The Ethics of Class Struggle: Lessons from the Civil Rights Movement
Ted W. Stolze
Philosophy Department
Cerritos College
Norwalk, CA 90650
[email protected]
By the “ethics of class struggle” I mean the values and principles
that should inform and guide movements against economic exploitation. I
am not concerned today with the equally important descriptive task of
studying why such movements arise or which strategies and tactics have
been, or would be, most effective in limiting or overcoming exploitation.
This I leave to social psychologists, historians, and above all political
organizers. Nor would I claim that the Civil Rights movement was nothing
but a class struggle. However, as Thomas Jackson and Michael Honey
have exhaustively documented in their marvelous new books, Martin
Luther King, Jr. well understood the connection between the pursuit of
civil and economic rights.1 Let’s not forget that after reflecting on both the
successes and limitations of the early phase of the Civil Rights movement,
in the last two years of his life King hoped to build a multiracial coalition of
poor people that would march on Washington, D.C., engage in massive civil
disobedience, and “compel Congress to enact an economic bill of rights
under the slogan ‘Jobs or Income Now.’”2 As should be widely known, but
unfortunately
is
not,
King
increasingly
drew
attention
to
the
interconnection of racism, poverty and war, indicted both Soviet-style
communism and U.S.-style capitalism for their moral shortcomings,
2
insisted that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money
on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching
spiritual death,”3 and was murdered while in Memphis supporting a
sanitation workers’ strike. This radical King remains, in Vincent Harding’s
striking description, an “inconvenient hero.”4
Perhaps, then, my
provocative title “the ethics of class struggle” is appropriate.
Let me reiterate: by the “ethics of class struggle” I’m not talking
about descriptive social science or organizing strategy.
Rather, I’m
drawing attention to what philosophers would call a normative dimension
of social movements against exploitation.
In particular, in such
movements the following basic moral question invariably arises:
How
should the exploited strive to emancipate themselves?
In response to this question, I would like to defend a general
Principle of Self-Emancipation:
Actions undertaken to improve the well-being of the oppressed
should be either led by the oppressed themselves or, to the extent
that this is not feasible, at their behest and under their authority.
Several remarks on this normative principle are in order. First of all, by
“oppressed” I mean those who are subject to unreasonable structural or
institutional constraint on self-development. Or, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s
admirably plain terms, oppression consists in “treating the Other as an
animal.”5
3
Secondly, it should be clear that I regard economic exploitation as
just one specific form that oppression can take—and not necessarily the
worst.
For example, Iris Marion Young has usefully identified five
different “faces of oppression,” which range from exploitation to
marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and overt violence.6
Exploitation, as Young writes,
occurs through a steady process of the transfer of the results of the
labor of some people to benefit others. The injustice of class division
does not consist only in the fact that some people have great wealth
while most people have little and some are severely deprived. The
theory of exploitation shows that this relation of power and
inequality is produced and reproduced through a systematic
process in which the energies of the have-nots are continuously
expended to maintain and augment the power, status, and wealth of
the haves.7
Although exploitation is customarily used to characterize only domination
based on class, I agree with Young that there also exist specific forms of
gender and racial exploitation.8
Thirdly, following Roy Bhaskar, I use the term “emancipation”
instead of “liberation” in order to stress that what I have in mind is not the
attainment of
a
blissful
psychological
transformation of social structures.
emancipation is better. 9
state
but
the
hard-fought
No doubt liberation is good, but
4
***
Let’s consider how best to defend the Principle of Self-Emancipation.
In my view, the main justification is that such a principle recognizes and
preserves the dignity of victims of oppression and avoids paternalism.
Although bystanders may be in a position to know who is oppressed and
why, who other than the oppressed themselves are in a position to express
the demand that they be emancipated, and in what manner? Victims are
never merely victims; they are never simply objects to be manipulated. In
short, we must beware of lapsing into what Alex Callinicos has termed
“moral imperialism,”10 by which self-serving emancipators wind up
unilaterally imposing assistance on those deemed to be in need of
deliverance from oppression.
