The Conspiracy is Capitalism's Reviews > The Radical King

What is a “radical”?

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint.
When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”
-Hélder Câmara. I cannot think of a better quote to distinguish the radical.
--A radical rejects convenient excuses for status quo power structures (unlike The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined) by uprooting the structural beneath surface distractions and proposing alternatives.

The Good:
--MLK is popularized for advocating active nonviolence (see debate in How to Blow Up a Pipeline) during the Civil Rights movement. Ignorance and spectatorship (i.e. Western “democracy” with its theatrical elections amidst capitalist authoritarianism at the workplace, built on capitalism's violent global division of labour) is not nonviolence; it is the acceptance of violence.
--MLK's progression towards radicalism culminated in connecting racism with poverty, militarism, and materialism; we can more directly use the terms:
i) “capitalism”: the endless accumulation of private money-power requires dispossession of other social relations, ex. enclosures privatizing the Commons to commodify (buy-sell; “materialism”) land, creating the land market, which the dispossessed have nothing left to sell but their labour (labour market). Historically, capitalism has been the culprit of mass social dislocation (The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time) and mass poverty (Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present; conveniently pushed to Global South slums). MLK was assassinated during the “Poor People's Campaign”.
ii) “imperialism”: capitalism's violence holding together the global division of labour/resources. MLK protested against the most visible manifestation, the US's genocidal war on Vietnam.
...The FBI correctly marked MLK as a radical threat:

“I am trying to get at the roots of it to see just what ought to be done.” [...]
“Are we integrating into a burning house?” [...]
It is no accident that just prior to King’s death, 72 percent of whites and 55 percent of blacks disapproved of his opposition to the Vietnam War and his efforts to eradicate poverty in America. When much of the black leadership attacked or shunned him, King replied, “What you’re saying may get you a foundation grant but it won’t get you into the kingdom of truth.”

--While MLK’s analysis of capitalism, Liberalism, Marxism, Socialism, and Communism evolves throughout his lifetime, a pillar of his methodology is radical love. With a basis in his religious background and subsequent inspiration in Gandhian nonviolence (another topic to critically unpack: The Doctor and the Saint: The Ambedkar - Gandhi Debate), the principles of radical love are surprisingly challenging. To attack evil but not attack the individual (let us add the recognition of many levels of contradictions in the messy real world), to win the understanding of the opposition and transform their moral disposition to build community, these can seem utopic when confronted with real world violence. The cycle of violence can seem so inevitable it leaves one to wonder how we ever find empathy, peace, truth, justice and reconciliation.

The Missing:
-- I'd like to see more synthesis between:
i) editor Cornel West's works: ex.Race Matters
ii) pioneering sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois. who also started as a liberal reformist and became radicalized as a communist/anti-imperialist internationalist)
iii) today's radical historian Gerald Horne, as well as case studies from progressive liberals (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America) to more radical economics/histories (The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, Empire of Cotton: A Global History). Also, RIP bell hooks: Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism.
--MLK's roots were organizing at home, but his protest of the US war on Vietnam reveals the direction and recognition of capitalism's global and imperialist nature, something recognized by Malcolm X (Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention) and especially the Black Panther Party (Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party). We must expand this synthesis to the struggles of decolonization, especially the hidden economic structures (unequal “free trade” imperialism, deindustrialization, colonial taxes, foreign currencies/debt traps, intellectual property monopolies, imperialist finance of free capital movement while labour is restricted by militarized borders, etc.):
-Vijay Prashad on imperialism's ideological censorship and exportation of violence: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS...
-overview: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
-Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
-economic intro: The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry
-economic dive: Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
-history intro: Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations
-history dives: The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World
-The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South
-Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World