People Before Profit blog

Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 11:39:00 +0000

16 April 1963

My Dear Fellow Clergymen:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against "outsiders coming in." I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here. I am here because I have organizational ties here.

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their "thus saith the Lord" far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good faith negotiation.

Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham's economic community. In the course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants--for example, to remove the stores' humiliating racial signs. On the basis of these promises, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained. As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: "Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?" "Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?" We decided to schedule our direct action program for the Easter season, realizing that except for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic-withdrawal program would be the by product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed change.

Then it occurred to us that Birmingham's mayoral election was coming up in March, and we speedily decided to postpone action until after election day. When we discovered that the Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene "Bull" Connor, had piled up enough votes to be in the run off, we decided again to postpone action until the day after the run off so that the demonstrations could not be used to cloud the issues. Like many others, we waited to see Mr. Connor defeated, and to this end we endured postponement after postponement. Having aided in this community need, we felt that our direct action program could be delayed no longer.

You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: "Why didn't you give the new city administration time to act?" The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I it" relationship for an "I thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up that state's segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout Alabama all sorts of devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes constitute a majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law enacted under such circumstances be considered democratically structured?

Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.

I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country's antireligious laws.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn't this like condemning Jesus because his unique God consciousness and never ceasing devotion to God's will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber. I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self respect and a sense of "somebodiness" that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle-class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad's Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro's frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible "devil."

I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the "do nothingism" of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as "rabble rousers" and "outside agitators" those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies--a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides -and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: "Get rid of your discontent." Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist. But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God." And John Bunyan: "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience." And Abraham Lincoln: "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." And Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . ." So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary's hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime--the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need. Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action. I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers in the South have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still all too few in quantity, but they are big in quality. Some -such as Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, Harry Golden, James McBride Dabbs, Ann Braden and Sarah Patton Boyle--have written about our struggle in eloquent and prophetic terms. Others have marched with us down nameless streets of the South. They have languished in filthy, roach infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of policemen who view them as "dirty nigger-lovers." Unlike so many of their moderate brothers and sisters, they have recognized the urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful "action" antidotes to combat the disease of segregation. Let me take note of my other major disappointment. I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership. Of course, there are some notable exceptions. I am not unmindful of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue. I commend you, Reverend Stallings, for your Christian stand on this past Sunday, in welcoming Negroes to your worship service on a nonsegregated basis. I commend the Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Spring Hill College several years ago.

But despite these notable exceptions, I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say this as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen.

When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.

In spite of my shattered dreams, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: "Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother." In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: "Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern." And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South's beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: "What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Wallace gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?"

Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

There was a time when the church was very powerful--in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators."' But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were "a colony of heaven," called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent--and often even vocal--sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world. But again I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom. They have left their secure congregations and walked the streets of Albany, Georgia, with us. They have gone down the highways of the South on tortuous rides for freedom. Yes, they have gone to jail with us. Some have been dismissed from their churches, have lost the support of their bishops and fellow ministers. But they have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the gospel in these troubled times. They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment. I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation -and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands. Before closing I feel impelled to mention one other point in your statement that has troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping "order" and "preventing violence." I doubt that you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I doubt that you would so quickly commend the policemen if you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you were to watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys; if you were to observe them, as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I cannot join you in your praise of the Birmingham police department.

It is true that the police have exercised a degree of discipline in handling the demonstrators. In this sense they have conducted themselves rather "nonviolently" in public. But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. Perhaps Mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather nonviolent in public, as was Chief Pritchett in Albany, Georgia, but they have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end of racial injustice. As T. S. Eliot has said: "The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason."

I wish you had commended the Negro sit inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy two year old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: "My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest." They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience' sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Never before have I written so long a letter. I'm afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?

If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil-rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood, Martin Luther King, Jr.
Published in:
King, Martin Luther Jr.

The Mystery of Invisible Terrorists

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:27:00 +0000

BERLIN -- "Ten murders traced to neo-Nazi terrorists!" More and more ugly facts splashed through the German media, with echoes around the world. Politicians from the "respectable" parties expressed shock and surprise. In 2007 a German policewoman had been shot to death and her colleague badly wounded. The murder weapon was now found in a partly burned-out building in the East German town of Zwickau. Nearby lay the corpses of two men, probably suicides, both guilty of a recent bank robbery and mostly likely of killing the policewoman. Nine retail merchants, eight of Turkish, one of Greek background had also been murdered as far back as 2000, often with the same weapon.

The two men and a woman accomplice who has since given herself up to police belonged to a "National Socialist Underground" with a brutal Nazi program. Why did it take years to find the culprits? Another group member, arrested on November 12^th in Hannover, was arrested in 2006 for mailing phony explosives - and then freed. Why was there no checkup on him? Was the group responsible for 14 bank robberies all over Germany, at least as far back as 1998, for a bombing in Cologne in 2004, which wounded 22 people in an immigrant neighborhood, and perhaps for other acts of violence, sometimes fatal, against people with immigrant origins? While the list of mysteries grew, one question kept recurring: what took the police so long?

Some answers are breaking through the fog. It is no secret that the Nazi movement, both its legal component, the National Democratic Party (NPD) and its illegal thug element are riddled with secret agents of the "Constitution Protection Agency" ("VerfassungsschA¼tz"), the German FBI. Their number and because they themselves often wrote Nazi propaganda, even holding leadership positions, had stymied an attempt to outlaw the NPD in 2003. The court found that the indictment was partly based on texts written by the agents and stated that: "A governmental presence at the leadership level of a party renders its influence on decisions and activities inevitable." So it threw the case out. The winner was the NPD.

