From Marx to Malcolm and Martin
By Grace Lee Boggs
The Other Side,
January-February 2003,
Vol. 39, No. 1.
In the 1960s I didn't pay much attention to Martin
Luther King, Jr. My own social-change activities
unfolded in the inner city of Detroit. So I
identified more with Malcolm than with Martin.
Like most Black Power activists, I tended to view
King's notions of nonviolence and "the beloved
community" as somewhat naive and sentimental.
Nor was I involved in the fifteen-year campaign
that was launched in 1968 by Detroit's own
Congressman John Conyers to declare King's
birthday a national holiday. While many progressives
rallied to the cause, I held back, concerned that it
would turn King into an icon, obscure the role of
grass-roots activists, and reinforce the tendency
to rely on charismatic leaders.
Thirty-five years have passed since King was killed--
decades during which many of us have continued to
struggle to free our communities of crime, violence,
and economic devastation. In the wake of the urban
rebellions of the late 1960s, the violence and fear
have only escalated. In the twenty years since Ronald
Reagan signed into law the King holiday, we seem to
have drifted further from anything resembling a
beloved community in this nation.
Thinking back over these years, I can't help wondering:
Might events have taken a different path if we had found
a way to infuse our struggle for Black Power with King's
philosophy and ideology of nonviolence? Is it possible
that our relationships with one another today, not only
inter- but intra-racially, would be more respectful and
harmonious if we had discovered how to blend Malcolm's
militancy with King's beloved community?
Could such a symbiosis have a revolutionary power beyond
our wildest dreams? And, I dare to wonder, is such a
revolutionary power available to us today?
I cut my own activist teeth, as did many of my generation,
on the revolutionary theories of Marx and Lenin.
Their ideas and strategies were developed during the
industrial era, when the prevailing concern of social-change
activists was to extend our material powers. People's lives
were determined by economic necessities--hence our strategies
for radical change centered on the economic arena. The goal
was to help workers understand that they were victims of the
economic system, and that the only solution was to get rid
of it. We struggled for political power as a way to abolish
the unjust economic system. That is still the revolutionary
scenario for most radicals, including African Americans and
other persons of color.
One of the weaknesses of such a revolutionary vision is its
failure to recognize the great divide created by the dropping
of the atom bombs that ended World War II. The splitting of
the atom brought human beings face to face with the reality
that we had expanded our material powers to the point where
we could destroy our planet. No longer could we afford to
act as if everything that happened to us was determined by
external or economic circumstances.
This crucial juncture in human evolution required (and requires)
a profound change in theories of revolutionary struggle. No
longer can we view radical social change as a D-day replacement
of one set of rulers with another. We can no longer define
struggle simply in terms of us versus them, victims versus
villains, good versus evil. We can no longer focus only on
transferring power from the top to the bottom. Henceforth,
we need to grasp a process of transformation that includes
both ourselves and our institutions, that fuses politics
with ethics, that operates according to a consciously
created integrity of ends and means.
That is why, as I have been reading and re-reading King's
speeches and writings from the last two years of his life,
it has become increasingly clear to me that King's social
ministry and prophetic vision are now the indispensable
starting point for twenty-first-century revolutionaries.
The civil rights movement, launched by the Montgomery Bus
Boycott in 1955, was the first struggle by an oppressed
people in Western society from this new post-atomic
perspective. Tens of thousands of African Americans in
Montgomery carried out a year-long nonviolent, disciplined,
and ultimately successful struggle against racist structures.
Before the eyes of the whole world, a people who had been
treated as less than human struggled against their dehumanization
not as angry victims or rebels but as new men and women,
representative of a new more human society. They used methods
that transformed themselves and increased the good rather than
the evil in the world. By always bearing in mind that their
goal was not only desegregation of the buses but the beloved
community, they inspired the human-identity and ecological
movements which over the last forty years have been creating
a new civil society in the United States.
King's speeches and writings, produced in the heat of struggle,
played a critical role in the success of Montgomery and later
struggles. As a Black man living in the racist United States
and as a philosopher, King was supremely conscious of the
contradiction between our technological overdevelopment and
our human underdevelopment--as he often put it, we have
"guided missiles and misguided men."
