What did he mean by this
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.
MLK (1967)
MLK was revisionist (I’m mostly kidding but still)
spoiler
The idea of him being more of a Hegelian than Marx is really funny though
Same thing say. It’s a Western Left thing: the USSR is proof that Marx went wrong because they’re scary authoritarians; yet obviously the analysis is still good so they need to find a way to keep some distance from it while not discarding it wholesale.
I mean, despite probably doing net good Chomsky’s an Epstein associate and Zizek’s probably an op despite having some insightful cultural critiques. Being insightful about Lacan and Hegel doesn’t really mean shit when your entire schtick and reason you get published is being capitalism’s “anti-capitalist” “communist.” I have several of his books before he got even more craven, but he’s functionally capitalism’s court jester.