Those agents are still in there, preventing new attempts to ban the organization, at least without risk of exposing, or having to withdraw, the agents. The government would not know what the Nazis planned if they were removed, it was asserted, while a second mishap in the courts would give the Nazis a big new propaganda advantage. Remaining legal not only guarantees the NPD large sums of badly-needed government money for election purposes, gives it the chance to elect legislators (now in two states and three Berlin boroughs), but gives it police protection for weekly, threateningly reminiscent anti-foreigner marches all around Germany, which feature fearsome- looking gangs of the thugs they are closely connected with.

But now their murderous menace has dramatically come to light. A video film was found, using the jolly "pink panther" film and TV cartoon figure to boast of the crimes already committed and those to come. Once again: Did the Constitution Protectors, especially in Saxony and Thuringia, where these three had been hiding out, know nothing about them?

Now an upsetting new fact has come to light. At the murder of one of the young Turkish merchants in his shop in 2006 an agent of the "protectors" from the West German state of Hesse was present, holding a heavy object in a paper bag, quite probably a gun. He was found and arrested. But 24 hours later he was freed. Some believe they saw the same man at some of the other murder sites. Who was he, why was he hired - and paid - by the forces of law and order in Hesse?

New connections have also come to light about connections between the former chief of the Constitution Protectors in the state of Thuringia, an extremely right-wing historian, and a pro-Nazi who was paid as a secret agent while vice-president of one such fascist group.

Leading politicians, with worried voices and furrowed foreheads, are now demanding a "total investigation"! No stone must be left unturned. Coalition party leaders, always opposed to a ban on the NPD, now, in dramatic tones, call for a reevaluation of the question.

What hypocrisy! What would a true reevaluation reveal? Historical studies, known for decades but recently reinforced, supply countless facts on how former Nazis dominated police, secret police and intelligence- gathering institutions in the Federal Republic from the start. The police apparatus was built up by and with SS officers and Gestapo men with the bloodiest of hands. At least a thousand ex-Nazi judges and prosecutors dominated the courts, many of them guilty of death sentences against opponents of fascism. The same held true of the military general staff, the diplomatic corps and the political scene. It has recently been disclosed that until 1966, in Hesse, a quarter to a third of Christian Democratic deputies and 60 to 70 percent of their Free Democratic partners had been in the Nazi Party, some in high positions. In charge of personnel questions nationally was Adenauer buddy Hans Globke, in great measure responsible for the criminalization and easy identification of German Jews.

Worst of all was the espionage apparatus directed against the Soviet bloc. Nazi spy General Reinhard Gehlen, first used by US intelligence after 1945 to build up its secret network, was then switched to the new West German government. A study by historian Martin A. Lee described how "Gehlen proceeded to enlist thousands of Gestapo, Wehrmacht, and SS veterans. Even the vilest of the vile - the senior bureaucrats who ran the central administrative apparatus of the Holocaust - were welcome in the 'Gehlen Org,' as it was called, including Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann's chief deputy. SS major Emil Augsburg and Gestapo captain Klaus Barbie, otherwise known as the "Butcher of Lyon," were among those who did double duty for Gehlen and U.S. intelligence (San Francisco Bay Guardian, May 7, 2001). Lee also quoted the Frankfurter Rundschau: "It seems that in the Gehlen headquarters one SS man paved the way for the next and Himmler's elite were having happy reunion ceremonies".

Nearly all these men have died. But their disciples remained, and so did their inclinations. The Gehlen gang and their friends in top army and government offices used the Cold War to justify their return to strong positions. In the twenty-one years since Germany was unified the main device has been a constant stress on the "totalitarianism" theory: one nasty dictatorship in Germany was replaced, in the East, by another one, equally bad or, to judge by the amount of propaganda, really far worse. The constant attacks on the system in the GDR and anyone who can be linked with it as being as bad or worse than Nazis, and a similar denunciation of "both right-wing and left-wing terrorism", again stressing the latter, have permitted most politicians and Constitution Protectors to concentrate on attacking those on the left.

This reflects fears that uncertain economic conditions, like a recession or worse, might cause Germans, especially in the East, to reflect that despite the bad features in the old German Democratic Republic, the limits on travel, far fewer high-quality consumer goods and the other pressures and defects, there were good features as well, like job security, women's rights, no financial burdens with child care, medical care or education. Maybe socialism?

Faced by fears of any such reflection (and possible growth of The Left), some leaders felt that Nazis, though not pleasant folk, are good to have around as a preferable, perhaps useful means of channeling dissatisfaction if things get rough. This was the same philosophy which led their grandfathers in politics and the economy to support Hitler.

Is such a stand really possible in today's Germany? Luckily, neither the NPD nor other openly racist (usually anti-Muslim) parties win nearly as many votes as similar parties in many other countries - most dangerously in Hungary, Austria and possibly even France. And while there is always potential support among racists, nationalists and economically hopeless groups, wherever Nazis demonstrate there is almost always a rally of anti-fascists to stop and usually to outnumber them. "No Nazis in Our Town" is a simple but common statement. But while there are still many good exceptions, all too frequently it is the city governments or the courts which not only protect the Nazis but also harass and often arrest their opponents.