King constantly pointed out to those in the freedom movement
that their refusal to respond in kind to the violence and
terrorism of their opponents was increasing their own
strength and unity. He constantly reminded them and the
world that their goal was not only the right to sit at
the front of the bus or to vote, but to give birth to a
new society based on more human values. In so doing, he
not only empowered those on the frontlines, but in the
process developed a new strategy for transforming a
struggle for rights into a struggle that advances the
humanity of everyone in the society and thereby brings
the beloved community closer.
Essential to king's power as a revolutionary was his
capacity, in the midst of specific struggles, to
redefine basic concepts of political philosophy
and practice.
Take, for example, the concept of freedom. Most people
in the United States think of freedom in terms of the
individual--the right to "do your own thing." They also
believe that the United States has the right and
responsibility to spread and defend this concept of
freedom around the world. King's experiences as an African
American man in a racist society had taught him the
limitations of this unhistorical understanding.
Freedom should not be viewed as an abstraction, he wrote.
Nor can it be separated from necessity and responsibility.
King urged us to look at freedom from the viewpoint of the
whole person, viewing it as a process which involves our
capacity to deliberate and weigh alternatives, to make
choices, and then take responsibility for our decisions.
King proposed a similar enriching of our concept of love.
Most people think of love only in terms of affection,
between lovers (eros) or friends (philia). Again, King's
experiences of systemic racism had taught him that love
of power goes hand in hand with domination and destruction
of community. He developed a profoundly political concept
of love (building on his theological understanding of love
as agape) that is based on the willingness of the oppressed
to go to any lengths to restore or create community.
Practicing this concept of love empowers the oppressed to
overcome fear and the oppressors to transcend hate.
Similarly, most people in the United States think of citizenship
only in terms of loyalty to this country. King, whose ideas
were developed in an era when liberation struggles were going
on all over the world, recognized that the time had come for
a more global concept of citizenship.
To become part of this world-wide fellowship, King believed
that we must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented"
society to a "person-oriented" society. "When machines and
computers, profit motives, and property rights are considered
more important than people," he warned, "the giant triplets
of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being
conquered."
Viewing Martin Luther King, Jr., as a revolutionary is in sharp
contrast to the "official" view of him as simply an advocate
for the rights of African Americans within the current system.
King was a revolutionary in the best sense of the word. In the
wake of the youth rebellions in Northern cities, which required
a more complex solution than visions of Black and White children
marching hand in hand, King began to explore a new kind of revolution.
He envisioned a nonviolent revolution that would challenge all the
values and institutions of our society, and combine the struggle
against racism with a struggle against poverty, militarism, and
materialism. King sought to conceptualize a new system that would
go beyond capitalism, which he said was too "I-centered, too
individualistic," and communism, which he saw as "too collective,
too statist."
Warning that material growth had been made an end in itself and
that our scientific power had outrun our spiritual power, he
refused to accept the dictatorship of High Tech, which diminishes
people because it eliminates their sense of participation. King
deplored the way that educators were trying to instill middle-class
values in Black youth, noting that "it was precisely when young
Negroes threw off their middle-class values and put careers and
wealth in a secondary role" that they made a historic social
contribution. And he called for programs that would involve
young people in direct actions "in our dying cities" that
would be both self-transforming and structure-transforming.
King the revolutionary challenged not only political and
economic systems, but our own internal understandings of
ourselves and of the world. He called not just for new
structures in power, but new kinds of power, rooted in
democratic empowerment of all persons as bearing dignity
and possibility. He sought out not simply new
revolutionary ends, but revolutionary means that bore
within themselves the character and quality of the ultimate
goal, a beloved community of all persons. He articulated
a dynamic and evolving process of revolution and transformation.
We will never know what King might have done had he not been
assassinated. What we do know is that, in the thirty-five
years since his death, the "giant triplets" of racism,
militarism, and materialism have become even more
dehumanizing. Our communities have been turned into
wastelands by economic disinvestment and the High-Tech
juggernaut, and the youth in our de-industrialized cities
have become increasingly desperate. Transnational corporations
have spread their tentacles around the world, widening
the gulf between rich and poor, robbing local communities
of their sources of food, fuel, and local cultures. At
the same time, U.S. military forces prop up compliant
reactionary regimes, feeding resentment and breeding an
international network of terrorists.
