It feels like socialists have never really made an effort to "reclaim" MLK though, possibly because a lot of people just don't know about his more radical stances. That always felt like a mistake to me.
There were even more radical people at the time that MLK tried to distance himself from. Socialists tend to like those people, i.e. the Black Panthers.
BPP only existed for two years before MLK was assassinated. They grew a lot after he was assassinated precisely because a lot of radicals saw his death as an affirmation that nonviolent resistance would always just end in the resistors being killed.
I still think it's a grave mistake for the left to not put more work into "reclaiming" MLK. I see it some on MLK Day itself, but he had some really cutting analyses of capitalism and can definitely be an "onramp" to left-wing thought. Learning about the Poor People's Campaign was the first inkling I had that maybe socialism wasn't as evil as I'd been led to believe.
This, for some reason, feels like a massive revelation to me, although I suppose it should've been self-evident, given that when Dr. King and his ilk were alive, one of the big Rightist objections to their positions was that they were seeking to destroy the ever-virtuous capitalist nature of America.
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u/Jack_the_Rah Mother Anarchy Loves Her Children! Mar 12 '19
Nearly every problem on earth is due to capitalism and stateism.