Last February, like every year, the Nazis wanted to misuse for their own purposes ceremonies in Dresden mourning those killed in the air raid of February 1945, largely to counterbalance recollections of the holocaust. 18,000 anti-fascists gathered to prevent their march and their rally for the second year in a row and, with no violence, sent them home in helpless rage. But after most Nazis and anti-Nazis had left the city one group of "anti-fascist" youngsters, their faces covered and almost certainly led by provocateurs, as on past occasions -skirmished with the police. This is always meat for the mass media; it has been tried recently against Occupy groups. During the day thousands of cell-phones were hacked by the police. At night the skirmish was used to justify a brutal, fully illegal raid on The Left headquarters and to remove the legal immunity as legislators of the leaders of The Left in Saxony, Dresden's state, and neighboring Thuringia. They are to be brought to court for sponsoring "illegal blockades". Voting against them were the Christian Democrats, Free Democrats and neo- Nazi National Democratic Party, the NPD. Once again it was: "When in doubt support the far right."

Until last week the media was full of angry articles about "right-wing terrorism and left-wing terrorism", with Angela Merkel joining the chorus. As ever, it was hinted, both were much the same but the latter were possibly worse, as proved by the burning of luxury cars in Berlin, presumably by "left-wing terrorists"? Even when an unemployed, very distressed young man with no political ties was caught in the act the chorus hardly let up. Now, with increasingly frightening details about genuine right-wing terror, strong indications that government spies were involved and the mysterious failure of Constitution Protectors to find the culprits in fifteen long years, they may decide to be just a little quieter, at least for a while. Protectors to find the culprits in fifteen long years, they may decide to be just a little quieter, at least for a while.

Frederick Engels on Dühringian vs. Marxian Socialism: Production

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 12:25:00 +0000

In the antepenultimate chapter of his book Anti-Dühring Engels explains the differences between the "socialism" espoused by Professor Eugen Dühring and the socialism of Karl Marx and himself. Dühring thinks the ideas of Marx are "bastards of historical and logical fantasy" and he seeks to replace them with his own views which are, naturally, the true historical and logical ideas which socialists should adopt.[Anti-Dühring Part III Chapter III "Production"]

Engels will compare his and Marx's "bastard" progeny with the "legitimate" progeny of Herr Dühring with respect to economic production in this chapter. Dühring rejects any notion of the capitalist production system which claims that economic crises are due to the very nature of the structure of capitalism itself. That is a Marxian fantasy.

For Dühring, Engels says, "crises are only occasional deviations from 'normalcy' and at most only serve to promote 'the development of a more regulated order.'" The Marxists maintain, au contraire, that crises are caused by over-production and this is a structural fault within the capitalist system itself. But Dühring rejects this and writes that the real reason for crises is, in his words,"the lagging behind of popular consumption ... artificially produced under-consumption ... with the natural growth of the NEEDS OF THE PEOPLE (!), which ultimately make the gulf between supply and demand so critically wide."

To this Engels replies that the masses have been forced to under-consume throughout history and in every economic system based on class exploitation, therefore under-consumption is not some artificially produced phenomenon but something all class societies share-- i.e., that the exploited class never has the value of its yearly production returned to it at the end of the year. The crises of industrial capitalism, however, only date from the the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

Thus, Engels concludes, it is under capitalism that periodic economic crises come into the world and while under-consumption of the masses is a PREREQUISITE it is not the CAUSE of crises. And knowing this, he says, "tells us just as little why crises exist today as why they did not exist before."

Dühring, in fact, does not think mass markets are all that important anyway. He himself says that capitalist production happens to "depend for its market mainly on THE CIRCLES OF THE POSSESSING CLASSES THEMSELVES." His confusion becomes only more apparent when he follows up on this by claiming that the most important industries (this is the 1870s remember) are cotton and iron production. But, Engels points out, the production of these two is entirely dependent on a mass market and the possessing class make up only an "infinitesimally small degree" of its market.

Engels then points out that capitalism, by it very need to grow and expand, brings about crises. He says, for example, in England there is just one small town (Oldham) that from 1872 to 1875 doubled its production of spun cotton [the number of its spindles went from 2.5 to 5 million] and this is just one of a dozen small towns around Manchester. Oldham, by the way, produced as much spun cotton as ALL of Germany (including Alsace). This was happening in towns all over Great Britain.

It thus shows "deep-rooted effrontery" on the part of Herr Dühring to blame the English masses for under-consumption rather than the capitalists for over-production when it comes to "the present complete stagnation in the yarn and cloth markets." [Engels is referring to an economic crises of the 1870s.]

Engels ends his critique of Herr Dühring's views on crises but gives a few quotes that demonstrate that Dühring has no idea about capitalism as an economic system but sees everything in terms of the behavior of individuals. If over-speculation and the unplanned building of private factories are responsible for crises we must see that as simply "the ordinary interplay of overstrain and relaxation" of the system and look closely at "the rashness of individual entrepreneurs and the lack of private circumspection" as one of the causes.

The only "rashness" here, Engels maintains, is the habit of turning the facts of economics into "moral reprobation." This is a problem of our times as well, not just the time of Engels. How often do we hear talk about our current crisis as a product of "greed" on the part of Wall Street bankers and that they should pay their "fair share" of taxes and such rubbish as if the decay of capitalism is a moral disorder on the part of the ruling class instead of a structural disorder that requires the replacement of the system rather than remedial Sunday school classes for the capitalists.

But all this has been treated of in the previous chapter of Anti-Dühring and Engels wants to move on (Cf. "Frederick Engels on the Theoretical Development of Modern Capitalism" in the November 2011 Political Affairs). Engels will now turn his attention to Dühring's new system of viewing socialism which is called "the natural system of society."

Dühring bases his system of socialism on what he calls the "universal principle of justice" which applies everywhere and is independent of historical and economic facts. This is enough to disqualify it as idealistic nonsense but Engels wants to philosophically pepper spay Dühring for having the gall to attack Marx for being unclear and fuzzy as to what type of socialism he believes in. It appears that the demands made in the name of the workers in the Communist Manifesto are "erroneous half measures" far inferior to Dühring's ideas which represent "a comprehensive schematism of great import in human history."

