This article originally written during the 40th anniversary marking the assassination of the legendary civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by our sister organization in the US (the American section of the CWI), is of special relevance to India, which is still today plagued by all sorts of oppressions that includes discriminations (after more than 60 years of Independence) due to a person’s caste, religion or ethnicity. India has seen many mass struggles that have been fought by some of the most discriminated sections in the society led by such figures like Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar. But despite their genuine belief in wanting to reform the society for the better through legislative measures, Indian society remains as oppressive as ever before. As this article explains Martin Luther King realized towards the end of his life that racism cannot be fought on the basis of civil rights measures alone but only by challenging the fundamental premise of society based on Capitalism.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was killed on April 4, 1968 while supporting striking Memphis sanitation workers.
Unfortunately, the official commemorations of King often provide us with a sanitized version of his life and legacy and the history of the civil rights movement. It is now routine to hear right-wing politicians quote King to justify attacks on affirmative action or welfare, or to see his image in marketing campaigns by huge corporations like Apple.
Like so many fighters for the oppressed, the ruling class fears and opposes them while they are alive, but following their death an attempt is made to render their legacy harmless through distorting their actual ideas. During his lifetime King inspired millions with his vision that fundamental change in U.S. society was possible.
The U.S. establishment especially feared his growing radicalization in the last years of his life, when he spoke out sharply against the Vietnam War and began to question the capitalist system and even talk about “democratic socialism.”
Strategy of Mass Struggle
King’s rise to prominence began with the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956. The strategy of mass, nonviolent struggle against Jim Crow, first pursued by King in Montgomery, was in contrast to the traditional strategy pushed by the more moderate leadership of the NAACP.
Beginning especially in 1960, with the wave of sit-ins challenging segregation at lunch counters across the South, civil rights activists waged a series of heroic struggles aimed at winning desegregation and voting rights for blacks.
King played a major role in organizing the mass struggle that shook Birmingham in 1963. Here, thousands marched to demand an end to segregation in defiance of court injunctions forbidding any protests. They faced down police dogs and fire hoses, enduring brutal beatings and numerous bombings and death threats. 2,500 ended up in jail at one point, including elementary school children as young as 6, but their tremendous courage brought widespread sympathy.
Only the fear of the example of Birmingham spreading to other cities, as well as the growing mood of impatience swelling among blacks in the North, convinced the Democratic administration of John F. Kennedy that some federal civil rights legislation would have to be enacted. This is in stark contrast to the widespread mythology crediting the Democratic Party for civil rights. The reality is that it was only under intense pressure from below and a growing radicalization among blacks that the federal government was forced to act.
The experience of the civil rights movement shows that the key to change is not relying on the capitalist political establishment but rather building mass movements from below.
Opposition to the Vietnam War
King also came into serious conflict with the establishment over the Vietnam War. By 1965, King had turned against the war, and he increasingly saw the issues faced by blacks in the U.S. as linked to U.S. foreign policy.
The Democratic Party, who started the war and prosecuted it under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, exerted enormous pressure on him to remain a single-issue reformer and not to speak out against the war. Under this pressure, King hesitated to come out publicly.
King was coming up against the limitations of his reformist outlook and alliance with the Democratic Party. The strategy of the civil rights leadership, including King, was based on maintaining an alliance with the Democratic Party.
However, this strategy was at odds with reality. The Democratic Party was (and is) a cynical party of big business who were incapable of taking serious measures to eradicate racism since that would clash with the interests of U.S. capitalism. The Vietnam War was completely against the interests of ordinary blacks, who were doing a disproportionate amount of the fighting and dying in a racist war to maintain colonial oppression.
Funding for the war was severely undermining the budget for the War on Poverty and social services relied on by blacks (as well as poor and working class whites). Politically, it was increasingly untenable to stay quiet on Vietnam. Blacks were increasingly rebelling against the war. King and other civil rights leaders’ silence was discrediting them in the black community.