King's reasons for opposing the Vietnam War against
communism in the 1960s can be applied almost verbatim
to the current U.S. war against terrorism: "Poverty,
insecurity, and injustice," he explained, "are the
fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows."
A positive revolution of values "is our best defense
against communism. War is not the answer. . . .
We must not engage in a negative anti-communism,
but rather in a positive thrust for democracy."
Now is a ripe time to look anew at King's "radical
revolution of values." Underneath the flag-waving
that has been so visible since September 11, 2001,
a great deal of soul-searching has been going on.
Many people in the United States, faced with
mortality on such an instant and colossal scale,
have been reassessing their priorities and wondering
how to make their lives more meaningful. In the process,
some are beginning to recognize that spiritual values
like compassion, generosity, and community are more
important than material consumption.
As the Bush administration continues to exploit
popular fears to carry out its agenda of military
buildup, cutbacks on social programs, and suppression
of dissent, we need to tap into King's revolutionary
spirit. We can find hope that increasing numbers of
Americans will realize that the best way to insure
our peace and security is not by warring on the
"axis of evil" but through a radical revolution
in our own values and practice. That revolution
must include a concept of global citizenship in
which the life of an Afghani, Iraqi, Irani,
North Korean, or Palestinian is as precious as
the life of someone in the United States.
We can gather as small groups, with our co-workers,
neighbors, families, and church members, creating
together a new language that describes the kind
of new human beings and the kind of country we
want to become. King's writings and speeches,
especially "A Time to Break Silence" and Where
Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, provide
excellent material for small discussion groups.
We also need to engage in practical actions that
help us transform ourselves and point the way towards
the radical reconstruction of society that King
advocated. Hopeful signs are popping up in cities
and communities throughout the country. More than
a hundred U.S. cities and four hundred more around
the world have defied the Bush administration's
abandonment of the Kyoto Treaty on global warming
by devising local initiatives to meet the treaty's
goals.
Numerous local groups are organizing programs
to reduce our dependence on global capitalism
by creating more self-reliant economies,
including urban agriculture programs and local
currencies like the Ithaca dollar. We need
experiments in alternative education for our
young people, like Detroit Summer and KIDS
(Kids Involved in Direct Service), which are
pioneering self-transforming and structure-
transforming community-building programs,
especially in our schools from K-12. We need
more grass-roots democratic institutions that
stress participatory and decentralized citizen
participation in all aspects of our community life.
We also need King's wisdom in re-envisioning our
movements for social change. (I like to think that,
based on the ideas that he was exploring in the last
two years of his life, King would have been at the
Battle of Seattle in November, 1999, and participating
in the ensuing anti-globalization movement.) Following
King's lead, we need movement-builders who, confident
of their own humanity, are able to recognize the humanity
in others, including their opponents, and therefore the
potential within them for redemption. We need movement-
builders who choose nonviolent struggle as a way of
restoring community rather than increasing hate, fear,
and bitterness. We need movement-builders who go beyond
slogans and create programs of struggle that transform
and empower participants--such as the Montgomery Bus
Boycott's creation of an alternative self-reliant
transportation system. We need movement-builders who
recognize the need for two-sided transformation, both
of ourselves and of our institutions, and who ensure
that the methods we use in our struggles are transforming
ourselves as well as our opponents toward a deeper,
truer humanity.
These are tough and uncertain times. We need a vision
that will do for our time what the beloved community
did for King's. We need a vision that recognizes that
we are at one of the great turning points in human
history when the survival of our planet and the restoration
of our humanity require a great sea change in our ecological,
economic, political, and spiritual values.
From The Other Side Online, © 2003 The Other Side, January-February 2003, Vol. 39, No. 1.
©2003 The Other Side
300 West Apsley, Philadelphia, PA 19144
(800) 700-9280 Fax: (215) 849-3755
|
