An Interview with Cornel West on Occupy, Obama and Marx
(excerpt)
SR: There’s been a revival of Marxism: for example, commentators have noted that since 2008, sales of Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto have risen. You describe yourself as a ‘non-Marxist socialist’. Can you elaborate?
CW: I think that a Marxist analysis is indispensable for any understanding, not just in the modern world but for our historical situation. I think in the end it’s inadequate but it is indispensablebecause how do you talk about oligarchy, plutocracy, monopolies, oligopolies, asymmetrical relations of power at the workplace between bosses and workers, the imperial tentacles, profit maximizing and so forth. That’s not Adam Smith. That’s not John Maynard Keynes. That’s Karl Marx.
It’s inadequate in the end because of the cultural issues. You have to deal with death, you have to deal with dread, despair, and disappointment. You have to deal with anxiety, insecurity, fears and so forth. And Marx just didn’t go in that direction. And people say, ‘well, you can go with Freud’. Yeah Freud got some interesting things to say, no doubt about that. But it’s indispensable and, in the end, inadequate. But it’s a beautiful thing to see the revival of a Marxist analysis. I think Marx was the great secular prophet of 19th century Europe. And that makes a difference.
![Dr. Martin Luther King and the Poor People’s CampaignPart of the legacy of a more radical Dr. King than we usually hear aboutThe history of the march itself is also quite interesting. Occupying before it was cool:
But Martin Luther King was committed to Revolutionary Pacifism. If you listen to the speeches we hear on Martin Luther King Day, they usually end with the March on Washington in 1963––“I have a Dream,” and so on. But he had a much broader dream. And right after that he began to expand the activities of the Civil Rights Movement to the North. That didn’t get very far. First to Chicago, for an anti-slum movement, housing, jobs, and so on. He then began to speak openly about the Vietnam War, partially denounced imperialist wars, directly confronted racism and oppression in the North, and his popularity sank. The Civil Rights Movement fractured and sank.
[King] was assassinated while joining a sanitation workers strike, a public servant strike, on his way to organize a march to Washington as part of an effort to establish a Poor People’s Movement. The march took place after the assassination, went through the places in the South where there had been bitter, brutal struggles and finally ended up in Washington.
The marchers set up a tent city, Resurrection City. Congress just dismissed them with contempt. The security forces were called in to forcefully drive them out of the city, just to make it clear who was boss. They came in the middle of the night and tore down the tent city, drove the people out, and that was the end of that.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7plbcdtJA1r47jb1o1_400.gif)