Far from being a more realistic strategy, this reformist approach forced the civil rights leadership to compromise the interests of the oppressed. Instead of a socialist or fighting strategy, which starts from the needs of the oppressed and building the largest and most conscious movement to bring maximum pressure on the ruling class to concede to our demands, they were forced to limit themselves to what was acceptable to the political establishment.
King’s genuine commitment to the plight of poor and working class blacks eventually forced him to break with the logic of his previous position and come out sharply and publicly against the war in February 1967. Calling the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” King became the most prominent American to demand withdrawal from Vietnam.
As soon as King stepped outside of “his issue” to draw the links between U.S. imperialism overseas and the treatment of blacks within the U.S., the corporate media got in line to trash him.
Tackling Poverty
In his last years, King increasingly turned his attention to problems of economic injustice and inequality. He saw that the victories won through the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had done little to “penetrate the lower depths of Negro deprivation” and that the gains of the movement were “limited mainly to the Negro middle class.”
Especially important in this process were his experiences in Northern ghettoes where the problems of working class and poor black people could not be laid at the feet of official legal discrimination. These conditions had fueled the riots in major cities during the mid-1960s and the growing militancy among a section of the black community.
In his search for a way to win real equality for African Americans, King began to draw the conclusion that a serious battle against poverty and oppression was necessary. Against separatist trends who wrote off all whites, King correctly argued for building a multiracial movement with poor and working class whites.
In 1968 King launched the Poor People’s Campaign. He hoped to go around the country assembling a “multiracial army of the poor” to march on Washington to abolish poverty in the U.S. and internationally and demand that the money being spent on the Vietnam War be redirected to provide jobs and income for the poor.
He aimed for more than just a symbolic march, planning a campaign of mass civil disobedience, including blocking traffic and staging sit-ins in Congress, to shut down Washington, D.C.
King hoped that the strike by 1,300 Memphis sanitation workers would be the kickoff for the Poor People’s Campaign. Tragically, he was gunned down before he could see the campaign through.
The State of the Dream
While memorials and celebrations of Martin Luther King often emphasize the civil rights era victories against Jim Crow, they could just as easily highlight the continuation of the most basic injustices in U.S. society. Official Census figures state that in 2006 24.3% of U.S. blacks lived in poverty vs. 8.2% of whites.
The struggles of the Civil Rights era did lead to important reforms but they did not culminate in fundamental economic change. The wealth of society was left in the same hands and in subsequent decades, African Americans have remained one of the most disadvantaged sections of the working class. All this underlines that the continuation of capitalism means a majority of blacks will continue to face nightmarish conditions.
This year we will hear many calls to honor King’s memory. We need to reclaim his legacy from the corporate media and politicians who attempt to use him to justify their system. Despite King’s political limitations, he was a genuine, determined fighter who inspired millions to struggle.
As he said in a speech exactly one year before his death, “Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo …”(“When Silence Is Betrayal,” April 4, 1967).
The real way to honor King’s legacy is to devote ourselves to an all-out struggle to eradicate racism, poverty, war, and all forms of oppression. As King was beginning to see towards the end of his life, this means a building a movement to abolish capitalism.
“Maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism”
Towards the end of his life, King was drawing far-reaching conclusions based on his experiences. He was increasingly considering the idea that a just division of society’s resources would have to mean breaking with the rules of capitalism, which relies on the poverty of black (and Latino) workers as an important source of super-profits due to their cheaper and more exploitable labor.
As he told journalist David Halberstam in early 1968, “For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”
King also began to talk about the need for socialism. In a speech delivered to his staff in 1966, he said, “You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry… Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong… with capitalism… There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”
By Will Soto
This is an edited version of the article that appeared in the socialistalternative.org website on Jan 22, 2008. The entire article can be read by clicking on the following link:
http://www.socialistalternative.org/news/article20.php?id=707