these sellouts making these anti-unity videos are guilty and this shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of us because the class struggle is real. There is no such thing as racial unity without a class analysis. There have always been Africans who would not hesitate to sell the masses out to the colonizers in Africa and the slave masters at home in Africa and across the Atlantic to the plantations here in the Western world. And, those sellouts continue to reproduce creating the current variety who disingenuously claim colonial borders as our identity while making Africans born outside of the U.S. our primary enemies when as my mother always said “none of us have a pot to piss in!”

This is also true for the Africans from and on the continent who, embracing the class struggle of exclusion of the masses of Africans, see aligning themselves with the enemies of Africa and the African masses as their meal ticket just as their diaspora sellout kin share the same backward perspective on how to potentially build wealth by exploiting our situation instead of eliminating our collective oppression.

Nonetheless, the statement is true by an African revolutionary in the 1960s when asked about the assassination of Malcolm X and whether the Nation of Islam committed the act when he said “they may have fired the guns, but they didn’t buy the bullets!” Deep in the interior, down underneath the surface, somewhere that we may not discover for another several years, the forces of intel for the capitalist system have their hands in this. As they always have from their efforts to advance the narrative of the Black Belt South (carving out territories in the Southern U.S. for Africans), originally created by the Communist International to sway Africans away from the Garvey movement and its focus on Africa, U.S.,intelligence built upon that narrative to continue to separate us from Africa, to their confirmed work to sabotage Pan-Africanist connections for decades afterward. Those intelligence agencies understand clearly that true African unity, across artificial colonial borders, is the key to disrupting their stranglehold on African self determination and the total liberation of Africa under scientific socialism. It would be naïve for us to ignore that and not consider their role in all this confusion. Kwame Ture told us – “any analysis of our people without including the work of our enemies is an incomplete analysis!”

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Three Widely Believed Myths about Socialism in the U.S.

9/4/2025

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Its 2025 so if you haven’t noticed yet, international capital and its exploitative dominance over the entire world’s human and material resources is facing its most serious challenge. Just 35 years ago, even the then powerful Warsaw Pact, or Eastern European countries led by the former Union of Socialist Soviet Republics (USSR or Soviet Union) were not able to mount the type of challenge to the capitalist/imperialist system that its seeing today.

And this is borne out by Kwame Ture’s prophetic statement during the 1990s that the cracks in capitalism’s armor were exposed by the fact “the same white racists who attacked us in the 60s for protesting because they saw this as communist activities, are now protesting against the very same government they brutalized us in favor of!” Ture went on to state that attacks from the right and left make the capitalist system that much more vulnerable.

None of this is to say that the capitalist system isn’t still extremely resilient. It certainly has life to continue fighting back, but one of its most important tools in doing so is its ability to maintain its dominant anti-communist propaganda over a large segment of the world’s population.

This is evidenced by the fact that much of Europe today, at the very demand of the populations in countries like France, Italy, Germany, etc., uphold socialist influenced national programs like free healthcare, education, etc. While doing this, these countries, including Canada, laugh off U.S. critiques of their systems as costing too much by responding that they, unlike the U.S., don’t spend 50% of their national tax revenues on maintaining war mechanisms and militaries, around the world. And, the majority of the people in these countries happily agree with this approach while many of them would still resist any comparison between their countries and socialist development.

Of course, the U.S. is still the unquestioned leader of international capitalist/imperialist dominance and as a result, the most effective and consistent anti-communist propaganda exists within the U.S. This can easily be demonstrated by simple experimentation. If you go to any U.S. state, urban or rural setting, and stand on any intersection, offering passersby $100.00 USD if they can demonstrate any comprehensive book on socialist development they have read, outside of an assigned reading from school, etc., you would find no more than 1%, and that’s being optimistic, who would be qualified to cash in on your proposal.

