The Ethics of Class Struggle: Lessons from the Civil Rights Movement Ted W.

Stolze Philosophy Department Cerritos College Norwalk, CA 90650 tstolze@cerritos.edu By the ethics of class struggle I mean the values and principles that should inform and guide movements against economic exploitation. I am not concerned today with the equally important descriptive task of studying why such movements arise or which strategies and tactics have been, or would be, most effective in limiting or overcoming exploitation. This I leave to social psychologists, historians, and above all political organizers. Nor would I claim that the Civil Rights movement was nothing but a class struggle. However, as Thomas Jackson and Michael Honey have exhaustively documented in their marvelous new books, Martin Luther King, Jr. well understood the connection between the pursuit of civil and economic rights.1 Lets not forget that after reflecting on both the successes and limitations of the early phase of the Civil Rights movement, in the last two years of his life King hoped to build a multiracial coalition of poor people that would march on Washington, D.C., engage in massive civil disobedience, and compel Congress to enact an economic bill of rights under the slogan Jobs or Income Now.2 As should be widely known, but unfortunately is not, King increasingly drew attention to the

interconnection of racism, poverty and war, indicted both Soviet-style communism and U.S.-style capitalism for their moral shortcomings,

2 insisted that a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death,3 and was murdered while in Memphis supporting a sanitation workers strike. This radical King remains, in Vincent Hardings striking description, an inconvenient hero.4 Perhaps, then, my

provocative title the ethics of class struggle is appropriate. Let me reiterate: by the ethics of class struggle Im not talking about descriptive social science or organizing strategy. Rather, Im

drawing attention to what philosophers would call a normative dimension of social movements against exploitation. In particular, in such How

movements the following basic moral question invariably arises: should the exploited strive to emancipate themselves?

In response to this question, I would like to defend a general Principle of Self-Emancipation:

Actions undertaken to improve the well-being of the oppressed should be either led by the oppressed themselves or, to the extent that this is not feasible, at their behest and under their authority.
Several remarks on this normative principle are in order. First of all, by oppressed I mean those who are subject to unreasonable structural or institutional constraint on self-development. Or, in Jean-Paul Sartres admirably plain terms, oppression consists in treating the Other as an animal.5

3 Secondly, it should be clear that I regard economic exploitation as just one specific form that oppression can takeand not necessarily the worst. For example, Iris Marion Young has usefully identified five

different faces of oppression, which range from exploitation to marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and overt violence.6 Exploitation, as Young writes, occurs through a steady process of the transfer of the results of the labor of some people to benefit others. The injustice of class division does not consist only in the fact that some people have great wealth while most people have little and some are severely deprived. The theory of exploitation shows that this relation of power and inequality is produced and reproduced through a systematic process in which the energies of the have-nots are continuously expended to maintain and augment the power, status, and wealth of the haves.7 Although exploitation is customarily used to characterize only domination based on class, I agree with Young that there also exist specific forms of gender and racial exploitation.8 Thirdly, following Roy Bhaskar, I use the term emancipation instead of liberation in order to stress that what I have in mind is not the attainment of a blissful psychological state but the hard-fought

transformation of social structures. emancipation is better. 9

No doubt liberation is good, but

4 *** Lets consider how best to defend the Principle of Self-Emancipation. In my view, the main justification is that such a principle recognizes and preserves the dignity of victims of oppression and avoids paternalism. Although bystanders may be in a position to know who is oppressed and why, who other than the oppressed themselves are in a position to express the demand that they be emancipated, and in what manner? Victims are never merely victims; they are never simply objects to be manipulated. In short, we must beware of lapsing into what Alex Callinicos has termed moral imperialism,10 by which self-serving emancipators wind up unilaterally imposing assistance on those deemed to be in need of deliverance from oppression. Beyond the theoretical question of how best to respect the dignity of the oppressed, however, there is an eminently practical justification for self-emancipation. For I take it that the purpose of a social movement is not to go down fighting but ultimately to win!11 Yet if a movement to improve the well-being of the oppressed is to be successful, to the greatest feasible extent the oppressed themselves must be able to deliberate regarding their own interests and objectives in lessening or eliminating the oppression they experience.12 As a result, third parties who want to

support the cause of the oppressed must do so cautiously and with humility. Above all else, they should repudiate all forms of paternalism. ***

5 But what exactly is the relevance of self-emancipation to how we should remember the Civil Rights movement and the charismatic leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr.? To begin with, it is worth noting that King and the organization he helped to found, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), were regularly criticized by other civil rights activists for their top-down approach to political change: mobilizing large numbers of people for the purpose of short-term, mediaoriented events but downplaying the need for long-term political pressure rooted in less dramatic but arguably more effective bottom-up community organizing.13 For instance, Ella Baker, who was SCLCs first full-time executive director, became frustrated after two and a half years of challenging elitist, especially sexist, attitudes by SCLC ministers toward the office staff. Soon after leaving SCLC, Baker became a mentor to the newly emerging Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), whose young activists quickly put into practice her alternative strategy for building the Civil Rights movement.14 The core of that strategy can be found in Bakers 1970 interview with Gerda Lerner on Developing Community Leadership, which should be mandatory reading for all activists, I have always felt it was a handicap for oppressed people to depend so largely on a leader, because unfortunately in our culture, the charismatic leader usually becomes a leader because he has found a

