By Peter Hudis

As we consider legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the 40th anniversary of his death, it is worthwhile considering an aspect of King’s legacy that has received little or no discussion—even though it speaks directly to the problems facing us today, including those revealed by the campaign for the next U.S. president.

In 1951, four years before the Montgomery Bus Boycott that catapulted him to national attention, King wrote the following: “Karl Marx, the German philosopher and economist, stated that capitalism carries the seeds of its own destruction…do we find any truth therein? It is my opinion that there is. I am convinced that capitalism has seen its best days in America, and not only in America, but in the entire world. It is a well-known fact that no social institution can survive when it has outlined its usefulness. This, capitalism has done. It has failed to meet the needs of the masses.”

King continued, “We need only look at the underlying developments of our society. There is a definite revolt by what Marx calls ‘the proletariat,’ against the bourgeoisie. Everywhere we turn we are faced with strikes and a demand for socialized medicine….I am not saying that there is a conscious move toward socialism, not even by labor, the move is certainly unconscious. But there is a definite move away from capitalism, whether we conceive of it as conscious or unconscious.”(1)

LIFELONG CRITICAL ATTITUDE
These comments may come to some as a surprise, since King rarely voiced such explicit condemnation of capitalism once he became a publicly recognized figure. But that does not mean that his comments reflected a youthful indulgence that he later outgrew. His entire life was informed by a critical attitude to the overall structure of U.S. society, even when he focused, out of necessity, on the specific demands of the moment.

This is evident from his speech on the second day of the Montgomery Bush Boycott, in December 1955, when he stated: “And we will not be content until oppression is wiped out of Montgomery, and really out of America. We won’t be content until that is done. We are merely insisting on the dignity and worth of every human personality.” This is evident from his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which he condemned segregation on the grounds that it expresses “man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement”—words that could have come from Marx’s Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, even though King explicitly referred to the existentialist theologians Martin Buber and Paul Tillich. He expressed his critical attitude to the overall structure of U.S. society even more sharply at the end of his life with his work on behalf of the Poor People’s Campaign and the Memphis sanitation workers.

Why is it important to recall the visionary depth that King brought to his criticism of racism and social justice? We need to do so today because so much of that visionary depth is being lost sight of—even as we confront the historical novelty of a white woman or a Black man becoming the nominee of one of America’s two main political parties.

Here we have an election campaign that comes at a decisive moment in the history of U.S. politics, and yet what has been seized upon is the most pointless trivia—as if what pin is worn upon one’s lapel is the defining feature of a world leader. All of the really serious issues facing this country—from health care to global warming and from the economic crisis to the criminal injustice system—are being assumed away. It isn’t of course surprising that those aspiring to lead the U.S. imperial behemoth would avoid raising critical questions about the state of U.S. society. What is striking, however, is the extent to which all the major players, especially the media, have tried to ensure that this election campaign avoids even mentioning the fundamental crises facing U.S. society.

There is, of course, a crucial exception to this—the way race has come to the fore in the campaign. This definitely isn’t want Obama wanted, even though he has credentials as a long-time supporter of civil rights for African-Americans. Obama nevertheless deliberately tried to foster the illusion that some “new beginning” could arise in America without having to deal directly with the critical issue of race and racism.

It wasn’t Obama, but Hillary Clinton who first made race an issue in this campaign—and she has done so in a most nefarious way. She has gone out of her way to subtly “remind” voters that Obama really isn’t “one of us” (“hard-working, white Americans just won’t vote for him,” she declared). The fact hasn’t been lost on Black Americans. There’s a good reason for why her popularity rating among African Americans plummeted 40 percentage points even while she managed to rack up a series of primary victories in the last two months of the campaign.

At the same time, the campaign has witnessed plenty of misogyny directed against Clinton—especially from the established media. Again and again we’ve heard references as to whether she’s “tough” enough to be president—as if the fact that she’s a woman presumably indicates that she is automatically disqualified from office!

Clearly, nothing has done more to bring race into the forefront of the campaign more than the hoopla over Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Many have correctly pointed to the hypocrisy of the entire controversy. Why are Obama’s links with Wright made an issue when Rudy Giuliani’s association with Pat Robertson was ignored and John McCain’s links with Rev. John Hagee and Rod Parsley were downplayed? Why should a Black preacher’s statements get so much attention when the far more bizarre statements of the white religious fanatics Bush associates with are given a free ride? It surely shows how far this country has to go to overcome its Achilles heel of racism, despite claims to the contrary.

RACE DEBATE EVADES REALITIES OF CAPITALISM
Despite the outcry on the part of many against all of this, one dimension of the controversy over Rev. Wright is getting little or no attention—the way race has been inserted into the campaign in such a way as to bury any discussion of the problems facing U.S. capitalism. Wright himself, after all, is a supporter of Louis Farrakhan—a champion of “free market” capitalism and “Black self-reliance” within the confines of existing capitalism (his sexism and anti-Semitism hardly need to be mentioned). For all the “dangerous” ideas that some are attributing to Rev. Wright, opposition to U.S. capitalism doesn’t happen to be one of them.

By making Wright an issue, Clinton, the media, and the political pundits have tried to present Obama as “outside the mainstream of U.S. society”—while defining “outside the mainstream” as being solidly within the framework of existing capitalism. The way in which the demonization of Wright, and by extension Obama, is being carried out not only stirs up racism, but also serves the purpose of making it unthinkable to even think outside of the contours of actually existing capitalism.

Not only is there no politician in this country who seems to have the nerve to even mention the “c” word—capitalism. It is also a fact that those figures that get denounced as “dangerous” to America, like Wright or Farrakhan, don’t oppose capitalism either. What we are witnessing with this electoral campaign is more than an effort to undermine the presidential aspirations of one individual. We are witnessing the removal from the table any conceivable discussion of any of the problems facing U.S. capitalism.

It isn’t only representatives of the bourgeois media and the major parties that have to answer for this. No less of a problem is that there are plenty of apologists for Wright or Obama on the Left who are going out of their way to refrain from issuing any explicit criticisms of U.S. capitalism. Much of the Left has abandoned its historic responsibility to “speak truth to power”—at least when it comes to telling the truth of what capitalism is doing to this nation and the world.

KING'S ANTICAPITALISM, AND OURS?
Here is where King’s words from 1951 continue to haunt—and enchant—us. He knew that racism is the issue facing U.S. society and that none of its basic problems could be resolved without uprooting it. He also understood that U.S racism has long been endemic to U.S. capitalism and that capitalism has outlived its usefulness. Although he tended not to make his opposition of capitalism explicit, can we possibly do justice to King’s legacy today by allowing the critique of capitalism to become effaced from public discourse—precisely when capitalism is entering such an extensive global crisis?

Let us not be short minded in our opposition to the efforts to demonize Rev. Wright, and by extension Obama. Far more is at issue than the ambitions of a junior senator from Illinois who has never favored serious social change in the first place. What is at stake is that we not take the ground of those we oppose in the media and government by letting their idiocies divert us from the task of showing that a viable alternative can be developed to what King called capitalism’s “failure to meet the needs of the masses.”

1. “Notes on American Capitalism,” in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Vol. I: Called to Serve, edited by Clayborne Carson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 435-36

2. “MIA Mass Meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church,” in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Vol. III: Birth of a New Age, edited by Clayborne Carson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 79.