This reality exists due to this non-stop anti-communist propaganda that exists like the sun comes up in the U.S.. And, the three myths about socialism are just some of many that can be easily dissected, yet they continue to represent what is without question the most dominant thinking about socialism in the U.S. today.

Myth # 1 – There is no freedom of thought in socialist societies.

This one is most likely the most widely propagated and the easiest to disprove of the many unfortunate lies about socialist development. The core of this mistruth rests in the mistaken assumption within capitalist U.S. that freedom and democracy is defined solely by being able to do what you think you want to do with no context and/or analysis. The truth is you can do what you want in capitalist societies as long as what you want does nothing to challenge the status quo of capitalist domination. In capitalism you can be racist, patriarchal, homophobic, and can even brag about being completely ignorant about any and everything, and all of this is not only acceptable, its encouraged within many quarters. This is of course an extremely primitive and underdeveloped perspective on freedom. Any healthy freedom has to require people within society to recognize not just their responsibility to themselves and their loved ones, but their responsibility to everyone. This is what socialist development promotes. So, in this collective mindset, a conscious socialist operating within a society committed to socialist development would have no issue in recognizing that the amount of money they can make should be limited for a time. Not to say that they cannot make money, but to say that their ability to make money cannot result from exploitative activities that maintain class inequities crucial for the continuance of capitalist development. For example, this conscious socialist would prefer that schools be prioritized with infrastructure. They would demand that the elderly and sick be taken care of without the burden of worrying about the finance to do so properly. And this socialist would always see these responsibilities as theirs as a human living in a collective society as a opposed to seeing the necessity to utilize tax revenues to fund schools as a personal financial burden that limits their personal profitability as is promoted within backward capitalist societies.

Also, since socialist societies prioritize collective input and participation, it’s insane to suggest that capitalist societies offer more free speech than socialist societies. Sure, from a surface perspective, capitalists can argue this point while leaving out that socialist societies haven’t been able to consolidate the values of socialism and moral incentives like capitalist societies have with financial incentives. So, to make that comparison is like expecting an undisciplined child to understand collectivism at the same qualitative level in a selfish capitalist society as someone who has practiced and is committed to collective development.

Deeper inspection confirms that that you truly can only say what you want within capitalist societies provided what you are saying is not opposed to capitalism and that a reasonable number of people are not listening to you. A simple inquiry into the capitalist system’s elimination of people like Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, Thomas Sankara, Fred Hampton, Salvador Allende, Samora Machel, Eduardo Mondalane, Ernesto Guevara, etc., etc., illustrates that capitalism will end you quickly if you speak out against it in ways that undermine its stability and ability to continue to dominant.
Meanwhile, socialist construction relies on tools like democratic centralism, which properly instituted ensures that everyone’s voice is heard and all debate is fully exhausted before a decision is made. Then, after the debate is exhausted, everyone has that collective responsibility to make a decision. With this socialist method, if anything, the danger is bourgeoisie democracy where people who don’t do the work are still able to express their opinions without any accountability to the work, but to call this style of work restrictive and undemocratic is laughable. This is especially true when free speech in capitalism doesn’t exist without dollars because dollars buys you the access. There are no historical accounts of capitalist development written and widely consumed by poor people.

Myth # 2 – You cannot make money in socialist societies.

The basis of this lie is that everything and everyone is equal under socialism and work is not incented so no matter how hard you try, everyone gets paid the same. This is also laughable. Doctors and lawyers within socialist societies make much more than street sweepers and garbage collectors. The fundamental and important difference is that within socialist development the value of that garbage collector and street sweeper is encouraged with the understanding that their role, although different, is as important as the doctor and lawyer. In socialism, the type of class hierarchy that dominates in capitalist societies is openly discouraged with education having a focus on eliminating this all together.