Marx, according to Dühring, thinks of socialism as "nothing more than the corporative ownership by groups of workers ... an ownership that is both individual and social." Engels is upset because this is far from anything Marx has suggested and in truth actually applies to the system that Dühring has concocted.

Dühring advocates a federation of independent economic communes which compete with one another and which have absolute freedom of movement from one commune to another. In this crazy system the wealthy successful communes will out compete the poorly run communes which will become defunct as the people will all end up moving to the well run ones.

Production within the communes stays the same as production in the past--i.e., the communes are still capitalist in nature even though controlled by the workers. So the greatly touted natural system of justice and the new socialism amounts to the fact, Engels says, that "the commune takes the place of the capitalists."

What are Dühring's views on the most basic form of all hitherto existing methods of production-- i.e., the division of labor? With respect to the primary division, that between TOWN and COUNTRY (or industry and agriculture) he has little to say beyond some common place remarks about its "inevitable" nature and the possibility of overcoming it in the future. Thin gruel from Engels' point of view.

When it comes to the modern division of labor in trade and industry Dühring is very vague and only says that we have an "erroneous division of labor" and that all will be remedied in the future "as soon as account is taken of the various natural conditions and personal capabilities [of the workers]." Engels doesn't say so, but Dühring's views here are suspiciously similar to those of Plato in the Republic and very far from the socialist analysis of Marx to which Engels now turns.

Marx tells us that in all societies where production springs up "spontaneously" (including capitalism) we discover the means of production dominate the people not the other way around. The first great division of labour saw the development of towns and cities surrounded by peasant agriculturalists. This division has doomed rural people for thousands of years, Marx says, to "mental torpidity" and enslaved the town dwellers to their own specialized trade. This "stunting" of humanity increases with the increase of the division of labor.

Under capitalism the workers become tied to their machines and to one specific function and one tool. Capitalism, Marx says in Das Kapital "converts the laborer into a crippled monstrosity. by forcing his detail dexterity at the expense of a world of productive capabilities and instincts.... The individual himself is made the automatic motor of a fractional operation." How much this has been alleviated by the modern day union movement varies from country to country and in proportion to the percentage of workers who are unionized. The large number of working people in the US for example, that vote Republican shows that "mental torpidity" is not confined to the rural populations of Texas, Iowa or Alaska (to name a few).

It is not just the workers who suffer under the present day division of labor but also, Engels says, the "empty-minded bourgeois" chasing after profits (Donald Trump comes to mind), the lawyers dominated by "fossilized legal conceptions" and so-called "educated classes" of society plagued by "local narrow-mindedness" and "mental short-sightedness"-- just think of the tribe of Sunday morning news pundits paraded before the public by all the major TV networks, or the platoons of professors giving advice about everything under the sun and hardly agreeing on anything other than that capitalism is still the best of all possible economic formations.

But how are we to overcome this division of labor and the consequent alienation of humanity from its potentials and possibilities? One way only says Engels: "in making itself the master of all the means of production to use them in accordance with a social plan, society puts an end to the former subjection of men to their own means of production." In other words, socialism based on central planning and most importantly-- a feature historically absent in 20th century socialist societies due to their premature appearance in economically backward conditions-- planning democratically controlled and carried out by the working people themselves. The former alienating division of labor will be done away with as "society cannot free itself unless every individual is freed."

Engels says that this is not just a "fantasy" or a "pious wish." He maintains that the state of industrial development in the 1870s is so advanced that society could "reduce the time required for labour to a point which measured by our present conceptions, will be small indeed." This figure needs to be actually quantified-- but the point is all the goodies needed to live and thrive could be created with people just working a few hours a week and with no one being chained to any one boring and unsatisfying job. The growth in productivity since Engels' day must make this even more true today.

Engels quotes Das Kapital: "The employment of machinery does away with the necessity of crystallizing this distribution [of labor-tr] after the manner of Manufacture, by the constant annexation of a particular man to a particular function. Since the motion of the whole system does not proceed from the workman, but from the machinery, a change of persons can take place at any time without an interruption of the work...."

Modern capitalism with its constant crises and dislocations of industrial centers and working people and financial catastrophes makes, Marx says, it necessary that we posit as a "fundamental law of production, variation of work" so that modern workers have to be ready to change jobs and learn new skills or leave the labor market. This disrupts lives and threatens widespread social disorder. Only socialist planning and a system that puts people before profits can prevent society from self destructing under the contradictions generated by the present capitalist world market which, in the name of profits first and people last, fragments both human individuals and their social relations with others which inevitably results from the private appropriation of socially created wealth.

Engels also says that the abolition of capitalism and the development "one single vast plan" which harmoniously "dovetails" industry and the means of production so that the differences between town and country are overcome is a prerequisite to overcoming environmental degradation and "present poisoning the air water and land." To this must be added the current disaster of human induced global warming which simply cannot be dealt with as long as capitalism remains the dominant economic system. This problem was not seen in Engels' day and now, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence of impending doom, the various capitalist powers are unwilling to take the drastic regulatory measures needed to deal with the problem.

Engels maintains that none of these claims he is making is "utopian" but that they are logical conclusions of scientific central planning and the abolition of the difference between town and country. It looks as if the towns, or rather the great cities (such as New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, etc., etc., will have be abolished as well! Engels says that it "is true that in the huge towns civilization has bequeathed us a heritage which it will take much time and trouble to get rid of." But, "the great towns will perish."

