Because the last fifty years have produced phases of rapid political change and massive political reaction, activists in the US today are faced with an unprecedented political reality. This new political reality requires new theoretical and organizational innovations in the same way that new personal problems require new ways of solving them. However, very few left or progressive activists and intellectuals have discussed the need to develop new theories to solve these problems.  Instead, many have continued to uncritically apply the ideas of Marx to the US while others have tried to recapture the spirit of the 1960s by modeling activism after successful 60s organizations that lacked a rigorous program for political development.  Aware that I run the risk of being labeled apolitical and individualistic, this week I'm following the words of Martin Luther King and suggesting that activism must begin with the application of love to the current political reality thereby creating a radical revolution in values, which could cause us to think about politics in entirely new ways.      

The political problems experienced by Americans today can largely be attributed to the American tradition of placing profits before human wellbeing.  Beginning with the extermination of Native Americans and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonists began a process of placing profits before human wellbeing still practiced today.  In 1776 an extraordinary group of colonists got together and forever changed the trajectory of world history by standing up to a colonial government and declaring themselves independent from it.  After winning the revolutionary war with Britain however, these new Americans continued to perpetuate this contradiction by omitting any reference to African slavery in the constitution of the new nation.  Then, in 1860, because national economic progress required that inefficient slave labor be eradicated, the chance to resolve this contradiction arose.  

The US Civil War lasted five years and ended with the emancipation of 4.8 million black workers.  During Reconstruction, these 4.8 million black workers were given the opportunity to work freely, vote, and run for government office.  This they did with great success and, as a consequence, opened several free public schools in the South and created a new democratic way of life in the US.  Unfortunately, this democratic way of live was short lived.  What historians generally call the Hayes-Tilden Compromise, W.E.B. Du Bois called the revolution of 1876, because it radically reversed the democratic way of life that immediately proceeded the emancipation of 4.8 million Africans from chattel slavery and sent them, in a very practical way, back towards slavery.

Resulting from the revolution of 1876, in the south black men were lynched when they attempted to compete for jobs with white men while black women domestics were raped regularly by white male employers.   To escape this horrendous reality, black folk moved north in great numbers during World War I when northern factories came south to recruit them as laborers.  Once coming north, blacks found that their treatment was not always different than in the south.  For example, in the summer of 1919 alone, whites initiated more than 26 race riots in response to growing black populations in the north.  In 1943, there were white initiated race riots in several major cities including Detroit, Los Angeles, Beaumont, TX and Mobile, Alabama.  The riots both summers were in many ways related to the competition newly arrived blacks posed to the jobs of whites.  Throughout American history great numbers of white Americans have been willing to sacrifice black human wellbeing for their own economic profit.    

In a pamphlet titled Change Yourself to Change the World, James and Grace Lee Boggs called this tendency to place profit above human well being the fundamental human contradiction facing Americans.  In fact, because the consumption driven American way of life forced profits to take priority over human beings, they argued that by the late 1970s there had a arisen a contradiction between being American and human.  Today this contradiction can be seen in the fact that millions of people hate their jobs yet refuse to quit because they would rather have a big house than do something they enjoy doing and make less money.  Imperialism, the process by which the working class of one country benefits from the exploitation of a poorer country, is the clearest example of prioritizing profit over human beings.  Importantly, due to US imperialism, working class Americans achieved a standard of living that required a socialist revolution in other countries.   Accordingly, the Boggs' argued that the working classes could not be motivated to change the structures that governed their lives on purely economic grounds.  Instead, because workers enjoyed a decent standard of living and had internalized this primary contradiction, structural social change had to be brought about by other motivating forces.  For James and Grace Lee Boggs, this motivating force became a desire for self-determination and the realization of human capacity.

While the Boggs' idea of political change as a consequence of self-actualization is nice, it is not an easy task to accomplish.  In fact, tactically, the Boggs' position leaves much to be desired.  To resolve this, we can do well by looking towards Martin Luther King Jr.  In a 1967 sermon called "Beyond Vietnam," King suggested that in order to conquer the giant triplets of racism, militarism, and economic exploitation, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values, which would "cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our privileges."   Further, such a change would cause us to move away from placing an importance on playing the role of the good Samaritan, and would instead cause us to "one day see that the whole Jericho road must be changed."  According to King, band-aid solutions to poverty would lose appeal because "A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, `This is not just.'"  

No less monumental than the suggestion put forth by the Boggs', King provides activists with a strategy.  "Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism."  Tactically, according to King, activists must develop an overriding loyalty to mankind, which could give rise to "a worldwide fellowship" that would lift "neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation" and would create "a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind" because "love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality."   We must now look to one another for ideas on how to make this happen.