6 spot in the public limelight. It usually means that the media made him, and the media may undo him. There is also the danger in our culture that, because a person is called upon to give public statements and is acclaimed by the establishment, such a person gets to the point of believing that he is the movement. Such people get so involved with playing the game of being important that they exhaust themselves and their time and they dont do the work of actually organizing people. Baker expressed to the highest degree what I have called the ideal of selfemancipation. She always tried in her organizing to get people to

understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but to themselves.15 Yet it is equally a testament to Kings development as a mass leader that he himself wound up adopting much of Bakers critique of top-down politics. As Thomas Jackson notes, King later admitted that SCLC relied excessively on mobilization for crises and national publicity. But King was also hugely popular at the grassroots, orchestrating dramatic confrontations and moving public opinion and political elites to support national legislation. This legislation helped local people uproot entrenched forms of white supremacy. Despite Kings continuous efforts to guide the masses and speak for the poor from his many pulpits, King never lost his

7 countervailing commitment to identify and speak with as well as to ordinary people.16 Indeed, it would appear that especially in the last years of his lifeas he moved onto the terrain of anti-poverty and open-housing initiatives in Northern cities, launched the Poor Peoples Campaign, and supported the Memphis sanitation workers strikeKing increasingly came to share Bakers radically democratic vision. Consider in this light the sermon he preached on February 4, 1968 entitled The Drum Major Instinct, excerpts from which were played at his funeral service just two months later.17 In this remarkable sermon King analyzes what he calls an instinct deep down within all of us. . . . a kind of drum major instincta desire to be out front, a desire to lead the parade, a desire to be first.18 According to King, such a desire for attention accounts for why so many people are joiners . . . why we are so often taken in by advertisers, in short, why so many people live beyond their means constantly trying to outdo the Joneses.19 Yet the great issue of life, King insists, is to harness the drum major instinct. Failure to do so can give rise to such dangers as social exclusion and violence based on race, class, or nation.20 As you might expect in a Christian sermon, King argues that Jesus recognized the drum major instinct but sought to reorder it by giving us a new norm of greatness by recognizing that he who is greatest among you shall be your

8 servant.21 In short, a good life is measured by the degree of one service to others. King eerily concludes his sermon by suggesting his own funeral eulogy: Id like somebody to mention that day, that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others. Id like for somebody to say that day, that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody. I want you to say that day, that I did try to feed the hungry. And I want you to be able to say that day, that I did try, in my life, to clothe those who were naked. I want you to say, on that day, that I did try, in my life, to visit those who were in prison. want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity. Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice; say that I was a drum major for peace; I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I wont have any money to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind.22 I cannot think of more fitting, self-emancipatory words by which to remember Martin Luther King, Jr. today. But with such remembrance comes an obligation to decide and to act. So let each of us ask the question, To what cause am I willing to commit my life?
1

Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin

Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); and Michael K. Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther Kings Last

Campaign (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2007).

2 3

Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights, p. 329. Beyond Vietnam, in A Call to Conscience: The Landmark

Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Clayborne Carson and Kris Shepard (New York: Warner Books, 2002), p. 159. This phrase also appears in Kings last book, Where Do We Go From Here?.
4

Vincent Harding, Martin Luther King:

The Inconvenient Hero

(Orbis Books, 1996).

5

Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume One:

Theory of Practical Ensembles (new and corrected edition), translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith, edited by Jonathan Re [NY: Verso, 2004 (1991)], p. 110.
6

See Iris Marion Young, Five Faces of Oppression, in Feminist

Theory: A Philosophical Anthology, edited by Ann E. Cudd and Robin O. Andreasen (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), pp. 91-104.
7 8

Young, p. 96. Young, pp. 96-98. On Bhaskars distinction between liberation and emancipation, Blackwell,

see Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom (Cambridge, MA: 1991), pp. 75-76.

10

10

See Alex Callinicos, The Ideology of Humanitarian Intervention,

in Masters of the Universe: NATOs Balkan Crusade, edited by Tariq Ali (NY: Verso, 2000), pp. 175-189.
11

Here I echo the poignant words spoken by the character Esperanza

(who is trying to calm her hot-headed husband and strike-leader Ramn) in the remarkable 1954 film about the self-emancipation of both MexicanAmerican zinc miners and women: Salt of the Earth. See Michael Wilsons screenplay and Deborah Silverton Rosenfelts invaluable commentary in Salt of the Earth (NY: The Feminist Press, 1978). Esperanzas lines (You want to go down fighting, is that it? I dont want to go down fighting. I want to win.) appear on p. 81.
12

For a similar approach, see Iris Marion Young, Activist Challenges

to Deliberative Democracy, Political Theory 29, #5, October 2001, pp. 670-690.
13

See Charles Payne, Debating the Civil Rights Movement: The View

From the Trenches, in Steve F. Lawson and Charles Payne, Debating the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1968, second edition (Lanham, MY: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006).
14

On Bakers still largely unsung role in the Civil Rights movement,

see especially the following: Charles Payne, Ive Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995); and Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker

11

and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
15

Quoted in Charles Payne, Ive Got the Light of Freedom, p. 93. A

Bakers full interview can be found in Black Women in America:

Documentary History, edited by Gerda Lerner (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), pp. 345-52.
16 17

Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights, pp. 89-90. The Drum Major Instinct, in A Testament of Hope: The Essential

Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by James M. Washington (New York: HarperCollins, 1986), pp. 259-67.
18 19 20 21 22

The Drum Major Instinct, p. 260. pp. 260-61. pp. 262-63. pp. 265. p. 267.