No, this is not Pol Pot, it is Frederick Engels and he is saying this because he envisions a complete redistribution of the population under socialism in order to get the "most equal distribution possible of modern industry." So the abolition of the separation of town and country means the abolition of the cities. They must and will be eliminated "however protracted a process it may be." This might just be a little too "utopian" and perhaps with the progress of science and communications since the 1870s, especially the growth of the internet, the contradictions between town and country can be resolved without offing the Big Apple.

In any event, leaving the abolition of cities aside, the point Engels wants to make is that Dühring's view of socialism leaves out of account that building socialism will necessitate "revolutionizing from top to bottom the old method of production and first of all putting an end to the old division of labour." Dühring thinks that the state can just take over production as is and harmonize it to people's "natural appetites and personal capabilities." He also thinks the division between town and country is natural and inevitable and has no plan for putting an end to the alienation and crippling of human capabilities that result from this division.

So much for Engels' critique of Dühringian socialism's handling of production. In the penultimate chapter of Anti-Dühring Engels will discuss the problems of distribution.

Lenin and Democracy in America

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:17:00 +0000

Socialist Principles and Their Emergence Under Capitalism

If I may speak for the US Left for a moment -- I believe we are agreed that we are for a socialist society. The signature distinction between socialist and capitalist ideologies is pretty simple: socialists, at least since Karl Marx, call for the abolition of private property in the means of production as the fundamental economic feature required to sustain a just and prosperous society organized on the principle "from each according to his ability to each according to his or her work". *

Neither Marx nor history has provided a concise answer as to how fast, slow, sudden or drawn out the abolition of property is realized. Further, history provides no clear answer as to how long commodity production whose products are appropriated privately and sustain the institutions of private property against diverse socialization pressures will persist. As long as they do persist so will the divisions and re-divisions of labor and capital persist. If you try to abolish them before their time of departure is at hand-- they will only re-emerge in a different, often worse, form.

Based on 20th Century experience, the battles and transitions between public and private property, and between public and private institutions, have taken and will take many forms. Nonetheless, the advance of the public sector, and socialization, is evident in nearly all dimensions of economic life. Its expansion has been both universal -- in every nation -- and profound in its effects, as production and exchange of both commodities and public goods become ever more social and interdependent in character. Follow the scientific, intellectual, engineering, materials, services, financial, production and labor supply train that put your iPad in your hands, and permit you to access the virtually infinite resources and information to which it can connect, and you have grasped part of the universe of social production. Now picture the public infrastructure -- schools, transportation, regulation, security, publicly funded R & D, licensing, etc, etc -- and that universe expands by another order of magnitude. Not to diminish the innovative work of Apple -- but the logo, patent and copyrights should really read: Apple, inc, and the peoples of the United States and 14 other nations.

The ideal expressed in the principle above is democratic in its essence. Increased public wealth is impossible with out the advance of culture, science and art among all who labor, and such advance is impossible without both political and economic empowerment. From each according to his or her ability, to each according to their work -- I have never met a worker who disputed the truth or value of this fundamental goal. However, while the principle reflects the socialist vision of equity and economic justice, it also reflects a vision rooted in the world of commodity production. Commodities are traded in markets because they are scarce and of necessity require a method of dividing and distributing them according to a standard. That standard is ultimately labor -- the cost of production, and the distribution of rewards is preserved by property. You buy the hammer -- its yours. Its price reflects its cost, including capital costs, and allocation by supply and demand -- all of which have finite limits.. If you cannot own it, you will not likely buy it.

The principle above also implies the need to invest in the abilities of the people as a foundation of growth no less important than markets: the more investment in the more people, the more potential for creaativity, innovation and growth. It also implies a distribution of wealth in proportion to labor productivity as long as there is a division of labor. Accompanying the division of labor is a division of the products of production in the form of property. China's mixed socialist/capitalist economy is an official exception to this, as it does not have, as yet, a private property law. However it has devised some unique aliases for private property -- because commodity production cannot really develop without it.

Relying on bureaucratic and command methods of allocating commodities is too inefficient and corruption-prone to be sustainable. The rise from a primitive agricultural society to a post-industrial, services based one, requires the coercive divisions and redivisions of labor and production relations for which markets, capitalism and the demand for ever greater efficiency are famous. The development of commodity production rapidly expands broader non-agricultural working and middle classes of both producers and consumers, and thus compels the abandonment of primitive agriculture in favor of large scale, scientific and mechanized farming. This is a revolutionary feature of capitalism. In the US, it contributed to the destruction of both the slave system and the yeoman farmer class which was at the heart of the Jeffersonian vision of enlightenment republicanism.

Marx, in distinction from many socialists, also foresaw that science and technology could ultimately allow the "springs of common wealth to abundantly flow", making most commodities so cheap as to be universally available -- like rights. In other words, like public goods: goods with a negligible per person cost; or, goods so necessary to all participants in the economy -- roads, lighthouses for example -- that they must be provided to all for other more valuable work to be possible. Such a condition would obviate in proportion to its advance the need for a division of labor in the market sense, and serve as the foundation for what he described as communist society, a society based on the principle: "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" -- a society in which labor is elevated from a coercive and alienated condition to life's prime want: living to work instead of working to live.

For Marx, however, these principles emerge not primarily from their moral power as a subjective social ideal, but from objective contradictions of capitalist society between labor and capital, and in all societies between man and the conditions of the natural world. Because of his commitment to materialism -- the study of the real, not the ideal -- he actually wrote very little on the subject of either socialism or communism, focusing instead on capitalism and the logic of its observable contradictions and development. The division between capital and labor he held as an necessary feature of commodity production and its private appropriation. However private appropriation is at war with the principles of equity. This contradiction is reproduced in new forms in the successive divisions of labor -- both mental and physical -- that the development of production relations and technology (the means of production for Marx) demand. But it also generates endless turmoil and instability in the political and social institutions that arise and fall on the changing economic foundations of production --- which leads to the central role of democracy in the class struggle. If there must be turmoil and change, then its rewards should lift ALL, not just a few at the expense of the many.

