Editors Note: The following is an analysis by African Socialist International Secretary General Luwezi Kinshasa of a Presentation made by African Socialist International Chairman Omali Yeshitela at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany on October 23, 2012 as part of a European Tour to Build the ASI.
BERLIN, GERMANY—The Marcus Garvey Legacy Tour event at the University of Humboldt on October 23, 2012 was a memorable day that no one who attended will ever forget, including Chairman Omali Yeshitela.
The event was organized under the dynamic leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party-Germany student-leaders who are in the forefront to build the African Socialist International in Europe.
The majority of students in attendance were German, with African students from different locations in Africa.
Young Palestinian and Romani activists were also in the room.
The Marcus Garvey Legacy Tour started in High Wycombe, England and proceeded to sweep through Stockholm, Sweden; Berlin, Germany; Brussels, Belgium and ended in London on October 28.
The tour itself represents the new phase of the ongoing African Internationalist ideological offensive against imperialism, which will give coherence to the upheaval caused by oppressed peoples all over the world and which has brought chaos to the center of the imperialist system, threatening to turn it upside down.
The voice and philosophy of the oppressed, the colonised, of the slave is reaching out at the heart of the bourgeois philosophical institutions, such as Humboldt University, whose mission is to justify, explain and defend the capitalist world system.
Karl Marx and Engels were students at this same university. No one lost the symbolic significance of the location of the meeting.
Chairman Omali was invited to speak on the theory of primitive accumulation of capital, which is regarded as one of Marx’s profound formulations in his voluminous work Das Capital, in explaining the birth of capitalism.
Virtually, up until now, the ideological discourse between the oppressors and the oppressed has always been the unrestrained and unrepressed worldview of Europeans, whether of so-called Marxist thought or the worldview emanating from the bourgeoisie.
The missing link in the ideological discourse has been the worldview emanating from the oppressed colonized peoples ourselves, the voice of the oppressed.
The reality is not as how white people have portrayed it, where white people are portrayed as having brought Africans and the rest of the world a surplus of civilization because of their whiteness.
Garvey and Marx were involved in creating organizations across countries and continents with pronounced differences.
Marx was uniting workers of the oppressor nations, while Garvey was uniting African people from the dispersed and oppressed African nation in solidarity with all other anti-imperialist forces around the world.
Marx was not in solidarity with enslaved African workers in the Americas.
Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation objectifies Africans and all other colonized peoples
Chairman Omali presented the African Internationalist perspective on primitive accumulation.
The Chairman posed the question, “Where did the capital that built capitalism come from?”
According to Marx, capitalism had a beginning: the enslavement of Africa and African people played the same role as “the original sin in theology,” in the emergence of capitalism as a white power and world system.
Marx considered the enslavement of Africans as an “economic category of the greatest importance.”
The tail of imperialism is in the imperialist centres; its head is in the colonies
Chairman Omali Yeshitela said that despite Marx’s statement on primitive accumulation, he came to the wrong conclusion.
The destruction of capitalism is in the hands of the colonized people.
He quoted Ho Chi Minh, the great Vietnamese revolutionary leader who used to say that “the tail of imperialism is in the imperialist centres; its head is in the colonies.”
Throughout our domination by imperialism, we could not disagree with the colonizers without being subjected to violence.
It has been a war without end.
Capitalism introduced relationships between things and not between peoples.
The birth of capitalism did not consider African people and other colonized peoples as humans. Only the colonizers, white people were the real humans.
This is the meaning of the famous phrase from George Bush, “They hate us because we are good.”
Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein and others who disagreed with imperialism were murdered in the most brutal and dehumanizing ways because, according to imperialism, they were neither “good” nor even human.
How can capitalism be considered progressive?
Certainly, capitalism was not progressive for the Awaraks, Apaches, Comanches and all other Indigenous peoples that Europeans massacred in the Americas.
It was not progressive at the Berlin Conference, which divided up Africa for the benefit of Europe.
It was not progressive when Leopold II, the Belgian King, massacred tens of millions of Africans in the Congo.
Production under capitalism is for profit, not for the benefit of colonized peoples, not for the benefit of Africa, but for the benefit of Europe and white people.