Another importance difference is since education, healthcare, childcare, etc., are free in socialist development, any and everyone is encouraged to pursue whichever type of career they wish because all work contributes to the revolutionary process. So, if the street sweeper decides not to go to law school, they aren’t socially penalized for this. That stigma doesn’t exist like it does in capitalist societies because the ability to have education isn’t decided by your elite class status, but by what contribution you wish to make to the collective society. Once all work is respected, you will always have some who wish to be doctors and some who decide to be street sweepers.

Myth # 3 – Production of products in socialism is inferior to capitalist production.

Although widely believed, another laughable concept. If you take s cellular phone for example. One developed in socialist societies is done under an environment of providing a necessary service to the user/buyer. The company is state owned so this is its motivation, not profitability. As a result, they have every incentive to build a superior product because their success is measured based on their ability to provide the people what they need, not how much money they make. This model has been proven time and time again, but a clear example is the work of Ghana’s tire manufacturing plant in Takaradi, Ghana from 1960 to 1966 under Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People’s Party’s socialist development. Ghana’s socialist tire factory out produced Firestone Tire and Rubber in Liberia during that period producing hundreds of thousands of tires that performed better and lasted longer. And, the recipe was no mystery. Under the socialist tire factory, workers were respected as contributors to the revolution by making those tires. They were paid respectively, provided benefits and treated as valuable members of the society. Even within capitalist societies we know that when workers are respected, they perform better, call in sick less, and produce at higher levels. In fact, the number one reason for worker dissatisfaction in capitalist countries is that lack of respect, not wages.

Meanwhile, capitalist tire production repped the same tired approach that is common in capitalist societies. Poor pay. Bad work conditions. Less workers to increase profitability with higher penalties for not meeting production goals. The fact that the neo-colonial U.S. backed thugs who illegally overthrew Nkrumah’s government in 1966 had the vision to close that tire factory immediately and sell it off to Firestone to be immediately closed, forever (it was never reopened) tells the full story. Capitalism will do anything to prevent the people from finding out what it really is because once people find out that capitalism is nothing except a brutal oppressive system, they will learn that scientific socialism is the exact opposite of that. As capitalism gets weaker and weaker, its ability to maintain that mirage of superiority is really the only trick up its sleeve that it has left.

o edit.

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Undeniable Evidence that the Empire is Crumbling

8/5/2025

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I live in the U.S., but evidence of the increasing failures of the capitalist system applies to the entire world, particularly the capitalist countries. And, the U.S. is a very reliable measuring stick for this analysis since it has been the leading capitalist and imperialist country in the world since 1945.

Before that time, Europe, particularly Britain, France, and Germany, parallelled the U.S. in world political and economic power, but World War II knocked all of Europe down several notches. After that dust settled, the U.S. stood as the dominant capitalist and imperialist country meaning it became the chief raider of world resources and terrorist oppression to ensure that dominance continues.

In the 1950s and 60s, that system worked pretty well for the U.S. It was able to present itself as an alternative to European colonialism all over the world while the economic prosperity following World War II provided stable economic growth for the U.S. economy and the primarily European (white) working class elements that prop it up.

The problem, as Karl Marx told us 150 years ago, is capitalism is an exploitative system so that means its existence is dependent upon saturating the markets to maximize profitability. Unfortunately for it, doing so, will inevitably create imbalances because it needs that imbalance to retain its profitable margins. In other words, this is how the capitalist cycle completes itself. The U.S. corporations create products, service and assembly line wise, but as workers and social movements around the world battle back against the inherent exploitation of capitalism, the ruling classes for this backward system have to search for more profitable arenas. Cheap resources and labor are the keys to these more profitable arenas, but the challenge they face with that is people in these areas of the world are the ones who are doing the most effective fighting back against this oppression. Examples are the organized labor struggles in countries like Argentina and Colombia against International Monetary Fund exploitation as well as the unified efforts within the Sahel region of Africa to come out from under the toxic control of the French CFA Franc currency. Even within the U.S. recent victories and potential victories by labor unions like the Teamsters, Amazon and Starbucks workers, food workers, etc., symbolize a new era of labor organizing that exists outside of the dominant dependence of the liberal bourgeoisie electoral process which has defined organized labor for several decades. And, nothing makes this point more than the level of consciousness today around the need for justice for the Palestinian people, something that only existed within the most radical sectors of activist work just a few short decades ago.

