Fred Weston, editor of www.marxist.com, provides a Marxist analysis of where racism and oppression comes from – and how to fight it.
On 4th April 1968, Martin Luther King Jnr. was assassinated – shot in cold blood whilst standing on the balcony of his hotel room in Memphis, Tennessee.
MLK was killed because of the danger his ideas posed to the establishment. Like other radical leaders of the black movement – such as Malcolm X and Fred Hampton – he was beginning to draw revolutionary conclusions, making the explicit link between racial oppression and capitalist exploitation.
50 years on, speaking at the recent Revolution Festival in London, Fred Weston discusses Martin Luther King’s life and ideas, the history of the Civil Rights movement, and the way forward today in the struggle against racism and for liberation.
