I’m not talking about communism. What I’m talking about is far beyond communism. My inspiration didn’t come from Karl Marx; my inspiration didn’t come from Engels; my inspiration didn’t come from Trotsky; my inspiration didn’t come from Lenin. Yes, I read Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital a long time ago, and I saw that maybe Marx didn’t follow Hegel enough. He took his dialectics, but he left out his idealism and his spiritualism. And he went over to a German philosopher by the name of Feuerbach, and took his materialism and made it into a system that he called “dialectical materialism.” I have to reject that.
What I’m saying to you this morning is communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both.
Cornel West is the same. You sometimes hear him talk and you think "what a wonderful human being" and then he says something that makes you want to poke your eyes out...
I'll stick to Lenin for inspiration, thank you very much.
He was literally a professional theologian and his beliefs were instrumental to his activist work. And when was this quote from? He became more and more fervently anti-capitalist as time went on and he realized that the United States was a "burning house" due to its broken economic system.
He spoke a few times saying that Communist states hadn't aligned themselves to the same freedoms as America is supposed to, etc. etc. It's pretty bread and butter appealing to red scare America rhetoric, and it's much less anti Communist than almost anything else that was remotely mainstream from the time. So I say he gets a pass.
Where Do We Go From Here? August 1967, 8 months before being assassinated
pointing out a bad take doesn’t diminish his accomplishments, being a demsoc is still good, he knew the feds were after him and what his audience needed to hear and definitely gets a pass
This is a great quote, it has been some time since I read up on MLK so I forgot who had said it. I agree with it completely.
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mostly, he also had some bad takes
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Cornel West is the same. You sometimes hear him talk and you think "what a wonderful human being" and then he says something that makes you want to poke your eyes out...
I'll stick to Lenin for inspiration, thank you very much.
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He was literally a professional theologian and his beliefs were instrumental to his activist work. And when was this quote from? He became more and more fervently anti-capitalist as time went on and he realized that the United States was a "burning house" due to its broken economic system.
He spoke a few times saying that Communist states hadn't aligned themselves to the same freedoms as America is supposed to, etc. etc. It's pretty bread and butter appealing to red scare America rhetoric, and it's much less anti Communist than almost anything else that was remotely mainstream from the time. So I say he gets a pass.
Where Do We Go From Here? August 1967, 8 months before being assassinated
pointing out a bad take doesn’t diminish his accomplishments, being a demsoc is still good, he knew the feds were after him and what his audience needed to hear and definitely gets a pass
Hard agree. Too bad seeing that in '67 though.
Yeah, sad that schools teach such a watered down version of him.
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