The Long Bourgeois Doctrinal Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is a good time to contemplate not just the physical assassination (or execution) of Dr. King on April 4, 1968, but also and above all King’s subsequent and ongoing moral, intellectual, and ideological assassination. I am referring to the conventional, neo-McCarthyite, and whitewashed narrative of King that rolls across the nation every year during the national holiday that bears his name.  This domesticated, bourgeois airbrushing exercise portrays King as nothing more radical than a mild liberal reformist who wanted little but a few basic civil rights adjustments in a supposedly good and decent American System – a loyal supplicant who was grateful to the nation’s leaders for finally making noble alterations.

The official commemorations never say anything about the King who studied Marx sympathetically at a young age and who said in his last years that “if we are to achieve real equality, the United States will have to adopt a modified form of socialism.”  They delete the King who wrote that “the real issue to be faced” beyond “superficial” matters was the need for what he called a radical social revolution. They typically leave out or downplay the King who was far from satisfied and grateful in response to the celebrated national Civil Rights and Voting Rights legislation of 1964 and 1965.

Against White America’s False “Sense of Completion”

They scrub out the King who went on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in late 1967 to reflect on how little the Black freedom struggle had attained beyond some fractional changes in the South. He deplored “the arresting of the limited forward progress” Blacks and their allies had attained “by [a] white resistance [that] revealed the latent racism that was [still] deeply rooted in U.S. society.”

“As elation and expectations died,” King explained on the CBC, “Negroes became more sharply aware that the goal of freedom was still distant and our immediate plight was substantially still an agony of deprivation. In the past decade, little has been done for Northern ghettoes. All the legislation was to remedy Southern conditions – and even these were only partially improved.”  Worse than merely limited, King felt, the gains won by Black Americans during what he considered just the “first phase” of their freedom struggle (1955-1965) were dangerous in that they “brought whites a sense of completion” – a preposterous impression that the so-called “Negro problem” had been solved and that there was therefore no more basis or justification for further black activism. “When Negroes assertively moved on to ascend to the second rung of the ladder,” King noted, “a firm resistance from the white community developed…In some quarters it was a courteous rejection, in others it was a singing white backlash. In all quarters unmistakably, it was outright resistance.”

No Apologies for Black Violence

Speaking on CBC, the subsequently whitewashed, deradicalized, bourgeoisified King made no apologies for Black violence during the remarkable wave of race riots that washed across U.S. cities in the summers of 1966 and 1967. He blamed “the white power structure…still seeking to keep the walls of segregation and inequality intact” for the disturbances. He found the leading cause of the riots in the reactionary posture of “the white society, unprepared and unwilling to accept radical structural change,” which” produc[ed] chaos” by telling Blacks (whose expectations for substantive change had been aroused) “that they must expect to remain permanently unequal and permanently poor.”

King also blamed the riots in part on Washington’s imperialist and mass-murderous war on Vietnam. Along with the misery it inflicted on Indochina, King said, the United States’ savage military aggression against Southeast Asia stole resources from Lyndon Johnson’s briefly declared and barely fought “War on Poverty.” It sent poor Blacks to the front killing lines to a disproportionate degree. It advanced the notion that violence was a reasonable response and even a solution to social and political problems.

Did the rioters disrespect the law, as their liberal and conservative critics alike charged? Yes, King said, but added that the rioters’ transgressions were “derivative crimes…born of the greater crimes of the…policy-makers of the white society,” who “created discrimination…created slums [and] perpetuate unemployment, ignorance, and poverty… [T]he white man,” King elaborated, “does not abide by law in the ghetto. Day in and day out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provision of public services. The slums are a handiwork of a vicious system of the white society.”

Did the rioters engage in violence? Yes, King said, but noted that their aggression was “to a startling degree…focused against property rather than against people.” He observed that “property represents the white power structure, which [the rioters] were [quite understandably] attacking and trying to destroy.” Against those who held property “sacred,” King argued that “Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround with rights and respect, it has no personal being.”

The ”Spiritual Death” of Militarism

Black Americans and others sensed what King called “the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same school. We watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit,” King said on the CBC, adding that he “could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.”

In his famous speech against that Vietnam War (“Time to Break the Silence”), delivered in New York City’s Riverside Church one year to the day (suggestively enough) before his assassination (or execution), King laid the anti-poverty campaign’s defeat at the blood-soaked doorstep of the US military empire:

“A few years ago, there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed that there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the Poverty Program. There were experiments, hopes, and new beginnings. Then came the build-up in Vietnam. And I watched the program broken as if it was some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money, like some demonic, destructive suction tube. And you may not know it, my friends, but it is estimated that we spend $500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only fifty-three dollars for each person classified as poor, and much of that fifty-three dollars goes for salaries to people that are not poor.”   