Germany, Britain, Belgium, Spain and the rest of the European societies were built with resources produced by the enslavement and colonization of Africans and other colonized peoples.
Africa, Latin America and Asia produce flowers, teas and other crops for Europe and North America, while the vast majority of the peoples of the world starve.
That is how Europe rescued itself from the black plague, which killed at least a third of the white population in the middle ages, which peaked at about 1348 to 1351, and this period was followed by regular plague outbreaks for the next 60 years.
Chairman Omali argued that as a consequence of the decimation of the population caused by the plague, Europe could not have a viable economic life.
A poor and disease-ridden Europe had no capital to start capitalism as a world system.
In the United States, white people’s assets are 22 times the wealth of Africans, and 50% of the world’s resources are concentrated in the U.S.
Today the vast majority of the peoples are opposed to the theft of their resources.
They refuse to allow the colonizers to shift their crisis onto the peoples of the Middle East, China, Venezuela etc.; this is why Greece, Spain and Portugal are highly anxious.
It is the resistance of the oppressed peoples that are a threat to their retirement funds and student loans.
The colonized have a completely different worldview from that of the colonizers.
African revolution is necessary
How many civil rights can we have?
Europeans talk about charity fatigue, assuming that they have donated generously so much to Africa to no avail, that they are now tired of it.
They have given us so much and we have squandered everything we received, goes the story.
Chairman Omali talked of the necessity of the International African Revolution as a united single revolution.
There will not be a Ghana, Sudan, Haiti, or U.S. revolution, but Ghanaian front, a Sudanese front, a Haitian front and U.S. front of the African Revolution.
We are building the Bahamian front of the Africa Revolution, the French front of the African Revolution.
Africa has no national economy.
Every new and old imperialist has a plan for Africa; the U.S., Germany, Brazil, France, China and India all have their respective plans for Africa.
We too have an African plan; it is the African Socialist International with the aim of the total liberation and unification of Africa and African people under a united, single, socialist state of Africa.
The liberation of Africa will depend on the struggles of all African people scattered around the world and on the continent of Africa itself.
The future is knocking on your door. Do not despair! Do not be afraid of the future. It is the era of the emancipation of the human race.
The struggles of the oppressed peoples are a call to white people to join humanity, to be on the right side of history, to be part of the future.
Who speaks for Europe?
The drones speak for the U.S. in Afghanistan, Somalia and in Pakistan.
The U.S. army spoke for America in Iraq when they slaughtered over a million people there after having found no weapons of mass destruction.
And before they dropped the bombs on Iraq, they imposed a sanction which killed at least half a million Iraqi children and babies.
The police speak for Germany in the refugee camps.
The British police speak for capitalism against Africans on streets of England.
Generally speaking, it is the soldiers and the police who speak for Europe and America.
This current period of struggles by the world’s masses are redefining the relationship between the North and the South.
Europe is not the center of the universe, and the false notion that Europe is the template of what civilization is all about is being challenged and overturned.
The false notion that Europe has a surplus of civilization is being rejected and destroyed by the growing resistance of the oppressed peoples of the Earth, of which we are part.
Chairman Omali insisted on the solidarity of the African People’s Socialist Party and African people with the Palestinian struggle, and promised to the Palestinian activist that our organization will make available institutions and means that we have, such as Uhuru Radio, to forward the Palestinian revolution.
This expression of African Internationalist solidarity was also extended to the Romani comrades who attended this outstanding event.
We are united with the Romani/Gypsy people’s democratic aspirations and are prepared to help them organize so that they can fight better for their own interests.
We are also looking forward to the Palestinian, Romani and other oppressed peoples’ participation in our events in the upcoming year.
The Chairman ended the event with the slogan “Izwe Lethu I Afrika!” (Africa is our land) and the non-African participants chanted the slogan “Izwe lenu I Africa” (Africa is your land).
Chairman Omali signed books at the end of the meeting and people stayed in the room as if they did not want to go home.
Truly, the time of the ascendancy of the slave is upon us and the rise of Africa has already begun.
Africans must unite!
Build the African Socialist International!