The Battle for Socialism is the battle for Democracy

In practice, in the history of the United States, almost all resistance to capitalism arises indirectly from excessive inequality and instability. A more democratic society is the political expression that describes the programs the working class as a whole and the political left have pursued throughout our history to redress grievances. Further, the expansion of democracy is inseparably associated with establishing as rights those services, working conditions, or goods that formerly were scarce or rare. The development and expansion of democracy in this sense is typically at odds with the domain of private capital, although there is division due to the fact that new entitlements and rights also create a platform where new products and services become marketable.

The abolition of slavery, the extension of suffrage without property requirement, the 8 hour day, universal suffrage for African Americans and women, progressive taxation, safe workplaces, anti-trust legislation, unemployment insurance, public education, the right to organize unions, social security, occupational safety and health legislation, civil rights against racial, gender, disability and nationality discrimination are historic examples of the rise of entitlement and rights. Today the battles to establish health care as a human right, for the government to serve as an employer of last resort in recessions/depressions, for a 'greener' and more democratic industrial policy than the existing one (defense) to give more public and scientific direction to sustainable economic and environmental development --- these are all democratic struggles to further extend entitlement, and whose success depends upon the expansion of the public sector to redistribute wealth in numerous ways, and the expansion of public goods available to all.

Once something is identified as a right -- it must be accorded to citizens universally. Markets cannot provide anything universally. Markets function well in the domain of commodities -- goods produced solely for exchange that have a price. They allocate scarce (i.e. inherently NOT universal) resources. The objective connection between democracy and socialism is thus not a simple matter of winning a "good" idea over a "bad" idea. It is not a morality play. Complexity arises because its original ideals were authored by revolutionary capitalists and their ideologists in their struggle against monarchy and autocracy. The Declaration of Independence and the US constitution are primary documents in that revolution. To establish democratic republics, monarchies had to be overthrown in most cases.The great majority of working people were overwhelmingly farmers, or hired farm labor who aspired to be independent farmers, or slaves. To overthrow the monarchy this majority had to be won to the project, participate directly or indirectly in armed insurrection. They had to be guaranteed political rights as part of the bargain. Thus the ideals of the enlightenment and republicanism could actually, not just in theory, be founded on the sovereignty of the people, not on the divine right of Kings, over all institutions only by bringing the whole people consciously and willingly into the process.

Each wave of struggle that has lifted up the people has been powered by, and subsequently powers anew, radical changes and shifts in the configuration and contradictions of class forces and interests that find a new equilibrium only to be transformed again by technological change and further class struggles. Today less than 3% of US workforce work in agriculture, compared to 90% in 1776. The rest labor for wages and salaries -- and for many some division of capital as well -- in manufacturing and services. The last relative equilibrium achieved after the New Deal and WWII lasted about 30 years. The financialization boom that began in the mid-1970's has now eroded many of the economic gains that democratic struggles of previous eras achieved as the giant corporations decided they required a massive re-accumulation of capital -- and the political freedom in which to do so -- in order to reproduce their positions. It has led to the latest, and perhaps the most degraded, cycle -- a new worldwide depression -- in the evolution of US capitalism, which is now a global system embracing millions of workers and communities beyond our national borders.

Inequality by any measure has steadily increased throughout this era, as has political instability and polarization. The depression beginning in 2008 and its corrosive effects continues unabated across most of the world. It shows few signs of self-correction, and some of falling even deeper into stagnation. Anti-democratic forces have risen sharply to block pressure democratic institutions to maintain and improve a fair division of wealth. The effect has been to nullify those institutions from taking corrective action: Congress, financial regulatory bodies, labor rights, the EPA, the Department of Education, state and local governments, progressive taxation and many other domains of social life have lost effectiveness, despite a president generally favorable to this pressure.

So great are the pressures and tensions generated by rising inequality in this depression that it is impossible not to ask if the current relations of class power can be sustained at all. We have had to ask this question before in our history: In the beginning -- can we live as a nation under the divine right of a King and his nobles? The answer was no. Divine right, nobility, and their entitlements were abolished. Can we live with chattel slavery? The answer was no. Both slave holder and enslaved social classes, and the political and social institutions that arose on them, were abolished, at the cost of 600,000 lives. Can we live with the dictatorial rule of one section of capital? Both WWI and WWII, taking a total of 80 million lives, were wars against this danger. The answer was each time no. Each time a wave of reforms and/or revolutionary change, both nationally and globally, arose to restrain the danger, although final judgement on the rule of capital was delayed. The rise of socialist, social-democratic and revolutionary-democratic, anti-imperial and anti-colonial, movements across the world, including the upheavals under both Roosevelt eras in the US made dramatic advances against the abuses of the rule of the giant corporate players and their political machines.

New and renewed abuses of corporate power now threaten equity, stability, security, progress and peace. We again have to answer fundamental questions about the class configuration of society. We will have to find a new equilibrium. We will have to address revolutionary change in the prerogatives of monopoly power and devise new strategies of economic and political organization to move forward toward a better life than the one we inherited. We will have to build new protections: against the poisoning and corruption our democratic institutions with fascist-like threats, against the promise of our revolutionary heritage of equality of opportunity for all and the public commitments that entails; against resistance to the necessary steps toward environmental and energy sustainability; against the transition to seek diplomatic and cooperative over military solutions to the many dimensions and challenges of globalization and peace.