This speech cost King significant support among the liberal class – a telling sign of how thoroughly imperialism polluted the hearts and minds of supposedly good US-Americans then as today (as many US liberals and progressives back the reckless and signifcantly US-funded carnage in Ukraine.)

Racial hypocrisy aside, King told his Riverside Church audience that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense” — here he would better have said military empire — “than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

A Challenge to “The Triple Evils That Are Interrelated”

What to do? King advanced “radical” changes that went against the grain of the nation’s corporate state, reflecting his agreement with New Left militants that “only by structural change can current evils be eliminated, because the roots are in the system rather in man or faulty operations.”  King advocated an emergency national program providing either decent-paying jobs for all or a guaranteed national income “at levels that sustain life in decent circumstances.” He also called for the “demolition of slums and rebuilding by the population that lives in them.”

His proposals, he said, aimed for more than racial justice alone. Seeking to abolish poverty for all, including poor whites, he felt that “the Negro revolt” was properly challenging each of what he called “the interrelated triple evils” of racism, economic injustice/poverty (capitalism) and war (militarism and imperialism). The Black struggle had thankfully “evolve[ed] into more than a quest for [racial] desegregation and equality,” King said.  It had become “a challenge to a system that has created miracles of production and technology” but had failed to “create justice.”

“If humanism is locked outside the [capitalist] system,” King said on CBC five months before his assassination (or execution), “Negroes will have revealed its inner core of despotism and a far greater struggle for liberation will unfold. The United States is substantially challenged to demonstrate that it can abolish not only the evils of racism but the scourge of poverty and the horrors of war….”

There should be no doubt that King meant capitalism when he referred to “the system” and its “inner core of despotism.” This is clear from the best scholarship on King, including David Garrow’s epic, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Council (HarperCollins, 1986)

“The Dispossessed Must Organize a Revolution Against Injustice”

No careful listener to King’s CBC talks could have missed the radicalism of his vision and tactics. “The dispossessed of this nation – the poor, both White and Negro – live in a cruelly unjust society,” King said. “They must organize a revolution against that injustice,” he added.

Such a revolution would require “more than a statement to the larger society,” more than “street marches” King proclaimed. “There must,” he added, “be a force that interrupts [that society’s] functioning at some key point.” That force would use “mass civil disobedience” to “transmute the deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative force” by “dislocat[ing] the functioning of a society.”

“The storm is rising against the privileged minority of the earth,” King added for good measure. “The storm will not abate until [there is a] just distribution of the fruits of the earth…” The “massive, active, nonviolent resistance to the evils of the modern system” that King advocated was “international in scope,” reflecting the fact that “the poor countries are poor primarily because [rich Western nations] have exploited them through political or economic colonialism. Americans in particular must help their nation repent of her modern economic imperialism.”

“Systemic Rather Than Superficial Flaws”

The threat posed to official bourgeois memory by King’s CBC lectures – and by much more that King said and wrote in the last three years of his life – is not just that they show an officially iconic gradualist reformer to have actually been a strident moral opponent of the unbridled profits system and its empire and a person who called for mass “revolutionary” action in the streets. It is also about how clearly King analyzed the woefully incomplete and unfinished nature of the super-imperialist United States’ progress against domestic racial and class injustice, around which all forward developments pretty much ceased in the 1970s.

The “spiritual death” imposed by U.S. militarism has lived on, to say the least,  with Washington having directly and indirectly killed untold millions of Central Americans, South Americans, Africans, Muslims, Arabs, and Asians in many different ways over the years since the so-called Vietnam War (the “US crucifixion of Southeast Asia” in Noam Chomsky’s words in the late 1960s).   Accounting for roughly 40 percent of the world’s military expenditure, the U.S. maintains Cold War-level “defense” (empire) budgets to sustain an historically unmatched global empire (with  at least 800 military bases spread across more than 80 foreign countries and “troops or other military personnel in about 160 foreign countries and territories”).  It more billions of dollars into a deadly and reckless US-NATO-Russia war in Ukraine and into preparation for a disastrous conflict with China while 40 million US-Americans live under the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level and a remarkable two-thirds of the nation living paycheck to paycheck as corporate price inflation eats away at wages, salaries, and savings. A very disproportionate number of the nation’s poor and insecure are Black, Latino, and Native America.

