ADOS (“American Descendants of Slaves”) is an internet based movement that has gotten more than its fair share of traction recently. It is a reactionary, xenophobic, divisive, capitalist, fascist-supported movement that stands in direct contradiction to the revolutionary heritage of the Black Panther Party, the Organization of Afro-American Unity founded by Malcolm X shortly before his death, and countless others who have bled and toiled for our people’s liberation since we found ourselves on these stolen continents or were subjected to depredation, theft and insult in our own native land. This article is a polemical engagement with this reactionary trend that has captured so many of our people’s minds due to their opportunist toying with and vulgarization of the struggle for reparations, and an argument firmly in defense of revolutionary Communist Pan-Africanism and Third World proletarian internationalism.

Pan-Africanism, loosely meaning the desire for strengthening of the bonds between indigenous nationalities residing on the African continent and all diasporic Africans, is the one trend shared by all Africans who call themselves revolutionaries. ADOS, on the other hand, claims that New Afrikan descendants of slaves should alienate ourselves from our broader diaspora, and our people on the continent. Malcolm X was a Pan-Africanist. His trip to Africa, mingling with its people, and talks with individuals such as Nasser, Nkrumah and Ben Bella helped ensure that the foundation for the OAAU (Organization of Afro-American Unity) was rooted in proletarian Pan-African solidarity. W.E.B. Du Bois was among the first to lay the foundations of Pan-African theory and practice with the Pan-African congresses he helped to revive and lead along with his myriad of works sharply criticizing European imperialism and channeling the voice of hundreds of millions of his beloved people through his pen. People in what was to become Nigeria lit torches and waited anxiously for the Black Moses in the form of Marcus Mosaiah Garvey to lead them out of their long night. Thomas Sankara was a pan-African Marxist revolutionary who led the struggle against neo-colonialism in the form of IMF and World Bank debt, and demonstrated in practice what a state that served the people looked like. Maurice Bishop of Grenada was a pan-Africanist and worked to develop concrete ties between the first revolutionary Marxist led movement in the Anglophone Caribbean, the African diaspora in the United States and our people on the continent. Kwame Nkrumah, as the leader of the first nation to break from the clutches of the imperialist British Crown and its Governors and soldiers, offered his nation as a rear base area for countless armed struggles working for national liberation and socialism on the continent. These are just some of our stalwarts. Naming all of them would exhaust this article.

Essentially, to be a revolutionary African in the 21st Century is to be a Pan-African revolutionary. We are one people with a common destiny. As one rises and liberates itself, we all rise and liberate ourselves. An old IWW slogan (the only non-black-led labor union that meant a damn thing to our people) goes: “An Injury to One Is An Injury to All”. This is a perfectly Pan-African slogan as well. We must reject ADOS rightism and puppetism that draws arbitrary distinctions between African people simply because they are from different islands or from the US or the African continent. This is what the enemy wants us to do. ADOS is a rightist movement that draws support from the most reactionary segments of the colonizer ruling class and should be rightfully ousted from our spaces and minds. ADOS seeks to divide our people from one another. It’s an old dictum of war that a divided people is a destroyed people. Our people on the continent say that two men in a burning house must not stop to argue over who started the fire. Only through unity can we win. Through division, we will remain in eternal servitude as a people and as a class. A win for the Haitian people against the sellout despot Juvenal Moise is a win on the streets of Baltimore. A win in the streets of Johannesburg is a win on the streets of Saint Louis. A win by African people anywhere is a win for African people everywhere. What is a win? The unseating of neocolonial dictators who help multinational companies loot the wealth which belongs to all of us. The diamonds and gold in South Africa are ours, all of ours, from the Cape to Chicago. The oil in Nigeria is ours. The coltan of the Congo is ours. Wherever the system which steals these things is violently unseated and the working class and peasants destroy the old, rotten, neo-colonial states and build new ones in our image, wherever neocolonial lackies, NGOs and IMF loan sharks quake in terror before the armed and militant masses, wherever we raise a firm hand and say “no more”, there is a win.

