Michael Parenti's legendary 1986 'Yellow Parenti' speech.
Transcript
The nature of capitalism is that it must expand. A no-growth capitalism as some of the more naive colleges have argued for is a contradiction in terms. The reason you invest is to accumulate and your accumulation of Capital has no purpose or meaning unless you can mix it with labor to yet increase your wealth further. And of course you use large sums of it for personal consumption and for political power and for control of your culture and for that wonderful good happy life that you so like. As George Bush’s wife said: “we are millionaires. We are not ashamed of it. We enjoy our wealth” and I thought [chief kiss] at last they say it. Finally they say it. Instead of the usual thing is ‘you know how we rich suffer and are misjudged and it’s just terrible being rich.’ [microphone problems]
Now that nature of expansion – really affects the nature of – I mean it’s an important imperative. Because it means capitalism also can never stay home. It goes abroad. If you ever saw the film Controlling Interests there’s a corporate president who says those corporations that stayed regional in New England years ago and decided not to go national, we can’t even remember their names. They died. We had to go national. And those of us who are now national know we have to go international. We have to invest abroad.
So one one of the laws of capitalist motion and development is this inexorable expansion, and that means expansion into and expropriation of the third world.
A process that's being going on for about 400 years. Perpetrated by the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Dutch, the Belgians, the French, the English, and most recently, most successfully, most impressively by the Americans.
[The perpetrators are] the ruling classes of these countries, not by the ordinary people. The ordinary people simply paid the costs of empire. The ordinary people simply sent their sons off to die on the plains of India and the jungles of the Congo or in Latin America wherever else.
That expropriation of the third world has been going on for 400 years brings us to another revelation; namely that the the third world is not poor. You don't go to poor countries to make money. There are very few poor countries in this world. Most countries are rich! The Philippines are rich, Brazil is rich, Mexico is rich, Chile is rich only the people are poor.
But there's billions to be made there to be carved out and be taken. There's been billions for 400 years, capitalist European and North American powers have carved out at taken the timber, the flax, the hemp, the cocoa, the rum, the copper, the iron, the rubber, the bauxite, the slaves, and the cheap labor, they have taken out of these countries.
These countries are not "underdeveloped" they're over exploited.
[applause]
One of the countries that had a great deal of Western capital in it was Tsarist Russia. Mostly English, French, some German, some American including one Herbert Hoover who, with Leslie Urquhart, famous British millionaire owned the Russel Asiatic Corporation.
If the Russian Revolution hadn't happened, Herbert Hoover would've been one of the richest men in the world.
And years later when he was the President of the United States in 1931, when one third of this country was unemployed, when people didn't have enough to eat, when people were driven to the edge of desperation, president Herbert Hoover said to the San Francisco Examiner: "my greatest ambition in life is to see the overthrow of Bolshevism in Russia"
There came with the Russian Revolution a break in the fabric of international capitalist history. There now was a country where the unwashed, where the workers of Petrograd and Moscow, were actually taking over. Where they were actually taking over the land, the labor, the technology, and the resources of the country. Where communists were coming into power.
And there's a remarkable correspondence between Secretary of State Lansing and the President Woodrow Wilson in which Lansing says "the Bolsheviks are wanting in political virtue what they would preach to the ordinary man that he might elevate himself through political means rather than by dint of hard work. This would be a most unfortunate example to the common man in our country and other countries"
[Lansing and Wilson] understood what was the threat.
The Americans themselves (American ruling class) had very little cap (?) [...] but they joined with 14 other nations to invade the Soviet Union to overthrow the socialist government that had just been put in after the Tsar was overthrown.
That process of invading a revolutionary country is still happening before our eyes. If you want to understand those years after the Russian Revolution, just look at what's going on in Nicaragua. Invasion either directly with troops from your own country, or using surrogate troops, and they use the White Guard Armies, [etc.].
Embargos, Isolation, withholding of food supplies, sabotage, encirclement, refusing diplomatic recognition, these are the methods that are used and these are the time-honored methods that are being used by Reagan against another revolutionary government which is Nicaragua.