‘Prophet of Discontent’ Seems at MLK’s Criticism of Capitalism and Militarism

One other yr, one other Martin Luther King Jr. Day, when social media shall be flooded with the standard pictures of the civil rights icon and posts about judging folks by their character and never the colour of their pores and skin. Liberals and conservatives alike can pay lip service to King’s goals — however what did these goals actually entail?

Over the previous decade, revelations about King’s extra radical historical past have seeped into the mainstream discourse. King wasn’t only a dreamer, though his imaginative capability is so essential to his legacy; he spent his profession being on the bottom with working-class poor folks throughout the nation, combating structural racism and financial inequality. He was a staunch opponent of the Vietnam Struggle, and he referred to as militarism “the ultimate section of our nationwide illness.”

Of their new e book Prophet of Discontent: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Critique of Racial Capitalism, authors Andrew J. Douglas and Jared A. Loggins make it clear that King was a socialist who thought “one thing is fallacious with capitalism.” King, they argue, needs to be firmly located inside the Black radical custom.

This dialog comes at an necessary time. This yr marks the sixtieth anniversary of the March on Washington, a historic milestone that, Loggins explains, has been stripped of its true which means, framed by some as simply one other step in a since-completed march towards equal rights. Not fairly, the authors say. Our nation continues to be very a lot formed by police brutality, college segregation, voter disenfranchisement, a racial wealth hole, well being inequity, and anti-Black racism. 

Teen Vogue catches up with Douglas and Loggins over Zoom to speak about their e book, the co-optation of King’s legacy, and the way we are able to notice the novel values that King championed.

Editor’s word: This dialog has been condensed and calmly edited for readability.

Teen Vogue: For these unfamiliar with the idea of racial capitalism, are you able to please clarify it? Additionally, what’s King’s critique — financial and political — of this method that y’all discuss within the e book?

Andrew J. Douglas: The idea of racial capitalism helps us take into consideration how racial violence and inequality are integral to how capitalism works. They’re what allow and maintain profitability, progress, non-public wealth seize. The concept is that we are able to’t have capitalism with out racism, and we are able to’t be antiracist with out being anticapitalist.

Within the e book, we flip to modern discourse on racial capitalism in an effort to reconstruct King’s critique of capitalist society. King, after all, didn’t use this language, however it may be utilized to his life’s work remarkably properly. King famously referred to as for a “radical revolution of values” and dreamed of a extra simply, extra compassionate, extra loving world. However he understood that we are able to’t worth each other in additional simply or loving methods after we’re embedded in a system of private-property relations, after we’re compelled to commodify ourselves and others, after we’re pressured to simply accept no matter values markets will bear. 

Jared A. Loggins: Racism is a necessary characteristic of capitalism. We needed to point out within the e book how capitalism requires, as a matter after all, the copy of racial animosities, inequality, and domination by way of slavery, segregation, exploitation and super-exploitation, violence (state sanctioned and extra-legal, gratuitous, and reasoned), colonial management and imperial conquest.