Radical revolution of values

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AP Photo/Horace Cort via PR

…the “black revolution” had gone beyond the “rights of Negroes.” The struggle, he said, is “forcing America to face all of its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”

[…]

His political maturation prompted him to connect the U.S. war in Vietnam to the deteriorating conditions in U.S. cities, and of even more consequence, it prompted him to search for more effective tactics in confronting the legal menace of segregation in the North and the attendant crises: slum conditions, unemployment, and police brutality.

Within this context, King began to publicly articulate an anticapitalist analysis of the United States that put him in sync with rising critiques from the global revolutionary left of market-based economies. Despite the “affluence” of the United States, it was, nevertheless, wracked by poverty and entrenched in an endless war. King masterfully tore down the wall that the political and economic establishments used to separate domestic policies from foreign policies.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
January 15, 2018

Fifty Years Since MLK, edited by Brandon Terry. Excerpt at The Paris Review. via Haymarket.

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“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”

Martin Luther King

The Force of Nonviolence by Judith Butler.

JB: My effort in this book is to try to shift the debate on nonviolence from an exclusively moral framework to a social and political one that is informed by ethics. The question of what you would do as an individual in this situation returns me to the moral framework. Of course, sometimes we function precisely in that way and ask: what do I do?

My answer is twofold: On the one hand, I would say that there are enormously forceful and aggressive forms of nonviolence that can be used to oppose state violence and police violence. It can be used to sort or undermine the capacities of violent institutions or violent individuals. I am in favour of that. I do not understand nonviolence as passive. I do not understand it as peaceable. I do not believe it emerges from some internal place of equanimity. Nonviolence can be raging and in fact it might be defined as a way of cultivating or redirecting rage in such a way that it does not reproduce the violence it opposes.

Judith Butler via verso blogs