The results of all of this are Malcolm X’s classic words in 1963 when he was asked to comment on the recent assassination of John F. Kennedy. Paraphrasing, Malcolm said that the violence the U.S. was perpetuating around the world, using the Congo in Central Africa for example and the U.S. role in assassinating the democratically elected Prime Minister Patrice Emory Lumumba, was a case of the “chickens coming home to roost!” Meaning, when you perpetuate violence and oppression against innocent people, that violence has a way of coming back around to you.

In the 50s and 60s, the U.S. and the entire capitalist world was seen as the citadel of peace, justice, freedom and democracy. Fast forward to today and the streets of Paris, London, the Scandinavian countries, and New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Montreal, etc., look like scenes from Senegal, Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Why? Because the instability that these capitalist countries have systemically unleashed against all of those countries has resulted in the people from those countries being forced to seek stability wherever they could get it. The capitalist countries destroyed the possibility of finding education and jobs in African cities, so those Africans found their way to Europe, the U.S., and Canada to find those resources.

This phenomenon has created a reality where the capitalist countries can no longer claim the allegiance of its internal populations as they could in the 50s and 60s. This is why they get so upset in Europe, Canada, and the U.S. when people in those countries proudly wave Palestinian, Congolese, Sudanese, and Pakistani flags. The message is clear, “we are here because you stole our birthright. Now, we will make you implode from the inside!”

This reality explains the outrage about so-called illegal immigration in these capitalist countries. Its simply the continued denial by those within those countries who ride or die with the oppressive empires they identify with that they are on the wrong side of history and its clearly catching up to them.

The rich within the capitalist countries are at the end of their road in being able to exploit, exploit, exploit, with no push back from the masses. There are countless surveys circulating within the U.S. today that demonstrate that upwards of 50% of persons 30 years and under have a favorable view of what they conceive to be socialist construction and policies. And, all that does is place the U.S. in line with the populations in the rest of the capitalist world. Obviously, there is a long way to go before any victories for socialist consciousness can be claimed, but it would have been absolutely impossible in the 50s and 60s to have even 3 to 5% of the any population segment express any level of positivity towards socialism in any way possible.

So, instead of being shocked by the outward racist, patriarchal, and homophobic rhetoric, see it for what it actually is. Instead of feeling depressed because racists are confronting people in McDonalds, see it for what it is. Rural European communities are waging protests against the U.S. government for its anti-human policies in healthcare and social services. The rich are having to eat the poor in order to maintain their profitability and the working poor are not accepting this lying down. Capitalism is in its last legs and even if some of us don’t know it, the capitalists know it. Their desperation attempts in recruiting Indigenous people in the West and Africans to denounce their communities with long discredited racist talking points, like all these other last ditch efforts, is nothing more than the actions of a cornered cat fighting for its very survival.

Every significant economist with a social lense predicted the decline of capitalism from Luxemburg to Marx to Rodney to Nkrumah to Ture, to Castro, etc., etc. In fact, Fidel Castro has a book entitled “Capitalism in Crisis” that was released in the late 80s/early 90s. That book is so prophetic for today’s reality that its like Castro hasn’t been deceased for almost 10 years and instead is sitting in Havana today writing notes about what’s happening.