It isn’t just the right-wing Republi-fascist Party that shits all over the real history and legacy of Dr. King (absurdly claiming him as a friend of white supremacist color- blindness and unbridled capitalism and individualism.)  The dismal, dollar-drenched Democrats do it too, using him as a prop in he game of bourgeois identity politics. The coldly vacuous neoliberal, capitalist-imperialist Barack Citigroup Obama presidency — a key midwife to the Trump atrocity and the strikebreaking corporate and proxy war presidency of Joe “Nothing Would Fundamentally Change” Biden — is a rich object lesson in how real progressive change progress is about something bigger than a superfical change in the party or color of the people in nominal power atop the nation’’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire. That is certainly something King (who would be 93 today) would have understood well had he been able to witness the endless corporate and imperial mendacity of the nation’s first half-white president first-hand.

“The black revolution,” King wrote in a posthumously published 1969 essay titled “A Testament of Hope” (embracing a very different, authentically progressive sort of hope than that purveyed by Brand Obama in 2007 and 2008) “is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws – racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction society of society itself is the real issue to be faced” (emphasis added).

Those words ring as true as ever today, with heightened urgency as it becomes undeniable that the profits system is driving humanity over an environmental cliff.  They are words we never hear during official King Day commemorations.

We’re King alive today, he might well expand his list of “evils that are interrelated” to five, making room include patriarchy (evident in the vicious assault on abortion rights in the US and the spark for the current women-led revolutionary movement in theocratic Iran) and of course ecocide.  He might also add a sixth, fascism, which is resurgent around the world and which (by the way) King warned would be the domestic outcome if the United States failed to radically reconstruct its society.

Who Knows Where King Might Have Gone?

The guardians of national memory don’t want you to know that King advocated mass disobedience and revolution against racist capitalist-imperialism. In a similar vein, our ideological overlords don’t want us to know that Albert Einstein (Time magazine’s  “Person of the 20th Century”) wrote an essay making a case for socialism in the first issue of venerable U.S.-Marxist magazine Monthly Review  – or that Helen Keller was a fan of the Russian Revolution.

I don’t want to overdo it. King was far from a perfect revolutionary role model, to be perfectly frank. He was no Fred Hampton. He was far too cautious about making his democratic socialistic sentiments public and up front (Einstein had that flaw on steroids). He was obviously deeply religious, something that militates against the scientific, historical and dialectical materialist perspective that serious revolutionary understanding and conduct requires.  He distanced himself from supposedly soulless Marxism and communism, mourning instead of properly celebrating the fact that (as he sadly complained at Riverside Church) Western capitalism-imperialism had “driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit.”  He unfortunately portrayed “communism [as] a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated” instead as the proper aim and end goal — a post-class society of abundance and freedom beyond all forms of oppression — of a socialist revolution crafted to defeat the counterrevolutionary efforts of a capitalist ruling class whose bourgeois revolutions were never meant to put the common people in charge of societal affairs. As the great Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote in the introduction to his magisterial volume, The Age of Capital, “the global triumph of capitalism” meant “the triumph of a society” based on “buying everything including labor) in the cheapest market and selling the dearest.” That society was and remains one where “participation in politics [on the part] of the common people” takes place only “within such limits as would guarantee the bourgeois social order and avoid the risk of its overthrow” (emphasis added).

Still, Dr. King was a man of great moral vision and social conscience willing to look deeply into and to call out terrible flaws and gaping moral inconsistencies and crimes in  U.S. American and global capitalism-imperialism as well as domestic racial segregation and inequality. The connections he made between “the triple evils,” his call for “systemic” and “structural” rather than merely “superficial” and “character” changes, and his “suggest[ed]” call for  “the radical reconstruction of society itself” — these are nothing to sneeze at. If he was insufficiently radical for people like the present writer and indeed for many radicals in his time, (when I was a grade-schooler), he was also far too radical for many liberals in the 1960s and  for the whitewashed “American exceptionalist” versions of US American history imposed by the dominant and degraded US media, politics, and pedagogy culture today.

And of course, King was assassinated, possibly executed by the US Empire, at the tragically young age of 39.  Who can claim to know where his heart, mind, and experience might have taken him during middle age and senior citizenship? The language in “Testament of Hope” is suggestive of a deepening radical trajectory, consistent with tendencies in his discourse from 1966 on and with his early enthusiasm for Marx.