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The radical MLK is a stark contrast to the domesticated King whose legacy involves little more than rousing speeches, dreams of “color-blindness,” and the occasional march. King died a radical anti-capitalist, resolutely opposed to America’s global imperialist project. 1/
The radical King was a controversial and offensive figure to most Americans, despised by conservative racists, white Christian churches, and the white liberal establishment. He was deeply critical of the interconnected structures of American militarism, racism, and poverty. 2/
He was a vocal proponent for a democratic socialist society. He refused the calls of moderates to gradually achieve justice within the confines of unjust laws, insisting that the destruction of racist power required coercion in the form of militant, non-violent protest. 3/
While the civil rights movement that King helped to organize did achieve momentous victories, the structural and material realities that King so keenly identified as productive of racism, white supremacy, and violence still plague American life. 4/
At his death, King had a full-blown critique of capitalism and believed that democracy and democratic socialism were synonymous. He insisted that if the momentum of the civil rights movement was to continue, American society must find a way to achieve economic democracy. 5/
King’s civil rights activism in the South awakened him to systemic injustices in America, leading him to develop a deeper critical analysis of America’s social and spiritual sickness — one that seamlessly linked class oppression with racism, poverty and militarism. 6/
The fight for racial justice would require what King called a “black revolution” that would move from smashing racial injustice to a full confrontation with the entirety of rotten American institutions. 7/
In the late 1960s, he turned to the work of exposing and eradicating police brutality, “hidden” segregation in housing and education, systemic poverty, and America's ever-expanding militarism, which culminated in the disastrous Vietnam War. 8/
King railed against war, connecting imperialist violence to the deteriorating living conditions of ordinary people in America. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” 9/
King's decision to condemn the Vietnam War was an unpardonable sin to the liberal establishment. The press formed a united front to condemn him, issuing 168 newspaper denouncements, while President Lyndon Johnson cursed him for daring to demand peace as well as justice. 10/
King’s developed a class analysis in his later years that linked racism and class struggle. While many know of the year and location of King’s assassination, fewer know that he was in Memphis to organize sanitation workers, urging a general strike to shut down the whole city. 11/
King’s now-famous speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” was no lofty piece of moralism. It was a speech forged in and through solidarity with the labor struggles of Memphis city workers, a meditation rooted in King’s engagements with the victims of capitalist exploitation. 12/