All every peace and justice loving person need do now is ensure that you are getting your mind, body and spirit prepared. Maintain that constant political education so that you can see the end of capitalism as simply the beginning of a better socialist reality. Continue reinforcing your work so that you continue throwing oil on the fire. View every conversation as an opportunity to fight back. You never know. The person you are talking to can become the next Malcolm X, Teodora Gomes, or Ella Baker.
Contrary to the lies being vomited over and over, the world never started with capitalism. Human progress never stands still. Capitalism is the dialectical outgrowth of colonialism and slavery. It replaced feudalism as the dominant economic system in the world today, but even right now, feudalism, like its predecessors communalism and slavery, still exists in pockets around the world. One day soon, capitalism will join communalism, slavery, and feudalism, as former systems of dominance in the world. And the people’s of the planet will have their time to shape scientific socialism in the ways needed. For African people that will manifest itself in the creation of one unified socialist Africa. For others, it may look different, but all of this work will serve the purpose of advancing socialist construction for the following stage of human development i.e. world communism, and so on and so on. Kwame Ture could not have provided a more accurate example of this when asked about why he moved from Black power to Pan-Africanism. He said that in the 60s, the struggle was dominantly defined as a struggle against racism so the African masses within the U.S. identified a forward thrust from that as declaring our Blackness as a shield against racism. Then Ture went on to assert that as time evolved, they began to recognize that the struggle was much more than a fight against racism. It’s a fight for power and power means land and resources and the only land we have rights to is Africa, thus Pan-Africanism. Human progress never stands still. The only people who want us to believe that it does are the people who benefit the most from it standing still right now in this moment in history. Soon, they will be eternally proven wrong.

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These "We Should Sit Out Protests" Folks Don't Speak for Activists

6/11/2025

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Just this morning I saw a social media video reel of an African (Black) man railing against the protests in Los Angeles. We realize that everyone everywhere has earned a PhD from Youtube, but the logic this dude articulated criticizing the protests (and expressing why African people should not be in support of the uprisings) was below even the most primitive manifestations of sanity.

He said that unlike the African civil rights movement of the 1960s, “they are breaking the law in Los Angeles!” Apparently, the institutions of Youtube PhD’s in social activism neglected to include the component that explains to people like this dude how everything African people protested against was legal, meaning just by standing up for our dignity, we were breaking the laws of this system. Colonialism in Africa was legal. We resisted it. Slavery was legal all throughout the Western Hemisphere, including of course the U.S. We resisted it. Jim Crow racial segregation from the late 1800s through the 1970s was legal. We resisted it. No African today would be able to attend universities outside of the historically African ones if we hadn’t been willing to break the law. No African today could have access to employment and other opportunities if we hadn’t been willing to break the law. No African could live where they wanted and could afford to live if we hadn’t been willing to break the law. Anyone who has even the slightest understanding of social activism knows that the foundational basis of it is building a collective movement to struggle against unjust laws so by definition, all struggles for justice and dignity are going to break laws. The point being anyone who knows anything about the African struggle for justice realizes how absurd it sounds in 2025 for anyone who looks like us to be sitting up there complaining about people breaking laws in the name of justice.

The other absurd thing these African people are saying is the exact same backward talking point the capitalist system has been spewing against the most radical elements of our struggle for the last 60 years i.e. the critique against urban uprisings. And we mean the same tired talking points. They don’t even have the ability to come up with anything new. “You are destroying your own communities! What good will that do!” Malcolm X literally deconstructed this empty argument 60 years ago. He said that the masses, sick of exploitation and discrimination, rise up in righteous anger, but the people behind their suffering don’t occupy the same physical spaces that they do, so they lash out against the resources and symbols of the power structure. Police cars being targeted is without question a clear and logical example for people to make this point. Just as people have targeted Teslas for destruction. These same reactionaries decry why the people who have pushed for electric cars would destroy them, but no one is destroying Priuses. The targeting of Teslas is a clear statement against the multi-national corporation that produces them, not the car/truck itself. The people are clear in their messaging. An example of this was from 1992 after the Los Angeles uprising after the acquittal of the four police accused of viciously beating motorist Rodney King. Oprah Winfrey went to South L.A. to film her show. Her audience was filled with local residents. She condescendingly asked one young African “what did you accomplish with these riots?” He took just one second to say “it got you here!”