This is a revolutionary democratic challenge --- and a task in which the rise of working people to greater self-consciousness and self-organization are indispensable. The defeat of the ultra right and the division of monopoly forces along side the rise of working people are the chief tactics of this era and both are a precondition for escape from this terrible crisis and movement forward.

Which brings us to V. I. Lenin.

Writing about V.I. Lenin in the United States always runs the risk of erecting a formidable wall with American readers. "Wasn't he proven wrong when the USSR imploded? A discredited dictator? What value could one possibly learn from the founder of the Soviet state relevant to the challenges of American democracy?" I have heard reasonable and progressive folks ask all these questions and more -- and that does not include the incurious dismissal Lenin gets from most elite media sources...

Here is the short answer: when the existing social relations and major institutions of wealth and power are widely held to be failing and unsustainable, the struggles to defend or advance the empowerment of working people tend to assume a revolutionary edge. As existing institutions are nullified or unresponsive, the idea that "we are our own protection" takes hold. The paralysis in Congress, the spontaneous occupy movements, the rebellions led by labor in Ohio and Wisconsin are recent examples of this developing edge. Especially where reaction employs repressive tactics, where the currents of change become swifter, where raw class forces contend and reveal themselves more directly, where political and social institutions must realign themselves -- sometimes sharply, to accommodate new modes of production and new divisions class relationshipe ---- In such times consulting a writer who assesses all questions from a single-minded class perspective adds a very useful methodological tool -- and tonic -- to one's understanding of politics and ideology.

Now, by "class perspective" I mean a focus on fundamental economic interests that a particular historical division of labor and capital impose on political culture as a means of anchoring political and ideological analysis. A person's class interest (or interests -- they can have more than one) are defined by the what they must do in society to obtain, preserve and advance their means of life: work, profession, interest or capital all have their own logic of necessity that underpins and drives association, politics, and ideology.

Reading Lenin for the first time is much like a first reading of Charles A Beard's Economic Interpretation of the US Constitution. With respect to understanding the constitution, for example, I had always been told, and read, that great men, or the great ideas of the Enlightenment, like "government should be founded on the consent of the governed", were the deciding factors in early American history.
The role of men -- and women -- and ideas cannot be denied and yet, before one reads Beard, the great and wise seem to walk with their feet planted in mid-air. After Beard, they are flesh and blood, representing diverse constituencies, occupations, and forms of wealth and commerce in the early republic. Some critics will scream "determinism! determinism" -- not true. Thinking through the words and deeds of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Paine and Hamilton after knowing their direct material interests for or against a union stronger than the Articles of Confederation does not make them less heroic. Nor does it diminish the liberating power of the ideas of the enlightenment. Instead, a large common ideological ground of interests and ideas is established across the centuries that adds great explanatory force to the narratives of the founders, narratives with which we can better connect and converse -- both directly and by analogy.

Class analysis does not -- and should not pretend -- to explain everything. But it has the great virtue of quickly and efficiently sorting political and ideological positions into interests. For example, Lenin's class analysis of society in 1905 Russia decomposes the country's interests and parties into components that can by degree and kind be usefully compared to 1860 United States without engaging in fantasy or idealist notions. Large scale industry and their proletarian workforces were expanding in both Russia and the US. Millions of "peasants" existed in enslaved or semi-enslaved conditions in both countries. Farmers -- middle peasants in Russia, yeomen in the US -- strained against the boundaries of slavery and/or feudal relations. There are big differences too -- the concentration of industry and labor was much advanced in 1905 St Petersburg and Moscow over 1860 US -- and sustained a genuine social-democratic labor party. In addition class lines were a much more powerful, entitled and direct force in Russia and hardened all political parties and polemics against any compromising spirit. There was no Russian parliament in which such spirit could take root, and repressions against democrats were pervasive and cruel.

Capitalist forces in the US were much more confident, independent and thoroughly disabused by the failed history of relations with the South since the "half-slave,half-free" "Great Compromises" of 1820 and afterwards. Land and society were far less entangled with monarchy and treaty. The worker-farmer classes had opposite interests to the expansion of slavery. In the US the industrial capitalist forces supported and helped lead the armed suppression of the Confederate rebellion against freedom. By contrast, in Russia similar forces tried to cut a deal with the Tsar. The "deal" with the Tsar led to the ruin of the country through secret alliances, debts and and corruption that ended in the catastrophe of World War I. But in both nations the pre-eminent challenge was to advance democracy, and to empower the working class as a key force in liberation.

Lenin's approach is from the standpoint of the working class whose objectives are clear:

"1) the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy; (2) its replacement by the democratic republic,[including provisional government to disarm the Tsar and actually constitute a Constituent Assembly based on universal suffrage and freedom of political association]; (3) the sovereignty of the people, safeguarded by a democratic constitution, i.e., the concentration of supreme governmental authority entirely in the hands of a legislative assembly composed of representatives of the people and forming a single chamber."

The responses of the capitalist parties in Russia to this was to support a "Constituent Assembly", but one that failed to "constitute" any authority over the Tsar. instead it focused on creating an "upper house" primarily designed to protect "minority" rights -- which turned out to be merely a tool through which wealthy forces could bargain with the monarchy. To which Lenin replies:

"Can there be any doubt that every consistent democrat is obligated to accept all these [democratic] slogans? .... But the main contradiction, the contradiction between the desire of the bourgeoisie to preserve private property at all costs and its desire for liberty, is so profound that spokesmen or followers of the liberal bourgeoisie inevitably find themselves in this ridiculous position."

