[rad-green] Martin Luther King’s Radical Antica pitalism

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/01/15/remembering-martin-luther-kings-radical-class-politics/

*The Paris Review          January 15, 2019*




*Martin Luther King’s Radical AnticapitalismBy Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor*


*
<https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/mlkpoorpeople_ap-e1515789258600.jpg>AP
PHOTO/HORACE CORT*

In a posthumously published essay, Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed out that
the “black revolution” had gone beyond the “rights of Negroes.” The
struggle, he said, is “forcing America to face all of its interrelated
flaws—racism, poverty, militarism and materialism. It is exposing the evils
that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals
systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical
reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”

But it had not started out that way. Over the course of a decade, the black
struggle opened up a deeper interrogation of U.S. society, and King’s
politics traversed the same course.

Indeed, in the early 1960s, the Southern movement coalesced around the
clearly defined demands to end Jim Crow segregation and secure the right of
African Americans to unfettered access to the franchise. With clear targets
and barometers for progress or failure, a broad social movement was able to
uproot these systems of oppression. King was lauded as a tactician as well
as someone who could articulate the grievances and aspirations of black
Southerners.

But despite the successful example of nonviolent civil disobedience across
the South, it appeared to have little, if any, lasting impact on the
edifice of racial discrimination that defined black life elsewhere. Indeed,
the seeming permanence of black marginalization across the United States
produced hundreds of urban uprisings in the middle of the 1960s. If King’s
strategic genius in the South was deploying nonviolent civil disobedience
to disarm Southern racists while  *coercing *the political establishment
into securing first-class citizen rights, it was a strategy that ultimately
failed in cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and
Washington, D.C. In those places, obnoxious signs of Jim Crow were not the
problem; rather, it was the insidious but obscured actions of the
real-estate broker, the banker, the employer, the police officer, and other
agents that maintained racial inequality.

As King’s attention drifted from the South to the entrenched northern
ghettos, he faced denunciations and chastisement from former allies in the
North. These people had supported him so long as he confined his demands to
ending legal discrimination. Indeed, because Southern racism was rendered
as antiquated and regressive, King was celebrated for helping to pull the
South toward progress and modernity. But even as the civil rights movement
was valorized for its intervention in the South, it was demonized when it
brought its call for black power and liberation to the North—a dynamic that
continues to the present day.

In King’s time, institutions in the North that preached racial neutrality
but that were wholly complicit in racial subjugation appeared impervious to
tactics that used confrontation and embarrassment to compel change. King
was forced to reconceive his strategy.

King’s confrontation with the Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, for instance,
was instructive. When King went to Chicago in 1966 to participate in an
ongoing campaign to end slums in the city’s black West Side, he was
confronted by the obstinacy of patronage-fueled machine politics. African
American gatekeepers viewed King as an interloper, and the mayor viewed him
as a nuisance. Daley simply denied that there was a ghetto in Chicago, and
the black political machine exhorted that the ghetto’s existence was proof
positive of racial progress. They deprived King of the spectacle of
confrontation that had exposed the Southern establishment.

It was this foray into the tough political environment of residential
segregation and political machines that provided the momentum for King’s
radicalization. His political maturation prompted him to connect the U.S.
war in Vietnam to the deteriorating conditions in U.S. cities, and of even
more consequence, it prompted him to search for more effective tactics in
confronting the legal menace of segregation in the North and the attendant
crises: slum conditions, unemployment, and police brutality.

Within this context, King began to publicly articulate an anticapitalist
analysis of the United States that put him in sync with rising critiques
from the global revolutionary left of market-based economies. Despite the
“affluence” of the United States, it was, nevertheless, wracked by poverty
and entrenched in an endless war. King masterfully tore down the wall that
the political and economic establishments used to separate domestic
policies from foreign policies. He debunked the lie at the core of the
Johnson administration that they could deliver both guns and butter, and he
pointed out how the Vietnam War made it impossible to satisfy the deep need
that existed on the home front. Moreover, any society invested in the
evisceration of the Vietnamese people could not truly be a society
committed to developing the human potential of its own people.

King’s realization was the need for even greater forces to be recruited
into the movement to achieve social transformation within the United
States. By the end of his life, King recognized the coercive power of other
forms of disobedience. In planning a Poor People’s March in Washington,
D.C., he called for extralegal protests not aimed at undoing unjust laws
but in the name of political and economic demands that represented the
interests of the majority. In Memphis, during the sanitation workers strike
in 1968, he called for a general strike to shut down the entire city.

In a story published a week before his assassination, King told Jose
Yglesias in the *New York Times *magazine, “In a sense you could say we are
engaged in the class struggle.” The civil rights movement had not cost a
dime, he said, but the movement to uproot poverty and inequality throughout
the country would “be a long and difficult struggle, for our program calls
for a redistribution of economic power.” Even as King recognized the need
for a broader, multiracial struggle to successfully engage in a “radical
revolution of values,” he still understood the dialectic connecting the
black movement to a larger reckoning in the United States.

He was cut down before he could see the fulfillment of his new strategy in
Memphis or in Washington, D.C., and the “interrelated flaws” of U.S.
society have only intensified in the fifty years since King first invoked
them. Indeed, the conditions warranting class struggle have become worse as
the wealth within U.S. society has continued to accrue at the top. Yet
King’s ability to name the elemental human suffering that is produced by
our profit system, while simultaneously demonstrating the centrality of the
black movement in unraveling its internal and external logic, remains a
powerful political tool. This anniversary offers new opportunities to
engage King’s political thought, including his anticapitalism and his
repeated call for larger and deeper political struggle.

*Excerpted with permission from the forthcoming book *Fifty Years Since MLK
<https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/fifty-years-mlk>*, edited by Brandon Terry.
 *

*Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, assistant professor in African American Studies
at Princeton, is author of *From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.

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