These African social media commentators are also criticizing the carrying of Mexican flags, saying that “if they love Mexico so much, why don’t they just go there?! Why are they protesting in our country?!” This “logic” is a supreme example of the absurdity of these arguments. Even a fifth grader can understand that the Mexican flag is an expression of dignity since the ICE raids into peoples residences and on people on the streets is a clear assault against that dignity. The flag is a call for self respect and unity, rooted in the truth that California was stolen from Mexico and the Indigenous people to begin with. And, its utterly amazing that these African commentators can completely ignore that during our recent protests for Black lives, etc., Red, Black, and Green flags are commonly displayed, we would argue for the same reasons the Mexican flags are being displayed. Our flags are not being displayed because people want to go anywhere. As Pan-Africanists we wish this was true, but we are not at that collective level of consciousness yet about Africa (although we are moving in that direction). We know that the presentation of these flags is clearly a statement of dignity. We also know that the same capitalist logic that condemns the use of the Mexican flags also condemns the use of our Pan-African flags. We know this because as the European comedienne said some years ago “I love minorities, as long as you act white!” The flags of resistance serves as yet another important symbol of rejection of this capitalist white supremacist empire and the power structure knows that, even if these ignorant commentators don’t.

Last, but not least, the foundation of everything these commentators are expressing is their calls for African people to sit out the protests. Of all of their insanity, this one sits at the top of the list. Only a lower level animal such as roach suffers from such unconsciousness. If roaches are crawling and you kill one, the others will not come to help the fallen comrade. They will either seek safety or continue on with their duties. As human beings, even on the most basic level, and especially as Africans, each and every one of us cannot be confused enough to believe that the gestapo actions aimed at the Indigenous communities in Los Angeles will stop there. Only the most foolish and brain dirtied African would truly believe that the state will wage such a violent assault against any people, yet we are safe because we are “Americans.” Any African today that confused is without question a disgrace to all of the struggle and sacrifices our ancestors contributed. If anything, these actions are just the first phase of Europeanizing the U.S. which means these Africans who are working so hard to push their heads up the rear ends of the capitalist system are next for the gestapo actions by the state.

Of course the fundamental problem with all of these rightwing and liberal African commentators expressing how none of what’s happening in Los Angeles is our concern as African people is that clearly, none of the people saying this are activists. They do not belong to activist African or anybody else organizations. They are not involved in our ongoing struggle for liberation and forward progress. They are just sad and confused people who sit behind computer screens. Most of them, by their own admissions, have never even attended a single protest. They certainly haven’t organized anything, not even the vomit coming out of their mouths. You would not accept someone conducting surgery on your body who had never studied and practiced medicine. You would not permit someone who has never studied or trained to work on cars to disassemble your car engine. So, why would you listen to people who have clearly never studied social justice struggles and never participated a day in our struggle for justice to provide you with an analysis for how you should see any social justice efforts?

These people on social media are saying the things they are saying to get likes and clout as a tactic to build their brands and open doors to paid endorsement of their content. For them its exactly what Malcolm also told us – “they say exactly what the white man wants them to say!” Those of who have been organizing on the streets for decades know better than this charade. We know that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was 100% correct when he said “a threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere!” King’s logic is ill refutable to anyone who is serious about life. The only exceptions are those who view our people and our existence as a means to an end. Those people will never speak for us. All they will do is what they always do, sit back, run their mouths, and then come in after the dusk clears to sweep up the benefits they can pilfer from everyone else’s genuine sacrifices.

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Why Malcolm X is Still Relevant To Us 60 Years After His Death

5/20/2025

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May 25th, 2025, commemorates 100 years since the birth of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz or Malcolm X. By now, many people already possess some knowledge of his life, primarily the least formidable elements which have been personified by capitalist efforts to redefine his image. His transformation from petty street hustler to renowned activist, and revolutionary organizer. The belief that Malcolm learned to read and write by reading every word in the Websters dictionary. His attention to developing intense discipline and largely, his ability to take the most complex political conditions and break them down into language every day folk can easily understand.