I can easily rewrite the first 2 points of the above program and principals as lessons learned from the US Civil War, which Lenin and many others around the world studied carefully:

The ability of the emerging capitalists and slaveholders to form an alliance with working and middle classes in the American Revolution, and throw off the monarchy by force, set the stage for the success of the Union agenda and its requirements in the Civil War (which were learned in the progress of the war): 1) the complete overthrow of the Confederate 'autocracy' and the destruction of its army; 2) the establishment of universal suffrage in a thoroughly democratic republic throughout the South (Reconstruction).

The third item in Lenin's list is interesting to think about. The protection of "minority" rights was a very important item in the American constitutional convention, as Beard thoroughly documents. Who was the minority? It was the rich: both merchants and slaveholders --- who created the complex balance of two chambers of Congress, an independent Judiciary and, as an inevitable result of the collision of these institutions, a powerful executive to protect themselves from "the mob". That would be you and me, reader. This had some important consequences:

1) it prolonged the time in which the South could expand slavery into new territories -- and thus its geographic and Senatorial strength. It had lost its ability to nullify in the House as early as the late 1840's.

2) it compelled anti-slavery forces to essentially destroy the Whig party and reform itself into a consistent anti-slavery, and ultimately revolutionary Republican party -- again, revolutionary in the sense that it forces a major class realignment in the country;

3) it prolonged and in fact nullified democratic Reconstruction in the years following the Civil war;

4) it accelerated the post-war increasing domination of corporations and industrialists including their seizure of control of the Republican party, the Senate, and the presidency.

Given the current policy of popular and democratic nullification by monopoly corporate forces in the US Senate, Lenin's unicameral reform is a constitutional change very much worth considering as this crisis intensifies, although we are not at the point where constitutional change is yet practical. His conclusions about the ridiculous position of capitalist forces tying themselves to the Tsarist autocracy in Russia instead of joining the working and middle classes and peasants was prophetic indeed. The failure to overthrow and abolish the Tsar completely fatally compromised the Russian 1905 revolution and created instead powerless legislative bodies -- the Duma -- that followed. No reconstruction or reform of any kind persisted. In fact reaction attempted to crush resistance with brutal violence, none of which could save Russia from the catastrophe which failure to restructure its society brought upon it. When the regime finally collapsed in the midst of WWI, nothing of value -- no legislature, no constitution, no courts, vast illiteracy, no legal party, no local or regional infrastructure, virtually no part of the former pre-war economy -- could be salvaged. The entire state failed; armed enemies on every side were prepared to savage the nation like wolves. The Bolshevik party was the only coherent political force. It finally led the overthrow of the Tsar -- but had to build a new society under the harshest conditions imaginable.

So what are the chief lessons of value from Lenin's advocacy in 1905, and his conclusions from study of the US Civil War, for workers facing a profound crisis in American democracy? Half-measures, fatal compromises that leave the main obstacles to progress in power, only lead to a greater debacle, a bigger catastrophe, a more difficult struggle, and a MORE uncertain future.

● We can wait on real financial reform and fail to take public control of the "too big to fail" parts of the financial system. But if we do -- the problem will return on an even bigger scale. In fact it is highly unlikely the current configuration of government so strongly influenced by corporate corruption can fix the current depression at all.

● We can wait on seriously addressing the many fronts of increasing inequality -- taxation, housing, health care, education, poverty, hunger, labor rights, retirement, persistent racial and national discrimination, gender barriers, criminalization of poor people, immigrant rights, LGBT discrimination But if we do -- social chaos will most certainly grow--and repression and fascist like measure by reaction will increase, and more and more institutions of our democracy will be nullified and useless; soldiers WILL be in the streets.

● We can wait until waves of doom wake us up to the need to take control of national energy policy and directly address the human-created components leading to climate change. But if we do, more and more cities and states will become disaster areas and "emergency executive orders and detentions", and the military -- not democracy -- will occupy our own land. The military is great at winning wars -- but a failure at governing and occupying.

● We can be satisfied with well-intentioned words and speeches about the above reforms and assume that WE -- the working people of this great nation -- who are busy with all the tasks of survival and have so little time for politics -- will NOT be called to the arduous labor of self-organization, self-consciousness of our own interests, and self-responsibility for fate of US democracy, and for the future we will bequeath to generations. President Obama has demonstrated he is open to being moved by the broad democratic masses. He has made stirring speeches that in most cases point in the right direction. But he will not be successful, nor will ANY leader, unless the working class stands for itself and does so on behalf of the entire people. We are our own protection in revolutionary times. You have to join the union on your own -- the old labor song says. No one can do it for you. And we must walk the valleys, to get to the mountain.

There are barriers any reader that dives seriously into the study of Lenin's work a hundred years or more after it was written must cross. The parallels between 1905, the Civil War and today are not far-fetched, or difficult to draw, and learn from. But on many questions circumstances and conditions have substantially changed since he was writing -- and more serious research into the history of the European and working class movements before the world wars is necessary to avoid misunderstanding or, worse, dogmatic affectations of "Leninism". Lenin made several efforts in later years to discourage dogmatic and infantile interpretations of the Russian revolution and his own works -- but after his death dogma replaced understanding in not a few quarters. Nonetheless, the careful and thoughtful student will find a treasure of intellectual and political rewards as long as he or she 1) takes the time understand the historical context of the material at hand; and 2) takes into account the all important issue of social and economic class which thematically unites all of Lenin's work. That done, readers may find many ideas and propositions with which they may agree and/or disagree, as I do -- but I promise -- your thinking about politics will be changed forever. For an introduction to Lenin's thinking on the democratic revolution in some depth, I recommend Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution.

* a paraphrase of the "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" expression adapted to Marx's ammendment of the principle for socialism, or "the first, lower stage of communism" from Critique of the Gotha Program.