Beyond the theoretical question of how best to respect the dignity of
the oppressed, however, there is an eminently practical justification for
self-emancipation. For I take it that the purpose of a social movement is
not to go down fighting but ultimately to win!11 Yet if a movement to
improve the well-being of the oppressed is to be successful, to the greatest
feasible extent the oppressed themselves must be able to deliberate
regarding their own interests and objectives in lessening or eliminating the
oppression they experience.12
As a result, third parties who want to
support the cause of the oppressed must do so cautiously and with
humility. Above all else, they should repudiate all forms of paternalism.
***
5
But what exactly is the relevance of self-emancipation to how we
should remember the Civil Rights movement and the charismatic
leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr.? To begin with, it is worth noting
that King and the organization he helped to found, the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC), were regularly criticized by other civil
rights activists for their “top-down” approach to political change:
mobilizing large numbers of people for the purpose of short-term, mediaoriented events but downplaying the need for long-term political pressure
rooted in less dramatic but arguably more effective “bottom-up”
community organizing.13
For instance, Ella Baker, who was SCLC’s first full-time executive
director, became frustrated after two and a half years of challenging elitist,
especially sexist, attitudes by SCLC ministers toward the office staff. Soon
after leaving SCLC, Baker became a mentor to the newly emerging Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), whose young activists quickly
put into practice her alternative strategy for building the Civil Rights
movement.14
The core of that strategy can be found in Baker’s 1970 interview
with Gerda Lerner on “Developing Community Leadership,” which should
be mandatory reading for all activists,
I have always felt it was a handicap for oppressed people to depend
so largely on a leader, because unfortunately in our culture, the
charismatic leader usually becomes a leader because he has found a
6
spot in the public limelight. It usually means that the media made
him, and the media may undo him. There is also the danger in our
culture that, because a person is called upon to give public
statements and is acclaimed by the establishment, such a person
gets to the point of believing that he is the movement. Such people
get so involved with playing the game of being important that they
exhaust themselves and their time and they don’t do the work of
actually organizing people.
Baker expressed to the highest degree what I have called the ideal of selfemancipation.
She always tried in her organizing to get people to
understand that “they cannot look for salvation anywhere but to
themselves.”15
Yet it is equally a testament to King’s development as a mass leader
that he himself wound up adopting much of Baker’s critique of top-down
politics. As Thomas Jackson notes,
King later admitted that SCLC relied excessively on mobilization for
‘crises’ and national publicity. But King was also hugely popular at
the grassroots, orchestrating dramatic confrontations and moving
public opinion and political elites to support national legislation.
This legislation helped local people uproot entrenched forms of white
supremacy. Despite King’s continuous efforts to ‘guide’ the masses
and ‘speak for the poor’ from his many pulpits, King never lost his
7
countervailing commitment to identify and speak with as well as to
ordinary people.16
Indeed, it would appear that especially in the last years of his life—as he
moved onto the terrain of anti-poverty and open-housing initiatives in
Northern cities, launched the Poor People’s Campaign, and supported the
Memphis sanitation workers’ strike—King increasingly came to share
Baker’s radically democratic vision. Consider in this light the sermon he
preached on February 4, 1968 entitled “The Drum Major Instinct,”
excerpts from which were played at his funeral service just two months
later.17
In this remarkable sermon King analyzes what he calls an instinct
“deep down within all of us. . . . a kind of drum major instinct—a desire to be
out front, a desire to lead the parade, a desire to be first.”18 According to
King, such a “desire for attention” accounts for “why so many people are
joiners . . . why we are so often taken in by advertisers,” in short, why so
many people live beyond their means constantly “trying to outdo the
Joneses.”19
Yet the “great issue of life,” King insists, “is to harness the drum
major instinct.” Failure to do so can give rise to such dangers as social
exclusion and violence based on race, class, or nation.20 As you might
expect in a Christian sermon, King argues that Jesus recognized the drum
major instinct but sought to reorder it by giving us “a new norm of
greatness” by recognizing that “he who is greatest among you shall be your
8
servant.”21 In short, a good life is measured by the degree of one’ service to
others.
