Marx, Lenin, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Marx, Lenin, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Some reflections on the fate of great human beings who spent their lives in the service of humanity and the working class, inspired by Lenin's masterpiece "State and Revolution."
In that work Lenin remarks that the great leaders of oppressed humanity are reviled and hated by the rulers of the day but after their deaths attempts are made "to convert them into harmless icons." Martin Luther King was reviled in his day as a trouble maker because of his civil rights work and as a traitor because of his opposition to the Vietnam War. Now he has schools named after him and his birthday is a national holiday. His fiery rhetoric against racism and imperialism forgotten. Malcolm X has suffered a similar fate. Once hated by the establishment and mass media he now has streets and housing projects named in his honor and his image graces postage stamps. His ideas virtually forgotten.
We have also seen the arch "terrorist" and communist agent Nelson Mandela rechristened as the grandfatherly "Madiba" an advocate of nonviolence-- his call for the oppressed to arm themselves and fight for their liberation lost among the platitudes of the world figures who rushed to his funeral to heap praises on the man they tried for so many years to undermine and destroy.
Just so was the fate of Karl Marx according to Lenin. Many left wing politicians and labor leaders of Lenin's day praised Marxism and even called themselves Marxist-- along with university professors and public intellectuals (then as now their name is Legion)-- but their real purpose was "to omit, obscure or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul." Lenin has suffered the same fate.
On this holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. let us do more than honor his memory but also recall the real revolutionary nature of his thought which aimed at the overthrow of the system that has produced racism, war, and oppression and now threatens the very existence of civilized life, if not life itself, on our planet.