excerpt:
To understand others' violence, too, requires that we stop ignoring our own government's actions abroad that maintain systematic inequalities. To understand is not to justify. Without understanding, however, violence appears to spring from nowhere without cause -- and, if there is no cause, there is no solution other than that implemented by the Bush Administration. Repression of violence by greater violence is a cycle that serves only as an excuse to buttress the power of the already powerful.
King's remark, it should be clear, was not meant as a comment on the use of violence as a form of social protest abroad -- rather, he was speaking to issues at home. The year 1967 was one marked by a growth of militancy in the black community, the year of Newark and Detroit, of a radicalization of protests against racism as it became evident that the reforms which had been won were themselves insufficient to bring changes of needed depth. The years since saw the movement disrupted due in no small part to the greater amount of force the state had at its disposal to suppress dissent. The quotation above from King, however, has, if anything, gained in relevance, for it is the seeming absence of the possibility of meaningful change through collective action that has created hopelessness that expresses itself in street violence. Violence is part of a life lived in a hurry, to be enjoyed today without thought of tomorrow, for the future is too uncertain, too unsure, to be counted upon.
Moreover, the glorification of war, all but openly enshrined as the guiding principle behind our nation's foreign policy, has trickled down throughout society. Recognizing that brings us to the question so much discussed during the 2004 presidential election campaign at the level of platitudes -- the question of values, those personal ones by which we judge the behavior of ourselves and others around us, those social ones by which society judges itself.
Democracy is, in theory, premised on the presumed connection between the two: we each have equal rights and equal capacities for self-rule, and we are able to recognize and combine social with personal self-interest, thus making majority rule and individual freedom both possible. What limits democracy in practice today must be recognized: the reality of a capitalist society in which some profit from the labor of others and great concentrations of wealth (and therefore inequality of power) are inescapable. Otherwise, the danger exists -- a danger we are experiencing -- of democratic rule being reduced to a purely formal mechanism designed solely to confirm what already exists, divorced from people's everyday needs and concerns, and even fundamental issues such as war and peace. The struggle therefore is to make of democracy a system real enough that through it people discover the collective strength to control, to transform, the social conditions and economic structures under which they live. Participatory governance, the application of popular rule to the economy, is possible because the interests of us all and the ability of each to seek self-realization are mutually dependent, not exclusive. This is consistent with King's understanding of freedom as something creative, not as something to be bought by some at the expense of others, but as something to be made possible for everyone.
The ideal of participatory democracy stands in direct contrast to implicit or explicit equation of freedom with freedom of capital on the part of those who see rights in terms of the power some can wield over others. The struggles of the early 1960s were fought in these terms: would society uphold the right of some to discriminate against others or the right of all to be treated with dignity? Purely verbal, paper equality came no closer to making the latter a reality than do our formal democratic norms enable citizens to exercise meaningful control over how government acts. Needless to say, the same line of difference can be drawn in the contrast between democratic values and imperial arrogance in the war in Vietnam – and which today finds expression in the opposing sides in the war against Iraq.
Unfortunately, we live in an era made noticeable by limitations on freedom and democracy, the assault on traditional rights in the name of national security, prepared earlier by corporate power ever more entrenched in law and custom, with choice reduced to a passive decision between us and them ("reds," "terrorists," the "enemy"), between candidate A and candidate B, between one product for sale and another. In fact, what we can choose to buy is supposed to compensate for the paucity of choices in other spheres of life. Relentless commercialization invades every facet of being such that the marketplace becomes the purveyor of all values, a price tag set on everything. Personal and political relationships are both subordinated to the unending need to consume. These tendencies already existed while King was alive. The alternative he called for, even if seemingly more distant today than then, is more necessary than ever:
I am convinced that if we get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution in values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
The morality put forward by conservative policymakers and preachers is proclaimed as an abstract ideal standing outside people, enforced by external authority as a means to set limits on personal behavior. Or, more to the point, as behavior can't be fully legislated out of existence, the goal is to drive what is condemned out of sight. Social realities are ignored in the process, and a focus is instead placed on a cruel and hypocritical denial of sexuality -- thus the condemnation of abortion, gay marriage, the preaching of abstinence to the young in lieu of sex education -- all reflections of just how far from a "person-oriented" society we have become.
..snip..
A true revolution in values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called upon to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution in values will soon look at the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the sea and see individual capitalists of the west investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for social betterment of the countries and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the local gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution in values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This is not just." The business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. - - M.L.King
cont'd
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/stand230106.html
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