All of those elements about Malcolm are true and magnificent, but none of them accurately capture why his life is so relevant today exactly 60 years after his assassination (February 21,1965). So, what is it about Malcolm that makes him still so attractive to entire generations of African and non-African people who were not even alive yet while he did his work?

The most important attributes from Malcolm, even if invisible to the naked and untrained eye, start with his complete dedication to principle and his unwavering courage in confronting the enemies of humanity. Most people, even in 2025, choose to ignore the obvious contradictions within this capitalist dominated world because addressing them still comes with consequences. Whether those consequences are serious ones like being pursued by gestapo police agencies are just losing a job, most people prefer to avoid the type of conflict that people like Malcolm run towards. He was without question unafraid to call out the injustices being perpetuated against the African masses worldwide. His characterization of the conditions in the Congo in Central Africa mirroring conditions in Mississippi in the U.S. was so courageous because certainly in 1963 when he made the analysis, it was viewed by mainstream capitalist media (correctly) as a bold denouncement of the capitalist world in the middle of a heightened cold war atmosphere. His appointment by the Harlem Committee to meet with Fidel Casto from Cuba in 1960 was a move plenty of people would reject in 2025, meeting with the newly emerged leader of the first socialist leaning (at that time) revolution in the Western Hemisphere. His open endorsement of Africans training with firearms and his open letter to violent white supremacist groups in the Southern U.S. that he would organize a continent of African militia persons to engage them if they did not stop harassing civil rights workers. All of these things and many more easily convey the courage of Malcolm X when very few people were willing at that time to express the radical views that he articulated so eloquently.

And, although his courage is undeniable, probably his most important contribution has been his vision as it relates to African liberation on a worldwide basis. Even before his break with the Nation of Islam, which can only accurately be described as his ideological growth beyond the realm of which the Nation operates, Malcolm displayed this vision. His debate at Howard University in 1961 against Bayard Rustin (at the invitation of Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee – SNCC – organizers on campus including the young Kwame Ture – formally Stokely Carmichael), planted the seeds for SNCC’s eventual evolution from an organization primarily influenced by the philosophy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (freedom now!), to one clearly more in line with the thinking of Malcolm X (Black power!).

SNCC’s invitation to Malcolm to speak to them in Selma, Alabama on February 12, 1965, just nine days before he was taken from us, is a clear gauge of his growing influence, despite the efforts by the movie “Selma” to dismiss his presence with SNCC

(as well as diminishing all the militancy of the movement inside of SNCC, etc.). His brilliant analogy of the “chickens coming home to roost” on December 1, 1963 in response to the question about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, not only openly defied Elijah Muhammad’s directive to all Nation of Islam ministers to refrain from commenting on Kennedy’s death (Malcolm clearly knew he had one foot already outside of the Nation anyway), but more importantly, his remarks were such a clear demonstration of the contradictions of international imperialism, capitalism’s continued exploitation of Africa and African people, and his growing Pan-African consciousness.

Its that Pan-African consciousness that is really Malcolm’s most lasting impact. Despite efforts by those loyal to Elijah Muhammad and the Nation to claim that Malcolm was solely a product of the Nation, we must remember that Malcolm’s parents – Earl Little and his Caribbean born mother Louise Little – were active members of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, an unapologetically Pan-African organization. Its 100% illogical to suggest that none of that rubbed off on Malcolm. What makes more sense is that Elijah Muhammad gets credit for waking some of that dormant consciousness within Malcolm, but once that process started, it continued to evolve beyond the Nation of Islam.

