From the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA)
To: The African National Congress
Luthuli House,
Johannesburg, South Africa
On Saturday January 7, South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) celebrates its 100th birthday. This event represents a century of creative struggle for the freedom of all the people’s of South Africa. It is a tremendous event for South Africans to celebrate, and for the whole world to celebrate with them.
The ANC was formally founded on January 8, 1912 in Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State, in response to increasingly harsh racist measures taken by the white dominated government that had achieved self-rule within the British Empire in 1910. Well before the advent of the Afrikaner Nationalist Party’s apartheid system, the white elite, of both Afrikaner and British background, was moving aggressively to drive Africans off the land and turn them into a source of cheap labor for the mines and other industries. To achieve this, it was necessary to deprive the majority population of what little political and civic rights it had enjoyed up to then, by means of such abominations as the famous pass laws and other restrictions. Noted South African intellectuals and leaders of the time, including John Dube, Sol Plaatje and Pixley Seme saw the need for the Black majority in South Africa to unite across ethnic, regional and other lines to confront this menacing prospect with a united program of struggle for equality, inclusion and justice.
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The Communist Party USA is a working class organization founded in 1919 in Chicago, IL.
The Communist Party stands for the interests of the American working class and the American people. It stands for our interests in both the present and the future. Solidarity with workers of other countries is also part of our work. We work in coalition with the labor movement, the peace movement, the student movement, organizations fighting for equality and social justice, the environmental movement, immigrants rights groups and the health care for all campaign.
But to win a better life for working families, we believe that we must go further. We believe that the American people can replace capitalism with a system that puts people before profit — socialism.
We are rooted in our country's revolutionary history and its struggles for democracy. We call for "Bill of Rights" socialism, guaranteeing full individual freedoms.
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