Food for thought 2

Capitalism was born parasitic and it was born as white power in the world. When I say parasitic, I'm talking about something like a tapeworm. If you're lucky enough to have a job in the legal capitalist economy, you go out and work. If you're black, you work like a dog. The you go buy food. Most of the time you buy the food in your own community, which means its the worst food you can buy. Then you cook the food, chew the food and swallow it.

The tapeworm doesn't do anything. It just hooks on to your intestines. No matter how much you eat, you never get bigger. You just eat and eat and eat, but you're still withering away and don't understand why. The tapeworm gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

That's the relationship that Europe has imposed on us and the rest of the world. It is parasitic, like a tapeworm.
You can't get rid of this tapeworm by simply educating yourself - especially when you go to tapeworm school to get your education. You can't vote the tapeworm out of you. The tapeworm will never leave of its own free will, because if the tapeworm lets go of your intestines, it will die. It needs you in order to live and it hangs on for dear life.

You have to take the right kind of medicine to get rid of the tapeworm. Then you can end up flushing it down the toilet. That's what we have to deal with, a tapeworm that's got to be flushed down the toilet of history.

"...The ones who started capitalism had to have some loot from somewhere. It didn't rain from the sky. If people who are in this room are religious, you know there was no basis for God to give it to these creatures. It had to come from someplace, didn't it?

That is the question that Marx asked. He said, 'We are therefore trapped in a vicious circle, unless we presuppose that there was an accumulation of capital that was not a consequence of capitalist production, but its starting point.' What is the starting point? He said it was the 'interment of the Indians in the mines of the Americas.' It was 'turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins.'

We're not just talking about Africa and what they did to the Indigenous population here. We are also talking about the fact that the British fought a war in 1841-42 against the people of China, to turn China into a nation of junkies. They called it the Opium War. That was also a part of the primitive accumulation of capital that began with the enslavement of the African.

The French held Viet Nam as a drug colony for a hundred years. There were more than three thousand legal opium dens in Viet Nam under the French. The French got most of their colonial booty from the drug trade. This is another example of the primitive accumulation of capital that we are talking about.

It is severe, Sisters and Brothers. This is something we need to understand if we want to get a real grip on the question of political economy and our own oppression.

What is the national drink of the British? Tea. Where does it come from? Sri Lanka and India. What is the national food of the Italians? Spaghetti or pasta. Where does it come from? China.
What do they claim is the national drink of this country? Coffee. Where does it come from? Brazil and West Africa.

Do you know that in Hershey, PA they have 10 years worth of the world's supply of cocoa? Cocoa beans do not grow in PA. They come from West Africa. Yet because of this parasitic relationship that we have with US imperialism, in West Africa they can't even use cocoa beans. They end up buying Hershey bars from Mr Hershey in PA.

...In this country when people eat food, they eat it off of plates they call 'china.' Then when they've stuffed themselves so much with the fruit of the labor and the resources of the peoples of the world, they go back to Mr Hershey to get an Ex-Lax in order to relieve themselves.

That's the world economy that we live with, Sisters and Brothers. Today in Africa, 3% or less of the trade is within Africa itself. 97% or more of what they call trade 'with' Africa has the resources leaving Africa, going to Europe, going to North America, and increasingly to Japan. That's the relationship. It is a parasitic relationship and we have to overturn it. If we don't overturn that relationship, we will die. It is that simple.

We are already dying. The question of life for Africans on the planet Earth is increasingly problematic. They are even making predictions that in the next century there will actually be a decline in the population of Africa due to AIDS alone. That's the extent of the contradiction that we are confronted with."

-Omali Yeshitela Speaks