ADOS opportunistically attaches itself for the longstanding struggle for reparations for the descendants of slaves in the United States and promotes a rightist, anti-immigration ideology and postures it as liberatory. Yvette Carnell, the ideological leader of this so-called movement, made a video titled “Pan-Africanism is Dead”, and has been seen wearing a MAGA hat in one of her rants posturing as pro-Black political analysis. This belies her lack of an analysis that is relevant to us as a people, worldwide. ADOS wants to preserve America (it’s right there in the name, “American Descendants of Slaves”) while we revolutionary Pan-Africanists seek to destroy it. What revolutionary wants to preserve the prisonhouse of nations that enslaves and continues to enslave their people? What revolutionary attacks other African people and tells them to “Go Back to Africa”? This is the same reactionary sentiment shared by the Ku Klux Klan and others. The enemy sees us, all of us, as African. Unity is forced upon us, as Gil Scott-Heron said. ADOS supporters also routinely defend the neo-fascist Donald Trump while attacking progressive Black people both in and out of the diaspora. They make videos and statements such as “Why Are People So Afraid of Steve Bannon” and “Trump is Right About Black Poverty”. Why would you align yourselves with enemies of our people who have expressly declared their status as enemies of our people? Because you’re an enemy of our people yourself. Yvette Carnell is a stool pigeon for Trumpite fascism. We must always do a class analysis when we consider seemingly ridiculous positions. Many ADOS people are not working-class but rather the upper petite-bourgeoisie or outright bourgeois. The progenitors of this movement can accurately be said to be reactionaries and sellouts who worked for the Reagan and Nixon administrations and helped push the lie of “Black Capitalism” in a counter-insurgency program to take the wind out of the revolutionary movement of which the Black Panther Party stood at the head. COINTELPRO was the stick, Black Capitalism was the carrot. One of the things that fascism has always been is sneaky and capable of twisting and remaking itself in a variety of images to seem to be benign and in the service of the people. ADOS’ heroes are Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, not Malcolm X and WEB DuBois. They seek credibility with the working class masses by superficially uniting with the timeless demand for reparations, but this is an example of waving the people’s flag to beat down the people.

Reparations are owed, this is a given. But they will not come in the form of a check, and they will not be limited to Africans born in the United States. Reparations are owed to all Africans, globally. Reparations are owed to the descendants of miners who were worked to death in the Witwatersrand. Reparations are owed to the Haitian people for the French-imposed indemnity for making revolution, and subsequent US/French meddling in their affairs and politics that included military occupation which killed countless thousands of people. Reparations are owed to the Nigerian masses whose air and water are being poisoned by the likes of Royal Dutch Shell. Reparations are owed to the Cuban people who have been strangled by the US imperialist python, yet still survive and prosper and enjoy a high standard of living. Reparations are owed to all Africans, because all Africans have suffered the effects of underdevelopment, colonialism and neocolonialism. These are not just one-time incidents that happened and can be forgotten with a bit of money changing hands. We demand the return of our cultural heritage that now resides in European museums. We demand a full accounting of and damages for the war crimes committed against our people and our Continent. We demand the immediate cessation of drilling and mining operations in our Continent and the parts of the Americas inhabited by our people and our Third World brothers and sisters. We demand the removal of all troops and military bases from our Continent. We demand the immediate cancellation of all loans that our Continent and our people in the diaspora have been saddled with, from IMF and World Bank loans right on down to student loans, car notes, and mortgages. And this is just a beginning. We know that the enemy will not give us these things. Nothing worth having is never given, not from this enemy, anyway. All that we have must be taken, with fire, sword and bullets. This is what ADOS fails to understand, or wilfully refuses to understand. We are a people at war, with enemies who have already displayed their capacity for genocide and mass murder. These enemies do not care how much you love Reagan, or Bush, or Trump, and how much you hate your siblings from Haiti, or Jamaica, or Nigeria, or South Africa. When you play the running dog, you will forever be kicked. ADOS is a fascist-backed movement that seeks to sow confusion and discord in the revolutionary movement for the liberation of our people all around the world, and it should be treated as such.

