Uhuru Solidarity Movement responds to the United Nations IPCC Report on Climate Change, April 2022
For the first time the United Nations Panel on Climate Change acknowledged that “colonialism” is a “driver of climate crisis.”
In its latest report, issued April 4, 2022, the IPCC has been forced by the resistance of African and Indigenous peoples worldwide to recognize that colonialism, the system of domination, occupation, genocide and plunder by a foreign and alien state power over other nations of people is the cause of the climate crisis faced by the world today.
Colonialism and climate change are one and the same.
For more than a half century Omali Yeshitela, Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party, has scientifically proven that the condition facing oppressed peoples is the political and economic reality of colonialism, of which racism is only a symptom.
Chairman Yeshitela laid out the narrative of African, Indigenous and oppressed peoples inside the U.S. and around the world, using the concept of “colonialism as the mode of production”, meaning that the driver of the entire world capitalist economy is colonialism, delivering all goods, services and a high standard of living to the colonizers at the expense of the poverty and suffering of the rest of humanity and the earth itself.
Chairman Yeshitela wrote:
“This colonial assault on the ‘climate’ resulted in the extermination of an estimated 90 percent of the Indigenous population of the ‘Americas,’ from an estimated 60.5 million people in 1496 to only 6 million by 1600. The ‘climate’ crisis being experienced and discussed by frantic colonial academics and environmentalists today is a crisis that began with the intrusion of the ‘white man,’ the colonizers, that created the colonial mode of production that is now pushing into the lives of the colonizer with greater intensity…”
The Chairman further explains:
“[T]he colonial mode of production is responsible for a climate crisis that is serious beyond most belief…
“All of the climate conferences, so-called climate agreements and imperialist demonstrations are meaningless manifestations of white opportunist idealism. Imperialism caused the climate crisis from its very inception with the assault on Africa and kidnapping of African people beginning in the 1400s.
“Oil and natural gas, the two greatest polluters on the planet, are the two most lucrative commodities of colonial capitalism. The interests of oil and gas are one with the U.S. state, with the largest, most deadly military on Earth, and the colonial interests of the entire U.S. political and economic system. These commodities are the basis for U.S. wars throughout the Middle East and conquest in Africa, the U.S. and Asia. Oil and gas are tied to the white colonial prosperity and way of life.
“Clearly the real issue is colonial capitalism, not the climate. European imperialism created and maintains this situation in one long trajectory that began when the first white person got off the boat in Africa and captured an African person, forced her into a ship to steal her, her genius, her labor and her land and resources.
“While white climate scientists fear ‘loss of habitat’ for ‘human beings,’ the fact is, as we have pointed out, the habitats of African and Indigenous peoples have long been destroyed by Europe’s colonial assaults on our peoples for 600 years in the process of creating the habitat and the production and reproduction of life for white people.
“Nothing will change the climate crisis short of total destruction of the colonial mode of production and only the organized African working class in the form of the African People’s Socialist Party can do that.”
Understanding that the climate crisis is caused by the colonial mode of production requires us to recognize that there is a colonizer and a colonized.
We, white people, as the colonizers, benefiting from centuries of ongoing theft, pillage, enslavement and murder of African, Indigenous and colonized peoples, must be organized under the leadership of the African working class struggling for national liberation and self-determination.
The struggle against the climate crisis is a struggle against colonialism. This struggle is being led by the colonized themselves. Our responsibility as the colonizers is to work under their leadership and build material solidarity with the movement of the African working class and oppressed peoples of the world to reclaim power over their land, lives and resources.
As Chairman Omali Yeshitela has made clear, this is the only way the climate crisis will be overturned. Colonialism must go.
The African People’s Socialist Party is leading the worldwide anti-colonial struggle of African workers for power and self-government. The Party is negating the colonial mode of production through self-determining programs of dual power such as the Black Power Blueprint, Black Star Industries and the All African People’s Development and Empowerment.
Reparations must be paid to African and oppressed peoples around the world. Colonized peoples, once liberated, will lead and are leading the healing of the earth and the end of climate change. White people must join in solidarity with the fight for the return of their stolen land, resources and self-determination.
Join the Uhuru Solidarity Movement at uhurusolidarity.org. Uhuru Solidarity Movement is the organization of white people under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party, working for reparations to African people.