“We must also realize that the problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.” —Martin Luther King, Jr.
Today is MLK, Jr. Day. Right wingers over at X (Twitter) are saying MLK, Jr. was an instantiation of “race Marxism.” This nonsense term was constructed by mathematician James Lindsay, who rose to fame on the basis of a series of hoax articles he published with Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose, an event popularly known as the “grievance studies affair.” Since then he has come to believe he has special insight into Marxism. He’s wrong. Here’s what I told End Wokeness @EndWokeness:
MLK was not a Marxist—racial (whatever that means) or otherwise. He was a Christian socialist. The “radical redistribution of economic power” rhetoric was in line with what other christian socialists advocated at the time (many still do). MLK rejected communism and Marxism: (1) He denounced the materialistic interpretation of history. “Communism,” he wrote, “avowedly secularistic and materialistic, has no place for God.” (2) He denounced communism’s ethical relativism. “Since for the Communist there is no divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything—force, violence murder, lying—is a justifiable means to the ‘millennial’ end,” he wrote. Finally (3) King opposed communism’s political totalitarianism. “In communism, the individual ends up in subjection to the state,” he wrote; “if man’s so-called rights and liberties stand in the way of that end, they are simply swept aside.” King argued that, under communism, man’s “liberties of expression, his freedom to vote, his freedom to listen to what news he likes or to choose his books are all restricted.” His conclusion: “Man becomes hardly more, in communism, than a depersonalized cog in the turning wheel of the state.”
The reason for pairing King with communism is the (fallacious) belief that DEI programming is a communist project and, since King was a communist sympathizer, and since his remark concerning the radical redistribution of economic power sounds like a communist remark to a right-wing numskull, King’s famous line about judging a man by the content of his character and not the color of his skin was a deception. Leave aside that it is more political useful to take as genuine King’s powerful rhetoric about character and color, the fact is that King was a Baptist minister who was trying to move people to established the Beloved Community, a society in which homelessness, hunger, and poverty will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency forbid it—you know, that “What would Jesus do?” thing. As a left-libertarian, I’m suspicious of King’s theocratic ambition; I lose no sleep over the Beloved Community vision.
King’s (1) is correct. Communism as envisioned by Marx and Engels is indeed an atheist endeavor. This doesn’t mean that people cannot worship God. It just means that governments and the law cannot be established on that basis. This is position is not unique to communism. Liberalism also demands a secular state and knowledge based on fact and reason. From his earliest writings right through his life, Marx equated communism with democracy and affirmed the liberal values embodied in the First Amendment to the US Constitution. King’s (2) and (3) point are incorrect. What I just said contradicts (3). We can say more. For example, Marx and Engels argued that communist development creates the conditions for the abolition of the state as the administration of people—the opposite of what King suggests. As for (2) King is here suggesting a theocracy with his reference to “divine government” if he means anything more than did our Founders (I recently published an essay on this Rise of the Domestic Clerical Fascist and the Specter of Christian Nationalism). King’s concern about man becoming a depersonalize cog in the turning wheel of the state is correct if the instantiation of communism is the Soviet Union under Stalin. George Orwell made a similar argument at that time, only the metaphor was “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”
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Update (January 16, 2024): Early this morning I received as a response, for user RoosterJuan @MedWerd1776 an old and well-known propaganda broadside from an entity called the Georgia Commission on Education.
I am very familiar with Highlander. I did my graduate training at the University of Tennessee which was the time affiliated with Highlander Center, as were a great number of churches in the region. There was in fact no center in Tennessee called the “Highlander Folk School for Communist Training.” What there was a Highlander Folk School that organized literacy programs, voter turnout efforts, and civil rights actions, including the Rosa Parks incident. What @MedWerd1776 shared is crude propaganda from white nationalists in the south who were trying to keep Jim Crow segregation in place. The Georgia Commission on Education was pro-segregation.
Where here were communists who attended workshops at that school? To be sure. There were communists at the Bridgestone/Firestone strike in Nashville Tennessee in the mid 1990s. I know, because I was there. They fed the striking workers. Communists are citizens who are free to participate in political action just like the rest of us. The attempt at guilt by association is very obvious in @MedWerd1776’s response and such a tactic should be beneath rational men. My charity is running low for those who share pro-segregationist propaganda.
freedom and reason 