King eerily concludes his sermon by suggesting his own funeral
eulogy:
I’d like somebody to mention that day, that Martin Luther
King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others. I’d like for somebody
to say that day, that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love
somebody. I want you to say that day, that I did try to feed the
hungry. And I want you to be able to say that day, that I did try, in
my life, to clothe those who were naked. I want you to say, on that
day, that I did try, in my life, to visit those who were in prison.
I
want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity.
Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was
a drum major for justice; say that I was a drum major for peace; I
was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow
things will not matter. I won’t have any money to leave behind. But
I just want to leave a committed life behind.22
I cannot think of more fitting, self-emancipatory words by which to
remember Martin Luther King, Jr. today. But with such remembrance
comes an obligation to decide and to act. So let each of us ask the question,
“To what cause am I willing to commit my life?”
1
Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin
Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Philadelphia:
9
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); and Michael K. Honey, Going
Down Jericho Road:
The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last
Campaign (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2007).
2
Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights, p. 329.
3
“Beyond Vietnam,” in A Call to Conscience:
The Landmark
Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Clayborne Carson and
Kris Shepard (New York: Warner Books, 2002), p. 159. This phrase also
appears in King’s last book, Where Do We Go From Here?.
4
Vincent Harding, Martin Luther King:
The Inconvenient Hero
(Orbis Books, 1996).
5
Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume One:
Theory of Practical Ensembles (new and corrected edition), translated by
Alan Sheridan-Smith, edited by Jonathan Rée [NY: Verso, 2004 (1991)],
p. 110.
6
See Iris Marion Young, “Five Faces of Oppression,” in Feminist
Theory: A Philosophical Anthology, edited by Ann E. Cudd and Robin O.
Andreasen (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), pp. 91-104.
7
Young, p. 96.
8
Young, pp. 96-98.
9
On Bhaskar’s distinction between “liberation” and “emancipation,”
see Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom (Cambridge, MA:
1991), pp. 75-76.
Blackwell,
10
10
See Alex Callinicos, “The Ideology of Humanitarian Intervention,”
in Masters of the Universe: NATO’s Balkan Crusade, edited by Tariq Ali
(NY: Verso, 2000), pp. 175-189.
11
Here I echo the poignant words spoken by the character Esperanza
(who is trying to calm her hot-headed husband and strike-leader Ramón)
in the remarkable 1954 film about the self-emancipation of both MexicanAmerican zinc miners and women: Salt of the Earth. See Michael Wilson’s
screenplay and Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt’s invaluable commentary in
Salt of the Earth (NY: The Feminist Press, 1978). Esperanza’s lines (“You
want to go down fighting, is that it? I don’t want to go down fighting. I
want to win.”) appear on p. 81.
12
For a similar approach, see Iris Marion Young, “Activist Challenges
to Deliberative Democracy,” Political Theory 29, #5, October 2001, pp.
670-690.
13
See Charles Payne, “Debating the Civil Rights Movement: The View
From the Trenches,” in Steve F. Lawson and Charles Payne, Debating the
Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1968, second edition (Lanham, MY:
Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006).
14
On Baker’s still largely unsung role in the Civil Rights movement,
see especially the following: Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom:
The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1995); and Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker
11
and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel
Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
15
Quoted in Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, p. 93.
Baker’s full interview can be found in Black Women in America:
A
Documentary History, edited by Gerda Lerner (New York: Vintage Books,
1972), pp. 345-52.
16
Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights, pp. 89-90.
17
“The Drum Major Instinct,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential
Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by James M. Washington (New
York: HarperCollins, 1986), pp. 259-67.
18
“The Drum Major Instinct,” p. 260.
19
pp. 260-61.
20
pp. 262-63.
21
pp. 265.
22
p. 267.