As Africans we must unite with each other to see liberation and socialism as an entire people in our lifetime, we must unite with our class siblings in the third world and in internal colonies in the United States. We share common enemies, the modern social imperialists represented by the Chinese ruling class and old European and Yankee imperialist powers. The principal enemy of the world’s people today is the Yankee imperialist. To bring down this massive beast requires thousands of cuts made everywhere it has tentacles. It must be fought in Africa, it must be fought in Latin America, and the killing blow will be laid in the belly of the beast itself. US imperialism is a blind, drunken, vicious beast staggering around the world, knocking over pottery and biting people. It needed putting down ages ago, but this task was delayed due to the fall of the revolutionary movements of the past to right-opportunism and revisionism. Those whose work was to bring down this beast capitulated to electoral cretinism, economism, and the paid speaker circuit. No more mistakes like this can be tolerated. We are running out of time not just as a people, but as a species. The imperialists, through their greed, are altering the planet’s environment so that it may soon become near-inhabitable in most parts of the world due to the effects of global warming and the consequent rising sea levels. Water is being poisoned. The Amazon and Congo rainforests, the left and right lungs of the Earth, are being decimated and destroyed for their timber resources and the minerals underneath. This is our heritage. The Congo is in Africa. The Amazon is the heritage of our indigenous siblings in Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru. Without the masterful stewardship of these resources that our people have developed through experience over the course of thousands of years, there would not be humanity as we know it today. It is essential that we seize control of our natural heritage from the imperialists and their multinational corporations to preserve our people and the human species.

Pan-African proletarian internationalism means support for the struggles for national liberation and socialism being waged by our class siblings in the Chicano nation, on the island of Borinquen, in Hawaii, and every other place touched by the imperialists. It means support for a hands-off line on Cuba. The Cuban people, most of whom are African, have, through their own determination to not be destroyed, staved off Yankee imperialism for decades. They have also served as stalwart displayers of proletarian internationalism by mingling their blood with ours in the savannas of Angola, against the Boers who sought to stifle the correct national liberation struggle being waged by the Angolan people under the leadership of the MPLA. It was Cuba which inspired the lauded vaccination programs of Sankara in Burkina Faso. It was Cuba which stood with the Grenadian people led by Maurice Bishop against Yankee destabilization and interventionism, helping to construct an airport that would enable more independence economically. Pan-African proletarian internationalism means support for the Filipino and Indian working class and peasantry led by their vanguards, the Communist Party of the Philippines and the Communist Party of India (Maoist). It means standing with the Wet’suwet’en people and countless other First Nations people as they fight for their sovereignty against the Canadian imperialists who seek to poison their land, air and water, just like the Yankee imperialists have poisoned the people of Flint and Louisiana with criminal negligence. It means uniting firmly against the police who beat and shoot both black and brown alike.

You cannot be a Pan-Africanist without also being a proletarian internationalist, and vice-versa. Pan-Africanists fight for socialism, because it is a scientific method for liberating the masses of our people and meeting their material needs, along with liberating them from the clutches of feudalism, bureaucrat-capitalism, and imperialism on the Continent. In the diaspora, we are beset by internal colonization and reside in settler-colonial prisonhouses of nations like the US, Brazil and Canada, or in old imperialist metropoles such as France, Germany and the UK, or in neo-colonialized countries such as Jamaica, Trinidad, and Barbados. In short, if we ain’t got socialism, we’re fucked. Capitalism is already in existence in the Diaspora and on the Continent, what has it gotten us? A few black billionaires are not worth the well-being, safety, security of our people, nor the planet. It must be rooted out in all its forms and we must see socialism in our lifetime. A united African people, led by the working class and incorporating as main force the peasantry on the continent, the semi-proletariat and the growing lumpenproletariat, constructing socialism and struggling through to Communism. This is a prime weapon in the arsenal for the final defeat of imperialism. Proletarian internationalism is a time-honored revolutionary pan-African theoretical cornerstone embodied by every one of our stalwarts. When W.E.B DuBois and Robert F. Williams shook hands with Mao Zedong, this was the representation of the affinity and unity of the majority of humankind against a grasping minority that, provided we continue along the correct theoretical path, will soon be confined to the ash heap of history.