In fact, the argument can be made that without those last 11 months after Malcolm left the Nation of Islam, he would be not much more than one of the many dynamic ministers that existed within the Nation i.e. Louis Farrakhan, Silas Muhammad, Jeremiah Shabazz, Abdul Allah Muhammad, etc. Of course, Minister Farrakhan’s work over the last 48 years he has spent rebuilding the Nation of Islam after Muhammad’s death in 1975 is obviously noteworthy for many reasons, it can be argued that Farrakhan’s impact on the African masses doesn’t extend any farther than that of Malcolm, certainly not internationally..

And, the last statements are validated by Malcolm’s work in those last 11 months. His travels and consultations with Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Sekou Ture in Guinea, Gamal Abdul Nasser in Egypt, etc., cemented Pan-African consciousness in the modern era, not only in the U.S, but around the world. When Sekou Ture invited a delegation from SNCC to Guinea in 1964 (led by John Lewis, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer, Cleve Sellers, etc.), John Lewis recounted in his memoir that everyone in Guinea wanted to know what SNCC’s positions were in contrast to Malcolm X who had traveled there a short time before. Lewis recalled that any detection of lesser militancy than that which was articulated by Malcolm in Guinea was cause for the complete discrediting of the SNCC organizers, an organization which was in the forefront of the most courageous civil rights work ever to happen in this country. Still, Malcolm’s influence in Pan-African organizing work as illustrated by the words of those SNCC organizers in Guinea, his impact on people in Ghana, starting with Kwame Nkrumah who strongly encouraged Malcolm to move to Ghana and work directly with him to organize for Pan-Africanism, to Alphaus Hunton, Maya Angelou, and others who were living in Ghana already, but clearly saw Malcolm’s presence there as a guiding light for what they felt their role should be in Pan-African work.

The core of Malcolm’s Pan-African consciousness can be summarized in the statements he began making in those last months of his life i.e. “we are Africans! If a cat has kittens in the oven, you don’t call them biscuits!” Anyone who is a capitalist is a blood sucker!” “You haven’t left anything in Africa? Why you left your mind in Africa!” These remarks and many more like them are carefully organized in the book of Malcolm’s speeches entitled “The Final Speeches of Malcolm X”. This book shouldn’t be confused with “The Last Speeches of Malcolm X” as the Final Speeches book is a chronology of Malcolm’s final 11 speeches before he was killed which articulates a clear analysis about his revolutionary Pan-African consciousness.

In 2025, most people who see Malcolm as an inspiration are not as well versed about his Pan-African consciousness on the surface as they are about his individual characteristics, many of which certainly deserve respect. Still, our freedom and liberation cannot be carried out by any one person, no matter how great they are. Only the masses of people make history, not individuals. So, the essence of Malcolm X in 2025, and why his inspiration is still so prevalent, is his life, particularly those last 11 months. His uncompromising commitment to justice. His focus on our connection to Africa and necessity for Africa to be free, we would argue, provides credibility to the principles he articulated because Africa’s liberation is the most just solution for African people, particularly those of us in the Western Hemisphere who (despite how many false identities we create for ourselves due to our ignorance about Africa) who have no legitimate claim to any lands besides Africa.

We would suggest that Malcolm’s commitment to truth and seeking it in an honest and uncompromising way are the values that make him so attractive even today. Everyone desires to have that type of integrity and dignity. No amount of money, material possessions, and fame could ever give any of us the pride that we feel when we demonstrate the level of dignity we see in Malcolm. And, it was Malcolm’s march towards his mission in life – his connection to the worldwide struggle for African self-determination – which is the engine that fueled his dignity. Even if many of us today aren’t able to make that level of connection as to why we love Malcolm, that is just a matter of time before it becomes more and more clear. Any solution for African people anywhere on earth has to have Africa at its core. Malcolm grew to understand this and we would argue that it was this realization that powered his courage and all the other attributes that make him so popular today, 100 years after his birth and 60 years after his death.

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Undeniable Evidence that the Empire is Crumbling

These "We Should Sit Out Protests" Folks Don't Speak for Activists

Why Malcolm X is Still Relevant To Us 60 Years After His Death

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